I'm going off memory. Pretty glad that never took off, even if what we were left with was Javascript...

I forgot where I heard this, but at one point around the same time, Microsoft was trying to get BASIC embedded into webpages for Internet Explorer as a competitor to JavaScript.

Would the internet really be better with BASIC?

For something as important as your web browser, that's a pretty good reason to me.

I use Nvidia's proprietary driver because the open-source Nouveau driver won't work with my display. Will this update break the driver, or just make it slower?

I'd love to stop using Nvidia, but I don't have much choice about using their proprietary driver until I get my next video card, or Nouveau starts working for me.

Nvidia is undermining patent law. That should be an issue that big corpos can understand.

after 90 days, they just send the BAT back to you. They don't keep it.

If you want to be nitpicky about it, you could consider it to not be an "ad" because its not a company paying to put that text there. It's Ubuntu promoting their own product. But I don't think it makes much of a difference in this case, since it's a big annoyance either way.

The fact that this isn't the first time I've seen someone make that false equivalence demonstrates pretty well the problem that comes when a small number of instances have the majority of Lemmy's total users. I chose a small instance myself, partially to do my part in avoiding this issue, but the consolidation will likely continue to be a big problem until a good solution can be thought up and implemented.

Fedora is great! It ended my distro-hopping.

I have not ever bought a single game that used those monetization strategies as a part of its core business model, and I never plan to. The problem is that people like me (and presumably you) aren't the ones they're making the bulk of their money off of. It's the vulnerable people with addictive tendencies, the "whales" as they call them in the industry, that they're getting the vast majority of their profits from. It's predatory.

When they're targeting people who are struggling with addiction, "voting with your wallet" doesn't work anymore.

I would agree if it was about genuine game mechanics or story or things like that. But lootboxes aren't designed for fun. They're designed to exploit vulnerable people for maximum profit, and trick others into giving those vulnerable people an incentive to spend away their life savings on thinly-veiled gambling for virtual prizes.

We have much to gain from lootboxes (at least in their current state) being removed from the equation entirely.

Because you can make sure it was done right. You don't have to worry about bugs or other issues being the result of faulty packaging if you're the one doing the packaging. Plus It makes reproducing bugs easier when everyone's using the same package, and declaring the flatpak as the official package makes it much more likely that people will use the flatpak.