their efforts are bringing bringing an open computing ecosystem to the mainstream

Disagree. They are bringing their own vision of an operating system, a realm in which they own the throne. Their OS abstracts Linux away so hard, it's hard to translate into actual experience using an established distro. Even if you use say Ubuntu, you can still go back to their closed source ecosystem even if you've just ditched Windows. They've already installed themselves as the Microsoft of Linux, and it'll be very hard to get their tentacles off. Those who are paranoid of Microsoft twitching a finger are conveniently, for lack of a better expression, in bed with Valve.

Hell, I remember when Steam had the Tux mascot to represent a game being compatible on Linux, but that has been replaced long ago with their own logo...

So yeah, I'm not praising them for Steam on Linux. Besides, I believe the total sum of their negatives vastly outweigh anything they've done for (or at the expense of) Linux. A full boycott really is the only appropriate response. Too bad that of the few regular storefronts just selling games to people who do such boycotts, the biggest one has incompetent management and loose moderation on their forum.

While I appreciate the honesty, is this part of your standardized approach to judgement?

This was a lapse on my part. I didn't have the time to read them, but I had the intention and have read them since. I was already aware of so-called "curators" creating "anti-woke" lists and shoving so many games on them, and the store selling games that explicitly demonize marginalized groups (funnily enough GOG is also selling one such game that I know of, The Great Rebellion), but I had no idea it went as far as Charlie fucking Kirk tweet curators. The level of openness these hateful people operate at on steam would make GOG blush... though I guess this still doesn't beat the official newsletter email...

You can still just play the game, nothing has changed.

I just explained how things have changed and how the casino earns money out of thin air with little effort on their part. Better yet, you just gave more examples of this House doing just that:

All the other stuff (emoticons or wallpapers) can be bought directly in the Points Shop.

These are all ways in which users get milked. Don't forget the lootboxes.

I acknowledge that it's important to raise awareness of bad practices, demanding change and highlighting alternatives where available.

Why yes, this is what I already do. But instead of it being seen that way, it's instead seen as

grudge-holding

All I ask is for one corporation, working in the capitalist hellscape that is the US, to be held to the same standards as the rest within its same field. That's apparently a bridge too far, equal to the strawman of suggesting one play only Super Tux Kart.

Before, you just played the game. Now when you play the game, these things fill your "inventory" out of thin air, and you can make transactions with them including buying them (to complete your collection out of FOMO, etc), of which Valve earns a cut out of them, again, out of thin air. Now scale that up to millions of users. Hmmm, it IS milking! Can't expect any less from the House of Valve.

while Valve is simply less so

Which company was it that popularized the lootboxes so bad that Notch made a parody of their game in Minecraft's earliest April Fool's version? Oh it's Valve. Which company has been extremely instrumental in killing the ownership of games, making the idea of having to be online and connected to an unaccountable corporation based in the USA to play a single player game so much more palatable? Look, it's Valve again. Even their quaint """wonders""" for Linux (creating yet another distro, forking wine, and porting their DRM launcher?) are such a naked embrace, extend and extinguish effort going very smoothly because they're not Microsoft, despite being quite literally of Microsoft origins, down to the anti-trust saga.

Valve isn't doing nothing. You think so because like you've noted, itch.io went into this payment processor kerfuffle, despite Valve also going into it but nobody else. Plus, GOG themselves aren't helping matters with their own actions, not just the double sig runes and their strange and ineffective apologies, but also the obsession with LLM generated art among countless moments of getting caught with their pants down. Meanwhile, Zoom-Platform is relatively quiet, for better or worse, and I never hear anything from Fireflower Games.

I actually wanted to mention that and the "trading cards" that literally milk the users out of thin air, but I didn't find a good place for them in my post. Thanks for mentioning them.

"winning by doing nothing" They do stuff. Like killing ownership, buying tons of yachts because their owner is a literal billionaire, and squeezing every last cent while gaslighting everyone into thinking they're somehow "pro-consumer". This is how they got here in the first place. They also appear to have a growing hate problem, but I haven't yet read the links I'll be sharing here, so take these with a grain of salt for now: 1, 2. They get away with all this because they have a captive audience, each user doesn't want to give up their library, or each user has already bought one of those steam devices becoming even more captive.

GOG doesn't have a captive audience, and this is by their own design. We take their DRM-free, launcher-free nature for granted. Yet it seem they don't understand that themselves, and continue burning the good will they earned on things like this, or continuing their obsession with LLM generated art. They can't keep tanking controversy after controversy.

DRM-free can continue without GOG, but it'll be handicapped severely without them. Is this what GOG wants?

I regularly use two websites which use recaptcha, one is necessary for work and the other is no-ip. The work one is annoying, it's almost every other day that I have to go through it.

Oh, shit. Sorry about that, I am incompetence itself. Thanks for coming to my aid. I replaced it just now in my comment too.

Another good reminder of my desire to drop this browser. The question is whether it's Ungoogled Chromium, or some Firefox forks available on Android and desktops.

It's sold through the European DRM-free-only store GOG and it's by Yacht Club Games, the makers of Shovel Knight. I put it on the wishlist for now.

The soundtrack is Pay What You Want starting from $0 through Jake Kaufman's Bandcamp page. It won't appear in your GOG library unlike the Soundtrack Edition, but that's OK if you get the music free or support him.

Speaking of the crossroads and fire hydrants and motorbikes... I fucking hate recaptcha these days. I used to be able to go through those annoying fuckers first try. Now it's either I sit through that slow as hell sequence that fades out and in new pictures at a glacial pace and lose it, or I go through the ones where I'm expected to select several tiles in several big pictures (no longer just a single one) and inevitably I always fail this one. It's gotten so bad I've resorted to audio captchas in a few cases. Am I the only one?