Killed by Google VS lutris

>Google operates in China albeit via their HK domain.

The Chinese government has access to the iCloud account of every Chinese Apple user.

>They also had project DragonFly if you remember.

Which never materialized.

>The lesser of two evils is that one company doesn’t try to actively profile me (in order for their ads business to be better) with every piece of data it can find and forces me to share all possible data with them.

Apple does targeted and non targeted advertising as well. Additionally, your carrier has likely sold all of the data they have on you. Apple was also sued for selling user data to ad networks. Odd for a Privacy First company to engage in things like that.

>Google is famously known to kill apps that are good and used by customers: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Google has been around for 26 years I believe. According to that link 60 apps were killed in that timeframe. According to your statement that Google kills an app a month that would leave you 252 apps short. Furthermore, the numbers would indicate that Google has killed 2.3 apps per year or .192 apps per month.

>As for the subpar apps: there is a massive difference between the network traffic when on the Home Screen between iOS and Android.

Not sure how that has anything to do with app quality, but if network traffic is your concern there's probably a lot more an Android user can do than an iOS user tp control or eliminate the traffic.

> This is proved by countless “killed by Google” incidents..

Oh, the Google's Graveyard: https://killedbygoogle.com/

I was already starting to feel a little cornered in the whole Google ecosystem and a bit limited with stuff like backups, vendor lock in, etc. (and you always have the obvious hanging over your head) and ultimately, I think I just find the mental model of a SQL database more intuitive compared to a NoSQL database. So I thought to myself; "the longer I leave it, the harder it'll be to make the switch".

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Their reputation is deserved. Google domains was killed only last year!

And this isn't even the first time I've been burned by Google's decisions. If you're familiar at all with the Google Graveyard, you'll know that Google has a long history of killing off products and services that people have come to rely on. This has happened to me a number of times, in both a personal and professional capacity, and frankly it's getting old.

Just because Google has a couple of decent services that you're willing to pay for doesn't detract from the fact that most of their products have a worse life expectancy than a victorian child in the 1800s. https://killedbygoogle.com

They ruined every single opportunity to be more than an advertising company since Orkut. With scrapped attempts, starts and lack of intention for most of the 2010s to even during the early half of the Pixel Era, they seemingly haven't learnt to stick to something and iterate on it well.

And the fact that over 50% of their revenues come from search and by extension, advertising.

The fact' that til this day, they still haven't evolved from the "throwing shit at the wall then at the fan" strat which explains how they have fumbled so much so quickly.

Yeah. The Google Graveyard really shows how far this can go.

https://killedbygoogle.com

The punchline is that in addition to hundreds of failed hobby projects, their stock is doing great. Monopoly power is a helluva drug.

You can get Lutris: It's an open source launcher that you login into with GOG account and it will download the games and wrap them with Wine, similar to Steam.

https://lutris.net/

For "normal" games you could look yourself using ProtonDB regarding every game released on Steam and AreWeAntiCheatYet for most multiplayer games. If a game isn't available on Steam you have three possibilities. First if it's available on GOG, Epic Games or Amazon Gaming, you could use the Heroic Games Launcher. Second you could try to run the launchers through Steam itself using once again Proton. Third you could try installing it with a script or tutorial in Lutris or Bottles.

Can I suggest you head over to the lutris.net site and follow the link the lutris discord - with what you are describing, it would take me 20 minutes to get the base battle.net working so you can see what is causing your issue or 3 days back and forwards here. As a hint, your wine version has known issues, and unless you manually installed the lutris 0.5.14 from the git page in Mint, or are running flatpak, you have other issues related to that

Hmmm I remember there was some confusion in Lutris around this, like https://github.com/lutris/lutris/issues/4237 , and I had to do some workaround. But I can't check what exactly right now...

As a data point, you can run a fair number of Windows games under Proton by using Lutris instead of Steam:

* https://lutris.net

* https://github.com/lutris/lutris

It's an OSS game launcher that takes the place of Steam, and you can set things up to run locally so you don't even need an account on their system (lutris.net).

Lutris

[Resources] * Ventoy (for EZ bootable USB sticks) ==> https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html * How to use Ventoy ==> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K64sT0pQc-0 * Rufus (alternative bootable USB stick creator in Windows) ==> https://rufus.ie/en/ * MD5 & SHA Checksum Utility (for validating your ISO downloads) ==> https://download.cnet.com/md5-sha-checksum-utility/3000-2092_4-10911445.html * Steam will be in the repositories (repos) and Proton is apart of Steam * www.protondb.com (lookup Steam game info... see how well it works or if it is in a FUBAR state on Linux) * WINE will be in the repos and can be acquired via WINE HQ. I recommend using the repos, but WINE HQ if you need it ( https://www.winehq.org/ ) * Lutris is a front-end to WINE which makes installing and running non-Steam games easy. It can be found in the repos ( https://lutris.net/ ) * How-To videos for setting up various distros for gaming ( https://www.youtube.com/@IntelligentGaming2020/videos ). I have no affiliation with this channel. He is a Linux user/gamer sharing info. Search his channel for your distro to find the specific how-to videos. * r/linux4noobs (a newbie focused Linux subreddit) * most if not all of the distros will have their own subreddits (ex: r/pop_OS, r/linuxmint, r/fedora, r/manjaro, r/EndeavourOS)

ProtonDB is a community list of Steam games rating their playability. Heroic launcher runs GOG and Epic games. Lutris and Bottles can be used to run everything else.