You would wish Google would turn into Apple. AAPL at least has the decency of respecting some privacy.
Google, on the other hand, is an advertising company (not a tech company), selling all the people pocket size advertisement billboards named “Android” for years, and they’re taking the last step of seizing full control over it.
WINDOWS USERS:
Installling Bazzite (Gaming focused Linux Distro) is very, very easy. All you need is a some disk space, and a 16gb USB stick.
You won’t lose any of your Windows data - even you don’t need to re-download any Steam game! Your Windows library will plug-in easily into Linux Steam.
Yesterday I’ve installed Bazzite (as a dual boot) for the first time. As a long time Windows user, Steam Deck convinced me lots of previous problems are solved now.
It’s the first ever I’ve installed a Linux Desktop distro willingly. And so far it’s working very, very smoothly even with my complex set of hardware.
This is true. Almost all time it’s the textures and the sound files. Even more, time to time devs choose not to compress them as decompression could be a performance bottleneck. Deep Rock Galactic is good example for that, the game is 4 gb because there’s no textures in it except UI brushes. All 3D models of the game uses very clever Vertex Coloring techniques instead.
You might be right with it could be optional, but I’m guessing it will be a deployment hell since Steam’s (only platform that matters) underlying mechanisms doesn’t directly support it, and when it’s done with workarounds it becomes a convoluted process for end users - especially when you consider most users will download the full pack anyway.
It’s been a thing since forever. There’s an industry revolving around regional pricing scalping, led by Kinguin, Eneba etc…