They were the only phones I would reasonably buy due to their ability to be customizable… Yeah this pretty much puts a nail in the coffin of using a Pixel in my book as well.

Thank you Ted, that’s the joke.

systemdeez nuts!

As long as the repair shop is reputable it’s not too hard. I was looking at options on iFixit when I first heard this update was coming down the pipeline. I guess I am lucky that mine was already a refurbished unit when I bought it so it looks like the battery has already been replaced.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Google+Pixel+6a+Battery+Replacement/152516

I replaced a few batteries myself before in a Nexus 6 and a Pixel 4a. The guides really help as does having the right tools. It’s also helpful that iFixit offers genuine battery replacements.

https://www.ifixit.com/products/google-pixel-6a-battery-genuine?variant=39912699330663

Currently out of stock but that’s probably due to this update that wrecked so many users battery life.

Also, they can still offer the olde versions of the file for download.

Except in a lot of cases they really don’t.

But if they keep it updated for modern systems that means as time goes on the files they are offering to install… won’t work on old hardware because they’ve been updated to the modern era.

Sure if you grab a file from them and never get a newer, more maintained version, it will play on exactly the hardware and software you had when you bought it… But if you lost the install file somehow and went to grab a new copy five years later the updated ones may no longer run on your old hardware

They keep a bunch of 32-bit libraries for backwards compatibility with older games that they launch. You can find numerous discussions about this in the Steam forums as well as on sites like Hackernews.

If you want, I can give it to you from a Valve employee:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/179#issuecomment-267790879

We will not drop support for the many games that have shipped on Steam with only 32-bit builds, so Steam will continue to deploy a 32-bit execution environment. To that end, it will continue to need some basic 32-bit support from the host distribution (a 32-bit glibc, ELF loader, and OpenGL driver library).

Whether the Steam client graphical interface component itself gets ported to 64-bit is a different question altogether, and is largely irrelevant as the need for the 32-bit execution environment would still be there because of the many 32-bit games to support.

Maybe do some cursory research before talking out of your ass.

I need DOS Box

It’s Valve’s responsibility that Microsoft stripped DOS support from their OS in Windows 10?

Starting with Windows 10, the ability to create a MS-DOS startup disk has been removed, and so either a virtual machine running MS-DOS or an older version (in a virtual machine or dual boot) must be used to format a floppy disk, or an image must be obtained from an external source.

GoG also famously uses a model where GoG does not care what OS you’re using.

I could have sworn their model was keeping old games updated to work functionally on newer hardware.

https://www.gog.com/en/gog-preservation-program

The GOG Preservation Program ensures classic games remain playable on modern systems, even after their developers stopped supporting them. By maintaining these iconic titles, GOG helps you protect and relive the memories that shaped you, DRM-free and with dedicated tech support.

The entire back-end has changed.

Literally. People miss the fact that Steam is still a 32-bit app just to support older games. The rest of the world has moved onto 64-bit operating systems and applications. It’s shocking they still support 32-bit in 2025. So the argument that they aren’t supporting older titles is a little misleading because that’s the whole reason they still run a 32-bit client.

Most operating systems are no longer even offered in a 32-bit variant, 64-bit only.

I haven’t had a device with 32-bit hardware in almost 15 years. The last device I can even think of that was still 32-bit within the last 15 years was a Google Nexus 6 in 2014. All the Pixel line have been 64-bit.

Steam is literally one of the last 32-bit holdouts. Everything else has moved on. Even Discord dropped 32-bit support last year.

EDIT: Also, for reference, since Windows 98 is heavily mentioned in the arguments, those operating systems included 16-bit code. We’re talking about dropping 32-bit code, 16-bit code is deader than a doornail. Windows 3.11 was the first introduction of 32-bit code. Windows XP seems to be where they dropped all 16-bit code in 2001. We’re talking over 30 years of hardware changes.

All versions of MS-DOS and the below versions of Windows had 16 bit code:

MS-DOS (all versions)
Windows 1.x/2.x/3.x (all versions)
Windows 4.x or 9x (Windows 95/98/Millennium Edition) (all versions)

I don’t necessarily agree with all of Kaldaien’s points, but I can’t say they aren’t well argued. Their opinions are valid if you’re willing to accept and consider their perspective.

I personally don’t see the point playing games on the original hardware, and I think keeping them updated for modern systems is a good thing, but I can see why someone might disagree and prefer running them in a VM on a traditional operating system, especially in terms of keeping the original way the game ran intact. I also disagree about the value of Microsoft’s game rental service, but I also see the value in saying “if I don’t actually own my games anyway, why not take it to it’s logical conclusion of just renting them.”

As I said, their points are well argued, even if I don’t necessarily agree on them.

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No, the graphics from Intel back in 07-10 were crap.

What are you using graphics on a server for instead of just CLI?

You just can’t buy too old or the inverse happens and the performance per watt drops. I think you’re right that 2012 is about the cutoff. Maybe 2007 for certain items, like my 2007 iMac. But if you’re getting back to the Pentium 4 era you’ve gone too far and need to turn back around.

See, I only use flatpaks sparingly for this reason, but in some cases they’re indispensable when you don’t want an application to access certain parts of your system. The sandboxing is what makes them useful, in my opinion. For everything else, there’s the deb packages.

Hell yuh.

I mean, I definitely didn’t jump to “let me shower in your apartment” like some suggested, that’s absurd. The whole reason for starting with a coffee date is because it’s low-stakes and in public so either party can bail easily if it’s not a match. Women especially shouldn’t be giving out their home address to strangers and letting them in as a first-time-meeting. I am also a cancer patient with limited income so driving 20 minutes to the nearest truckstop or trying to buy a daypass at a local gym were both unrealistic as well.

I just asked to reschedule and was ghosted, but yeah, I get that people usually think that’s someone trying to flake out. It just sucks when you have a legitimate reason and that gets assumed.

Anyway, waters back on now.

Counterpoint: When Louis CK (prior to being outed as a sex pest) released one of his comedy specials on his website DRM-free for $5 he became a millionaire almost overnight.

https://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/drm-free-experiment-makes-loui.html

Price point matters, too.

It also jives with early Steam Sales when Valve would cut titles like Left 4 Dead Counter Strike down to 90% off, and they would sell so many digital copies that they were actually making more money off the lower price.

https://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economics-valves-gabe-newell/

Now we did something where we decided to look at price elasticity. Without making announcements, we varied the price of one of our products. We have Steam so we can watch user behavior in real time. That gives us a useful tool for making experiments which you can’t really do through a lot of other distribution mechanisms. What we saw was that pricing was perfectly elastic. In other words, our gross revenue would remain constant. We thought, hooray, we understand this really well. There’s no way to use price to increase or decrease the size of your business.

But then we did this different experiment where we did a sale. The sale is a highly promoted event that has ancillary media like comic books and movies associated with it. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40. Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation. …

Then we decided that all we were really doing was time-shifting revenue. We were moving sales forward from the future. Then when we analyzed that we saw two things that were very surprising. Promotions on the digital channel increased sales at retail at the same time, and increased sales after the sale was finished, which falsified the temporal shifting and channel cannibalization arguments. Essentially, your audience, the people who bought the game, were more effective than traditional promotional tools. So we tried a third-party product to see if we had some artificial home-field advantage. We saw the same pricing phenomenon. Twenty-five percent, 50 percent and 75 percent very reliably generate different increases in gross revenue.

I’m having trouble finding a link to substantiate it, but I remember in the early 2000’s a group of artists having to sue their record labels because of the lawsuits on file-sharing users. The record labels said they were doing it for the artists, but the artists had to sue the record labels to even ever see a penny from the fruits of those lawsuits. The record labels were just pocketing the money for themselves while saying it was “for the artists.”

Anyway, long story short is that kind of behavior from the recording industry made me want to give money directly to the artists and cut out these selfish middlemen who did nothing but claimed all the profits.

http://www.callbeforeyoudig.org/washington/

At least in Washingon there are free services to locate pipes and lines for this exact purpose.

Also, it’s a legal requirement for anything deeper than 12 inches, and the 12 inch exemption is mostly for homeowners and road work.

https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=19.122

Finally, I’m pretty sure you’d have be using a backhoe or other industrial equipment to bust open a water main that affects a whole neighborhood.