UPGRAYEDD

Steam has had monopolistic policies. There just so benign compared to other monopolies of the current time, that they seem pedestrian. Im not anti steam, but i try to never be pro any company.

Digital markets are naturally monopolistic. If there are no other barriers in a market, a single solution will rise to the top. Once it has gained enough market share, the “network effect” and incumbancy are often enough to keep it in power, even if the product degrades. Leaving steam is difficult, even when a better solution exists ( like gog) due to separated game libraries and friend groups. See the following examples: Amazon, facebook, youtube, google, instagram, X Amazon has many examples of enshitification. Higher prices, worse search, paid promotion of products etc. Facebook adds, social experimentation and propaganda machine. Youtube removes the dislike button, more advertisements and recommendation algorithm pushing conspiracy theories. Hell. Here we are, a small group of people who left reddit because of their anti consumer policies. But lemmy is still no competition, and getting smaller by the day. Markets are not the solution to monopoly, they are the creator. Its the natural end state of competition.

Im in firmware. IDEs change often depending on the chip i am working with. In some cases, the tools are better on windows, or have been in the past. It has gotten alot better recently.

I dont mind windows personally(from a usability standpoint, the spyware aspect worries me). And WSL has not caused me any issues in my dev environment.

This isnt a windows issue, its a company policy issue. If developers dont have full admin rights on their systems, its a failure of managment. If you cant trust your developers enough to give them admin rights, thats not a co worker i want to be around.

This sounds more like IT babysitting. If IT cant trust software engineers to have full admin rights on a work computer, either the calibur of your co workers is so bad that no one should want to work there, or the IT department has such a god complex, no one should want to work there.

WSL has worked fine for me for the past 4 years.

I have a 5 digit steam ID, made on the 3rd day steam existed. Back when we all hated thebconcept.