It's not a hard requirement, they just include a disk image instead of a real installer at this stage, so it's pretty limited.

It's easy to set up yourself though. Install debian, add steamos repo, apt-get dist-upgrade. You are now running steamos.

Ubuntu has always been a commerical distro, and yeah - nobody is surprised that they make a "product" that puts Cannonical's bottom line above needs of the user.

But we've always had to clean distros without the commercial cruft. We call them "community" rather than "city" distros, but it amounts to the same thing. Debian, Arch, Slack, Gentoo... the list goes on and on.

That's kind of a re-invention of history. CM simply didn't integrate pdroid because it was a support nightmare waiting to happen. At the time of the pdroid discussion, Steve said that they were already working on a bunch of privacy features that would meet the usability standards they were aspiring to... and here we are.

Don't forget that this message encryption follows on from the App Privacy Mode that they have successfully deployed since then (and makes much of pdroid redundant). They are taking a measured and transparent approach to privacy. Just as a serious organisation should..

The lucrative video gaming market you were a member of no longer exists. It's been replaced by a lucrative consumer milking machine.

Sure, a new video game market is forming around the fringes, but it's far from lucrative.

We had advisories from "concerned" police that Apple's service was potentially life-threatening.

Not ruling out the advisories may have been overblown, but yeah... that's a fiasco alright.

Because it's not really Apple or Samsung that are suffering. It's us. The consumers who are literally paying for the benefit of stagnation and lack of choice.

Apple and Samsung like the weather in Hell just fine.

The HIB grand experiment was in proving there was a demand for fair content. Child's Play are simply beneficiaries.

Certainly CP have enough avenues for donation already, it's not like people who want to donate are forced to do so through HIB. One has to assume that the reason HIB was successful was because of the business model, not the charities selected.

The support of Free, non-DRM software and indie developers is the charity, chief. The other guys are just icing on the cake. Not only have they dropped the indies and dropped the no-drm requirements, but they've they've dropped support of the EFF too!

If a new group had come along with a "support struggling AAA studios" charity then we might laugh, but they wouldn't be denounced for compromising their ideals.