Playtron has made some waves in Linux gaming. They have lots of big names in Linux working on the project. Recently they were featured by Framework today in their presentation. However, I think it’s abundantly clear that anyone who cares about FOSS should stay far away from this.
I was intrigued by this as well some months ago. I even ignored when they blatantly lied about Valve/Steam locking down their OS to only play Steam games. So I gave it a try and installed it. On setup they wanted me to agree to a EULA. That was red flag #2. Never seen that before. Then they wanted me to agree to their privacy policy. It is a very typical corporate user-hostile privacy policy. Some highlights
- Like many website operators, we collect information that your browser sends whenever you visit our Website. This includes Log Data, such as your computer’s IP address, browser type, browser version, the pages of our Website that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages and other statistics, and whether you reached our page via a social media or email campaign. This information may be collected via several technologies, including cookies, web beacons, clear GIFs, canvas fingerprinting and other means, such as Google Remarketing and Facebook Pixel.
- If you access our Sites through third parties (e.g., Facebook or Google), or if you share content from our Sites to a third-party social media service, the third-party service will send us certain information about you if the third-party service and your account settings allow such sharing.
- “Professional, employment, or education information, such as your industry and job level, for news personalization, or copies of your resume or CV and any other information required to verify your qualifications, for recruitment purposes”
- “Commercial information, such as a record of purchased products or subscriptionsInferences about your consumer preferences or characteristics.”
How we use personal information:
- To market our products and/or services to you
- With respect to website cookies, to share with third-party marketing partners to provide tailored advertising on our Website and other websites that you may visit
We share your information with our third-party service providers and any subcontractors as required to offer you our products and services. The service providers we use help us to:
- run email and mobile messaging campaigns;
- perform marketing analytics;
- provide measurement services and target ads (you can opt out of these services at websites such as http://www.aboutads.info/choices and http://www.youronlinechoices.eu/)
They even admit to not respecting “Do Not Track” signals.
What makes it more tailored than Bazzite? That includes Lutris, which you can use to install games from GOG, Itch and Epic Game Store, as well as add them to Steam for Gamemode with just one click.
Theres no need to back out of Steam to open and configure Lutris. It boots right into a cross-platform launcher.
I mean, I’m all here for a cross-platform Gamemode replacement, but that could be a package, rather than needing to be a whole distro.
Edit: and I meant to add, I’d love to see someone like Lutris develop it.
You could say the same thing about Bazzite or SteamOS. It’s the convenience of having all of those preconfigured “out of the box” that makes them popular.
E: Lutris is developing it, along with Heroic.
Bazzite is a collection of packages and default settings, as is SteamOS. My point is that a cross-platform Gamemode replacement could be used by better already established distros like Bazzite.
As is Playtron
You seem to have a lot of praise for a distro you’ve (rightfully) called out having several red flags?
I praise things that are worthy of praise and call out things that are worthy of being called out. The only reason I tried it out was because the concept is appealing.