
No like i don’t think they’re still competent enough. Morally, sure, thry could be that evil.
If, say, Denver needed that database, they’d do it before the check cleared.
I dont think they could do it for a large country.
They would want to, they would take the contract, ans it would hire so many subcontractors cut so many corners the end product would be unrecognizable.

Yeah. I’m not a fan of any if this, but nobody cares when you say ‘dont be evil¹’; not being pointlessly recklessly evil isn’t a serious grown-up policy. better to do a political Tesla valve; introduce competing contradictory evil, dilute the propaganda, and arrest momemtym
¹except HUAC. HUAC cares.

The thing is: they’re not different.
And their hardware isn’t, like; special; it’s a single board computer running the standard x86/64 architecture that ships with a lightly customized OS most users won’t change.
I’m more worried about what nvidia Intel and and are getting up to. They’ll fuck you first.
I guess valve kind of is special? They are a games company, so they don’t have big government contracts, they don’t work with palantir, and they dont work at a low enough level that they can easily install something my electrical engineer or hacker friends can’t possibly fix with a soldering iron.
Theyll fuck me, sure, yes, but the chip makers already have their pants down.

The competition on…
Okay, so, it’s an OS right?
So for free linux-native stuff, there’s the default package manager that comes installed. Switch your steam deck to desktop mode. There’s a lot there, including emulators that will run on steam deck from ancient Atari shit to Nintendo switch.
But you can also run non-steam executables with proton. Heroic, lutris, etc are great tools from that. You can buy your games anywhere without rootkit DRM. Most things from itch.io or gog.com will run. Or, you know; other places. You can just pirate shit.
You can in fact uninstall the stock OS and run anything you can compile for midrange x86 hardware.
Of capitalism. The concept that ownership creates value rather than labor and entitles one to decision making power/virtue reward inevitably leads to dismantling regulations.