It’s the irreverence with which they are used. If the average European medieval peasant affirm their sincerity and honesty by saying “May God damn me to hell if I lie”, that’s an (implicit) oath. They’re putting their salvation on the line. That’s how serious the matter at hand is.

If I casually say “damn, that ass”, I’m using a boiled down version of that (when the oath formula becomes so widespread, people start omitting words because everyone knows what you mean anyway, even if you just say “God Damn me” and eventually just “damn”). But I’m not doing it out of a devout belief that the thing I’m saying warrants reinforcement by invoking divine wrath. I’m abusing the sanctity of good for an entirely profane matter. I’m reducing God’s power and wrarh to a colloquial tool.

That would be rather pathetic then, to resort to anticompetitive practices and still not prevail.

I believe that is why people made such a fuss about the GDPR allowing courts to slap companies for up to 4% of their worldwide annual revenue. Whether or not that full extent is ever brought to bear against particularly megacorps is a different question, but at least medium-sized companies will probably avoid repeat offenses. I don’t know how Meta felt about the 1.2 billion ticket either, but I can’t imagine they just shrugged it off as normal business expenses.

Are they succeeding? I have no idea of the actual figures and the Internet tends to form echo chambers, so I don’t know if the sentiments I read that they’re still not much of a threat are actually representative.

I’m actually gaming on nvidia! Didn’t take any tinkering either. I got the Nvidia version of Nobara, which many steam games “just work” on.

That’s not to say I didn’t start tinkering anyway, but new games I install and just run work fine.