TL;DR you aren’t being targeted because you’re a woman. It’s because you game
I explained this to another person before: many gamers are too competitive for their own good. That means they want to win at nigh any cost. A simple “tactic” is make the other team make mistakes by influencing them. The best way to do so at a distance is by breaking their spirit. So you act like any attacker: you find weaknesses, attack vectors, ways to inflict psychological pain.
Most of the time there are very few things you know about the enemy besides their pseudonym. So you attack them with bog standard things, generic things, because they are generic. However, every tiny thing you find out about them increases the attack surface. Their location, their voice, typing speed, character choice, character set (colors, theme, items, …), etc. Perceived gender is just on other thing to add to the list.
Of course, if the gamer is losing, they are never the problem. Fault lies in others. Hence, even team mates become the enemy and the same rules apply. “If only everyone were like perfect like me, we would win”.
It doesn’t help that online gaming is just another digital activity. People behave worse when they can dehumanize the other party and that’s what the internet does. It makes it easier to act worse. Additionally, gamers who spend a lot of time online, are not good at socializing, hence the chance of them having a partner is lower than average. To make matters worse, spending so much time in such toxic communities only propagates the behavior.
Even if the sex split were 50/50, each gender were represented equally, or the gaming space were dominated by non-males: they are just as human and I bet the problem of toxicity would persist. Humans are nasty, disgusting, and evil. We are mostly egoistic, self-centered beings that socialize because it helped us survive for millennia. However, that need to socialize is dwindling quickly.
If we want to tackle toxicity in gaming, there are many, many things outside of gaming that play a role which make it impossible to conceive a gaming only solution.
“I’ll give more money to EA, Epic Games, Ubisoft, Riot Games or anything the community hypes up, then whine about how I’m mistreated, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
What you mean “you don’t tailor it to linux”. Sure you can. You can optimize hardware to take over certain tasks. There are entire chips out there made explicitly for certain workloads like encryption, neural networks, RAID, encoding, decoding, mining crypto, what have you. Do you really think there’s absolutely nothing in the linux kernel that couldn’t be optimized away into hardware?
Apple made its own chips with the Woz and then became a software company with that dude who got cancer. Only with the M1 did they design their own hardware again. Or am I getting this wrong?
What’s to stop Valve from owning the vertical?
And to go arm would mean throwing out the majority of their current store.
That really depends on the game studio support or how good the translation is. Wine games sometimes have better performance than when running on Windows (how they do that magic is beyond me), but adding another layer to translate from x86 to ARM isn’t insane. Even Apple wants to do it and they hate compatibility.
Plus arm gaming performance is trash, apples chips struggle to run games 10 years old at 1080p 60fps.
Apple is trash - that we can agree on, but does the chipset really hinder an APU from getting a better GPU? Nvidia is going to enter the ARM space and if they have an inbuilt GPU to make it an APU, then it might blow the Apple chips out of the water in terms of gaming.
Anyway, all I’m saying is I’d welcome “Made for Linux” hardware.