I haven’t heard anyone else mention it, Vultr is a good one as well.

Even considering your edits, it’s still a stupid argument. By that same logic nothing should be preserved. Watching LotR now is not the same as watching it when it first came out, which should have never been made according to you because by that time the book should have already been destroyed since you wouldn’t want to preserve it for 50 years, but Tolkien shouldn’t have even written it, since they were based on ideas and drafts he did during the first world war exploring how war changes men and power corrupts, which obviously is only valid in that context and nowhere else so it should be destroyed since preserving it would be invasive and destructive, no?.

Preserving something can never be destructive, it’s the opposite of it. If the Mona Lisa was destroyed you wouldn’t even know it existed, so how can having preserved it be destructive when the alternative is oblivion?

And I agree that the Mona Lisa is no big deal, you know who else agrees? People from that time. It’s widely known that the Mona Lisa was one of Da Vinci’s less famous works, and until Napoleon made a big deal out of it it was just a random painting in a random museum. So I get part of your point, that people who make a big deal out of the Mona Lisa are only there to see the famous painting, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no reason to preserve it, or that there are no people who go there to see the actual Mona Lisa.

That’s a very bad decision as a manager, if I was another employee in that store I would take that to mean never control kids in the store, let the manager deal with that.

And if I was the friend I would have asked during that exchange with the manager present “So, I assume that means she’s paying for everything the kid broke before I asked him to stop, right?” Just to see the reactions.

To be fair GoG selling point is that it doesn’t use any external software, it tries to emulate the old disk feel.

Personally I identify much more closely with GoG philosophy, i.e. mostly no DRM, manage the games on my own, etc. However I use Linux, and Steam has been investing into it so I’ll keep giving them my money (the input management is indeed great, but not enough on its own for me).

People downvoting you are very self-centered, they don’t understand the importance of a job for lots of people. Until we have UBI, jobs like these will always be necessary.

That’s one of the things I miss the most in Gentoo, having the packages of your system defined in text files so a fresh install was just copying those files and running an update.

I’ve tried similar things with other distros, but it’s never the same, the list of packages ends up getting out of date or ends up with too much garbage.

Currently I have a home server so I took the time to get an Ansible playbook setup for running, maintaining, and maybe migrating the server if needed. Since some stuff is also run on other machines that I have (update system, update some docker images I run in multiple systems, etc) I did setup some minimal packages that I need on my main system, it’s easy enough but I wouldn’t recommend using Ansible just for this (but if you also have dotfiles it’s a great tool for automating lots of the initial setup).

All of that being said, the reason I never bothered with this until I had a home server is that usually there are years between system installs, so even if what you had was exactly what you wanted the last time you installed your system, it’s unlikely to be exactly what you want next time you do. Since the last time I installed my main system I switched from X to Wayland, from i3 to Hyprland and then Sway, etc, etc…

I know there are several reading orders available depending on which stories you want to prioritize, but I like publication order because you can see him creating the world. As in you can usually see him writing some one liners that prompt some ideas which are fully explored in the next book, I don’t remember any specific things but it’s stuff like talking about Gods being as powerful as how many people believe in them right before small gods.

What’s wrong with Ubuntu/Mint/PopOS/Fedora or any of the distros usually recommended? They’re easier to maintain and more up to date than Debian

Acknowledging DRM free games on steam is absolute proof that steam is not DRM, you cannot hold both views at the same time, they’re contradictory. Either all games on steam have DRM or steam is not DRM. Again, replace steam with an actual DRM software like Denuevo and you’ll see why.

“Any” has those two meanings, the fact that you chose an ambiguous phrasing is your fault, and the fact you haven’t apologized while making clear what you meant, but in fact doubled down in the aggressive tone tells a lot about you.

Also the phrase doesn’t mean what you think it does, you should have said"you can play all games on steam without steam", which would be correct, not all games can be played without seam, but some can, you yourself recognize this when you say that the odds are against me when picking a random game, therefore there is a chance. And this is the thing that seems hard to comprehend to everyone who claims steam is DRM, they that same phrasing with Denuevo or other actual DRM things and you’ll see why it’s bullshit.

In other words, a software is DRM if and only if every game that contains it is DRM protected. Let’s go back to logic school: if A then B is negated as A and not B, for example"If a dog then an animal" is true, so the negation would be false: “dog and not an animal” is in fact a contradiction. Or on the other side “if animal then dog” is false, so the negation animal and not a dog" must be possible, and indeed it is.

In this case what you’re stating is that steam is DRM which means “if it’s on steam then it’s DRM protected”, that statement is false because the negation"game on steam and no DRM" is possible. On the other hand “if it has Denuevo is DRM protected is true” and the negation “has Denuevo and is no DRM” is an impossibility.

Yes, in the sense that every store online is a digital right management, but people wouldn’t consider itch or GoG DRMs, and if you go to this level of what DRM is it becomes impossible to sell software, because the mere fact of having someplace that allows some people access to something and others not it’s a form of DRM.

Writing is hard, huh? According to the dictionary Any means “some, or even the smallest amount or number of”, therefore “you can play any steam game without steam” means “you can play even the smallest amount or number of steam games on steam”, or in other words “you can play one steam game without steam”. And like I said you can in fact play more than one steam games without steam, therefore you’re wrong.

claiming […] you can play any steam game without Steam is flat out wrong.

You should go inform yourself, many games on steam can be played without steam. I’ve even shared my copy of a game with a bunch of friends and we all played together in LAN, with a single copy of a Steam game, and only I had steam installed since this was at work.

Steam does not enforce games to require steam, it is not a requirement, it’s available for those who want to use it.

It’s probably fine, but you can accidentally short it when moving it around by touching it or resting it up on something conductive, even if you’re careful dust might short it as well, but this is much rarer.

As a general rule I would try to avoid it, but would not be my first concern.

If you read the first story (The colour of Magic + The light fantastic) you will know the story of the librarian, he start as a human there hahahah.

Not necessarily your fault, some games make the steam library a hard requirement by not implementing safe guards against it not being present. Others use some of the API there to ensure the game is owned and steam is logged in, but that’s not enforced by steam, so if a game doesn’t work without steam it’s by design of the game devs.

You must sign into steam the same way you must sign in to GoG, i.e. to download the game the first time. After that you can just run the binary. In fact you can copy that binary to another computer without steam to play there. However Steam is not against DRM, therefore some games there do have DRM and need either steam or in this case PSN to run.

That’s an important thing, games CAN use steam as DRM, but they’re not forced to, so there are games in Steam without DRM, therefore Steam is not a DRM by definition.

If for every 41 games that had Denuevo one didn’t had DRM Denuevo wouldn’t be a DRM software. However Denuevo is a DRM software, a game cannot both have Denuevo and not have DRM, however a game can be on Steam and not have DRM, therefore Steam is not DRM.

Btw, I think the ratio is way off, the vast majority of games on steam are Indy which don’t usually integrate with DRM.

Someone else already suggested it, but I would second Terry Pratchett. Even though most of the books are standalone, I recommend start with the Colour of Magic and follow publication order.

Did you actually tried to launch the game? What error did you get? What game was it?

Steam launcher is not needed unless the game is programmed to fail if it doesn’t detect steam, not all games do, it’s usually a sign of a badly programmed game. Also the game might have had other DRMs.

But for example grab Crusader Kings or Stellatirs which tries to use the steam API bit if it fails it just keeps going without, and you can copy it to another computer and play without steam installed.