I do appreciate the ability to download a fully offline installer from gog and the requirement that games be drm free. But people keep making statements similar to yours as if steam games have to include some form of drm. There is no such requirement. Steam can simply act as a downloader and patcher. Integrating stream services and failing to start if there is no steam or the active account doesn’t own the game is completely up to the developer.

So if they have a drm free build on gog, but the steam hype includes drm, that’s cause the developer actively decided it should be like that.

Popular game examples that do not include any drm in the steam version are Factorio and (the original) Kerbal Space Program. Once downloaded, you can freely copy the installation around, and just start the exe. These games start just fine.

The service part only applies to copies sold that include steam keys and therefore use the steam-API related things (workshop, cloud saves). I haven’t read about this specific case in detail, but as long as that use of steam for copies sold is part of what they wanted to leverage but essentially not pay for, that’s obviously bull.

This honestly is somewhat unexpected and I had to re-read the comment I replied to to understand it correctly, hence my misunderstanding of that aspect. It’s unexpected cause ubisoft in particular for the longest time had their own “store” and games required at least their own launcher. I haven’t played Ubisoft games in at least a decade, so I don’t know/remember if the games reuired your own ubi-account, or if the games relied on Steams systems (workshop/cloud saves/…). I would’ve assumed no, and that they only use it as a downloader cause players essentially wouldn’t buy it outside of steam (or at least not enough).

Top be clear: if steam allows copies of a game listed on steam to be sold at an arbitrary price as long as that doesn’t include a steam key, this is perfectly fine. Actively thinking about it now I would assume it does, as I’m pretty sure I bought games without steam keys for less than the listing on steam was.

if you have a separate non-steam version you can charge whatever you want.

This is the part that was unclear from the original comment. If that’s in fact the case, that’s obviously fine (and different from the Amazon case).

why wouldn’t they?

it’s called “competetive pricing”. If I’m a customer and have a steam account holding most of my games (like most PC gamers), why would I even consider buying it anywhere else if it isn’t even cheaper and now I got games in like 3-5 stores with at least 2-3 launcher/downloaders/apps. No, this most likely won’t make them more money but much much less with fewer people buying it there.

Amazon got slapped with a substantial fine (in the EU) for having basically the same “rule” in their contracts, that forbid cheaper listings elsewhere. So yes, in the EU hanging that rule is illegal. But if it applies to digital licensing is another matter.

You do know you’re only renting access to the game with a one-time fee, not buying it, right?

Edit: the original comment left it unclear if the price rule only applies to copies sold that include a steam key, or if copies that work completely without steam can be arbitrarily priced. If the latter is the case, it’s obviously fine. If it includes any game version, it isn’t OK.

I sure haven’t, and won’t. If that’s what their leadership wants, I won’t touch it with a 10 foot pole. There are many other games, I don’t need to play this particular one that badly.

These days, if you’re not on Windows you can use luks or just zfs with encryption enabled. Code is open and can be audited by anyone. But yes, VeraCrypt to my knowledge is also still a viable option.

Until very recently, I exclusively used the /56 prefix I get from my ISP exclusively. This is still relatively annoying in my case as this prefix changes at least daily for some reason. Clients get their IP via SLAAC.

I’ve added ULA literally less than a week ago as I have a local reverse proxy I want to handle both local and external request, in both v6 and v4. Obviously more hosts should be accessible from local clients. But I can’t tell local clients apart except by IP, and since the prefix is unstable this would require some sort of hook to update the proxy with that new prefix (might be possible, but seems like a real hassle). So here we are.

No company that doesn’t allow you to install browser add-ons will allow you to run a pi-hole instance. Not on your machine, and much less as an actual pi plugged into their network. If you did plug an actual pi into the network it would probably reason to be just straight up fired.

I wouldn’t think so. I would also assume that direct DNS requests to external servers aren’t allowed in the firewall. But even if they are, they probably can’t use a non-company DNS server if he needs to reach internally hosted services. So it would at least require using different browser for internal and external browsing, assuming DNS requests to external servers really are allowed.

If he can’t even install an addon for a browser, what do you think he can do with DNS?

The arch package has to be built somehow. You could look at that packages source to figure out how to manually do it on your system, or wait/hope the deb is being maintained and gets fixed.

It’s likely mostly some plumbing, like a systemd service with it’s configuration, to get the audio routed properly.

There’s also a dedicated recipe in “bottles”, which I think is based on it at least in part. As I’m trying to move away from fusion, I haven’t tried it yet though. Apparently it can work, but can also randomly break with updates…

There’s also In shape, which has it’s down sides (some go away with money), but also runs anywhere bring browser based. One of the more obvious down sides is that it’s by definition cloud based.

There has been a lot of advances even with Nvidia in recent years. Assuming the GPU in the laptop is semi-modern (not sure if it’s 10xx or 20xx and newer, but one of those), you should be able to just install any modern distro and it should just work. This is especially true for gaming focused distros (like CachyOS), which doesn’t have to be used for gaming btw. They will auto-detect just fine in the installer and there is zero effort or tinkering required.

If you’re using a keepass database, Keepass2Android can natively sync with many cloud options including self hosted and generic ones, even without specific “companion” apps. That’s what I use. In my case, it’s backed by my NextCloud, but it used to be Google drive before.

Just also sync the file on your PC, merging changes from different clients is part of the keepass database format and “just works”.

Also VaultWarden works great if your can self host it, but I prefer keepass for a variety of features and integrations.

Forgejo was soft forked from Gitea after they went commercial and changed the license (I think). If there aren’t any so far, expect pay walled features eventually.

Forgejo turned into a hard fork after communication issues between the teams. I haven’t looked too deeply into it (as I don’t really care about the fact that it’s a hard fork now). This means while it used to be a drop-in replacement allowing you to go back and forth between the two, it’s now an active conversion, I think.

All normal PCs run CachyOS, includes gaming PCs, laptops and media PCs. All servers run some form of Debian (includes Proxmox) or a dedicated distro for their use (TRUE WAS, technically also Debian based).

Maybe look onto OwnCloud. That’s the project NextCloud was forked from many years ago. It’s very much still around and had a very different philosophy, a much more minimalistic approach with focus on stability. That’s actually the reason the people behind NextCloud had to fork it, cause all their additional features (bloat) wasn’t accepted upstream.

If you want to lessen the barrier of entry to Arch, maybe try CachyOS. It’s Arch based and very close to normal Arch, but has some conveniences. Might be worth a look. It’s also got it’s own CPU specific repositories (same content as Arch), giving even more performance.

Appreciate the heads up. I’m reasonably sure I’ve already uninstalled it anyway, but I’ll check tomorrow to make sure.