When people say “DRM,” they almost always mean the check when the game launches, not the one-time license check when you download a game. Whether they use their Steam platform or a webpage, I honestly don’t see much of a difference, provided you end up with a DRM-free product at the end.

But yes, technically Valve is verifying that you own the game, but it’s not really what is meant when the average person says “DRM.”

Exactly. Don’t use Manjaro, I argue that it’s less stable than Arch due to how updates are managed.

That’ll be… quite the Leap. I haven’t done an Arch install, but the last time I did, it required a fair amount of reading since the installer doesn’t walk you through everything. It’s not hard per se, but it does take some time for the first install.

If you’re not super familiar with Linux, I recommend holding off on Arch. This isn’t coming from any form of elitism (I don’t use Arch anymore) or lack of experience (I used Arch for > 5 years), just from reading between the lines of what you said, which indicates that you’re probably not super familiar with Linux.

If you really want to do it, go for it! I think Arch is an absolutely fine distro, and I think there are a lot of good reasons to use it. I just don’t want someone who may be new to Linux to get frustrated and end up not having fun. So don’t let me discourage you, but also know what you’re jumping into: probably a couple hours of getting the base system installed, and maybe another hour or two of installing packages to get to a usable system.

Exactly. I ran Arch for over 5 years, and the only “instability” I had was:

• Nvidia drivers not matching kernel drivers - also happened on openSUSE Tumbleweed, and has more to do with Nvidia’s driver being closed-source than anything Arch is doing
• systemd and usr merge - this was many years ago, and the only reason I messed it up was because I didn’t actually follow the instructions; and this was an absolutely massive change
• I did something stupid - sometimes this is uninstalling the display manager or some other critical component

That’s really it. I’ve since moved to openSUSE Tumbleweed and an AMD GPU, largely because of built-in snapper support and their server-oriented distros (Leap and MicroOS), and it wasn’t because Arch was “unstable” or anything like that. In fact, I had far fewer issues with Arch than I did with the other distros I used before: Ubuntu and Fedora. It turns out, as you understand Linux better, you tend to mess things up less.

And even if they had a monopoly (which I agree that they don’t), they have to actually abuse that monopoly to be a problem. Last I checked, the only requirement Valve has for games distributed on Steam is the devs can’t sell Steam keys for less elsewhere, but they can sell as many Steam keys as they want outside of Steam w/o paying Valve anything. They can also generate keys for other distribution platforms and price them however they want.

That’s extremely fair, and the fact that they’re able to maintain a dominant position in the PC games distribution market without any exclusivity agreements or anything of that nature speaks volumes to the level of service they provide for both users and publishers/developers.

even free games on steam require the steam client to install

That’s not exactly DRM though, that’s just only supporting one distribution method.

You have to use GOG’s servers to get games you purchased from them as well, that doesn’t make that DRM, it just means that’s the only distribution method they support.

To me, DRM has absolutely nothing to do with delivery, it’s all about use once you have it.

You can use Parabola instead, which is basically FOSS-only Arch. This funding would likely also benefit Parabola indirectly.

They kind of tried with UWP apps in the Microsoft Store, but they didn’t catch on.

And for Valve, producing SteamOS images could be easier, meaning they can focus their dev efforts on something else.

I hope it ends up similar to OpenSUSE’s OBS, or even better, that they can reuse a lot of the work OBS has done. I use it and think it’s fantastic.

What exactly did you learn? If it’s that there are a number of different types of stem cells, then we really need to improve scientific communication to the average person. I learned this kind of thing because I’m interested, but I thought this was being taught to kids since they were an active area of research (something like 15-20 years?).

Well, “nuclear” has come to mean “fission,” because that’s how it’s used in every nuclear energy system today. “Fusion” isn’t something that exists in a meaningful way outside of science labs.

So I think that association is fair. If you mean “fusion,” you should say “nuclear fusion.”

Yup, 2 + 2 = 5, I love big brother.

BTW, reading Julia right now, which is the same setting, but with more graphic language and a dose of feminism. Will probably follow up with a re-read of 1984, it’s been a few years.

So, the first few minutes of any politician opening their mouth?

Maybe it’s a regional thing, or maybe you’re just a hothead, hard to tell.

Either way, in my region, “scuzzy” and “sequel” are the dominant pronunciations for SCSI and SQL in my field.

LibreOffice Online does. It’s not built around it, but Collabora’s work has added some level of collaboration to it.

That said, if collab features are your top priority, then OnlyOffice may be the better option, since it was built web-first. I don’t know what OpenOffice offers here though.

Nah, there are no such rules, like anything else, initialisms are defined by speakers of the language, and that’s what industry professionals seem to use most often.

Yup, pretty much the same. If we do get email, they’re usually pretty short, or they’re corporate nonsense.

LibreOffice can also be self-hosted as a web service.

The C is hard because the second word is “Computer.” The O in “Computer” becomes a “u” sound because “scossy” sounds odd.