People who pirate games are generally young and have no money. (like me a long time ago)
People who have work and money, will buy games to support the devs. (like me right now)
People who still pirate games (or any content) are trash, maybe you can just ignore them?
Pirating is not a bad thing, since people will discover your “brand” and when they can, they might buy your games. (I remember playing Starcraft 1, D2 and AOE, all quakes pirated when I was young, now I have all of them in my steam library)
OSS your game but the assets could be a great way, it feels similar to openTTD in a way.
But supporting Linux is great thing, (Fedora user here) and I try to buy games to support devs that support Linux natively. I have about 900+ games on Steam (Mainly Win titles), and I have finished only 30 or 40 of them. Now that Linux is getting more popular and because Steam makes playing windows games so seamless, it’s not worth the assle of pirating IMO.
But that just me. I am sure there are many others with similar opinions out there ;)
Here’s the straightforward version of why I use it:
The entire state of your operating system is defined in a config file, and changes are made by changing the config file. This makes it super easy to reproduce your exact system many times and to know where all the many different configuration elements that describe your system are located.
Updates are applied atomically, so you don’t have to worry about interrupting the update process and if it fails, the previous state of your system is still bootable. By default every time you change something, you get another option in the boot menu to roll back to.
Making container-like sub systems is super easy when you’re familiar with nix, so you can have as many different enclaves as you like for different software versions, development environments, desktop setups, whatever without taking a performance hit. Old versions of stuff are very accessible without breaking your new stuff.
The package manager has a lot of software and accessing nonfree stuff is straightforward. Guix looks rad, but nix ended up being the more practical compromise for my usecase. I didn’t want to have to package a heap of software the moment I made the switch.
It’s not just about malware, but more about system stability and avoiding breaking your system by bad updates. Updates are atomic (all or nothing) Ideally if something goes wrong, the update isn’t applied at all. If you manage to boot to a bad config, you can fix it by rebooting in to the previous known good config.
This is immensely valuable for appliance-type devices that aren’t meant to be “administered” by end users, like the Steam-deck, set top boxes, even Android phones. For laptops / desktops I’m sure it has some value for people who want a stable base, with newer flatpak/AppImages for day to day use.
As for how updates and system packages are installed, I can’t answer the specific technologies used, but I believe the principle is that an entirely new/complete filesystem “image” is created / layered on top. Then you reboot to the new image.
applications are installed with flatpak - basically little containers that contain everything a program needs. sort of like docker
so normally if you wanna install something - let's say minecraft. you would also need to install java. the flatpak for minecraft would have java inside of it so it can be run in its own little container and you don't need to install either
I’ve only really used Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu (in that order!), each for years at a time over the past two decades. I suppose it shows how progessively fewer fucks I give about the inner workings of the system.
I also tried to install a copy of… TurboLinux 6, I think? that I got from a Ham Radio swap meet as a kid sometime in the '90s, but I never got it to work.
This feels like the reviewers expected Debian to create their own desktop environment between releases or something. The point of Debian has always been a stable experience, not to be flashy.
If you haven’t tried them, I recommend giving them a try. They all have something to offer.
I don’t use Gnome, for example. People knock on it a bit BUT a large group of people swear by it for workflow.
KDE Plasma is the dream for anyone who likes to tweak settings. I used it on my laptop for a long time and it is very convenient. It also manages power and monitor settings very well. In terms of memory usage it is now similar to XFCE.
XFCE is perfect for people who don’t like change. It is a slow moving DE; tried and true.
Right now I am using LXQt. Not sure why I decided to do that. It looks ok. It is fast and light. That’s it’s claim to fame. It can be used with different WMs which is nice.
Are there any particular DE’s you like on a laptop, because of things like power consumption and efficiency that would not come normally into consideration for a desktop?
I can’t say I’ve ever looked into it. But, I found that KDE handled things very well. I used my laptop for full workdays, getting 11 hours out of it.
I’ve settled on Ubuntu in 2008, but jumped between Gnome, KDE, Unity and LXDE. Then I got a Steam Deck last year and it became my main machine, so now I am not only with its Arch based OS, but I a secondary Arch SD card that I occasionally boot, if I need something not immediately available in SteamOS.
linux
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.