this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I'm generally pretty much in agreement with the idea that online services are crap because you don't really own the things you buy, but honestly I've been buying physical media since the 80s and pirating since the 90s, and the oldest games I currently have easy access to are ones I bought on Steam. I'm not a collector or an archivist or anything. Those just aren't hobbies that interest me, and I move a lot, and don't always take care of my stuff, and freely lend things to unreliable friends, and frequently wipe my drives to try out new Linux distros, so at this point even if Valve probably won't be around forever I still expect my Steam games to last longer than anything else I could get. Steam is really the only reason I ever buy games at all anymore.
I used to almost exclusively pirate because I couldn't afford much of anything. Steam has actually enabled me to purchase most of the games I use since I can wait till they're on special and cheap. There's also a huge amount of indie games that would never have seen the light of day if they could only release on physical media or through their own website or whatever.
no Steam isn't perfect, I would like Valve to take less of a cut but in terms of making games more accessible, I think they've done a decent job.
No shade on my fellow pirates who still exclusively pirate and don't want to feed the corporate beast.
A lot of newer games are also big enough that backing them up reliably actually is a meaningful burden. My Steam library is like 900 games. Even though a lot of them are 500MB, a lot of them aren't.
I can't store that shit.
You can move your home directory to a different drive so that you don't lose everything when you switch distros.
Yeah, I know, but I like starting with fresh dotfiles. It gets rid of all the weird settings changes I've made and makes the install really feel clean and fresh. I do have important stuff backed up. I'm just overly aggressive about removing unimportant stuff.
I'm actually about to do this this weekend. I use Arch on my laptop and Pop on my gaming desktop. I'm going to switch my gaming desktop over to Arch. The only thing I'm going to keep is my docs folder. Everything else is getting nuked.
When I set up mine, I created a separate /data mount point and drive for anything that I expect to keep between distros. The problem with keeping the home directory is that means all your personalized config files which may or may not apply to a new distro you switch to. I keep configs I want to keep in a git repo (like my i3 configs and scripts that I absolutely wouldn't want to redo from scratch), data I want to keep in /data, and everything else can pretty much be wiped for a new distro on a whim without too much hassle.
That's a great idea to use GitHub! I'm going to do that too.