Remember Kim Dotcom? He had a file sharing website and the police raided his house with guns like he was a dangerous criminal. There is a video of it on YouTube.

“Piracy” is a propaganda term. We shouldn’t use it. There is nothing wrong with sharing files.

Check the Historical section.

Those distros are just not being developed anymore, so they are no longer recommended.

Why do you bash Valve but not any other company like Apple, Nvidia etc?

I do. I will never buy anything from those companies.

The distros being removed from this list mostly by requests from maintainers means it’s not actively monitored or researched at all. So by not verifying it you put yourself on a mercy of other people. It will fail, if not already.

What are you talking about? It’s a list made by the Free Software Foundation. What was removed? If some information is incorrect, you should be able to prove it.

That’s because you have to use consoles to even read them. They contain hardware DRM and are far from being ethical.

I don’t know what hardware DRM means, but they use proprietary software, so you are right that they are unethical. I never said they were.

Am I missing something or you’re thinking that starting with least offenders is a good idea?

I don’t know what you mean.

You do. But hey you end up with DRM free games you like so much.

But to get there I have to use unethical proprietary software that I hate so much.

By the way why so you even want games? Aren’t most of them unethical?

Who said I do?

Gog offline installers are also unethical, no?

Of course. This is why itch.io is better than gog.

99% users won’t ever need that. For cases when they do, they can find guides, modify settings or install software that does what they want.

You could make the same excuse for Windows.

Any distro you download can do this exact thing and you wouldn’t know for a long period, unless you spend enough time to compile the whole thing yourself, compare and research.

You don’t have to compile to know this. You can find the list of fully free distros here: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html . Debian removes those blobs too, but it’s not on that list for other reasons.

I consider myself knowledgeable but you surely chose a wrong example to teach people about DRM. Try some denuvo or eac maybe.

That’s DRM too and there are many more examples. Blu-ray also contains DRM. And so do most PC games thanks to Valve. Console games on the other hand usually don’t have DRM when you buy a physical copy.

Whatever that means, users don’t care about it. Compared to others, Valve provides a lot more value in most of their solutions. They are hackable just enough to satisfy most enthusiasts.

I know that most people don’t care about their freedom, privacy or security. Most people use Windows. But this doesn’t stop us from trying to build a better world for ourselves and to try to convince others to care.

Some games on Steam are DRM-free and you can play them without running Steam. That is good, but you still need the proprietary Steam client to download them and Steam doesn’t tell you which games have DRM before you buy them. gog.com and itch.io prove that this can be done better.

That doesn’t mean you can’t control how it works. Most people don’t need sources of their Linux distros to use them as they want.

You can’t easily make changes to a program without the source code or even check what it does. Most people are not programmers, so others study the code and make the necessary changes for them.

It would be cool to have the source, but you wouldn’t expect them to have an official maintained repo since they spend much more resources on actual hardware that needs this distro.

This is not an excuse. What they are doing is unethical. They put themselves in a position of power over their users. Not much different from Microsoft or Apple.

Yeah it seems to also be the only thing that is proprietary in SteamOS too.

I don’t know if that’s true. But the Linux kernel is proprietary as well (just like the one in Arch) - it contains binary blobs without the source code.

Are you clueless or what? There are too many ways to do what you want with SteamOS. You can use offline mode, desktop mode, play pirated games in any mode, install any controller software you like.

I was explaining to you how DRM works and why it’s wrong, since apparently you have no idea. I don’t know why you are listing features that any popular desktop operating system has (even Windows). SteamOS is still proprietary, which makes it unethical.

Finally, install another Linux distro on it, or Windows. But people buy Deck because of SteamOS mostly since it creates the intended (and expected) experience.

If you buy a Windows laptop, you can install any operating system on it too. That doesn’t make Windows ethical.

They are DRM-free. I can send you a copy of those games and you can run them on your computer. Without you having to log in anywhere or install an additional proprietary application. Without anyone verifying anything. Isn’t that amazing?

Can you explain what parts of SteamOS are not controllable in a way that makes it more restricted than Arch, which it is based on?

Valve won’t release the source code and I don’t use it, so it’s hard for me to tell which packages are proprietary and which are not. Steam client for sure is proprietary and it comes with the OS. Arch by default is Free Software (other than proprietary blobs in the kernel) and you can audit what each program does and modify it. With SteamOS you can’t do that, because Valve keeps secrets from you on your own device.

[If the account owns the game - allow user to download and run the game] is a DRM sure… But it’s kind of fair, no?

To play any game you have to install and run the proprietary Steam client and be logged in to an account. Even to play singleplayer games. Even if you bought a physical disc. There are stores that don’t do this: gog.com and itch.io. They provide an optional client for convenience, but you can just download a game’s installer from the website and install it on any PC any time you want. In case of Itch the client is Free Software so anyone can see what it does and modify it.

And that makes it ethical? DRM-free stores exist: gog.com and itch.io for example.

Anything you write should be proprietary by default. So I don’t think you have to add this license to your comments just to achieve your goal. But it makes sense if you also want to give some extra rights to people.

If AI reads your code, but the output is something entirely different, why would that be illegal? Isn’t that the same as a human reading something? I’m curious what the courts will decide, though.

I don’t want to help Microsoft, but some of the arguments made in that article are strange. If AI means the end of software licenses, that means the end of copyright, which is a good thing. When AI gets better, we might be able to feed it leaked or decompiled source code and get something that we can legally use. That’s not the current situation, though. At the moment Microsoft uses libre, copylefted software to improve their proprietary program and that’s bad. But I don’t think we can do anything about it other than telling people to not use it.

Steam (and other parts of SteamOS) is non free software, it can do anything on your system and there is no easy way for you to change that or even know what it does. Valve developers put themselves in a position of power over you. They keep secrets from you on your own device. This in itself is unethical, but they also abuse their users with DRM. How can you say that you have control in this case?

Anti Commercial AI thingy

Just out of curiosity, do you think that licensing your posts under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 makes it illegal to use them to train an AI? If so, why do you think that? I post GPL licensed code online, so I’m interested in this topic.

Steam Deck is a computer, so its users deserve to have full control over it just like their PC or smartphone.

You are correct about Steam client though. Even if they keep the internals closed, the GUI part alone would be worth forking. I wish a chrome-less version would exist.

If people can’t easily modify it, then its developers have power over users. You have to trust that they will not abuse that power, but they already do - with DRM for example.

Their system (and the Steam client) is proprietary, which means you can’t easily see what the software does or change it. If you can’t control the software then you don’t control the device. People deserve to have the 4 essential freedoms. This is why Windows is bad and it’s the same with SteamOS.

Making a proprietary operating system is not the right decision. It’s unethical to take away people’s ability to control their own devices.

GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!”,[6][12] chosen because GNU’s design is Unix-like, but differs from Unix by being free software and containing no Unix code.[6][13][14] Stallman chose the name by using various plays on words, including the song The Gnu.[4]: 45:30

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU

Steam OS is proprietary.

But Arch contains proprietary firmware, so technically it’s not fully free software either.

They made a device with a proprietary operating system and proprietary software. If you really want that, why not just use Android?