the game was entirely streamed from a cloud service

That’s a DRM, you do not own the copy of your game, you rent it and don’t even run it on your hardware. That sound pretty Digital Restrictions Management to me.

DRM is not about a file or a security, it’s about control and restrictions which big corpo calls: rights.

That’s why I try to do DRM-free as much as possible!

• Infomaniak kSuite
• Zaclys and other similar entities
• Murena Workspace (Had a breach a few years ago)
• Proton

For photos only +1 for Ente Photos, very good product. I’ve been paying for more than a year and improvements are always made from their team. Everything is FOSS and e2ee + well documented even for less techincal nerds. The only thing I don’t like is the company being registered in the USA.

Not compatible with my option for online payments, which makes me not able to donate.

Yeah I hope for the same! I wish they had other mean of support than Open Collective…

I used lgogdownloader

This is a very interesting project, I had some limitation with GameVault with my quite large library.

The main ones were no real Linux support and one game per platform (resulting in many duplicates). And the philosophy of AGPL-v3 is closer to mine than the “source available” commercial stuff of GameVault. For now I’ll keep GameVault, I might run Drop in parralel using the compatibility flat thing so my library works on both and will switch completely to Drop once I have tested the experience and the project reach more maturity because their roadmap is hot as hell.

Thanks for sharing, I added it to AlternativeTo so more people can discover it.

More like Jellyfin for your DRM-free game installers.

Fedora is known to be a good middle ground, and that’s why Linus Torvalds is running it on its work machine. But Fedora is more GNOME focus, while it does not stop you from using KDE, if you’re on Xubuntu you might want to consider Kubuntu.

Reaper is the DAW for audio-engineers that is well supported on GNU/Linux.

FL Studio can works well with Wine or VM but its plugins are another story.

A few WebApps worth knowing (might not suit heavy usage):

• https://drumha.us/
• https://composeyogi.com/compose

There is also LMMS but this is more for small hobbyst rather than serious work.

You might wanna try running in a VM or WinBoat and maybe it’s worth asking on the CrossOver forum to see how well things run with CO.

oh, I need to look into it again for my old macbook.

Just have fun with your machine, learning is better when you are not forced to read the fucking manual. Of course you might need to do it but do it when you have the time on something you need to.

Of course distro-related forums are a great place to start, the legendary Arch Linux Wiki is a great place (even for other distros) and I know this might be contreversial but LLMs nowadays can be useful at explaining these kind of stuff to you, especially if you feed them the adequat ressources.

how to do this, best ways to achieve that etc

Often there is multiple best ways to achieve stuff and people are not agreeing on how. Of course there is often consensus on how NOT to do but doing and learning is better in my opinion than not doing because you’re scared it’s not the best way. Just do it!

Asahi while being an incredible project, that I fully support the people working on it, is not very usable.

It’s running, sure, but you will miss very important hardware features such as hardware acceleration and speaker. You cannot tell someone “Buy a supported mac and install Asahi on it!” it’s not honest about what how your software will utilized your hardware.

You can use nixpkgs and brew on macOS.

I have both kernel (GNU/Linux and XNU/darwin(macOS)) and even if there is tons of stuff I don’t like with macOS and their non-repairable hardware I have to admit that battery life, trackpad feeling, monitor, speaker and build quality are very hard to beat.

But unfortunately due to the undocumented arm architecture of Apple Silicon you will have hard time running GNU/Linux on M macs.

My MacBook is my last non-linux based machine as of today and I have difficulties switching it even if I want it very bad, some of my software don’t run well on Linux even through Wine/CrossOver and the battery life and idle power are the main reason why I am still using a lockdown OS on one of my laptop.

It is not next-generation, this is a versionning solution for a different kind of software than git. Git works extremely well for traditional software development.

Lore seems to be tailored for video games and other software that have large amount of assets, partial checkouts, worktree where patched-based system is not very well adapted.

Interesting, unfortunately I still rely on proprietary binaries but I could try it on a secondary device. Reproducibility is one of the reason I chose to learn NixOS.

I never said that GitHub was better. I just don’t feel like using a package maintained by a stranger with no tied to neither the software I want to install nor the distribution packages repository.

Of course installing random code from stranger is never great advice regardless of the distribution source. But AUR is simply not for me, and many users don’t understand the risk or let’s say responsabilities it involves while installing packages from that source.

Is Guix the GNU approach to NixOS?

isn’t enough to call it open source

I never said that ProtonDB was open source.

you would still have a diverging dataset if you allow people to insert new records in the new app

An Open source WebApp would not prevent this from happenning either. A community-led fork is nothing if “new entries” are all going through the main open source tool extending the “old” database.

It would only benefits from having the same code base. Same problem, doesn’t solve it.

The ProtonDB owners could just decide to not export that data any longer whenever they want.

I haven’t read the whole license myself so I don’t know all the legal aspect if they were going to do this.

But if they chose to close the database future entries, I’m pretty confident that the Linux Gaming community will organize themselves to quickly get another app, forking the open database previous from the closing decision. Allowing them to quickly move to a new common place. ProtonDB will probably lost reputation and usage as time goes but this is not a prediction scenario.

You also can’t change the data being Steam specific when the app is closed source and not accepting contributions

That’s another (valid) point. But nothing prevent you to build a webapp that periodacly imports from ProtonDB database to show Steam games data while also lists other titles that are not available through Steam creating a new database with your users entries for other platforms.

Open Source is a way to organize people around a project. ProtonDB author doesn’t seems to want their code to be publicly available for consulting nor for improving or modifying by external people. And that’s their rights to do so. For now, it seems that their projects is benefiting the Linux gaming community and the open license of the database is appreciated. If the project goes in an unexpected direction, people can fork the database which is the most valuable data, more than the code of the webapp.

I think OP means that the community feeds a database using a platform they have no real control over, as the source code of the website/WebApp is not public.

However it is good to remind people that ProtonDB database is published under the Open Database License ODbL at this GitHub repo. To me having the db under an open license is more important than a WebApp (especially now that anyone can build such a website in a probably insecure way, using a 20$ monthly LLM subscription).

I haven’t digged into the db myself, maybe it does not come with the comments and so and only the borked, silver, gold, platinum labels.

So yes the website doesn’t seems to be open source but the database is. So anyone could rebuild an alternative from its database (which is probably the most precious part of ProtonDB). If nobody already did it yet, it’s probably because no one felt the need for, as ProtonDB already offer a valid, great and free user experience with currently no reasons to distrust the project.