A iot of the FOSS projects are developed by a handful of people, often just one or two. So you buy a licence from those individuals and remove and replace the rest. Or just hire the one or two devs and they can pull in the bits they wrote. You’re always free to relicense your work.

And if it’s GPL v2, there’s no problem because you can probably treat it as “firmware” since it’s a console and not a PC (e.g. like TiVo did). GPL v3 blocks that loophole though.

Yup. I’ve completed hundreds of Steam games, I’ve played one EGS game. My library size isn’t that different between the two (like 600-700 on Steam, 200-400 on EGS), but I spend a lot on Steam and nothing on EGS…

Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to buy a license from an emulator project, hire one or two from the team, and give them access to internal info to help fix things up? Then your internal team just integrates it with the console and you ship it.

That sounds way cheaper than NIH…

Wow, are you me? I just finished my first EGS game a month or two ago, and that’s after years of collecting games. I played on Steam Deck with Heroic, so I haven’t even used their client (I claim on their website).

I have never spent a dime at EGS, but I have hundreds of games from their giveaways. I’m rich!

And a bunch I didn’t complete, but felt I got good value from for <10h playtime.

Same, but also add Fanatical and game giveaways.

Exactly. I almost never pay full price on Steam, and I add a lot of keys from Humble or Fanatical bundles where I only intend to play half or so.

So yeah, I’m guessing it’s actually 10% or so of that figure if we make a few rules:

• count bundles as a single game, and if one game is played from it, that counts for the whole bundle
• assume games added to Steam are part of a bundle (perhaps in groups of 5)
• don’t count games that were ever given away free
• assume all games were purchased at a discount

That would probably get us pretty close to the real number.

Well, if anyone points out a pedo in my neighborhood, I’ll do something about it.

… I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror

So it goes.

Good luck! I also don’t like spending money, so I don’t blame you. Definitely consider a dual-boot w/ Linux though, it can at least help you separate work from play. :)

Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro every day for my day job

Probably easier to run a VM or dual-boot then. Trying to keep those up-to-date is going to be a nightmare.

Honestly, if I were in your shoes, I’d probably get an Apple device. Adobe works great, and macOS isn’t as bad as Windows IMO.

I liked being functionally untrackable online, and not getting ads shoved down my throat

There are a lot of ways to get around that, such as:

• uBlock Origin - blocks ads
• use a VPN and switch locations periodically - limits efficacy of tracking
• try Mullvad Browser - basically Tor Browser (i.e. the browser included w/ Tails), but without Tor, so fewer breakages

But honestly, the first two are really easy to do and solve 80% of the problem with a very small amount of breakage, and Firefox is installed by default in most Linux distros, and is available in the repositories on those where it’s not the default.

But they do because they control their developer ecosystem.

I agree that consoles should allow competing stores, but that’s not the current reality.

Pretty much any major distro is going to have similar support for all of that. And for Adobe CC, that’s going to be limited at best. You didn’t specify which part of CC you need, but here’s an option for installing Photoshop 2022 on Linux. Trying to get the latest is likely going to be painful, since WINE would probably lag with supporting all the new updates.

Steam works pretty well pretty much everywhere. I’ve used it on Fedora, Arch, and openSUSE, and I’m sure it works fine on any Debian-based distro. VR support is similar, you’re going to have a much better time with SteamVR headsets. That said, here’s a guide to VR on Linux, stick to “confirmed working” sections for minimal tinkering.

Tails

Yeah, don’t use that for regular work, that’s an uber-paranoid distro that’s intentionally locked down, which means things are likely going to be more difficult to get working.

Try Linux Mint or Fedora (or Bazzite if you want gamer flavor), they’re both solid and tend to work pretty well out of the box. Software and hardware support doesn’t vary much between distros, so if it you can’t get it working with one of those and it’s not “officially supported” (i.e. instructions aren’t in one of my links), distro hopping probably won’t help.

Played a bit of Despotism 3k and it was surprisingly addictive. I forget when or how I got it (probably a bundle), but I enjoyed myself.

I have been trying to avoid buying new games, and I’ve really enjoyed digging through my library.

Why include Linux bloat? Just write the kernel yourself!

Oh no!

Anyway…

What could possibility go wrong?? :)

Even simpler! Nothing to get between you and the kernel. :)

I’m guessing you’re running either the nvidia open source drivers (way worse performance) or you don’t have graphics switching configured and it’s using your GPU’s iGPU (way way worse performance).

Bigger distros like Mint will probably configure that for you.