I started my last Distro hop 11 months ago with Manjaro, I killed the system within two days. Then moved onto Bazzite briefly until I realised that was likely to be within the US Government control. Settled on CachyOS, which I broke after 3 months (that is a record for me!). Latest distrib of CachyOS is mightily impressive.

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It looks impressive, but its NVIDIA... I'm on a 4070 at the moment and my upgrade cycle is 3-5 years away based on what I play. This will be my last NVIDIA card though, I'm not going to support a company that is actively trying to kill the pass-time I have had almost entire life.

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These days I always checkout 'who owns' a particular software. I checked out 'Opera Norway' and noted that the company was floated on the NASDAQ, ergo it will have lots of American investors and will likely cater to US tastes and business norms. In my experience as a developer/tester/project manager, I know most US firms will make all the noises to comply with GDPR, but will often breech intentionally as 'part of business'. In contrast Vivaldi is still privately held (not floated) - so right now at least is still within GDPR.

I'm not being anti-US, I'm just taking precautions against a prevalent business culture that is actively hostile towards its customers. At the moment the only US tools I'm using are Steam (as I have such a large back-catalogue) and Lutris. I'd opt for Heroic Launcher instead, but it is just not as flexible as Lutris. I use CachyOS which is a Deutsch distribution based on Canadian Arch.

Still hoping to see GOG.com bring Galaxy to Linux, then I can remove Lutris from the equation.

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Very shortsighted, but there is an alternative already.. Steam! I've never understood why more games that support modding, don't use the steam workshop. Perfect it isn't, but it could be used in a far better way. Nexus lost my business as a result of their lack of Linux support. I guess I won't be returning anytime soon.

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I'm a huge GOG advocate, as they a) are based outside of the USA and have to comply with GDPR (in fact, not just lip service) and b) DRM free is growing in importance to me (I want to give my video game collection to my kids before I die - you can't do that via other storefronts). There is only one thing lacking and that is a new version of GoG Galaxy (3.0 is well overdue) and a Linux native version of that. That said, Heroic Launcher is a great alternative.

GoG is actually my first preference when buying any game.

On the digital preservation side of things, whilst I'm sure there was some good commercial reasons for CDPR to go for it, I'm a frequent donor as I believe that video game preservation is a critical thing to do, to ensure that all the generations to come, can see how this art-form evolved from simple sprites all the way to vast open worlds in 3D that is near real. Sure there are areas that could be improved, but GoG (CDPR) is the only firm in the world that is doing anything even remotely close to what is needed, and for that, I think we should applaud and support with some real gusto!

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Honestly.... I'd rather play Space Marine 2.. GoW: Reloaded; I'll give it a miss as I already did the who GoW thing again a few years back. Warhammer 40k is just better.

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IF Sony win, it will be bad for video-gaming. Its not a clone/copy of Horizon. It sure as hell looks similar and has a similar vibe, as does Horizon to Assassin's Creed games. As does Star Wars to Dune, as does all arcade racing games to Outrun. I dislike corpo crap at the best of times. But when I see a Company like Sony that routinely rips off other games (and steals art assets), I get a little fed up. I present my evidence as Astro-Bot - which is a Mario Clone. If Sony want to start throwing their corpo-crap around, they better get ready for a whirlwind - Nintendo could make an awful lot of trouble for Sony in the courts, as could SEGA - and in Japan they take copyright law to the next level.

I suspect that if Tencent lose the case, they will just release in BRICS countries instead. I think the market in India and China would exceed anything in the US anyway. Bear in mind that whilst the US has a large market for video games, compared to the RotW - its only about 1/3 and reducing every day. China's Economy is still growing at 5% India at 6%, the USA at only 2.8%, and European nations (inc. UK) are relatively stagnant at about 1%. Which means more and more Indian and Chinese consumers will have enough disposable income and free time to buy systems and games.

The only people who will really lose in these cases, are US/Western gaming consumers. I personally can see enough differences between the two games, as to throw out the case anyway. And I say that as someone who really enjoyed the Horizon games.

As a footnote.. RUSSIA is growing at 4.3% - those sanctions are really working aren't they?

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I really love it when a foreign country decides what I can, and cannot buy.

I may have no desire to own those 'banned' games. But anyone with any sense of history know where this goes. If the USA doesn't take a chill-pill soon, the RoW will be using non US fintech instead - bye bye Mast3rCard and V1sa, TTFN YankExpress and say hello to EUCard and ChinaCard. Go ahead, ban away with puritanical zeal, it won't stem the flow at all - if anything, it will expand. It will drive those that want that content onto the Darkweb instead - and trust me, there are FAR worse things on the DW than some badly drawn 3D images of Sex of (what are) cartoon characters.

I wonder what will happen when the shrill-maga-pearl-clutching crowd get sight of GTA6?

Slippery Slope....

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So I installed 'lsfg-vk', blind - (stupid I know) and ended up in a situation where I could not unpick it from my cachyOS machine. I ended up having to do a re-install of the whole OS. I know I didn't RTFM and didn't do the prep for it. But the Linux version doesn't feel as complete as the windows version (where I have had almost no issues).

Gonna give it a wide berth for a year or two I think!

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Biggest issue I have with Bazzite is that it is based in the USA.

As someone who lives in Europe, and who takes data privacy seriously. I have moved away from any application that is US centric. I've had to do this to ensure my data security and also to ensure that GDPR is actually enforceable. I moved to Linux to get away from all the Windows/MacOS Spyware and ensured all my security applications are EU based. At the moment I'm using CachyOS which is based in Germany and uses Arch - based in Canada. This way I can be sure to maximise my security and ensure that my data is not held any place within the USA. Fedora/Red Hat/Ubuntu are all really rather suspect, as once something stops being really FOSS, then there is an instant conflict of interest.

That all said, I trialed Bazzite and really loved its smoothness and easy of working (although the install was a little troublesome). Had it been a EU based distribution, I may have stuck with it, but then the fact it is Fedora based would always represent an issue.

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