Betas are unstable. Don’t use them if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Is that a practical question looking for a real solution right now or is more of a philosophical question?

If the latter:

Tech should be approachable by teaching users and add safeguards, not by dumbing things down to a degree users stay dumb. Options should be easy to find, preview what they do, and always offer to restore defaults. A desktop for extreme beginners may even adopt an idea from gaming and have them do a tutorial section first. It may even double as a wizard of which accessibility features to enable for elderly users.

MOST people use smartphones before they use PCs and none of them have drive letters. All use a unix-style structure internally and just hide this fact through abstraction layers. Not one chose to show drive letters.

I think it’s pretty clear from context that they mean they have the ability to perpetually play the games because of the lack of DRM, not the right.

Plenty claim it’s their right and with much ferocity while as vehemently ignoring that there are plenty of games on GOG that offer reduced content when playing offline (an extensive list was posted by someone). Also, because games on Steam must disclose their use of DRM (and anti-cheat), people can just buy DRM-free games which can be backed up just as well. Goldberg is a drop-in library for games that use Steam APIs. So everything is fine there as well for people who actually make informed buying decisions.

But the APIs are public, so they can be reimplemented in open source.

And have been since years: https://mr_goldberg.gitlab.io/goldberg_emulator/

Is proton entirely FOSS?

Of course it is. Proton-GE and umu wouldn’t exist if it weren’t.

but now that I think about it, I am not sure.

You could have headed to Github and just looked for yourself…

For most people that is a distinction without a difference.

So what’s the difference to making a backup of my Steam folder? The games I play have no DRM either.

but your pedantry is making you miss the forest for the trees, basically.

No. People here claim, that just because GOG cannot remote wipe your drive, people buying off GOG have a perpetual right to the games they’ve bought. But they don’t because that’s not how copyright works. If a game’s license is revoked, to keep playing the game is copyright violation.

Not only do so many people not grasp basic concepts of copyright, they claim Valve could take away all downloaded games. No, Valve cannot remote wipe my drive either. I can back up my Steam folder. Many games on Steam don’t have DRM at all. It’s opt-in and the actual Steam documentation outright says not to rely on Steam DRM because “it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.” If games rely on crap like Denuvo, 3rd party launchers, or invasive anti-cheat, the publishers are required to clearly state so on the store page in one of those orange boxes. Users can make an informed decision on a per-game basis even with Steam. And those games that ship crap like Denuvo aren’t on GOG in the first place.

So in the end GOG is a store that stretches the truth about game ownership in their marketing and despite all their Witcher and Cyberpunk money, they don’t care about users of platforms competing against Windows at all.

If you can’t play the game without the steam client then it still has drm.

Plenty of games don’t rely on any Steamworks API at all. For the remaining goldberg_emulator exits.

It’s not a game bug; that’s Steam’s DRM.

Funny how you got hit by that on an domestic train trip and I traveled abroad several times and not got that weird behaviour even once. I simply never use offline mode. On the plane I was in airplane mode and when not on the plane I was on hotel wifi, personal phone hotspot, or just not connected to any wifi. Steam also never just out of the blue validated my game data. Must be a problem on your end.

With GOG I get an actual license key & terms that state my ownership.

No, the intellectual property is not transferred to you. You have no clue how copyright works.

No one needs to “offer” Proton. It’s available freely for anyone.

And that’s how GOG does not support Linux: Paying customers need to figure it out on their own. They don’t even value their customers to a degree to take and integrate existing open source solutions.

I booted up Metaphor: ReFantazio, and it just about made it to the main menu before telling me I needed to be in offline mode

Sounds like a game bug.

but you can’t explicitly put the device in offline mode if you don’t have an internet connection, funny enough

“…” button --> Airplane mode.

the reason I needed to authenticate the game again is because the Deck ran a “validating install” step on boot, but I have no idea when that step is going to happen

When you do something to bork the game data. It’s either user error or a bug but definitively not regular behaviour.

This year I was in three foreign countries with my Steam Deck. Once per flight, the other two by car. On the plane I activated airplane mode because duh but outside the plane airplane mode was always off.

By default Steam downloads shader caches off Valve’s servers. So if Steam saw before that an update is available and you didn’t download it, Steam wants to be online to download them. You can disable shader cache downloads in desktop mode but then the games have to compile the shaders by themselves which takes time computing resources, and in turn wastes battery power.

Also, pretty recently there was a bug in Steam that messed up authentication in general. It required me to log in twice (!) on every power on. The bug is now gone. It wasn’t a feature.

GOG is a side project of CD Project, the makers of The Witcher and Cyberpunk. They are massively wealthy. If GOG goes down, it’s because CD Project lets it happen, not because there is no other way.

It does support Linux: it lets you download Linux installer for games that have a Linux port.

GOG lets publishers upload various installers but GOG does nothing to support them, let alone offer something like Proton (which is open source, so they could take and integrate it for free).

Morals

Nothing moral about a store that affirms Microsoft’s Windows monopoly.

How do you use a Steam game after its license was revoked?

By default Steam is a mere download manager without any DRM. You can zip the game folder and back it up anywhere. Whether or not publishers go through the additional steps to enable one or more DRM solution is a different matter. My favorite Steam games have no DRM at all.

GOG sells actual Linux games with no 3rd party software necessary to play them.

Ah yes, stand-alone binary installers that work only on a very tiny set of Linux versions because they rely on specific version of system libraries, sometimes contain distribution-specific hardcoded paths, and so on. I especially like those older Linux ports that exclusively target Nvidia drivers because why would anyone just have coded to the OpenGL standard back then…

We have Flatpak Runtimes and Steam Linux Runtimes since years. CD Project / GOG can’t even be bothered to pick these existing open source solutions.

Shit I really like GOG as it’s the only competition to steam

There are plenty of competing PC game online stores, it’s just that they all suck monkey balls when you’re not using Windows. Microsoft is currently using their old monopolist playbook and release Blizzard games to the fucking Microsoft Store and Game Pass and not a single 3rd party store.

And don’t forget that the other publisher-owned storefronts like EA’s and Ubisoft’s are also still alive. They suck hard but they exist and apparently they do well enough to continue to be around.

Steam is the only PC games store that fights Microsoft’s Windows monopoly. GOG Galaxy has been written using the Qt framework. Making a Linux version of an existing Qt application is relatively easy (at least compared to a full port). Do that, integrate umu-Launcher for Windows games, bundle everything up and release GOG Galaxy on Flathub. Boom, done. But they don’t do that despite their massive pile of Witcher and Cyberpunk money.

So plenty of competition exists but if you happen to not be Windows-exclusive, everyone but Steam is bad.