Nibodhika

People downvoting you are very self-centered, they don't understand the importance of a job for lots of people. Until we have UBI, jobs like these will always be necessary.

How? I’ve installed Debian with KDE

Mistake number 1, Debian is not beginner friendly.

downloaded the .deb from steam website

Mistake number 2, this is windows mentality, if it's not in the package manager it's too advanced for you for the time being. Beginner friendly distros would have had steam in their package manager.

learnt to install that using sudo dpkg -i steam_latest.deb

You could have also double clicked the Deb file, but this is a bad way, dpkg does not resolve dependencies, so you would need to figure those out and install them by hand, which can be tedious at best.

opened the app and i’ve been welcomed with a text inviting me to press enter to continue, pretty simple. The program downloaded stuff, steam is ready now. Not bad.

You lucked out, your system had all of the requirements met.

Repeated the exact same thing on Debian with xfce, that apparently doesn’t come with a software installer, nothing works. An alert says i need to download dependencies (i know dpkg doesn’t resolve dependencies). Where’s the “enter to continue”?

No such luck therez remember when I told you to use the package manager? This is why. Possibly missing something stupid like an i32 library, which you could manually install, but you shouldn't, you're making things hard for yourself for no reason other than wanting to avoid beginner friendly distros.

How is this my fault??

It's your fault because like I've been saying since the beginning you're trying to use Linux as if it were Windows and getting frustrated because it behaves differently. Trying to do this will be frustrating and you will become angry because nothing works like you expect, but you must understand that it's not that things don't work, it's that they work differently.

You might be thinking this is stupid, an installer should install everything it needs, right? Nope, that's a windows mentality, in Linux the main idea is that an installer only installs what it's supposed to, any dependency should be system-wide. Why you might ask? Simple, imagine if every single GUI app had to include it's own copy of the full GUI library it uses, your system would quickly become bloated, not only that but each program would open it's own copy of the library using more and more memory, not to mention the interoperability problems between programs using different versions of the same library. In Linux the standard is for programs to use system libraries, it's the convention, just like how on Windows it is to not (which has its own set of problems). This is why package managers are important, they're not just downloading an executable and running it, they're doing lots of stuff behind the curtains, all of it can be done manually, but like you found out it's troublesome, so best is to avoid.

That's one of the things I miss the most in Gentoo, having the packages of your system defined in text files so a fresh install was just copying those files and running an update.

I've tried similar things with other distros, but it's never the same, the list of packages ends up getting out of date or ends up with too much garbage.

Currently I have a home server so I took the time to get an Ansible playbook setup for running, maintaining, and maybe migrating the server if needed. Since some stuff is also run on other machines that I have (update system, update some docker images I run in multiple systems, etc) I did setup some minimal packages that I need on my main system, it's easy enough but I wouldn't recommend using Ansible just for this (but if you also have dotfiles it's a great tool for automating lots of the initial setup).

All of that being said, the reason I never bothered with this until I had a home server is that usually there are years between system installs, so even if what you had was exactly what you wanted the last time you installed your system, it's unlikely to be exactly what you want next time you do. Since the last time I installed my main system I switched from X to Wayland, from i3 to Hyprland and then Sway, etc, etc...

I’ve never, ever got a virus on any of my pcs. I grew up with internet, since the ADSL days, i know my shit.

Therein lies the problem, you're a windows expert, moving away from your comfort zone will always feel bad. It's okay to stick to Windows, no one should be forced to use an OS they don't like. But if you ever want to try again, I recommend taking a step back and accepting that for all your years of experience in Windows you are a noob here, and trying to jump into the deep end is more likely to get you drowned than learning how to swim.

Also I recommend dual-booting, so you have the safe heaven of a known OS to reboot into in times of need. Most of us started that way and dealt slowly with the difficulties in using Linux with a windows user mentality, until at some point we realized we were spending the majority of our time in Linux and Windows had become unusable because we were now thinking like Linux users. I'm sure that if I had tried to do what you did I would also be frustrated, so I completely understand you. But let me tell you something which you might not want to hear, and will possibly even get angry at me for telling you, but there's a fairly good chance that the majority of issues you encountered were self-imposed. Linux has near infinite possibilities, but that's like saying the ocean is nearly infinite, it doesn't mean you should try to swim across it just because you're used to doing it on a swimming pool, you'll drown fairly quickly and get nowhere.

I see a common trend here. You seem to be very tech savvy and a windows power user, and get frustrated with Linux because you're trying to solve problems with a windows mentality and failing.

Yada, yada, yada.

That yada yada yada is the most important part from my entire answer, choose a beginner friendly distro and stick to it.

Things to do to install an app on Windows: download the exe, double click on the icon, follow the instructions, done.

Nope, things to install an app on Windows: Open a browser, search for the program, click the wrong link, download a virus, go back, try again, find a more reputable site, download another virus, run anti-virus, discover your computer has been completely overrun by viruses, format, reinstall everything, find the right site, download the installer, click next 20 times, accept to have a new service running when you start your PC by accident, done?. You don't do all of that every time? That's because you know what you're doing, I certainly don't do half the stuff you mentioned for Linux.

Things to do to install an app on Linux: check the package manager

That's it, if it's not there you shouldn't worry with it until you're a bit more experienced. This is why I recommend beginner friendly distro a, they will have more stuff and possibly have snaps/flatpacks by default which should cover most of your use ases and are installed via the same GUI.

Man, there are hundreds (nonsense) distros out there, i need something like 3 lives to try them all.

Precisely my point, don't. Pick a beginner friendly distro and stick to it.

Apparently not. I’ve saved a copy of the saves folder and simply pasted it in the retroarch folder on linux but the game doesn’t read anything.

Have you tried saving something new to see if we have the correct folder?

There were no errors. Screen went black and then everything was reset.

That's crashing, there should be some log somewhere, can you reproduce or is it random?

This is actually fun: i have Ubuntu Budgie on my laptop and i was trying to create a bootable win10 on my pendrive with ventoy given that jesus christ woeusb is super complicated to install with all those manual dependencies installs and woeusb-ng gives problem with python. Installed ventoy, copied the iso, pasted it, nothing shows up in the drive. Copied the iso again, pasted it again, file already existing. ????. I’ve extracted the drive, plugged it back in, nothing. Extracted it again, plugged it in on my desktop, iso is actually there. Wtf is wrong with linux?

Did you installed Ventoy properly on the drive? Did you unmounted before removing the first time? Otherwise you might have corrupted the file, remember how people always say to eject before unplugging a USB drive? This is the reason, the GUI that shows you copying stuff is just a FE to the calls to the kernel for writing, the kernel actual writing to the disk is done afterwards, so even after the GUI closes the file was not totally written. Again, regardless of OS, unmount/eject drives before unplugging them. Also is your desktop Linux or windows? Does the bootable drive works? You need to learn to provide more information if you expect help, saying "stuff doesn't work, what's wrong with Linux?" Will get you a lot of answers of the type "the problem is between the keyboard and the chair".

I know there are several reading orders available depending on which stories you want to prioritize, but I like publication order because you can see him creating the world. As in you can usually see him writing some one liners that prompt some ideas which are fully explored in the next book, I don't remember any specific things but it's stuff like talking about Gods being as powerful as how many people believe in them right before small gods.

What's wrong with Ubuntu/Mint/PopOS/Fedora or any of the distros usually recommended? They're easier to maintain and more up to date than Debian

Replace Arch with Ubuntu and the answer is yes. Arch based that's not a good idea.

The reason is that in 6 months lots can have changed, and Arch is not guaranteed a stable base, so updates might assume you have certain versions or things might break because you should have done a middle step during the upgrades that you didn't which is now buried in months of update news in the wiki.

If you want to only update your system every six months, Arch is not ideal, it's likely to work, but not guaranteed.

The Navidson record is a movie though.

Acknowledging DRM free games on steam is absolute proof that steam is not DRM, you cannot hold both views at the same time, they're contradictory. Either all games on steam have DRM or steam is not DRM. Again, replace steam with an actual DRM software like Denuevo and you'll see why.

"Any" has those two meanings, the fact that you chose an ambiguous phrasing is your fault, and the fact you haven't apologized while making clear what you meant, but in fact doubled down in the aggressive tone tells a lot about you.

Also the phrase doesn't mean what you think it does, you should have said"you can play all games on steam without steam", which would be correct, not all games can be played without seam, but some can, you yourself recognize this when you say that the odds are against me when picking a random game, therefore there is a chance. And this is the thing that seems hard to comprehend to everyone who claims steam is DRM, they that same phrasing with Denuevo or other actual DRM things and you'll see why it's bullshit.

In other words, a software is DRM if and only if every game that contains it is DRM protected. Let's go back to logic school: if A then B is negated as A and not B, for example"If a dog then an animal" is true, so the negation would be false: "dog and not an animal" is in fact a contradiction. Or on the other side "if animal then dog" is false, so the negation animal and not a dog" must be possible, and indeed it is.

In this case what you're stating is that steam is DRM which means "if it's on steam then it's DRM protected", that statement is false because the negation"game on steam and no DRM" is possible. On the other hand "if it has Denuevo is DRM protected is true" and the negation "has Denuevo and is no DRM" is an impossibility.

Yes, in the sense that every store online is a digital right management, but people wouldn't consider itch or GoG DRMs, and if you go to this level of what DRM is it becomes impossible to sell software, because the mere fact of having someplace that allows some people access to something and others not it's a form of DRM.