claiming [...] you can play any steam game without Steam is flat out wrong.
You should go inform yourself, many games on steam can be played without steam. I've even shared my copy of a game with a bunch of friends and we all played together in LAN, with a single copy of a Steam game, and only I had steam installed since this was at work.
Steam does not enforce games to require steam, it is not a requirement, it's available for those who want to use it.
It's probably fine, but you can accidentally short it when moving it around by touching it or resting it up on something conductive, even if you're careful dust might short it as well, but this is much rarer.
As a general rule I would try to avoid it, but would not be my first concern.
If you read the first story (The colour of Magic + The light fantastic) you will know the story of the librarian, he start as a human there hahahah.
Not necessarily your fault, some games make the steam library a hard requirement by not implementing safe guards against it not being present. Others use some of the API there to ensure the game is owned and steam is logged in, but that's not enforced by steam, so if a game doesn't work without steam it's by design of the game devs.
You must sign into steam the same way you must sign in to GoG, i.e. to download the game the first time. After that you can just run the binary. In fact you can copy that binary to another computer without steam to play there. However Steam is not against DRM, therefore some games there do have DRM and need either steam or in this case PSN to run.
That's an important thing, games CAN use steam as DRM, but they're not forced to, so there are games in Steam without DRM, therefore Steam is not a DRM by definition.
If for every 41 games that had Denuevo one didn't had DRM Denuevo wouldn't be a DRM software. However Denuevo is a DRM software, a game cannot both have Denuevo and not have DRM, however a game can be on Steam and not have DRM, therefore Steam is not DRM.
Btw, I think the ratio is way off, the vast majority of games on steam are Indy which don't usually integrate with DRM.
So i really wanted to ditch windows once and for all
Why?
so i’ve tried Linux for a week trying different distros (debian, manjaro, ubuntu, opensuse, mint)
Why? Choose one and stick with it, preferably a beginner friendly one like Ubuntu or Mint.
and first of all why? Why are there so many distros out there?
Because different people like different things and have different opinions. Some people like to have the latest packages and so they choose Arch, while others prefer to have a stable system until they want to upgrade core packages and so they go with Ubuntu.
What’s the difference between debian + kde and manjaro + kde?
One is Debian based and the other in Arch based. Debian uses apt, Arch uses pacman. Debian has a slower release cycle to ensure compatibility while Arch has a faster release cycle to ensure the latest versions of things are available. Like these there are thousands of small differences between any two distros. It's mostly philosophical, so just pick something beginner friendly and stick with it until you find a reason to switch.
They look the same, they work the same. I don’t get it.
They don't work 100% the same, that's like saying that a car and a truck are the same because they're both painted black and have a steering wheel. Under the hood they're very different.
Also why do things have to be complicated?
They're not, they're different. Doing stuff on Windows is also complicated if you don't know what you're doing, excepts you've had years of experience, in a few years Linux will feel easy and Windows complicated.
I’ve installed debian, installed calibre to manage my ebooks, created a library from an existing library on my hard drive (not the one with debian installed), ERROR! All the files are read-only.
Is the entire hard-drive read only? How did you mount it? What format is it on? You're skipping a lot of important questions, that if you had answered (or asked about this issue) you would know the problem. My guess is that you don't have ntfs-3g installed and the drive was NTFS.
What???? I’ve followed multiple guides on how to change permissions and finally solved the problem.
How? This might give us an idea of what was wrong with it.
Now let’s restart my pc. files on the hard drive are read only WHAT????
Yes, makes sense, did you applied a permanent fix or a temporary one? Since we don't know what you did we have to assume you did a temporary fix, so it's like asking why did Firefox not opened after I restarted my computer if I had open it before.
Fuck debian, let’s go on manjaro.
That's a bad reason to switch distros, if you switch distros every time you run into something you don't understand you're going to run out of distros fairly quickly. Let me tell you right now, EVERYTHING one distro can do another one can, no exceptions. Something not working is a bad reason to switch distros unless you know why the other distro makes it work and are okay with the philosophical differences between distros.
No problems at all on calibre. Managed to create the library as easy as i did on windows. My question is: where’s the fun in this?
The same thing that's causing you problems is an awesome feature, Linux is very modular, you can build yourself your system exactly the way you want it. That is very fun.
It’s just problems, after problems, after problems and i didn’t even start gaming.
Well, yeah, it's an unfamiliar thing, I feel the same every time I have to use Windows.
I mean i tried installing retroarch and importing my saves but of course nothing works.
Why not? AFAIK RetroArch should have cross compatible saves.
Read this guide, read that guide. Nope. Nothing works. Ok, fuck retroarch let’s customize the appearance of my desktop: move some icons on the panel, center this, adjust height, move this on the left, spent 30 minutes tweaking, very nice…
Did you saved in the meantime? Let his be a lesson, save often, you never know when something will happen.
kde crashes, all back to default.
That's weird, I don't remember last time KDE crashed, but then again I'm not using Manjaro so maybe the current version there is broken? What was the error? Did you submitted a bug report? That might be an important finding.
Let’s download some apps. I want as many apps that i already know as possible. Let’s see if jdownloader is available for linux. Yep there’s one. Nope, not for manjaro (officially). There’s a AUR package available. Nice.
Not nice, don't use AUR on Manjaro, you will break stuff.
What do i need to do to install a AUR package? A wall of text on the wiki, 20 minutes videos, yay.
That's because AUR is not meant for people who don't know what they're doing. It's dangerous and unstable, the way to get an air package is to build it yourself, the way to get an automated tool to install them is to build the package for it yourself, this should prevent people who shouldn't be building packages from doing so. BTW, Manjaro is especially unsafe because it has an AUR manager in their official repos IIRC, which btw is called yay, so not sure if that was a joke.
Ok let’s call it a day. Do i need to live another life to make linux work?
No, you just need time to learn something new, instead of jumping around thinking that things would solve themselves. If you had started with Ubuntu you might not had either of those problems, and if you had learned what was wrong with the first problem on the first distro you would know how to fix it in every other distro and solve similar problems, just like you did with Windows before and now solving things there is intuitive for you.
Someone else already suggested it, but I would second Terry Pratchett. Even though most of the books are standalone, I recommend start with the Colour of Magic and follow publication order.
I disagree, I think Cryptonomicon is a very heavy book, might be too much for someone just starting, I've been slowly reading it for months, but I end up getting tired of it and reading something else to rest from it before going back and end up forgetting half of the characters and what they were doing.
Now is the perfect time for you to read "The end of Eternity", I'm not going to spoil it, just go.
Did you actually tried to launch the game? What error did you get? What game was it?
Steam launcher is not needed unless the game is programmed to fail if it doesn't detect steam, not all games do, it's usually a sign of a badly programmed game. Also the game might have had other DRMs.
But for example grab Crusader Kings or Stellatirs which tries to use the steam API bit if it fails it just keeps going without, and you can copy it to another computer and play without steam installed.
Writing is hard, huh? According to the dictionary Any means "some, or even the smallest amount or number of", therefore "you can play any steam game without steam" means "you can play even the smallest amount or number of steam games on steam", or in other words "you can play one steam game without steam". And like I said you can in fact play more than one steam games without steam, therefore you're wrong.