You are right about teenagers, but on the other hand not all people are the same. For some reason we’ve decided that they are competent to make those kinds of decisions and to do other things like driving a car. So even though they are not adults, we don’t think of them as children either. There is probably no simple answer to this question, though.

Introduce him to game development with Godot engine. I don’t know any specific tutorials, but you should be able to find something on YouTube.

You can also introduce him to the Free Software movement: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM

Here is an article from the FSF explaining why we should avoid making such compromises: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html . They probably explain this a lot better than me, so if it doesn’t convince you, then probably nothing will.

Neither is mine, the cost is extremely minor in this case, because steam is a gaming client, and the fundamental nature of a gaming client is non-essential and not integrated into the system deeply at all.

You could use this excuse to justify almost any type of proprietary software. Most apps are not deeply integrated into the system. That doesn’t make them ethical.

What you fail to understand is people being on windows is way worse in every single way than them having one proprietary app on their computer.

It is more free than Windows and I never said otherwise. I just said that it was still unethical.

There is huge benefit, more people are using much more FOSS, and the fact is, if more people were on linux, there’d be more foss software, which means better alternatives and outcompeting proprietary software.

But those people don’t care about their freedom. That’s the problem. They will always use proprietary software, because they only care about convenience or features. We need to change that. Only then our movement will benefit from this. We can’t let them get attached to Valve as long as they make proprietary software.

Steam ain’t that. It’s video games. And nothing else.

Games are software. If you can’t control what they do on your device, then you don’t control the device.

Steam isn’t going to be what “traps” them or anything, especially when it’s sandboxed, and when you sandbox it, it has literally no integration with the rest of your system at all.

You are assuming that a company that makes proprietary software won’t try to get more power over their users. Why wouldn’t they? Their users don’t even care. Sandboxing improves your security (which is good), but not your freedom. You still can’t see what the software does or change it, so that program is still unethical.

Games don’t come with the source code.

Most of them don’t, but some do. Just like with programs and apps.

Do they provide ethical installers?

They don’t provide any, you just download the game itself. Or you can use their Free Software client, which will download and update the games for you.

Check the Historical section.

Those distros are just not being developed anymore, so they are no longer recommended.

Why do you bash Valve but not any other company like Apple, Nvidia etc?

I do. I will never buy anything from those companies.

The distros being removed from this list mostly by requests from maintainers means it’s not actively monitored or researched at all. So by not verifying it you put yourself on a mercy of other people. It will fail, if not already.

What are you talking about? It’s a list made by the Free Software Foundation. What was removed? If some information is incorrect, you should be able to prove it.

That’s because you have to use consoles to even read them. They contain hardware DRM and are far from being ethical.

I don’t know what hardware DRM means, but they use proprietary software, so you are right that they are unethical. I never said they were.

Am I missing something or you’re thinking that starting with least offenders is a good idea?

I don’t know what you mean.

You do. But hey you end up with DRM free games you like so much.

But to get there I have to use unethical proprietary software that I hate so much.

By the way why so you even want games? Aren’t most of them unethical?

Who said I do?

Gog offline installers are also unethical, no?

Of course. This is why itch.io is better than gog.

My goal isn’t to increase the number of GNU/Linux users at all cost. I see very little benefit from people using GNU/Linux if they will use proprietary software on it, unless it’s only a temporary solution for them. If people stop using one proprietary platform only to be trapped in another without realizing it, then something went wrong. Some people ditch Android only to use SailfishOS. Or they ditch Twitter only to use Threads. So I hope those new GNU/Linux users who know nothing about the Free Software movement don’t get trapped again.

Steam is an unethical DRM platform, so I will always criticize it regardless if it makes people switch to GNU/Linux.

Also the Linux kernel and possibly some drivers according to the FSF: https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html. But I don’t know how to verify that last part.

Arch’s kernel contains proprietary blobs, so it’s not exactly Free Software. SteamOS just makes it more proprietary.

Yep. You can’t control what those games do on your system.

Realistically, what are you expecting?

Just for people to acknowledge that Steam is unethical and that we can do better. That’s it.

If Valve suddenly decided tomorrow to release all of their source code on Github, all you’d get is a big blob of source code that is purpose built for Valve themselves and not really modular. They’d have so much technical debt and auditing requirements that it’d probably be easier to start from scratch, which I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect them to do.

You could make the same excuse for any company. Releasing the code under a Free Software license is all that’s needed. Even if it’s hard to compile (but it has to be doable) and even if the code is a mess. It’s their responsibility as developers to not take away people’s freedom and to not put themselves in a position of power over users. They can use a Copyleft license if they don’t want they code to be used by proprietary competition.

And honestly, nothing closed source that Steam does is really novel enough to warrant being open source. The value of Steam comes from its ecosystem and playerbase, as well as the backing of Valve themselves. That’s not something that an open source Steam server or client would allow people to compete with.

It’s not about innovation, it’s about people being able to control the software that runs on their computers. The rest doesn’t matter.

I would like them to release an open source command line tool for downloading, launching and DRM-validating-ing games though. That seems reasonable for people who don’t want to run the full client and want something like Heroic or Lutris to be able to hook into.

They could release the code to a lot of things. For example their proprietary Steam SDK library. Currently games that are libre software have to use this proprietary library to use Steam’s features. DRM is unethical too and if Steam was Free Software, people would probably just remove it (kinda like crackers already do) or at least make it less annoying. This would only affect Valve’s DRM and modern games often have multiple forms of DRM, but it would be an improvement still.

My point is that Steam doesn’t have to be proprietary. You can make money in an ethical way with Free Software. Itch.io does this by providing a Free Software client. There is no excuse for making nonfree software. I don’t know why they didn’t use BSD like Sony did, but it really doesn’t matter.

If something contains proprietary software, then it’s proprietary. I know that you can turn SteamOS into a Free Software system. At the very least you would have to remove Steam (this is easy), use a Linux kernel without proprietary blobs (might be harder, but Arch has the same issue) and maybe some other things (I don’t know about the drivers). It’s nice that this is possible, but it’s still proprietary by default and that is wrong.

My priority is not for GNU/Linux (or any other particular OS) to get the most users. It’s not the goal of the Free Software movement. The goal is for people to use Free Software and for proprietary software to be destroyed. Valve makes proprietary software, so they are working against us. If your goal is for people to have freedom and control over their devices, you should criticize those actions too. You can do that, while also praising Valve for the good things that they do. Maybe Valve can change and become better, but if not then at least people should be aware of the situation. If you are against proprietary software, then you should understand that Steam being proprietary is bad for us. But maybe you care about features more than freedom - then we probably won’t agree on this.

If your goal is to get as many people using as much FOSS software as possible, steam is your ally.

I want people to eventually use fully free systems. It can be a gradual process, but this won’t happen if we don’t make our end goal clear to people. Companies that make nonfree software won’t do this - they use the term Open Source to avoid talking about freedom and avoid mentioning that proprietary software is bad. So we have to do this ourselves. You can you Steam and SteamOS if you want and at the same time tell people that we can do better than that. That’s all you have to do - just accept that they current situation isn’t perfect and that we can work on improving it.

Then it should be very easy for you to point out which part is idiotic. You are using the name of the kernel to describe the operating system and you accuse me of being clueless? You must be joking.

Steam comes with SteamOS. Steam is proprietary. Which part do you not understand?

We’d all like Steam to be open source, but that’s not going to happen for a number of reasons

We should fight to make that happen or at least not pretend that it’s fine.

We like Valve because they are actually contributing to open source projects, unlike Microsoft who say they love open source but don’t do anything to support it.

I don’t deny their contributions. We should praise them for the good work that they are doing, but at the same time we should criticize their bad behavior. Microsoft makes Free Software too (VS Code kinda, TypeScript) and they give money to the Linux Foundation. But they also do a lot of unethical things.

…again, why would they? They’ve thrown all these resources into helping foss, why would they perform a massive duplication of effort and create more than steam? What could the possible benefit be? I don’t see any incentive whatsoever to do that. If you don’t like steam you uninstall it and enjoy all the benefits that valve is giving us.

Why do companies make proprietary software and operating systems at all? Because they think it will make them the most money. Why is Steam proprietary? Why is Valve keeping secrets from their users? They could do the ethical thing and make it Free Software.

I’m aware of this, I’m just completely unaware of what malicious thing you’re implying valve will possibly do, other than make steam itself worse, which, again, if you don’t like steam, you’ll still be reaping massive benefits, they’re paying many full time developers to do literally nothing but make linux better.

Making proprietary software is already unethical by itself, because users can’t control it. They already do other malicious things like restrict their users with DRM. I’m glad that Valve, Microsoft and other companies contribute to Free Software. They deserve to be praised for this, but it shouldn’t distract us from the evil things they do, which we should criticize. Why can’t we praise Valve for the good things and criticize them for the bad things?

Steamos is not worth taking issue with, STEAM ITSELF is where you should point your attention.

Steam is part of SteamOS, so I criticize both.

In the same way I wouldn’t worry if somebody made a version of debian with google chrome preinstalled, I’m not worried about steamos. It’s worse for freedom, if you use that version of debian, but pragmatically, how much does this matter? All you need steam for is to play video games, you uninstall steam and then steamos is literally just immutable arch linux.

For me personally it doesn’t matter, because I will never use such system. But I want other people to have freedom, I want to live in a free society. For that to happen we must destroy proprietary software, not include it in our distros and pretend that nothing is wrong. I don’t want to see people spied on, restricted by DRM and abused in other ways. That’s wrong, so we have to talk about it and show people that it doesn’t have to be like this.

99% users won’t ever need that. For cases when they do, they can find guides, modify settings or install software that does what they want.

You could make the same excuse for Windows.

Any distro you download can do this exact thing and you wouldn’t know for a long period, unless you spend enough time to compile the whole thing yourself, compare and research.

You don’t have to compile to know this. You can find the list of fully free distros here: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html . Debian removes those blobs too, but it’s not on that list for other reasons.

I consider myself knowledgeable but you surely chose a wrong example to teach people about DRM. Try some denuvo or eac maybe.

That’s DRM too and there are many more examples. Blu-ray also contains DRM. And so do most PC games thanks to Valve. Console games on the other hand usually don’t have DRM when you buy a physical copy.

Whatever that means, users don’t care about it. Compared to others, Valve provides a lot more value in most of their solutions. They are hackable just enough to satisfy most enthusiasts.

I know that most people don’t care about their freedom, privacy or security. Most people use Windows. But this doesn’t stop us from trying to build a better world for ourselves and to try to convince others to care.

They deserve to be praised for their contributions. It’s great that they do that. But at the same time we should criticize them for bad behaviors. Microsoft contributes to Free Software too and I’m glad, but we can’t let that distract us from the unethical things they do.