Valve pulled support for Steam at the start of January 2024 for Windows 7/8. I thought that was the end, but apparently it actually just meant “Steam may still run but we don’t support it in any way”. Which surprised me when I booted up the old Windows 7 PC a few months ago and discovered that Steam still ran and seemed to work.
Apparently this update is actually incompatible and now Steam won’t run at all.
I can see it. My corporate work laptop is locked down with their security and monitoring software, so I’m not using it for personal things, even if it is allowed for some limited things. And there’s company resources that I can only access through the machines under their control, so I couldn’t ditch it either. And using that laptop for a second job would be a big no-no.
I can see the school laptop being similar, though my experience is that they tend to not be locked down quite as hard as the corporate machine, unless you do boneheaded things with it and piss off the school’s IT department.
So I can see the need for a personal computer, plus it’s always nice to keep that well separated to avoid things like incidents hooked up to a projector and screen sharing.
The games that are going to be the hardest to preserve may end up being many of the mobile games that are popular now.
These games are usually installed through an app store, so if the app store pulls it, that could be it for new installations of the game unless the game can be extracted off an existing device. And even if you manage to extract the game off of a device, in order to get it onto another mobile device will likely require some way to side load it.
Many of these games also depend on a server so once the server is turned off that’s another way the game to die.
The mobile devices these games run on aren’t built for the long term either. They are essentially disposable devices meant to last a few years and then be tossed. They aren’t built to be serviced or repaired. Eventually the batteries will die, and while you can replace the battery, there’s no standardization of battery packs and eventually replacement batteries won’t be available either.
Even if you can get an old mobile device going, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually be able to do anything with it, because the device itself may depend on some remote server just to function that could someday be shut off. There’s already old phones today that if you factory reset them, it effectively bricks them since they need to contact some activation server as part of the initial setup process and that server is long gone.
Of course, many people may ask - who cares? Perhaps so, but I’d bet a lot of people said the same thing about the old Atari and Nintendo and Sega and MS-DOS games that were popular years ago and are still popular today.
It’s kind of interesting that pretty much all the games I played as a kid are still accessible to me today - in many cases the original game is still playable on the original, still functional, hardware. But a lot of kids today growing up today playing mobile games on a phone or a tablet, when they are my age, could very well have no way to ever experience those games again that they grew up with as kids.
I’m using Manjaro for my desktop and laptop. If I had to pick a new distro today, I’d likely give EndeavourOS a try. But Manjaro has been working well for me for a several years now, does everything I want with little drama, and issues have been few. So I’m a happy camper and I’ll keep on using it.
I have a home server that has been running Debian Stable since the mid-2000’s or so. It just chugs right along, so complaints are few. Though occasionally having to deal with the old versions of some of the packages on it can be annoying.
If you’re comfortable with swapping out components in your PC, just buy a second SSD. Remove the Windows drive, put Linux on the new drive. If Linux doesn’t work out for you, just swap them back.
You could also run a live Linux distribution from a USB stick, or potentially install Linux onto a USB stick or SD.
It’s been a while since I’ve used Gnome, but back when I did I also felt it lacked a lot of configurability much like the Mac.
In comparison, KDE felt a lot more like Windows (or how Windows used to be in the past) where you could configure and tweak all sorts of things.
Finder? Polished? Even compared to Windows Explorer, Finder is terrible.
Not too long ago, on a Slackware box I needed to manually change glibc to another version. No problem, I thought, just remove the version that’s there and install the package for the version I needed. So removepkg glibc and then immediately dawned on me… oh wait I really didn’t want to do that… Of course, after that installpkg and pretty much everything else was broken since pretty much everything either depends on glibc, or has a dependency that depends on glibc, so I couldn’t install the new package or do pretty much anything other than smack my forehead.
Wasn’t actually too big of a deal to fix. Used another computer to create a bootable USB stick with the Slackware installer, booted the computer with the USB stick, and did some chroot trickery to reinstall the old glibc package again. Then booted it back up normally and used upgradepkg to change glibc like I should have in the first place.
The thing is, it forced the people making games to release them as a finished, working product, with the bugs (mostly) stamped out.
Today it’s just push something out the door now, and we’ll patch it soak them for even more money with DLC later.
I did the same thing, but mostly because my computer worked, did what I needed it to do, and I was too lazy to replace it until I was basically forced to.
After building a new PC and switching over to Linux I was like “why didn’t I do this a long time ago?”