That garbage is rarely even worth pirating anymore.

I’ve come to a point where I don’t even pirate AAA, just buy indie or anything made by Fromsoft and any team that still presents any semblance of passion for their work.

Some AAA games are worth buying. Some indie games are pure garbage. It’s a mixed bag. I rarely pirate and most of the time its because shitty DRM or to try expensive game before buying.

I used to almost exclusively pirate because I couldn’t afford much of anything. Steam has actually enabled me to purchase most of the games I use since I can wait till they’re on special and cheap. There’s also a huge amount of indie games that would never have seen the light of day if they could only release on physical media or through their own website or whatever.
no Steam isn’t perfect, I would like Valve to take less of a cut but in terms of making games more accessible, I think they’ve done a decent job.
No shade on my fellow pirates who still exclusively pirate and don’t want to feed the corporate beast.

A lot of newer games are also big enough that backing them up reliably actually is a meaningful burden. My Steam library is like 900 games. Even though a lot of them are 500MB, a lot of them aren’t.

I can’t store that shit.

You can move your home directory to a different drive so that you don’t lose everything when you switch distros.

I switched over to Linux about a year ago and personally do not care if you do. But I do agree that some seemingly simple stuff on Linux can be fucking annoying. And that would be fine if you could post on forums without at the very least one douche nozzle implying that you are an idiot.

Until the user experience is not “spend hours on forums to find hacky fixes for things that just work on Linux” it’s gonna be a tough sell.

Why I personally can’t go back to Windows.

I understand that the threads about the dumb shit microsoft is doing (ads, ai, etc.) are primarily just for venting frustrations; however, I just want to help. People complain about a problem, I know a good solution. Obviously I’m going to tell people about it but in the end it doesn’t really matter to me if you switch or not.

I agree with you that Linux is not a drop-in replacement for Windows, unless literally all you do is browse the Internet. However, I kinda disagree with a lot of your reasons.

Yes windows blows ass, but everything still works on a functional level.

The reason I finally switched my gaming PC fully to Linux (PopOS specifically) was because my GPU drivers consistently crashed in Windows. They don’t crash in PopOS. Plenty of stuff doesn’t work or is hard to get working in Windows, but is plug-and-play in a lot of Linux distros.

You want to move over to Linux? Better backup ALL of your info onto a USB that supports Linux and Windows hd formats

Sure, but you’d want to back up all your important files even if you were upgrading Windows versions though. I remember when Windows 11 first released, tons of people ended up losing data or soft-bricking their machines in the upgrade process. OS swaps/upgrades are huge changes, and making a backup is the first step in any good OS installation guide.

you can’t use a built in troubleshooter

When’s the last time the Windows built in troubleshooter has fixed anything beyond the most trivial issues? Lol in my experience it was always next to useless.

Do I even need to get into gaming on non SteamOS distro’s?

Again, I game on PopOS, which is Ubuntu-based, and it’s been solid as a rock for over a year. I initially had some audio issues, but I was able to fix them with the UI, I never had to touch the terminal. Performance is the same if not better than on Windows, and for almost every single game I play, it’s as simple as clicking the play button in Steam. For the games where it’s not that simple, it’s usually either trying different versions of Proton, or checking protondb for command line arguments I need to configure in Steam. Both of these things just require drilling into Steam’s UI though, nothing on the terminal.

I definitely get where you’re coming from about the learning curve involved with the terminal. For the times you do need it, it’s daunting for an average user. Even if there’s tons of great documentation out there, it’s still overwhelming if you’re not experienced. But more and more is becoming possible with UIs - it’s getting more user friendly, and it’s not quite where it needs to be yet, but it’s come a long long way in the last couple decades.

As far as looking for replacements for Windows-only software, I feel that pain too. Just the other day on my Linux work laptop, I wanted to make a quick diagram in Paint, but I didn’t have anything preinstalled that I could use, and there were several graphics program choices in the software store, and I didn’t know which one to choose. I think this is ultimately both a good and a bad thing - more choices is almost always a positive, but again, it can get overwhelming, especially if you just want something now that “just works”.

I don’t know why but Linux users just can’t fathom that at some point, a person’s time is more valuable than some “efficient” functionality.

Its much much much easier to disable telemetry and ads on windows than to switch to Linux. Infact there are simple one time scripts or even Rufus can create an installation drive without the stuff that Linux users try to dunk on windows with.

Some Linux distros needs to be purchased. But that piracy forum should obviously be replaced with gog.com if we’re talking about buying stuff

If you’re playing homebrew adventures, I’d say Pathfinder 2E Remastered is superior in every way nowadays.

Big(gest?) piracy forum

Mostly steam stuff, each game has its specific forum post with info on who cracked the latest versions of a game and whatnot, links to download methods and there’s also plenty of piracy related projects (like creamapi, goldberg, etc)

I’m not sure if you’re familiar with fitgirl-repacks, but most of her repack pages actually points to the cs.rin website for game updates

Yeah but 2e is the newer one, and is default now. Assuming 1e is like assuming 4e for DND, it just doesn’t make that much sense.

If the chart was gonna include 1e, it would need to say so explicitly.