I can log into my GOG account with Lutris and it will NOT auto-update my games but rather works as a pull-only manager, which I prefer since over 2 decades in Software Engineering have taught me that shit getting updated at the convenience of a 3rd party is a great way to randomly and for no good reason have stuff that works stop working. Even in Windows I refused to use GOG Galaxy for exactly that reason and kept downloading offline installers (and that’s also part of the reason I favored GOG over Steam). You could say it’s a professional quirk 😀

I’m definitely one of those people who swears by Lutris and even went to the trouble of figuring out how to run games from it automatically sandboxed and have mine configured to run them with Firejail set for, amongst other things, no network access (it looked into it because I wanted to make sure any pirated game wouldn’t hack my system, but it also works well to stop official versions of games from doing any funny business - mainly privacy invasive stuff - so I have it set up as default for all games).

I too was holding back from having Linux as my main by the lack of availability of games that would run on Linux - and I’ve been playing around with Linux and even using it professionally since the early 90s - so I’m very happy with how this transition from Windows to Linux turned out for me and, like you, almost all of the games that I know won’t work are games I don’t have interest in playing anyway (mainly because the Online Multiplayer experience for AAA games nowadays is horrible even when compared to the 2000s and early 2010s, worse compared to LAN gaming in the 90s).

Well, my Steam collection isn’t all that big (I mostly buy from GoG) plus I’ve only changed to Linux about 6 months ago, so out of the 6 Steam games I have tried so far in Linux, only for 1 (The Sims3, an EA game from 2009) has it failed to run from Steam whilst a pirated version ran perfectly fine with Lutris and Wine.

If I remember it correctly since the very beginning this game was problematic even in Windows because of its excessive DRM and if you look at ProtonDB, most recent experiences reported with the Sims 3 are either negative or problematic.

I’ve tweaked a lot of problematic games to get them to run in Linux (mainly GoG games with Wine and Lutris, though in addition to the Sims 3, one of the other 6 Steam games I’ve tried require tweaking in Steam, which for that one worked and I got it to run) plus I know enough about tweaking Wine to get pirated games to run in Lutris (Lutris doesn’t have install scripts for downloaded “releases” like that, so they often requires tracking in the logs the missing DLLs and figuring out what to install with Winetricks or even if the problem requires forcing use of the native DLL in WINEDLLOVERRIDES) so it’s not as if by now I’m devoid of experience at tweaking that stuff.

In summary, my total rate for problems running Steam games under Linux is 33.3%, half of which I could solve with tweaking and half I could not, though it’s a pretty small sample so the error margin is large.

For comparison sake, with Wine and Lutris out of maybe 20 games, looking at my notes - because I write the tweaks down for future reference - 5 required tweaking (so around 25%) and only for 1 of those (10% off the total) I failed to get it to run properly.

Compared to the last time I tried gaming on Linux (maybe a decade ago), it’s incredibly good.

In some cases my 0 minutes played are because I bought it in Steam but had to go get a pirate version to play it in Linux (via Lutris and Wine rather than Steam and Proton) since the Steam version didn’t work in Linux but the pirate one did (probably something to do with the game’s own DRM, which in the pirate version has been cracked)

Which, IMHO, is more sad than just buying a game because it’s cheap and never actually getting around to playing it.

Acting techniques improved massively during the XXth century, so stuff that relies on that (basically anything but slapstick Comedy and mindless Action) will feel less believable, which impacts mostly things from the 60s and earlier.

Then there are the Production values: the scenarios in early XXth century films were basically Theatre stages whilst more recent stuff can be incredibly realistic (pay attention to the details in things like clothing and the objects and furniture in indoor scenes in period movies) and Sci-Fi benefited massive from the early XXIst century techniques for physically correct 3D rendering and Mocap techniques so there is a disjunction in perceived realism between even the early Star Wars Movies and something like The Mandalorian.

Method Acting (which is a pretty powerful Acting technique for getting actors to genuinely feel the emotions of the character) dates back to the 60s in Movies (it dates back even longer to Stanislavski in 19th century Russia, but its popularity really took off mid 20th century) so before that actors were just faking it whilst after that it will be more and more them reacting genuinely to imaginary circumstances (in terms of the audience it means we will actually empathise with what’s hapenning to the character because the emotions on display are genuine).

So the quality of the acting in the kind of Films that are now coming into the Public Domain will be lower than what we are use to (though in stuff like Comedy and certain kinds of Action it’s seldom noticeable).

And this is before we even go into the quality of the Production (in audience terms, how believable are the scenarios).

I doubt Hollywood will be threatened by this for at leat a couple of decades.

I’m pretty sure those things are trained on content which was obtained without paying royalties to the creators, hence by definition pirated content - so that would count as “piracy around them”.

On the opposite side, as far as I know the things created with Generative AI so far can’t be copyrighted, hence by definition can’t be pirated as they’ve always belonged to the Public Domain.

As for the engines themselves, there are good fully open source options out there which can be locally installed (if you have enough memory in your graphics card) and there seem to be thriving communities around it (at least it looks like it from what bit I dipped into that stuff so far). I’m not sure if it’s at all possible to pirate the closed source engines since I expect those things are designed to be deployed to very specific server farm architectures.

I did get the idea you were just quoting their excuse and meant it the same as in my post.

I just wanted to really hammer down the point beyond any doubt.

More like “not making as much money as they want”.

Thank the gods you put an /S at the end.

It’s funny that without actually spotting the mistake I just read it as the op expecting multiple criticisms to and basically telling people bringing them to get in line.

Look for a processor for the same socket that supports more RAM and make sure the Motherboard can handle it - maybe you’re lucky and it’s not a limit of that architecture.

If that won’t work, breakup your self-hosting needs into multiple machines and add another second hand or cheap machine to the pile.

I’ve worked in designing computer systems to handle tons of data and requests and often the only reasonable solution is to break up the load and throw more machines at it (for example, when serving millions of requests on a website, just put a load balancer in front of it that assigns user sessions and associated requests to multiple machines, so the load balancer pretty much just routes request by user session whilst the heavy processing stuff is done by multiple machines in such a way the you can just expand the whole thing by adding more machines).

In a self-hosting scenario I suspect you’ll have a lot of margin for expansion by splitting services into multiple hosts and using stuff like network shared drives in the background for shared data, before you have to fully upgrade a host machine because you hit that architecture’s maximum memory.

Granted, if a single service whose load can’t be broken down so that you can run it as a cluster, needs more memory than you can put in any of your machines, then you’re stuck having to get a new machine, but even then by splitting services you can get a machine with a newer architecture that can handle more memory but is still cheap (such as a cheap mini-PC) and just move that memory-heavy service to it whilst leaving CPU intensive services in the old but more powerful machine.