If you’re going to use Arch you should use Arch. One of the biggest advantages for Arch is the AUR which can cause many issues on Arch based distros that are not Arch.

That being said, for a media center, if you’re not used to, I wouldn’t go with Arch, Debian is a much better choice since you’re already used to it and should be good for that use case.

I think it’s you who is missing the point everyone is trying to explain to you. Valve doesn’t dictate the price on other stores, want proof? Epic gives free games regularly, those same games are sold on steam, for example currently you can get Definitely not fried chicken for free on Epic, but it has never been free on steam.

Valve only forbids you to sell Steam keys cheaper than on Steam. And even then they tend to turn a blind eye to stuff like humble bundle. They provide you with free Steam keys that you can sell and keep 100% of the value, but in exchange you can’t sell them cheaper than on Steam, which just seems like common sense really. If that lawsuit goes somewhere what Valve will do is charge for extra steam keys, or stop providing them, both of which are bad for developers.

How is it anticompetitive to regulate the price for items on their store? Valve doesn’t dictate price on any other store unless they sell steam keys.

Plus all of those games are still on steam, so no actual action was taken against them, one support person possibly misunderstood the question thinking he was selling steam keys and answered with incorrect information. I would get it if the game had been removed and that’s why they were suing, and in that case I would be with them, but that’s not the case. And Overgrowth is an old enough game that they could realistically risk it since there’s very likely not that many new sells happening.

What?

Except that’s not what their terms say. Their terms prohibit you from selling a steam key cheaper than on Steam, they don’t regulate your game price on a different store if you’re not offering a steam key together.

All of my systems are Linux, launching Windows games on Linux is not trivial, Steam takes away almost all of that complication. It also provides an excellent ten foot interface for me to use on my TV and buy/install/launch games from my couch without any hassle. Speaking of controller usage, Steam provides excellent support to remap controllers even if a game doesn’t support it, and provide amazing features at that (for example multiple layers, gyroscopic mouse)

Games getting updated automatically is a great feature, I still remember having to download patches and applying them one by one after a fresh install. Similarly Steam also provides a workshop that allows you to install mods and keep them synced across different systems automatically.

Finally, the convenience of cloud saves for someone with multiple systems or who uninstalls a game and reinstalls it later is not easy to achieve without a launcher (I still have a saves folder backed up somewhere from before).

Besides all of that Achievement and other social features are important for some people. And for some games being able to easily play online with friends is amazing (if you’re not old enough to know what GameSpy is you don’t know what it was back then), although I don’t play too many online games so this one is not that important for me, but when I need that feature it is very handy.

In short there are many reasons, but if you’re playing old single-player games with mouse+keyboard on only one windows PC, then none of my reasons apply to you. Still I would argue that buying games on steam is easier than pirating them, so there’s the convenience factor still (e.g. at a friend’s house and they mention a game, open my phone, and in 5 min with a very intuitive flow I have the game downloading on my home PC so when I come back it’s ready to play).

While this might be true, there’s a big difference in using LLMs for auto-completions, second opinion PR reviews, and maybe mocking up some tests than using it to write actual production code. I don’t see LLMs going away as a completion engine because they’re really good at that, but I suspect companies that are using it to write production code are realizing/will soon realize that they might have security issues and that for a human to work on that codebase it would likely have to be thrown away entirely and redone, so using slop it only costed them time and money without any benefits. But we’ll see how that goes, luckily I work at a company where managers used to be programmers so there’s not much push for us to use it to generate code.

Same thing that would happen if someone proved in a lab they’re filling a cup while removing more water than what they’re putting in. I.e. it won’t happen.

In reality the body is a lot more complex than a cup of water, and it’s possible you gain weight on calories deficit by accumulating water or feces. But you WILL be losing fat and/or muscle, otherwise we will use you as an infinite source of energy.

Not European, although I live and work in Europe so the official language at my company is English, so I can give some extra insight there.

English is my third language, I learned it in part because the school teaches it (albeit very badly), but mostly because games and movies weren’t translated back then, especially those a young teen without money but with internet access could have access to. I watch English content regularly (in fact I think 90% of the movies and TV shows I watch are in English). I do watch them with subtitles (in English), but that’s because I sometimes have trouble hearing things (I also watch content in my native language subtitled when possible).

I communicate daily in English with my coworkers, some of who also have English as the second language. We’ve had some minor misunderstandings because of things that sound a certain way in one language, e.g. I came out harsh on one discussion because I said something I can’t remember now, luckily my manager is also a native Spanish speaker and explained what I meant when the other person responded harshly. Speaking of my manager, we usually talk in Spanish, but sometimes you get a technical term or something you’re so used to say in English that you just switch and start talking English, until randomly you switch back, so on and so forth. I think someone would have to be fluent in both languages to follow our conversations.

I’ve also used Nvidia for years without issues, that doesn’t mean there aren’t pain points. For example the open source driver is severely worse in performance than the proprietary one, but the proprietary one lacks some features used by some Wayland compositors, which is why for example sway requires a special flag to be passed if you’re using Nvidia proprietary drivers.

Yes, I agree, learning to write English is harder than to write Spanish, in fact Spanish has the most phonetic writing of all the languages I know. But your question was about babies learning, which is solely spoken language, you only learn writing after you’re already a fluent speaker.

I do intend on installing Linux on this computer.

In that case I strongly suggest you look at an AMD GPU. Nvidia is usable on Linux, but not pleasant.

Yes, that’s the same with most languages. My point is that being proficient in several languages I find English text a lot more repetitive, whereas Spanish text has multiple turns of phrases used to avoid repetition, which also makes it a lot harder to learn (although I don’t think we expect kids to know many synonyms for stuff, and children books tend to stick to simpler construction of phrases).

The things I’ve seen people point to English to claim it’s hard are not really needed to be fluent in speaking the language (which is what kids do).

Yes, we don’t know the rules to conjugations, we just know them. But you know what’s faster than that? Not having that to begin with.

In Spanish we also have lots of words that sound the same but mean different things, for example Punto means dot, point, spot, stitch, stop (in the meantime of bus stop). Plus, I would argue that’s not a problem when you’re learning the language, in fact the opposite is true, having many words to mean the same thing makes it hard to learn since the same thing can be said in a multitude of ways, and it might be because English is not my first language, but I find Spanish to have lots more synonyms or entirety different ways of saying the same thing.

Since the main question here has already been answered by the Danish/Norwegian post, I would like to address something different. My native language is Spanish, and I completely disagree with you.

English is a lot easier to learn to speak than Spanish. Spanish has everything English has, plus:

• Conjugations (corro, corres, corre, corremos, corréis, corren, corrés, corría, corrías, corríamos, corríais, corrían, corrí, corriste, corrió, corrimos, etc, etc, etc vs run, runs, ran, running)
• Gendered words (La Tienda, Las Tiendas, El Pape, Los Papeles l vs The shop, The shops, The Paper, The Papers)
• Purposefully misgendered words in certain contexts (i.e. Feminine words that use the masculine article in some occasions: El alarma, Los alarmas)
• Particles that change because of sound (Ostras o mejillones/mejillones u ostras : oysters or / mussels/mussels or ousters; insectos y arañas/arañas e insectos : insects and spiders/spiders and insects)
• Extra sounds (hard R as in “Raton”)
• Temporary being verb (Ella es rubia/ella está rubia VS she is blonde/she is currently blonde)

The complications in English are later, after you know how to speak and have to learn how to write it, but we’re talking babies learning here. Spanish writing is much easier than English because it’s very phonetic, but just the conjugations are enough to drive English speakers insane trying to learn them because in English you use constructions to achieve the same effect, e.g. I run: yo corro; I ran: yo corrí; I would run: yo correría; I will run: yo correré; I used to run: yo corría; so that I would run; para que yo corra; so that I could run: para que yo corriera; run!: corre!; don’t run!: no corras!. Different verbs would use the same construction in English but may be different sounds for different verbs in Spanish: e.g. I ran, I walked, I had vs Yo corrí, yo caminé yo tuve (and yes, I get that using run is a bad example here since it’s irregular, but it’s only one of a handful, whereas Spanish has different conjugations for different verbs plus some irregular ones)

1. Ecosystem is closed, you buy a quest you need to buy from Meta and have your Facebook account linked.
2. It is good, and objectively currently the best (and only) standalone headset.
3. The Quest is a standalone headset, he doesn’t need the phone. He can plug it into his PC, but that’s not the main intended use and there are some quirks.
4. Not sure what you mean, but like I said the quest is a standalone headset, so nothing else needed. If you want to run it connected to a PC it would require fairly decent hardware for it to be worth the bother.

All of this being said, and like others have told you, we should be getting the Steam Frame somewhere in Q1, and it’s objectively better in all those points:

1. Open system means you can’t be closed onto one garden. Although Steam is a lot easier.
2. It’s theoretically comparable with the Quest 3
3. Frame is also standalone, but it’s also designed to be wirelessly connected to PCs using it’s own designated bandwidth, making it much better at that than the Quest.
4. While PC is the same for both cases. The streaming experience should be a lot better with the Frame due to improvements to the way the content is streamed that Valve has made.

All of that being said, the Frame WILL be more expensive than the Quest. IMO, it’s worth to pay more for an open platform, but you might look at things differently. Also you should consider that we don’t know when it will be available and how much it will cost, but I’m confident that it will be a better purchase regardless if both of you can afford the wait and price.

Personally I bought the Quest 1, and while I don’t regret it, I got fed up with lots of the Meta stuff. I plan on buying a frame on release, and would only get a quest if it was given to me for free since I don’t plan on spending a single cent more on that platform.

There are several ways to counter that sort of thing, but let’s start from the beginning. LLMs (what people call AI) is VERY computational heavy, you need a powerful GPU to run a model locally, and it occupies lots of power and memory. The idea that we’re even remotely close to something like that being embed into hardware without people realizing it is just absurd.

But let’s imagine someone is able to make it, and magically prevents hackers from breaking it and using it as extra free power. This will have to live in the CPU as anywhere else wouldn’t have authority to “delete files”, and even the CPU would have a hard time doing that. Now this LLM needs to distinguish stuff I’m writing with stuff I’m reading, otherwise it would also delete files when someone is observing me. It also needs to reply in sub millisecond otherwise the computer will lag absurdly. It also can’t update it’s local model because it doesn’t have network access, so just use tokens it hasn’t heard of.

In short if someone managed to add a piece of hardware capable of doing that it would have to be significantly more powerful than the piece of hardware it’s embed in, and it would only work until someone breaks it and gives everyone a free hardware upgrade.

You can relax, nothing like that is even remotely close of being theoretically possible.

That being said, Windows doing this or similar is a possibility, your best bet is to use an open source system.

I feel like you might be young and not have had to actually use analog stuff. Your whole family trip photos could be gone in an instant because you burnt the film accidentally, or you could lose the film before getting it revealed, and although rare (probably as rare as a bit flip destroying data nowadays) it happened that pictures were destroyed during the revealing process, and even if all of that worked the pictures could have been over/under exposed, out of focus, or any other variety of issues.

Typewriters? I wrote stuff in them when I was a kid, granted computers were around back then, but I liked the sound. They would jam the hammers, run out of ink, or just annoyingly one letter would not work. If you’ve made a typo or wanted to edit something the entire page had to be thrown out and rewritten, and if it didn’t fit now the next page would have to be rewritten as well. And now that you’ve finished writing and left the pages on the table a spill could destroy your day’s work, or your dog could eat your homework.

Film? I don’t think anyone here has actually dealt with film unless you work in the industry. For home users we used to use videocassette, which is a digital medium, and a very flimsy at that, dropped soda on it? Gone, it got stuck in your player? Gone, you put a magnet near it? Gone.

On the other hand digital pictures, text and movies you can have multiple backups effortlessly and completely avoid any possible single disaster scenario.

Maybe not yours, but I’ve had a fire in my life that deleted lots of pictures and stuff, whereas all of the digital media we have is still with us because we copied it to several places so no single event could destroy it. If you only had one copy of an important digital file, you’re doing it wrong.