The Gulag Archipelago is on my shelf, when I rotate back to Russian authors (big fan of Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Bulgakov) I will hopefully get to it.
Here's my log for 2025, most recent at the top. Currently I am slogging my way through Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast" which I'm not a fan of. Halfway done with it though!
Gabrielle Zevin, "The Hole We're In" (not my usual genre, enjoyed this though)
Robert A. Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land" (pretty good)
Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" (PHENOMENAL, highly recommended)
Robert A. Heinlein, "Methuselah's Children" (pretty good, required to understand "Time Enough for Love")
Richard K. Morgan, "Altered Carbon" (very good)
Robert A. Heinlein, "The Rolling Stones" (young adult, but good all the same)
Robert A. Heinlein, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (very good)
Piers Anthony, "On A Pale Horse" (very good, never got very far into the series though)
Lincoln Child, "Full Wolf Moon" (okay, not great)
Lincoln Child, "The Forgotten Room" (pretty good)
Lincoln Child, "The Third Gate" (very good)
Lincoln Child, "Terminal Freeze" (okay, not great)
William Gibson, "In the Beginning… Was the Command Line" (good, but outdated, look up what he's said about it more recently)
Lincoln Child, "Deep Storm" (very good)
James Patterson, "Along Came a Spider" (not my usual genre, okay though)
Jules Verne, "Around the World in 80 Days" (from childhood, revisited)
I couldn't get past the awful sex scenes of "Altered Carbon". OK, after having watched the TV series I should have known, but reading it is completely different. Also, the main character is so dislikeable.
It has been a while since my last Heinlein, you reminded me I should read more.
Dostoevsky's Memoirs from the House of Dead is a good companion to Gulag Archipelago to show how things got worse into the full medieval sadism in less than a hundred years.
Besides the gulag is a blueprint to basically all the forms of how totalitarian societies treat their subjects, especially if you can see the pattern working in less cruel and plausible forms.
"Time Enough for Love" is the only Heinlein I've felt any inclination to reread in the past few decades that held up at all (and it's still a good read).
I don't use Ubuntu anymore, partly because of their habit of running experiments like the coreutils switch, but I must say I do admire them for it. They seem committed to pushing the ecosystem forward, even if they have taken a leaf from Microsoft's book and are treating their users as test subjects.
Nothing really looks like Apple products except Apple products though, so you are locking yourself out of buying pretty much anything except Apple with this idiosyncrasy. Which I'm sure Apple is quite pleased about.
There appear to be ulterior sociopolitical motives held by the author, which involve using the blanket term "genocide-friendly software" [1] to refer to anything OSI-licensed (implicitly suggesting all contributors to anything not using his homebrewed license are supporters of genocide?)
This does not look like a technical or business decision, but rather a malicious function used to identify users (and/or their employers) for arbitrary reasons, under the guise of "licensing compliance."
While the whole genocide thing is a bit of an odd angle (though hardly a new one, the author themselves links to the FSF statement on free software used for evil), I get the idea of checking for corporate installs.
The next step wouldn't be anything crazy like "MDM detected, send invoice to corporate"; there are too many false positives. It's better to use the MDM profile information to filter out the larger corporate MDM providers (InTune etc.) and filter out school MDMs before taking any action.
Most software isn't important enough to pirate if the company in question needs to comply with certain standards (ISO etc.) where an auditor might catch such a popup and make it a problem. Plus, IT probably wants you to stop downloading freeware onto corporate devices anyway. Risking being slightly annoying to people with corporate devices may very well help more people than it hurts.
Most software license violations I've spotted were purely accidental, at least at the start. An (occasional?) popup saying "hey, you need a corporate license to use this product for business use" may be enough to scare people away from your software (ending the violation). Convincing someone with financial power to buy your software is harder than making people seek out an alternative, but at least your software is less likely to be used by freebooters.
He describes OSI licenses as “genocide-friendly”, and links to the OSI page about how their licenses don’t prohibit the software being used for “evil”.
Yet his own license also has no such prohibition.
You are free to commit genocide using his tiling window manager, provided that your genocide is strictly non-commercial.
Will this also happen if you let the Nextcloud app rename the files as it uploads them? I usually take that option and haven't had an issue with this although I don't have it set to delete from my phone after uploading.
If every aspect of Nextcloud was as clean, quick and light-weight as PhoneTrack this world would be a different place. The interface is a little confusing but once I got the hang of it it's been awesome and there's just nothing like it. I use an old phone in my murse with PhoneTrack on it and that way if I leave it on the bus (again) I actually have a chance of finding it.
No $35/month subscription, and I'm not sharing my location data with some data aggregator (aside from Android of course).
Fantastic recommendation, it's like exactly what the doctor ordered given the premise of this thread. Does Bewcloud play nice with DAV or other open protocols or (dare I hope) nextcloud apps? I wouldn't mind using nextcloud apps paired with a better web front end.
bewCloud creator here, it does play nice with WebDAV, CalDAV, and CardDav. That's what's used for file/photo sync, calendars, and contacts.
It does not support Nextcloud apps (and I don't ever plan to). If you're looking for extensibility, it's not a great option for you (I've been feeling some "pressure" to add a plugin system, but I'm very concerned it'll compromise bewCloud's main value drivers — it's speed, low resource use, simplicity, and ease of use).
Thanks for making it. Please do what's best for you and don't regard my comment as a feature request. I was kinda-sorta wondering out loud whether existing Nextcloud apps on android could be pointed to BewCloud (as opposed to Nextcloud plugins).
But now I think the right train of thought is there should be an webdav-based notes app that just looks in a notes folder for a combination of folders and text files, which it displays in a Nextcloud Notes-app kind of way. But that could be done and benefit people without it having to be your job to do it.
I like GOG a lot but it's wild to me that their GOG Galaxy client doesn't work on Linux! A lot of gamers who care about preservation and availability are spending money with Valve because Steam's DRM is mostly inoffensive and the Linux support is so good.
The addressable market segment of people who play PC games and also care about DRM-free accessibility would be larger if GOG's launcher ran on Linux and targeted Linux users. It seems like a logical overlap to me.
Valve is eating GOG's lunch in this segment but it could easily change. Sure it might be small but it's bigger than ever, still growing, and seems to fit GOG's mission.
I would definitely start repurchasing my Steam games DRM-free on GOG if only they provided a launcher with the tooling necessary to download & run them on my system.
As things stand now, and for all the good GOG does... it's not enough to be DRM-free but only distribute Windows installers. You've just outsourced the DRM scheme to Microsoft. If the software doesn't run on a DRM-free OS, the job is only halfway done.
And in the meantime, GOG's product is tragically subject to piracy, (I believe) partially enabled by their decision to _only_ package games for the OS upon which most piracy traditionally takes place! :( I hope this could be offset by packaging for a crowd with more ideological overlap.
I'm a Linux user who buys a lot of games on GOG and I've never had a problem running them using Wine stable, with the only exception being games that supposedly don't even work on Proton yet.
Majority of the games there don't even come in a native Linux form, and those that do can be a hit or miss when it comes to compatibility - at least one game I tried needed a dependency from a no longer available package. Alternatively a few titles come shipped with some kind of wrapper that's really just an outdated version of Wine surrounding a win32 EXE.
Also, isn't the point of buying something DRM free that you don't have to use a client or any other online feature? The offline installer has always been GOG's killer feature in my book, that's how you make sure the game gets truly preserved.
> Also, isn't the point of buying something DRM free that you don't have to use a client or any other online feature?
Agreed. I thought this was the whole point of GOG.
The problem with buying movies from streaming providers, games from Epic and Steam, etc. is that you don’t own them. They say you do, but even something like Movies Anywhere isn’t guaranteed for life. Downloading digital content is the surest way to ensure that in-theory you could against use it someday. Anything else is a false promise of forever.
How do you download the games? I tried logging in to download cyberpunk which I purchased on gog, and they wanted me to download tons of files individually! I couldn't even just click a "download all" button.
Every installer there comes with an executable and those files you mentioned, for some reason they are always split into 4GB chunks, that’s why there’s so many.
AFAIK download all is not available, you will have to get them one by one. But after that they’re yours to keep forever.
I have Aria2 download manager installed on my router (OpenWrt) and Aria2 Integration plugin in the browser with "Capture downloads" option. I click on each file and it gets sent to the router which downloads them one at a time over night.
There is a third-party downloader that uses an API to grab binaries for all games in your library. I just download the individual files one by one, though.
Apples and oranges yes, but to most users (even Linux users) there's only a very blurry line between these concepts. I admit this is not ideal.
I believe choice of storefront is more a service and support problem, and less about the product itself.
Game licensure and game ownership are equivalent products at the end of the day in most instances. Rugs could be pulled, yes, but thus far haven't been very often or to any significant extent (that I know of).
Most paying customers are fine to run proprietary code, accept DRM, or buy a license instead of owning a game. Even Linux users will do this if the company (Valve) has a decent track record at practicing "don't be evil" (they do).
As a Linux user, when you purchase a game from GOG (and I concede that this is ideologically superior to a license from Valve) you are on your own afterwards. Windows users can get a bit of help from Galaxy and I think GOG even does tech support now but this doesn't apply to our segment.
You must now divine a scheme whereby your game is made runnable. Cue fighting with distro repositories and Wine versions/prefixes/winetricks, or depending on a third party launcher (Bottles/Lutris/Heroic/pick one), or adding the game to the Steam client (that you probably have installed already anyway) because Steam knows how to run things with Proton... and then you must maintain this going forward.
This might not bother you or you may even find it therapeutic (and I do, for certain games). But the majority of the segment doesn't like it, and it won't scale as well as a first-party solution, not even for an individual user.
My assertion is that exchanging game ownership for game licensure currently looks like a pretty fair deal if I receive first-party support for running the game on my OS. But GOG could change that!
> 1. The single-player mode has to be accessible offline.
> 2. Games you bought and downloaded can never be taken from you or altered against your will.
> 3. The GOG GALAXY client is and will remain optional for accessing single-player offline mode.
> Having said that, we believe that you have the right to make an informed choice about the content that you choose to enjoy and we won’t tell you how and where you can access or store your games. To make it easier to discover titles that include features like multiplayer, unlockable cosmetics, timed events, or user-generated content, we’re adding information about such functionalities on product pages. In short, you’ll always know.
If you want to play multiplayer HoMM3, you can. That's how the game was commercially released and it hasn't been updated to add DRM.
Modern releases DRM the game as a matter of course, and GOG defied their user base to say that that's fine with them. Do you want to play with your friend? You need an internet connection and multiple accounts registered with the vendor.
For a concrete example of Galaxy being the DRM implementation, the Gloomhaven executable you can download from GOG has the button to play multiplayer disabled. It will still work if you get around that - the functionality itself doesn't check anything. But the executable will only enable the button if you start it with Galaxy running and logged in to an account that, according to GOG, has purchased the game.
That doesn't sound like "digital rights management" to you?
That sounds like the game has implemented multiplayer in a way that requires an external server to me, not like DRM proper. DRM would block single player as well.
That is quite false, especially if you mean "out of the box". And it's likely a temporary situation - there's no guarantee whatsoever that people will maintain x86 and some specific Nvidia Pixel Shader emulation support 50 years from now.
This has already happened, PC Gaming Wiki has entries for lots of games where support for various old methods of doing things no longer work, on real hardware on windows, and you need to use a variety of workarounds like dgvoodoo or a fix by a random third party modder to get the game to operate correctly. And that's before you consider defunct copy protection or trying to add improvements.
Given the amount of work emulator authors go to supporting consoles like the Neo Geo CD, with 8 not very good games (they had to do serious work, over many years, breaking the encryption), and the amazing cycle accurate emulators for consoles like NES and SNES, I’m confident we will continue to have good emulators in the future for any system anyone cares about.
nVidia has dropped 32-bit PhysX support in 50-series cards, significantly impacting some older-but-not-old games, and there’s no real solution yet except to own an older card.
I don't know about the overall market analysis so I'm not commenting on that. But I do know that personally, GOG meets my needs in spades and Valve doesn't, so I've spent a lot of money at GOG and will for the foreseeable future. I am a Linux guy and don't own any Windows machines. I couldn't care less about the Galaxy client. To be honest, I'm not even sure what it does -- I just know that I get along just fine without it.
the unification of other game stores is just largely broken. They haven't maintained their plugins for many years and as the stores change, functionality breaks in weird ways.
A bigger problem for me is not lack of Linux Galaxy client, but that a bunch of developers only release Linux versions on Steam (Larian with BG3 is a recent example).
But I agree in general. The issue is probably that GOG is a smaller store than Steam and Linux segment for them in result is also way smaller than for Steam, so they don't see it as a priority.
Meanwhile you can use lgogdownloader.
It's sort of interesting that they support Linux as platform for games sales to begin with. Besides them, Steam and itch.io who even does?
>Linux versions on Steam (Larian with BG3 is a recent example)
Not just on Steam but only for Steam Deck
But I think that's an understandable position. One single distro with one single hardware (okay two because the LCD and OLED versions has some differences).
Once you go down the "full Linux support" way it's a hellhole of different distros, compositors, proprietary and open source hardware drivers etc. This is where Flatpak, AppImage, snap etc. could actually play a good part imo if done well but I'm not sure I've seen any games released on Steam for Linux in those formats (maybe Steam not even allow it)
Edit: you can download BG3 for any Linux distro not just the Steam Deck
Good chance that this version will run on most up to date distros without much issue. So I don't see it as a reason not to release it.
> proprietary and open source hardware drivers etc
Somewhat of a problem, but not so much anymore, most Linux gamers know to use AMD and Mesa. So I'd say their focus on SteamOS is a good base of support.
> A bigger problem for me is not lack of Linux Galaxy client, but that a bunch of developers only release Linux versions on Steam (Larian with BG3 is a recent example).
It's because building for Linux expects specific versions of system libraries like glibc, if you compile your game on newer glibc, it may not run on older version of glibc at all. Steam solves it with Steam Linux Runtime compatibility layer which forces the game to run with specific glibc (and others) shipped with Steam on Linux, other video game stores have no equivalent solutions.
I don't think Steam runtime provides custom glibc. Above is cited sometimes as a complication, but a bunch of projects solve it without much hassle (appimage is one example).
Anyway, Steam runtime is a massive overkill especially when its libraries get outdated.
Those are sometimes related. I know Tooth and Tail never released on Linux on GoG because they use the stores networking for multiplayer. So you can't do that on Linux without Galaxy but can on Steam.
> Using heroic and wine is so seamless that I don't even remember if I have been running a game natively or not. It just works.
If you're using Heroic on Linux, then there's no question whether you're running games natively or not. You are running a Windows game in WINE (or Proton, a WINE fork). Epic Store doesn't carry any Linux native games (even when a native Linux version exists).
Bad QA for actual Linux games was the main reason I stopped buying on gog. Even when a game had a (gog exclusive) Linux port using their weird "game inside a shell script" approach[0], often times I would run into more problems than just using wine/proton on the Windows build.
I agree. Game devs are better off targeting proton as a platform, but Linux purists complain if there is no native port and you don't get the brownie points for putting in the effort.
I think there's plenty of brownie points to be had for making sure a game runs well under Proton... There's very little reason that GoG cannot do what Steam does with Proton for Windows games.
That's not the same as a native client that launches games under Proton... GoG would be better served with something native/adaptive (even web/electrion/tauri based) that also installs/manages a Proton install along with the games.
I only run Linux at home, but on GOG I download the Windows versions and run them via Wine. This for me has had a higher success rate than keeping the native Linux versions around.
Linux has a very stable ABI. It's considered a bug if userland breaks.
If you want a stable userland, you can try using flatpaks. When I tried it, it downloaded entire root filesystems for Fedora and Ubuntu just so the applications would run.
It does work. The application appears to be unaware of the outer, incompatible distro.
I don't quite see how this approach wouldn't work for games.
Don't conflate mobile free to play games (i.e. gambling simulators with a thin veneer) with actual games. I wouldn't be surprised if there were fewer actual games playable on Android than the full catalog for Sony PSP. Mobile free to play games are exclusively a way to prey on people's addictions in the hopes of finding enough "whales".
The Android version of the game Fractal no longer work (So I use the Windows version). And the only way to play the Steam version of Dungeon Defenders on Linux is to use the Windows version instead of the native one.
Even if Windows ever did disappear as an OS, it would remain as a backwards compatibility layer apparently...
I agree that GOG needs to port their client to Linux for all the reasons you stated, but as a workaround you can use Lutris which lets you log into your GOG account and download+install games (Windows games too).
It's not as pain free as Steam, because you sometimes still have to apply wine fixes, but it works well with the most popular games.
1. it doesn't (at least recently?) always do a great job of handling multiple displays, either launching games on my second monitor, which I orient vertically or getting confused about which monitor to use and switching back and forth until eventually the instance (but not the Lutris client) crashes
2. I find myself getting into launcher hell where I'll use a different wine version for one game and when I switch to a different game, it's using this new wine version and stops working
Not sure if Heroic solves these issues but I would try it again (didn't have any luck setting it up initially) if it does
If you are using KDE then there is a global Window rules setting and Heroic actually obey those rules, so you can force to launch a game always on X display, always minimized etc.
I've been using Lutris on i3 with multiple monitors. Enabling gamescope has been extremely helpful. I just get a window that tells the game to render at some fixed resolution, and it is happy to scale fullscreen or any size. I've been using i3's fullscreen toggle, it goes to the current monitor, or I can move it to another with my regular i3 binds.
It looks like gamescope has it's own fullscreen shortcut (super + f), but people complain about it about it going to the wrong display. Maybe your window manager offers a more consistent full screen option like i3 does.
I believe the problem is that most of the games they host are Windows games, so in that regard, Linux doesn't make sense.
And maintaining something like Proton is pretty complex, there's so many different distros. Actually ensuring the game works probably was too big of a task for them.
You can always add your gog games to Lutris though.
> I believe the problem is that most of the games they host are Windows games, so in that regard, Linux doesn't make sense.
The vast majority of games on Steam are Windows games, yet the Linux Steam client runs them fine via Proton.
I don't think people are asking for GOG to make Linux-native games. People are asking for an official GOG client that can handle installing games via Proton/Wine, handles cloud saves, account management, etc.
If a bunch of open source hobbyists can create a viable multi-platform client (see Heroic Games Launcher), then so can GOG.
It really does seem like the idea of DRM free games and Linux goes hand in hand. I would be really interested to hear about why they don't currently offer Linux support for their launcher.
I'm in the same boat here. I would be more than willing to rebuy some games on GOG if they supported Linux.
The idea of running old Windows games definitely doesn't go hand in hand with Linux. And I think GoG simply has way more Windows experience, lots of work to do, and little realistic chance of tapping some huge market if they spent all the time you need to support 2-3 major Linux distros - especially when you need to offer things like Multi-player support as well on those, plus maybe game recording and whatever else the overlay offers (GoG Galaxy is not just a storefront).
Heroic launcher works great and also doubles up as an Epic client and you can just run your own installers with it too (this is how I install Battle Net and Diablo 4).
I give GOG a lot of leeway, because in my heart of hearts, I know I will eventually curse steam lockin ( that day may be far away, but it is in our collective future ) so I throw them some money every now and then.
Still, you do have a point, by comparison Steam is a lot more polished on that front. I would complain more, but my personal hangup is very niche to begin with so it does not seem fair ( remote view in vm ). It is small things, but small things add up.
But IIRC you don’t even need to use the launcher, that’s the whole point of DRM free games
You can just download them from GOG and play, so no Linux launcher is not a big deal, just a convenience (some would argue launchers are an inconvenience)
It would be great if everyone could release Linux binaries, but smaller studios are extremely stretched and with no shortage of work as it is. Considering the quality of Windows emulation today, it's quite possible that the windows API simply becomes the new "Java for games", where studios test their games on Linux and never release a native binary.
> ... "but smaller studios are extremely stretched and with no shortage of work as it is."
My experience is that it's never been the "smaller studios" that give Linux the middle-finger the way the so-called "AAA" publishers do. I see a shocking number of small studios and indie developers consistently releasing for Linux, Mac, and Windows and managing to do a surprisingly reliable job of it, where "AAA" companies sometimes can't seem to manage to keep a game running reliably even on the one platform they support.
Honestly thanks to Lutris, I have no want of a native linux GOG client and would rather GOG and others contributed to an already excellent solution and for there to be less distributor owned clients.
Thanks for this. My wife is a clinical dietician and we try very hard to extend her knowledge (dieting for sick people) into our home so we can eat foods that will keep us healthy. Always very nice to see other people doing/writing similar things. Big fans of Salt Sugar Fat/Michael Pollan as well!
Here's my log for 2025, most recent at the top. Currently I am slogging my way through Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast" which I'm not a fan of. Halfway done with it though!
Gabrielle Zevin, "The Hole We're In" (not my usual genre, enjoyed this though)
Robert A. Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land" (pretty good)
Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" (PHENOMENAL, highly recommended)
Robert A. Heinlein, "Methuselah's Children" (pretty good, required to understand "Time Enough for Love")
Richard K. Morgan, "Altered Carbon" (very good)
Robert A. Heinlein, "The Rolling Stones" (young adult, but good all the same)
Robert A. Heinlein, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (very good)
Piers Anthony, "On A Pale Horse" (very good, never got very far into the series though)
Lincoln Child, "Full Wolf Moon" (okay, not great)
Lincoln Child, "The Forgotten Room" (pretty good)
Lincoln Child, "The Third Gate" (very good)
Lincoln Child, "Terminal Freeze" (okay, not great)
William Gibson, "In the Beginning… Was the Command Line" (good, but outdated, look up what he's said about it more recently)
Lincoln Child, "Deep Storm" (very good)
James Patterson, "Along Came a Spider" (not my usual genre, okay though)
Jules Verne, "Around the World in 80 Days" (from childhood, revisited)
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