enjoy your lols. e17 -> e18 took 12 months. it's been about 4 months since e18.

Whut up, yo? Mostly moved to Twitter... You have an account... why don't I see you there much?

No, I am saying that you get two. If I buy for example Strike Suit Zero on GoG I get Mac and Windows versions. If I buy it on Steam I get Mac, Windows and Linux versions. GoG simply doesn't offer Linux versions, even if they exist and the developers are willing to provide them. GoG so far has completely refused to offer any Linux support at all, even so there is absolutely no reason to not have that in this day and age. See also this popular wishlist item:

http://www.gog.com/wishlist/si...

Simply going for multiple USB HDDs seems to be the obvious option (cheap, extendable, can be stored offsite and offline, etc.). However what would be some good Free Software to actually handle the backup? Common solutions such as duplicity, rsync, rdiff-backup, etc. all seem to assume that your backup target directory can hold the whole backup all at once and that the whole backup is online at the same time. While one can probably hack something together with union mounts to accomplish that, it seems like a very cumbersome and fragile solution.

Is there anything that allows you to just copy the data to a HDD and then plug-in a new one when the old one is full? Preferably in a data-format that is robust enough to handle some backup HDDs dieing without destroying the data on the other drives (i.e. no incremental changes across HDDs).

LTO-6 can hold 2.5TB per tape, a tape cost ~$70, the drives cost $2000. That's still more expensive then just more HDDs for 20TB, but at >50TB it might be worth it.

Yes, I can come up with a thousand free market answers. And yes, that pretty much answers your question.

Would you buy a vehicle from any company whatsoever if you knew that parts were difficult to acquire? A manufacturer can play a game with parts availability only if they don't plan to stay in business.

Maybe we should go back to renting our phones from ATT as well.

GOG doesn't have to pay anybody to offer a Linux version. When it comes to modern indie games all they have to do is give developers a place to upload them. With Mac versions they already do that, which you get for free if you bought the game. Only Linux versions are excluded. With those old DOS games things are a little bit trickier, as GOG themselves would need to do the porting work, but even that isn't exactly rocket science, DOSBox exist on Linux and simply offering the game as plain old .zip instead of self-extracting Windows installer would already go along way to make using GOG on Linux much easier. I really don't get why they avoid Linux as much as they do, as they could support it with very little extra work.

With Steam you can do that. If you bought a game there, Steam gives you all the different OS versions there are and all the languages the game was released in. There are other shops (most annoyingly GOG) that won't give you a Linux version, even if it's available, but as long as you bought the game is on Steam or activated it on Steam with a key you'll be fine.

Not quite. The GEMA only collects fees for its members. The problem is the GEMA assumption. If you play a song, you either have to pay the GEMA or document that the relevant artists do not have GEMA contracts (which is either a pain or plain impossible).

Do you have a source for this? To my knowledge, the GEMA demands 0.375 Euro cents [PDF] per view.

I tried Beta. Fuck Beta.

I don't think it's a problem with user trust, given all of the viruses and malware I don't think many are left that have trust in software. I think the problem is that no desktop OS gives you an easy way to properly isolate apps from each other. In Linux I can fudge around with multiple user accounts and such, but it's generally a mess, if there would something as easy as "sandbox ./your_untrustworthy_app" then people might actually use it.

While it would be nicer without DRM, DRM is really only a small piece of what makes the whole service. Take for example Linux versions, on Steam, you automatically get them when they become available for free. When you buy on GOG or physical discs you don't get them, either they aren't provided at all or you have to pay again for them. If you want to play a non-english version of a game you also have a much better chance at getting it on Steam then on any other service.

While that doesn't make the DRM go away, Steam does give me a lot more freedom on where and how I can play my games compared to other services. Would it be nice to have a DRM-free service with the same feature set as Steam? Sure, but as far as I know no one like it exists, closest thing is Humblebundle Store, which gives you both DRM-free versions as well as the Steam version, but they offer a lot less games then Steam at the moment.