Gosh. Tough crowd. Do you heckle professionally, or is it just a casual thing?

Of course I cherry picked! That was the basis of my list: show great games that are playable on SteamBox / Linux. Way to miss the point.

Interesting that you singled out Psychonauts, as that often gets criticism for the difficulty of the Meat Circus level, supposedly ruining the game for many. I didn't mind it myself, but I can see their point. The insane asylum levels, and Lungfishopolis, are some of the most blindingly brilliant and creative game levels! Blows my mind. What a great game!

As for the other games on the list ... they cover such a wide spectrum of gameplay, you can be excused for not having the good taste to appreciate them. ;-)

Some of these are on consoles. Some are exclusive to specific consoles. Some are only available on PC.

They're all available on Steam, and playable on Linux.

True, you don't need a high powered machine to play these, although I'd recommend something more than integrated graphics for some of them. Valve's own games, which I didn't mentioned, would certainly benefit from more power.

Steam Machines will be created by many different manufacturers. So who knows, maybe one will be priced around the Ouya range. Time will tell.

Seriously? You've never heard of Tim Schafer? Double Fine Productions, previously LucasArts? Tim is responsible for absolute classic games like Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, and of course, Psychonauts, Brütal Legend, and Stacking, from my list.

Super Meat Boy and Fez? They are very high profile indie games. Creators and games were also the subject of an excellent documentary: Indie Game: The Movie.

Wasteland. Created by Interplay Productions, and used as the basis for Fallout. You must have heard about the Fallout series of games, surely!

Bastion, To The Moon. More high profile indie games.

Actually, I didn't create my list with the idea that these games were famous. My criteria was more about quality. These are _excellent_ games. Very much recommended to play. It's just coincidence that some are well known. Anyone with a decent knowledge of gaming culture would know the all. I didn't even mention any of Valve's own games.

It's not size that matters, but how you play with it. ;-)

Who is to say that the Steam Box will not be a better platform than current consoles? Let's see what Valve come up with first, before judging.

A very subjective opinion.

With games like Psychonauts, Bastion, Wasteland, Fez, Frozen Synapse, Brütal Legend, Aquaria, FTL, Super Meat Boy, Stacking, Shank, To The Moon, Hotline Miami, and so many other brilliant games, there are a huge selection of quality launch titles for the Steam Box.

I'd easily take the Steam Box and its library over current console launch titles.

Sure, legally speaking, it isn't theft. It's a copyright violation.

From the perspective of the English language, though, the word "theft" is a valid use for this situation. Theft, by definition, is the act of stealing. An appropriate definition of "stealing", in this case, is to appropriate an idea or work without right or acknowledgement. For example, you can "steal" an invention, even without depriving the inventor of their property.

So, while the MPAA et al are obviously using "theft" in a grossly rhetorical manner, it is a valid use of the word. You can't take one definition, and then claim it doesn't fit. It should be inappropriate for all definitions.

I'm not the OP, but thought I'd correct a few misconceptions you seem to have.

It is the distro with the best packaging system.

While this is mostly a subjective matter, Debian's apt/dpkg is pretty archaic. .debs are nothing but glorified tarballs which get unpacked when installing, (therefore have to be created with fakeroot(1)) to name a random point at which it is inferior to a semi-decent system like Portage you can't use it to install packages from source (unless you use 10 debianisms to build a package beforehands). Searching for something with apt-cache is a joke.

You say that like tarballs are a bad idea. It worked well for Slackware. ;-)

Anyway, more to the point, debs are much more than glorified tarballs. That one deb package file contains control information, which specify version information, dependencies, basic package information, installed size, and much more. It also contains scripts to preinstall, postinstall, preremove, and postremove the package. It really is a one-stop shop when it comes to installing programs under Linux. Other than dependant packages, of course.

You can use apt to install packages from source, but the source code must come from the Debian repository. It needs to contain all the info above, and more. A source install is relatively simple to do. Basic process is "apt-get source package; cd package; debuild -us -uc; dpkg -i ../package.deb". So, that's three "debianisms" to download, build, and then install the package. Not as convenient as Portage, but apt/dpkg was not designed to be a source distribution. It probably could work as one, though. Should be simple enough to create a script which does everything automatically for you. If you want a source distro, then Gentoo is definitely the way to go.

Unsure what you find so funny about apt-cache. I use it regularly to search for packages. It works well for me.

It is the distro with the best variety of packages.

Name one relevant package which isn't available on any relevantt distro.

Unsure what you mean by "relevant package" or "relevant distro". I just did a search for a package called "clipit", on packages.gentoo.org. It's a program I like to use to copy between X clipboards, and store a clipboard history. Gentoo doesn't seem to have it. Debian does.

It is the distro with the best package maintainers.

No. Last time i had the pleasure, the maintainer in question didn't reply for 4 months, finally apologizing for not replying and (redundantly) suggesting i follow up with a patch (which i did 3 months ago, at that time). Guess I'll have to wait another couple months until it finally get applied.

One anecdote does not a conclusion make. I've had some very good experiences when dealing with Debian maintainers. In any case, this is subjective. I'm sure other distributions have some great and enthusiastic maintainers, but Debian ranks highly in my experience.

It is the distro with the best reliability.

Stupid and wrong piece of uneducated gibberish. What exactly is Debian's role in Linux' or GNU's reliability? How is Debian more reliable than, say, Gentoo? Fanboyism at its finest.

Not quite. Debian Stable achieves its high reliability by subjecting packages to a good testing period. It suffers jokes from the Linux community for being out of date, but that's what you have to do to achieve that level of reliability. Package maintainers even backport security patches to older package versions, to make sure that they don't install newer package versions on a Stable system.

Debian Testing/Unstable/Experimental aren't quite so rock solid, but that's where the latest stuff goes, and there are package updates on a daily basis. I happily use Testing on my laptop, and it is still very reliable, but Stable _ensures_ that the whole system works exactly as you expect, even avoiding new features and possible regressions.

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That's about it. The rest of what you said was generally valid. I agree that the OP was acting somewhat as a Debian fanboy. And that's fine, really. Let people be excited by the distro that they use! If you do absolutely have to object, though, formulate better arguments, and try to curb the vitriol.

Fair point, but I still think that the NBN, as originally conceived, and once it gets some good momentum, has a good chance of getting close to its original budget.

As for connections to the home, the cables won't all be underground.
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/news/2013/4/3/nbn-buzz/nbn-co-uses-federal-law-access-nsw-power-poles

The NBN install was only behind schedule because of Telstra issues, and also due to a delay to train techs to handle asbestos. The thing is, in full stride, the NBN was actually going to end up being cheaper than the $4000 per house estimate (not per man/woman/child as you say). A report I read about estimated that it would actually soon be around half that. Also, at full speed, they would have been able to deliver it faster than projected, which meant they could catch up to the schedule.

So yes, the FTTH project may well have been delivered for $37bn, or even less. Unfortunately, all that is hypothetical, because it's going to be derailed due to a purely politically motivated change. Sad, very sad.

Improved mathematics and modems fall a tad flat when they encounter a wet and corroded copper cable. For more reliable communication infrastructure, fibre is far more superior. Australia is hamstringing their infrastructure upgrade if they only do a partial fibre install.

It's a shame that this will happen, not only because a node solution is inferior, but also because the change in policy is politically motivated. The new government needed to adopt something different, because they were so critical of the broadband project when they were in opposition. I wish they'd swallow their ego enough to admit that the previous govt were right about this.

Gotcha. So btrfs and df play up only under a raid1 situation. That explains why I didn't notice any problem.

As for snapshots, I've set up an automated snapshot system using btrfs. Main volume is mounted to /snapshots. One subvolume is created in there, and is then separately mounted to /data . Snapshots are created under the /snapshot directory, while /data is the path used by applications. I've created a nightly script which renames all previous snapshots, and then creates a new snapshot. It all works seamlessly, and it seems pretty easy to understand. I'm unsure what the fuss is, really.

I'm playing around with btrfs at the moment, and I've spotted some inconsistencies in the document you mentioned.

* Subvolumes can be moved and renamed under btrfs. I do this on a daily basis.
* btrfs can do read-only snapshots. Mind you, it does have to be specified.
* As far as I can tell, "df" does work fine with btrfs. The document implies it does not.

I am still quite new to btrfs, so I'm learning much at the moment. There may be more points that I've missed.

It seems, though, your document is a bit out of date, and btrfs has improved since then.

Well, I guess it all depends on the type of game you want to play.

For AAA type games, Windows is the only obvious choice.

For more Indie type games, Linux is actually an excellent choice now. Especially for the average person, who can run them via Ubuntu and Steam.

My preference is for the latter type, and since Valve introduced their Steam client, I've found myself going to Windows much less. In fact, I only recently booted Windows up for the first time in 4 months or so, just to install system updates and the latest firefox. Just because, well, I didn't feel right leaving it without updates.

I've a healthy collection of over 50 Linux steam games, thanks mostly to Humble Bundle. None required any work to get going. Steam took care of it all. An average user would cope fine with that.

I game on my laptop, which admittedly, was pretty highly spec'd a few years ago (sandy bridge quad core cpu, Nvidia 485M, 8GB mem). Works great for anything I've thrown at it so far.

Basically, my point is, depending on the type of gamer you are, Linux Gaming has made a _huge_ leap this year. For me, the improvement has all but removed my need for Windows. For others, well, mileage may vary. For the standard indie gamer, Linux is here and and is very usable.

True. I recently went through a bunch of Debian upgrades from 6 to 7, and this happened to one server. Unfortunately, it was one of the few physical servers on the list, which meant I had to haul my ass down to the data centre, early hours of the morning, to fix it at the console.

Serves me right for ignoring the grub update warning while doing the update. A simple "grub-install /dev/sda", when the update process is finished, would have made sure that all was OK. Also, this can be fixed by booting the Debian 7 install CD, and running through the rescue menu. No need for a live CD or such.

Still, it's a shame that this one got through the testing process, especially for such a crucial bit of the system. Very unusual for Debian.