You can keep on seeding after downloading and your torrenting program will still manage to upload to any member of the swarm for that torrent that it connected to (even if only to check their status) during the download phase.

This should be enough to get you consistently above a 1:1 upload to download ratio for any popular public torrents, though for those with very few leechers you might never get there.

The lack of port forwarding is only a problem for remote machines your program has not connected to during the current session for a torrent (i.e. not yet seen machines that try to connect to your client), which means you can’t seed at all in a purely for seeding session or upload to machines that joined the swarm after your download was done in a mixed session.

If your pattern of usage is that of mainly a downloader of public torrents who tries to give back to the communy at least as much as they took and whose not mainly into obscure stuff, it works fine.

It massively depends on the country - it’s probably fine in Southern and Eastern Europe but not for example in Germany were if I’m not mistaken copyright violation is even part of Criminal Law rather than Civil Law as in pretty much the rest of the World.

Personally ever since I lived in the UK - which has the most insane levels of civil society surveillance in Europe, including of Internet usage - I got into the habit of doing pretty much everything behind a VPN, which also helps with peace of mind for the whole torreting thing no matter which country I’m living in at the moment, plus I pay 5 euros a month for the VPN which is less than a single streaming service, so in a way it pays itself (it’s funny how piracy compensates for the costs of protecting myself from dragnet surveillance).

Bullshit!

The tariffs on the tools required for the mandatory cock and ball torture would be set higher than for everything else imaginable.

As somebody from a poor EU country with good weather - Portugal - if Albania is anything like here, it’s a great place to live as long as your income is at the level of somewhere else.

The problem is to live in such a place with the level of salary of such a place.

A lot more humane, though, as the flies get upright much more easilly than the cows.

Gruesomely mass murdering civilians using bombs to get the rest to comply with your will is only “Terrorism” if the bombs were placed on the ground and then exploded, not when they were dropped from the air.

Hence the smaller per-capita representation of white people in the count of terrorists.

Same here.

In my transition from Windows to Linux on my main machine, one of the more funny discoveries I made was that for many older Windows games, Linux with Wine has better backwards compatibility than Windows.

That’s also my experience: there’s a certain generation of games, around 10 - 20 years old which have more likelihood of problems running in Linux than both older games and newer games.

I suspect it’s partly to do with the kind of DRM used by AAA publishers back then - for example the Steam Windows version of The Sims 3 will simply not work in Linux but a pirated version will work fine with no tweakings needed whilst other AAA games from that era need a lot of tweaking to get to work in Linux.

Meanwhile the most recent stuff just works with no need for tweaking.

I run my pirated games in Linux sandboxed using firejail (Wine itself doesn’t sandbox anything as it’s only an adaptor layer) configured to block a lot of things including network access.

Then again I also run my non-pirated games in Linux in the same way.

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.

This is the Wine side of it, changing it to use that feature which is now in the Kernel.

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.

I did the same, and when I switched I just switched to Linux rather than another Windows version.

Then again I’ve been playing with Linux (and using it professionally on the server side) since the 90s, so am not at all representative of most people out there.