It looks like the other side needs a bit more representation here. I’m late 30’s. While I’ve had the occasional wine with friends and family, I’ve never been drunk and have no plans to change that. I’ve also never done drugs unless you count stuff like caffeine. I guess my rule of thumb is if a substance makes me not me, I don’t want it.

In case you’re not being hyperbolic (or for anyone else legitimately thinking this because I’ve heard it multiple times), I think Valve really did the best thing they could. I know Valve feels huge, but MasterCard and Visa together are over a hundred times bigger, and any payment processing system Valve could make would definitely be a pushover.

Also, never underestimate the casual normie population. If Valve lost Visa and MasterCard support, I’m pretty sure that would mean losing two-thirds of their playerbase if not more. Those people would either prop up alternative stores like Epic or Microslop’s or just pull away from PC gaming altogether.

Anyway, it’s a bit like the people saying Valve should make their own DRAM to combat the shortage. It doesn’t acknowledge how entrenched the existing manufacturers are and how far away Valve actually is from that level of manufacturing.

I’m only a recent Linux convert, so you probably know better than I, but it seems having distros suited to different use cases is a strength of Linux to embrace, not shun. And, even if it’s a little more work to maintain up front, staying familiar with distros from different families keeps you ready to pivot in any direction you might need to later if one family massively improves or sours.

Still, consolidation doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Instead of consolidating down to one distro, can you consolidate down to two or three with much less hassle? Instead of trying to “migrate everything over,” can you make it more piecemeal where each individual changeover is progress?

I’m personally just doing CachyOS for both my daily driver desktop and NAS with Bazzite on my laptop and friends and family gaming PCs. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed was also high on my radar, but I’ve got nothing running it at the moment.