I think that a Marxist society should allow for 0 proprietary software, and instead support for everything in free and open source decentralized technology.
I've played with alpine linux for the wonderlust of seeing if I can work with all of the alternative smaller code bases for the theoretical stability it provides.
Why use bash when you can use ash?
Why use the unauthorized escalation bugs of sudo, when you can use doas?
Why use all of the gnu tools of stallman when you can use the smaller version of those tools with busybox?
Why use the garganuan sprawling systemd when openrc has a much smaller codebase and fewer vulnerabilities?
I have to say I'm a fan of light (lite?) software.
I can't tell you how pissed off I was when browsers switched to infinite ram. One day they were capped at using ~4gb ram and the next, I need a new machine.
In general, I just prefer the idea of only using enough resources to do what I need a program to do. Options are great, but e.g. with a word processor all I need is stability, footnotes, a few tags, grammar/spell check, and track changes. A few other features are nice to have but almost all the rest is unnecessary bloat and bugs, for me.
I was able to run LMDE (linux mint deiban edition) on a 3 gb Imac with libreoffice installed by default, I don't know if I'd still reccomend that but it would freeze if I had too many tabs open
right now I have a 32 GB ram tower computer playing a small game, a crazy looking terminal emulator, a spreadsheet program and a browser and it's still using less than 2 GB of ram. Debian cinnamon is good for me.
Impressive. Do you need a lot of ram nowadays to play games? Or do you have so much so you can play games at the same time as having other programs open?
Depends on the game. I like playing 0ad and that never seems to use that many resources, but I haven't checked much. Some steam games can be a bit more intense but 8gb should be fine for most games. Steam proton https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton offers a compatibility layer to play steam games as if they were in wine and works pretty good. I'm trying to game less so I stick to open source versions of pacman and tetris. I was playing rimworld but that shit was like cocaine to me. Rimworld runs fine on linux as well as windows. One thing I like to do is use "yt-dlp -f" to download playlists audio only from various sites, save them in a particular folder, then "cd" into that folder, then "mpv *" to play all of the audio files in that in the background. You can play minetest with the mineclone mod (to be similar to minecraft) while listening to various audiobooks podcasts and lectures that way.
8gb should be fine unless you are playing a AAA game, but if you already bought the games, you can try it out.
Oh, so with Linux, you can run a command that downloads files from websites? That's handy!
I've not bought any games for a good while and I usually buy older games. Although I do have my eye on three games that keep getting mentioned around here: Hearts of Iron 4, Victoria 3(?), and Disco Elysium. One day, maybe – part of it is finding the time!
yt-dlp lets you download videos by scraping the site and find audio or video files in there depending on how they are embedded.
wget can help you scrape the contents of a web page. This often allows you to get the html of a web page, but if it ends in a file extension you can download a file there too.
w3m allows you to view a pure html page in the terminal and it will not display css or javascript. This can sometimes bypass paywalls and allow you to read. sometimes not.
I think all of those games are supported on steam.