Repos are servers.

Yeah and you need them to install software and update your system as well as get the dependencies needed to make your stuff work. How is this not like DRM?

Because you have other methods to get the exact same things. You do have the option of source packages, as well as downloading straight from the developer.

As for grabbing updates, it's always optional and updates must be acquired in some way if you want updates. You have numerous options, actually. You can actually get physical CDs for most repos.

Okay so how do you install the latest nvidia drivers and VLC without using the package manager or repository?

Depends on how fast you want it. Drivers usually come through the kernel, though there are exceptions. Depends on your distro. For VLC, The up-to-date source is , while the old versions are [url=http://download.videolan.org/pub/vlc/]here. You can always grab them from git://git.videolan.org/vlc.git, if you don't mind a source repo, but you can also grab them here and all this still assumes you want to compile from source instead of using a pre-built binary. At which point you can get CDs that hold prebuilt binaries, but i recommend the package manager just out of ease, which you can still use without an internet connection if you can get the package files.

And why is there so many options? Because not every linux distro has a package manager.

The first link you posted doesn't work. I have never found a way to install drivers outside of the repo. There are some portable apps but they are very unoptimized. Most distros I know of are ubuntu based and thus need a repo to work properly. Unless you know of one I've missed.

The busted links are an issue with the way gog handles the URL tags. Basically, sources can always be compiled, which is actually more optimized than downloading from the repo, which is why there are distros out there where the repos are nothing more than source-code distributers and the updater actually compiles the code on the spot. And, no, they're not ubuntu based, but debian based, since ubuntu was built on debian. My server runs fedora, which is a little too loyal to the FSF, since some drivers aren't available without adding extra 3rd party repos (which you can even make yourself). All a given repo is is a format for which package files can be downloaded, which are open to the degree that you can also download or even make them from third parties and install without a connection (outside of downloading on a gate PC). The packages can also be found on CDs, but if you're not using the internet to any extent, it's kind of hard to find a way to get something up to date.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Updating a computer that never connects directly to the net? Or are you just trying to push the envelope on what is and isn't considered DRM? If you're trying to figure out how it works, being open source, you can actually read up on it and design your own tools if you don't like the ones available. That's kind of the big point with linux.

Ubuntu based Debian based you really like splitting hairs don't you? As for what I'm trying to do well I'm an archivist which means I like to store all my software locally and why I like drm free software. As for compiling no I not prepared to do that. Put it this way

1. download a thing

2. copy thing to USB or Hard Drive

3. Click on thing

4. thing works

Microsoft figured this out in 95 and that was 23 years ago why hasn't Linux caught up yet?

iirc, all package managers keep the packages themselves stored locally by default. And this works for linux, too, actually. The problem is, you just don't know where to find it. And there's commands to help you automate the process. Another thing you can do, if you don't mind these types of archives, is full HD backups (or small partiions since most linux distros are designed to mould a series of partitions together as one). Just back up the system partitions, and since linux tends to detect and automatically use drivers on startup since most drivers are in the kernel, this is viable.

Don't get me wrong, but i can see the arguments for it. It's still not DRM, but, rather, it works under the presumption that you, as a customer, have the right to modify the product, but you don't have the right to then turn around and take a chunk out of the profits of the company that made it simply because you fixed a typo or converted it to british spelling. Companies should have a right to make a profit if they invest in something, and the license usually works on trust, rather than complex DRM or something. Meaning, they'll often let small files with your modified changes get released to other legal purchasers. Is he really talking about windows vs linux or is this more or less about how he incorrectly viewed linux repos as another form of DRM?

FOSS doesn't prevent companies from making profit or selling their FOSS based products. It nowhere forbids commercial usage.

So far it was a bunch of "Windows is so much better than Linux", "I'm against Linux", "developers shoulnd't make games for Linux" and so on. IMHO it's enough of that already in this thread. Let's move on to relevant stuff.

FOSS has some funny distribution rules, however, that basically allow a single person to gate the purchase for others, IIRC. Or i could just be confusing it with GNU GPL v3. But, this opens up the discussion that humans should've had 20 years ago: what are we paying for when we buy software? A license? The software? A key? What? What value does a company retain, and, given the ability to infinitely copy software without an extra manufacturing cost (unlike with books and furniture and such), is it right that we charge for software on a per-copy basis?

We never really answered that as a culture, let alone people.

You'd have much the same issues with MacOS.

Linux *does* work that way. e.g.: I need a newer version of Innoextract for some GOG installers, so I just download it from its website, then extract it & run it as needed. There are also other software packages I use that are provided as simple binary tarballs that I just extract & run. GOG games are provided like this too, as are many games on the Humble Store, itch.io and elsewhere.

.so files on Linux are essentially the same thing as .dll files. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_linker

This very issue is one of the reasons why "Good Old Games" started in the first place, because it's a problem on Windows too (and it's becoming even more of a problem with every release). There are loads of Windows games that have issues with newer versions of Windows and need all kinds of workarounds to get running, some of which are far from straightforward.

Also this kind of problem is partly what the likes of flatpak, appimage, snap etc. are intended to resolve (although they have their drawbacks too).

The numbers given by Steam's survey differs wildly from actual sales figures reported by developers. It's still not a huge market share, but it's quite a bit more than what Steam's survey suggests, and more in line with what other surveys have reported for Linux market share.

I'm running Linux Mint 18.3 on a very recent Ryzen based system and it runs great. But YMMV of course, especially if you're trying to run it on a system that uses hardware by certain Linux-unfriendly manufacturers, or a laptop with customised hardware & no thought put into having it run anything other than Windows etc.

Wine isn't an emulator. The executable is loaded and executed on the system just as it would be on Windows, with Wine providing its own implementation of Windows' APIs.

However not everything has been fully implemented (or at all) yet, and doing so is a far from trivial task: Windows is an extremely large and complicated system, and Wine needs to duplicate Windows' behaviour as perfectly as possible, including all undocumented features and behavior (and there are a lot of such undocumented features). Plus Windows is a rapidly moving target so full compatibility will likely never be achieved unless/until Windows stops being developed.

I actually gave him a simple set of scripts to backup and restore both the apt cache and package indices for Mint, to allow offline installation of any packages from the repositories. Very easy to use: run one script after installing the packages you want to create the backup, then copy it to the offline system & run the other script there as root to restore, and then simply use the package manager to install the required packages as if the system was online. I gave instructions for them & confirmed that this worked on multiple systems but somehow he still couldn't get them working.

I don't think you understand what I'm saying.
I have two computers and my main gaming rig is air gaped. That means permanently isolated and offline. This is to keep it fast and reliable. I've had no problem keep it updated. It's a bit of a hassle but again streamlined compared to Linux. You can install KB commutative updates yourself or use tools like WSUS offline updater or even run a batch script.

Funnily enough this is to do with topic. I'm trying to tell you why Wticher 3 won't come to Linux any time soon but it sink it