People still by cds and vinyls, I don’t think is fair to compare today with the apex of physical media, an adjustment in numbers is inevitable.
Comment on Time to bring back physical media on PC?
tal@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
Most laptops don’t have an optical drive any more. I haven’t looked at desktops.
You can obviously buy an external USB one, or sell things on USB thumb drives, but…
SolarPunker@slrpnk.net 4 weeks ago
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I built a desktop five years ago, and when I asked the Micro Center employee where the Blu Ray drives were, he looked at me like I had two heads, then pointed me to a sad little bin with loose drives with no boxes. People haven’t had disc drives for a long time.
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 4 weeks ago
Physical media on PC is as dead as it can get. I haven’t touched an optical medium in the last 15 years, and i don’t have a drive going on 10 years now. I also know of noone around me that is still using CDs/DVDs, the last time i messed with DVDs was when ripping every last one of them, and even my grandma has opted for converting her music to FLAC and freeing up the largish space her music Cds were using, making her collection both save from bitrot and a lot more readily available. I could get behind distribution per USB-Stick, but sticks that are fast enough to handle 100GB+ installations comfortably aren’t cheap in comparison to optical media, and in most cases it would only mean they are used for a single time when copying them to a network storage, in the end just creating tech waste.
DRM-Free installers - that’s where it’s at, and that is what i store; alternatively, for PS1/2 games, compressed CD images are the way to go.
Collectors Editions are the exception, but even here I would prefer the USB stick format if it had redundancy built in - nowadays that is the truly universal storage that any computer can use without needing extra hardware.
Zephorah@discuss.online 4 weeks ago
The internal optical drives for PC used to cost under $30, and then you just need the right case.
tal@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
I mean, you can definitely get drives. I bought a LibreDrive-flashed USB 4k/UHD Blu-Ray last month, because I wanted to (legally) play UHD Blu-Ray movies on Linux — I don’t know how much longer they’ll be around, and the quality is generally higher than streamed video. But just saying…the infrastructure to use the optical media directly is not generally there any more, I think, on most out-of-box PCs. That’s an additional barrier if you want to sell the stuff in that media format.
goes to skim Dell desktops
Yeah, it doesn’t look like they have optical drives these days.