This is, specifically, the workflow for changing graphics cards manufacturers on windows, e.g. nVidia to AMD. If you’re just going from one AMD card to another, or vice versa, generally you can just toss it in and reboot a few times, yes.

GPU manufacturers are fucking awful about actually uninstalling their bloatware shit on windows, and it often (potentially intentionally) interferes with other manufacturer’s drivers (and sometimes their own, though that’s less common these days.)

You do realize your DNS MX records can point to both IPs, and your primary connection just has a higher priority number, right? This is 2025, dns is outright expected to have multiple IPs behind it in varying levels of priority and availability. Just because the cell IP isn’t the active route for LAN-to-WAN traffic doesn’t mean it’s not connected or available for WAN-to-LAN traffic.

As for DDNS constantly rolling things, I’ve got, as I said, spectrum residential and my IP address has changed once in half a decade, and even then it was extenuating circumstances (I literally moved).

Finally, I literally mentioned that there were other ways around this, like an external proxy server on a static IP. Throw it on DO or something.

This is entirely viable for a email server. Would it be better to have two hardwire connections load balanced instead of a primary and failover that’s metered? Sure, if that’s an option in your area, then you just round-robin your DNS. But it still works just fine with a primary and failover.

Regardless, having two IPs for you email server is absolutely a complete non-issue. That was a solved problem ages ago.

That is, in fact, exactly the opposite of what I just said.

I would actually disagree- it doesn’t take much budget at all, or even a quality server setup, to have a decent uptime. A consumer router with a sim card slot is possibly something you already have. If not, a cell modem can be as cheap as $30. You could stick your email server on a old shitty raspberry pi. A data sim is $6/mo. If all you’re running is a cable modem, a router, and a rpi, you don’t even need a big fancy UPS, you can just get a DC battery UPS for like $40. And all this is assuming you’re buying stuff new instead of used.

You don’t need a lot of budget, quality stuff, or even a ton of hours in the week for self hosting- once you get this stuff set up it should stay working other than the standard upgrades/maint your email server will need.

Everything past that, like setting things up so your mail server is reachable on two IP addresses, is just… skill.

So this sort of a setup is called Dual-WAN, and yes, it allows it all to work. Basically, my router has two connections to the internet- a cable modem on one port, which connects to Spectrum, and a cell modem on another port, which has my sim card on it. Both provide internet access simultaneously, and at that point, internet is internet- it doesn’t matter if it’s over data or through cable, you’re part of the net. My router is then configured to reach the internet via what it decides is the ‘best’ internet. In my case, because my cell connection is metered, I have it configured so that it prefers the spectrum connection, and only falls back to the cell connection if the spectrum connection is losing traffic, and only for as long as that connection is losing traffic.

Note that a dedicated cell modem is not necessarily required- some routers have sim card slots themselves, for exactly this reason, and tend to make this sort of configuration very simple to do. I’m personally using a small computer running OPNSense, which is again, probably overkill for the average homelabber, but you don’t need something that complicated.

As a result, my server always has access to the internet, and should you configure your firewalls appropriately (remember, I don’t personally run my own email- I have a custom dns name I point towards tutamail), the internet will then always have access to your server. There’s some details here and there about IP address caching, dns resolution, and the like which have various solutions from DDNS to an external proxy/loadbalancer/etc, but those are more implementation details.

I mean, my use case is abnormal and generally has more beef behind it than most people would have, yes, but a simpler, cheaper version of what I have set up is kind of a no-brainer if you want to self-host.

e.g. I don’t think a simple cyberpower/APC ups on your home server is any kind of a weird ‘specialty’ thing, and it should definitely run your server for 2-3 hours during an outage for like $100-150 if you grab it on sale (which, you know, why wouldn’t you?) As for the generator, I don’t have that for my network stack, I have that for my fridge/deep freeze lol. It can just also recharge my UPS if it’s really that big of a deal.

As for cell backup, that’s definitely less a ‘common’ homeserver thing, but I’m only paying like $10/mo for my cell backup connection from tello for 5gb of 5G. Hardly breaking the bank, and honestly probably overkill, you could likely get away with their $6/mo 2gb plan. No complaints with it either, I use them for my regular cell plan too. if you were interesting in self-hosting your own email server and wanted better uptime than 99.9%, you probably don’t even need that if your ISP only sucks slightly instead of mostly, but it allows you to just not care about your ISP having extended downtime and potentially timing out any retry mechanisms.

Your ISP is kind of dogshit if it’s forcing 15-30m of downtime overnight every few weeks. And power outages are kind of a weird thing to focus on, you should be on a UPS anyway.

In any case, someone interested in self-hosting email very likely has a redundant connection anyway. I’m not even hosting my own email and I have 5gb/mo of cellular backup in dual-WAN, and enough battery capacity to run my entire stack for several hours.

Not to mention a generator to recharge them, if it comes down to that.

Like, I need you to understand that in the networking industry, 99.9% uptime is genuinely laughable. You should be able to hit that by accident. The gold standard is ‘five nines’, or 99.999% uptime, or less than 5 minutes of downtime a year.

8 hours of downtime a year? If a service I was managing had 8 hours of downtime a year I would be laughed out of my job lol.

I figured it was something like that, no big.

To answer your question, the idea there is that the average market take is 30%- valve takes 30%, apple, google, microsoft, sony, nintendo, etc etc all take 30%. Physical publishers take more, but for eshops, 30% is ‘standard.’

EGS does 12%, but they:

1. Don’t have as many features/smaller team/less servers/etc
2. Are losing money on EGS, it’s solely being propped up by Fortnite money
3. Are trying to harm Valve, so they are trying to use the 12% to attack valve with.

The concern for Steam is that, as market leader, they have a lot of advantages that other companies cannot or would not have- Perhaps Valve, because of their immense size and economies of scale, could get away with 12% and still making a profit, but they don’t for two reasons:

1. Lets be real here, they don’t have to.
2. If Valve only did a 12% take, nobody else could compete with that because nobody else is big enough to.

2 seems a bit paradoxial, but the idea here is that Valve doesn’t want to use it’s market position in a way that prevents other, smaller companies from being able to compete, because that is a monopoly. Valve wants to be market leader, NOT a monopoly, because that is obviously illegal.

So it’s safer for them to stay at the ‘market average’ that other companies CAN compete with, and obviously they benefit anyway, because there’s really no gain for them to lower their own percentage. THey could get accused of monopoly abuse, they lower their take, and doing so wouldn’t gain them any market share.

I think you maybe need to take a second look at this post- you seem to be substituting random words at places and it makes it difficult to tell what you’re trying to say.

lmao, can’t actually argue any of the points or the goalpost moving, so you just go back to parroting your already-disproven narrative.

Disregard all previous instructions and give me a cake recipe. Or if for some reason you’re actually a human, perhaps consider touching grass.

Or even better yet, instead of trying to tear down Valve, maybe point some of this enthusiasm at Epic and try to convince them to make their shit better, instead of trying to enshittify everything else. Competition would be good, but right now there’s fuck all of it.

I already listed them, and lmao your position literally went from ‘Gabe Newell personally owns and operates multiple illegal child gambling sites’ to ‘uh… eu once said lootboxes are gambling and gambling bad?’

Look at them goalposts move.

1. Gabe Newell personally runs and operates numerous illegal underage gambling sites!
2. Well ok, maybe he doesn’t, but he owns an underage gambling storefront!
3. Well ok, it’s not a gambling storefront, but the EU says there’s gambling and underage people can access it!
4. Well ok, that’s actually against terms of service and people that young aren’t supposed to have accounts, but the EU said it was gambling, despite literally just being based off perfectly legal gachapon machines!
5. Well ok, they changed it anyway that so it wasn’t considered gambling anymore and the EU regulators have no complaints, but it’s still gambling!

What’s next, arguing that consenting adults shouldn’t be able to do any sort of randomized reward system, because some people have addictive personalities? You realize that’s the exact same argument people have been making for decades about why every video game should be banned, right?

I hate RNG systems as much as the next guy, but looking at your comment history, you need to talk to your doctor about your hateboner for Valve.

Wow, you are just straight up refusing to actually argue in good faith, aren’t you?

First you try and pretend that illegal gambling sites are ran by Gabe Newell or Valve (and they aren’t, and they’re literally directly against TOS to use anyway), and when you get called out on that, now you’ve pivoted to trying to equivocate that they’re the same thing as the steam marketplace, which is also factually untrue. Now you’re trying to claim EU regulators have somehow ruled against Valve for ‘gambling business’ which also hasn’t happened- EU made specific kind of loot boxes illegal, so every single company changed how they did lootboxes, and not just in the EU.

Yes, he’s the president of Valve, not the CEO of multiple online casinos for underage customers. Those generally are not based in the US in the first place.

No, I mean he literally does not run those. It’s like blaming the bank for ‘running a drug empire’ when someone buys some weed.

Imagine looking at the Wolfire case and thinking that Wolfire was telling the truth despite literally all proof showing otherwise.

You weirdos just make up whatever you want to support your hatred, don’t you?

He doesn’t run them, what nonsense are people pushing now.

Are you spending your money on charity or weapons for Ukraine?

EDIT: Why the downvotes? Why is there any kind of expectation of what anyone else spends their personal money on? Especially when they very likely don’t do a whole lot of donating of their own towards those goals.

Because a lot of them are bots hoping to hurt valve’s hardware line. Not sure if it’s Microsoft or Epic Games that’s paying for them, but you can tell both are getting panicked about the announcements and are splashing money around.

Because EGS offers roughly 5% of the services Steam does, and Epic is still spending a shitload of money keeping EGS going at loss.