I suppose you mean "stairs"? In that case, good analogy.

I have a gaming laptop (since i travel a lot) and no I don't have an optical drive.

However I do have a 11 year old external dvd drive but it is rarely used

I have a Blu-ray burner in my current gaming rig (salvaged from my older gaming rig). Since I'm a dinosaur when it comes to music and still buy CDs, I use it mainly to rip the songs from the discs. That's about it though. For backups and storage, I use internal and external HDDs.

Similar case here. In addition to that I still have my games collection and not everything exists digitally or has been bought by me.

Auto correct betrayed me again!

I still buy DVDs and watch them, and I typically do this with an external drive hooked to a laptop. (None of my laptops have an optical drive).

As for 'gaming PC', that would imply gaming, which I don't do that much. The closest to that is the HTPC, whose main purpose these days is family gaming. Though it's been crippled by the death of a RAM stick and the GPU suffering when I took it out while checking the RAM issue, so it's not really much of a gaming PC now. Anyway, that has a BD-R drive.

Thinking about it, I would like a LaserDisc drive in my machine. To play Cobra Command.

External only. And I can't actually remember the last time I used it.

I voted "Yes". I have 2 internal drives installed, one is a brand new DVD reader-recorder that I never use, but the other is an older Bluray reader-recorder which I only use to burn DVDs to backup my data... weird, never actually used it to watch movies (:P)

It's simple enough really. Depending on your distro they might even include a media writer program that makes it even easier.

(Not that any Distro that I'm aware of these days even accept disk upgrades anymore.)

I don't think I've built a PC with one included for about 8 years now.

As a matter a fact, my current (and so far favorite) case the NZXT S340 doesn't even have a spot for one. So if I ever did for some reason need one I'd just grab an external.

I still have a DVD drive in my desktop. I rarely use it however. Almost everything goes from the internet. It's useful for older games which I don't have on my GOG and Steam accounts. I use it also for reinstalling Windows.

External BluRay

I love it. Small, out of the way, and with it I can still use my old ROMS and still burn music CDs.

Desktop with an internal Blu-Ray drive. And back when I got it it was nigh-impossible to actually play Blu-Rays without using some godawful overpriced bloatware, but thankfully VLC has made massive strides over the years.

I'd never get a desktop without an optical drive, and would hesistate to get a laptop without one.