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Yet another regular day of live-services on Linux.

It's actually even a little worse than that.
I've seen some reports of developers (not necessarily game devs, but any coding) who are running some WSL ( Windows Subsystem for Linux ) for development - and somehow some of that running while a game was running triggered some anti cheat systems to flag them.

So even Windows people just running some Linux stuff for completely unrelated reasons get hit by this nonsense...

This will only stop if the share increases to something like 5-10%.
Or whatever number is needed for publishers to no longer outright ignore a chunk of their customers.

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Well, I definitely received the updated versions on GoG. Downloading now! Let's punch some monsters!

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We used to point out games not working well natively on Linux for what they are: bad ports.

We still do.

We used to ask for ports for each and every game we wanted to buy.

... which basically never worked for obvious reasons.
Even now, with a share quadruple of what it was it still wouldn't.

Devs either do a native port for intrinsic reasons or they don't - outside pressure from an absolute minority is a complete futility.

Nowadays not only "I can run it." seems to be enough for most people.

I am going to assume the first "not only" is too much, otherwise I don't get that sentence.
If you can run your game without issues, you can run your game without issues. If the performance is good, it is good.
Everything else is secondary at best.

They even started to actively ask developers to not port games.

If a dev already shows clear signs of not being up to the task of doing and supporting a proper native port, that's an extremely good suggestion.
We've had plenty low effort, zero support ports.
And we had plenty good intentions of devs, who then realized there is actually some work to supporting an additional platforms, and as a consequence stopped. I'd argue it objectively would have been better if those never even tried, because their failure story is guaranteed to carry more weight than any success story (negativity bias & media echo).

Devs already comfortable with Linux are very welcome to do a native port.
But those who never even touched Linux, have no real intention to, and only push the "export to Linux" button? That's a huge risk likely to come back to haunt Linux gaming as soon as a platform-specific bug arises.

They even started to attack fellow Linux games asking for ports.

Yeah, I doubt that - at least no more attacks than anywhere else on social media for any given topic or opinion.
People are people, the social climate is what we live in, it is what it is.

Using Proton will always be being second class citizen.

A clear improvement over what Linux used to be: no citizen at all, and third class or worse often enough even if there was a port.

Proton will always have to chase whatever Windows comes up with.
Proton can at most be on par, but never ahead.

Nice platitudes. But:

What more than "on par" do you need when it comes to video games?
What do you actually want to be ahead of?
Run them faster? Video games are mostly platform agnostic code, any kind of serious performance bottleneck will be cross-platform. At the bottom of it all is usually a C/C++ (or other low-level language) core that is standardized and will thus also behave the same no matter where. MSVC, gcc, Clang, etc all perform within 5-10% of each other, with differences only showing up in (surprise!) platform-specific code.

Features, like eg certain GPU techniques? May be thinkable, but that, too, is mostly hardware-bound.
But nobody would develop such a thing Linux-first, with a 2-3% share.

The gist of everything is that for anything serious to happen, the share has to rise.
That "No Linux support, no buy" crap didn't lead anywhere. Neither did the friendlier variant, the "Linux port pls" begging.
As Valve and years of dedicated work on compatibility layers has shown, you rise the share not by pestering devs with minority demands, but by ease of adaptation and support. And good hardware ideas.

But how about letting others have it their way?

Nobody is stopping you.
You'll just have to live with most people in the Linux community having realized by now that blind idealism leads nowhere and consequently calling others out when they show just that.
Somebody telling you to "just use Proton" is not an attack.

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This is a nice game, my kid loved playing it with me (more like watch me play) when he was 6 years old

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Yeah, there's a difference between something being made exclusive to a single platform artificially as a tactic to pressure consumers into buying that platform, and something being exclusive to a platform because…that platform is the only one that can do it. It's like a flautist complaining that a Beethoven piano sonata is "exclusive" to the piano…well, yeah, you can't play ten different notes at a time on a flute*.

*As far as I know. No hate for flautists, it was simply an example that came to mind.

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Hopefully, we'll get Hexen 2 and Heretic 2 before we get a Q3 remaster, and possibly other games as well. RTCW? Not that I don't have fond memories of Q3, but it strikes me as the single most unexciting game of this catalogue to do such a re-release of.

To break it down a bit... For any of the singleplayer games we get a nice new sp campaign extension, new enemies, thus far remixed music, just cool stuff all around. For Quake 3 we'd possibly get some consolidation in terms of the additional maps available in the console ports, models, some entirely new maps perhaps, and maybe some of those consoles modes, which aren't a massive improvement over the OG sp mode from the PC... and with some basic modern functionality and accessibility options that's kind of the extent of what you can do. Better bots? From what I recall Q3 bots were basically about superhuman aim and UT bots seemed more human, more pleasant in gameplay, so in a way we might be talking about nerfing the Q3 bots for a more natural experience. Doesn't seem like a good idea if you're largely targeting the hardcore Q3 players, and if you're not then... who's this game for? It doesn't strike me as a great gamepad game, either, so new player influx will more likely than not be minimal. I'm just not sure how to make it a decent package with broadish appeal, save for bundling Q3 with Q4, and that's two different engines to work with for a single release, so maybe not the greatest idea from a project management point of view.

Then again, if Night Dive has ideas to make a Q3 remaster exciting for the crowd outside of people who both still play Q3 AND cannot stand Quake Live... sure, bring it on.

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Would be nice if they added theming support like it was in the pre-Chromium Steam version

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I remember being like 10 years old, launching Hexen demo on my PowerMac, getting warnings for blood and gore, and discovering the loading screen consisting of two skulls left and right and the progression bar being a spine slowly linking the two of them. Along with the music, that was like coming across a forbidden game...

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the game does not support running under Linux

A most unhelpful response.

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Nowadays doesn't everyone just target the Steam runtime? And before that, didn't everyone just target Ubuntu, and then maybe add others if they thought about it?

I do think it might be worth having a project that basically reproduces some relevant old libraries and stuff so as to run old Linux games and other older, not-updated software. Presumably it could be as simple as a Flatpak with some old stuff in it. Maybe you'd also want some kind of layer for translating sound and things. You could call it LINE.

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I suppose arguably Valve could say "If you want to sell your game on Valve's platform Steam, and that game has anti-cheat, that anti-cheat will run on Valve's Steam Deck or you are not selling your game on Steam".

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My efforts to get Paypal (through support) to stop bullying itch.io have been largely ineffective. I will likely cancel my account of that surveillance-sta.. payment processor, and donate to this an other project that were abruptly affected by this wave of changes.

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So is this why Phil Spencer wore that Hexen shirt at Xbox games showcase? ^^

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> I have plenty of Native Linux games that no LONGER work native out the box but swap proton on and works great.. also have TONS of native ports that run MUCH better in proton then native..

This is why linux native gaming fucking sucks and has done for a long while. Who knows if glibc will break it. Who knows if the distro you run will change how things are compiled and break something obscure. Who knows if the compiler version change will do the same.

Linux on desktop/gaming needs a single source. Not the absurd amounts of random shitty distros and ways of building them with different compile flags, libc versions, kernel and driver versions held back or whatever.

Been on Linux for 25 years and I've grown to dislike it a lot :( Absolutely over the drama of packaging and no flatpak is not the answer, it's just a further abstraction of the same issues and brings *more* bloat.

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Yet another regular day of live-services on Linux.

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One day I really hope Valve can solve this repeating issue.

The games are looking forensically for any behaviour that's not Windows; Wine is never going to be Windows. There's nothing Valve can do to change that; at best they can persuade developers not to automatically consider not-Windows as evidence of a cheating cheater by itself, and the weight of that persuasion is only going to come from market share.

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Also like in general, people on PC hate the entire concept of "exclusives".

Well, I personally don't. Not exclusives in the vein of what this game's doing.

I dislike it when games are made exclusive for a platform when it can work fine on other platforms. But I don't dislike exclusive peripheral choices. If a game was made to be played with a Guitar Hero controller, you get a Guitar Hero Controller. If it was meant to be played with a Lightgun, you get a Lightgun. If it was made for Wiimotes, you get a Wiimote. If it was made for VR, you get a VR headset. If it uses a cam to use your video streamed body as the controller, you get a cam. If it's a Karaoke game, you get a mic. And so on and so forth, there's plenty of examples of games made for specific peripherals.

Games are an interactive medium, and as such the peripherals are the be-all and end-all. I don't think devs should be forced to support gamepad, mouse and keyboard for every game as that can be a serious limitation for creative freedom.

And also, it's not true forced exclusivity anyways. You can buy and install the game on any PC even when you don't have any gyro devices, and someone will probably mod in a way to use mouse support. Even Half-Life Alyx, a VR game, was modded to use mouse controls.

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Oh man, I've really been wanting a game that makes full use of the Steam Deck's touchpads so bad.

I felt a game like Katamari would have been a perfect candidate for that. You can map the joysticks to the trackpads but I imagine it would be even better if fully developed with that in mind.

Or perhaps a game that uses the trackpads as drums. There's probably lots of interesting unexplored ideas.

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I remember renting hexen for the n64. Will have to try this.

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Well for me both of these games are some of the very first if not the first FPS games I ever played around 1997. I played on a HP Pavilion with on-board AMD graphics in software rendered mode. I paid over $3000.00 for that hunk of store bought PC and it never died in fact I donated it about 7 years ago still working. Also installed my first AGP graphics card (Voodoo II 3000) in it about 6 months after buying it. God what great memories starting a demo download on 56k and waking up at 2-3 AM to play them.

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The state of affairs in Linux community saddens me as of late. So much to say but I am clearly in the minority. Never mind...

You're not alone.

We used to point out games not working well natively on Linux for what they are: bad ports.

We used to ask for ports for each and every game we wanted to buy.

Nowadays not only "I can run it." seems to be enough for most people.

They even started to actively ask developers to not port games.

They even started to attack fellow Linux games asking for ports.

Using Proton will always be being second class citizen.
Proton will always have to chase whatever Windows comes up with.
Proton can at most be on par, but never ahead.

If that's what floats your boat, ok.

But how about letting others have it their way?

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I thought that it would be Quake 3 :/

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The state of affairs in Linux community saddens me as of late. So much to say but I am clearly in the minority. Never mind...

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Always makes me laugh when I compare my own collection to these bundles...

I have everything in this bundle already, apart from the Watchmen game. I did not know I owned about half of the titles, until I checked.

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This game is still breaking the "1800s crime all happens in London" rule.

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. . . If you're a normal computer user, never trust the recommendation of someone who says a piece of software is their favourite alternative to using the CLI.

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... in the meantime, there are so many place to put such backdoors and killswitches in so many chips/chiplets that even Nvidia doesn't manage while soldering them on their own products.

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The first game was alright, but in the end I dropped it. I was not a fan of raising unit caps every few minutes. Just get rid of unit caps entirely and let me build my army without the busywork. I wonder if the sequel will change that.

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The only reason I remember the original AotS is because I think this was the game that put AMD GPUs back on the map because their optimized DX12 async compute implementation advantage over Nvidia GPUs at the time. Of course, the game itself turned into a bit of a meme with being renamed to 'Ashes of the Benchmark' as a result.

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Using UE5 as that is what I use for work and while building for Linux is possible.. it is annoying to do.

Supporting only the Steam Deck is a quality assurance thing yes. Not only gyro, but also small things like resolution, sound of the speakers, etc. My last Steam Deck game runs fine on things like the Legion GO etc (and people are playing it on those devices), but that is not something I officially will support as a guarantee. Sure I will do minor updates if possible to accommodate, but I want to test it thoroughly myself before officially supporting a device/controller myself.

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