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They should do something like ProtonDB. Why not? I've seen a lot of verified games with problems.

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Poké Ball clone go! *throws*

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*dramatic music intensifies*

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Meh. Half-arsed rating system plus plus. Barely worth the pixels it's printed on.

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Holy crap, finally! Thank you valve!

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No, an Office365 subscription is worse. It is now all your documents belong to us Office and not the your computer may leak data Windows.

I did not know about Softmaker Office.

"But also why? If she's working at a university than she probably already has a free subscription to the online MS office anyway."
Nope, she does work for a university, she does not work there anymore. She hasn't worked there for over a decade.
She now only reviews reports and a few papers to keep busy. She does it on a consulting business. She keeps on getting asked to do it because she's a known quantity and sits outside the University politics and because she was a Dean knows when to ask nicely and when to fierce all over them.

I'm wondering if Office 2013 will run reliably and completely under Wine. I haven't tried Office-on-Wine in over a decade, I'd have to start at discovery again

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that would explain why they dropped Mac + Linux and also give me hope for a more optimized game client.

The old games ran better on Linux due to some unique system calls they used, This seems like a step away from optimization and a step towards easier/faster releases for the devs.

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Did Steam just unintentionally curate a list of games for Nintendo’s lawyers?
😂

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Meanwhile… Anyone considering a Switch (1 or 2) should know Nintendo introduced terms allowing them to brick them remotely. It doesn't look terribly legal, yet here we are:

https://www.gamefile.news/p/nintendo-emulation-hacking-brick-warning-terms-of-service via
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/05/nintendo-threatens-to-brick-switch-consoles-for-hacking-piracy/

In section 2. License
https://accounts.nintendo.com/term/eula/US?lang=en-US

Without limitation, you agree that you may not (a) publish, copy, modify, reverse engineer, lease, rent, decompile, disassemble, distribute, offer for sale, or create derivative works of any portion of the Nintendo Account Services; (b) bypass, modify, decrypt, defeat, tamper with, or otherwise circumvent any of the functions or protections of the Nintendo Account Services, including through the use of any hardware or software that would cause the Nintendo Account Services to operate other than in accordance with its documentation and intended use; (c) obtain, install or use any unauthorized copies of Nintendo Account Services; or (d) exploit the Nintendo Account Services in any manner other than to use them in accordance with the applicable documentation and intended use, in each case, without Nintendo’s written consent or express authorization, or unless otherwise expressly permitted by applicable law. You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part.

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These days I mostly use my Steam Deck as a 'home console' connected to a TV, because while I love it, the tiny screen with 16:10 aspect is my biggest gripe with it. It still runs all of my games supremely, yes even the newest ones such as Indiana Jones and the Last of Us: P2 Remaster. I think it's great for when I want to completely focus on a game without distraction (such as Discord) for hours at a time. Sitting on the couch is also a welcome change to sitting in an office chair for most of the day

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To be honest I am actually ok with it now that proton is well established.

As mentioned above by others, Linux runs practically any game through proton. The only issue now that needs addressing is the Anti-cheat DRM.

I suspect when Linux adoption passes the 10% mark we should start to see native Linux ports again. Lets get the Market-share up first. With W10 being killed of by MS we now have a good opportunity to grow.

Yes, I want native ports but I am happy with Proton as things stand.

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The goal of Proton is not to shift more developers to native Linux ports. It is to move more consumers (i.e. gamers) from Windows to Linux. A side-effect absolutely is that 'Linux support' means 'it runs on Proton'.
The question is: what if Proton ever succeeds in bringing a critical mass of gamers to Linux? Then suddenly it will make sense for developers to support Linux. One can dream...

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@grigi

I don't know what I'm supposed to do. if I move her to e.g. Linux and LibreOffice... is she going to be able to do her work?
She's 78, she doesn't want to learn new things right now.

You can pay a subscription to use then online / web version of MS office. So if that's the only thing she needs to escape windows than it's asking if the subscription cost is worth the other benefits.

Sure you have alternatives on Linux, may much better than Libre Office for people coming from MS office... (I'd go with the paid version of Softmaker office myself. It basically feels like an older version of MS office and has near perfect support for MS office formats.) But also why? If she's working at a university than she probably already has a free subscription to the online MS office anyway. I know my sister who works at a university has it for free.

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Proton is a blessing and a curse. More games than ever can run on Linux, but developers and publishers are more then happy to focus on Windows and consoles while shifting the burden of Linux support to Valve

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My LibreOffice documents make their way into IGO's. Never received a complaint

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I do like my Steamy Deck, although I've been lately using it more as a media center that I connected to TV and I would start Kodi on it (to local Jellyfin of course). Given how simplified emulation is with EmuDeck makes this an incredibly compelling handheld for sure.
One thing this device hasn't changed for me: Playing First/Third person shooters on gamepads/Deck controls is still shite xD

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I think the only thing that might knock it off the top spot is the Deckard, aka the Steam Grid, or whatever it ends up being called.

I use my Steam Deck daily, and I don't really care about it being underpowered, because it has introduced me to so many genres of Indie and less graphically demanding games, which do run amazingly well on it, not everything has to be about AAA graphics. But when Steam Deck 2 comes out, I'll be sure to get that as well.

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Yes the user stats is gone. To repeat my previous comment:

The stats served their purpose, and people were steadily using it less and less over time that it just didn't really feel like it was relevant any more. I'll most likely run some dedicated stats for people over the years instead so people can still get a good look at what systems our readers are running.

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Unrelated, but the graph reminded me. I can't find the link to user stats in the site menu anymore. Was it removed? It was one of the very interesting features really.

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The specific campaign is, sure, not that likely to move the dial anywhere much. But that's OK--it will probably shift SOME people and it doesn't do any harm, and who knows? Maybe it will take off. As the great-in-hockey-but-crap-as-a-Canadian, Wayne Gretzky, once said, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take". So I'd rather see this kind of thing being done than not being done. And every time, the barriers to switching are lower.

On LibreOffice vs MS Office, specifically Writer vs. Word . . . switching is generally OK but it does depend on use case. I use LibreOffice at home, use both at work. You can do most things in Writer that you can do in Word, like a big most, and I actually like the user interface better overall. Never liked the damn ribbon. But, especially if you don't sweat the fonts, stuff can end up looking a bit different if you open the same file in the two programs. Something can end up a line or two longer or shorter, which if it was designed to fit exactly on a page can be annoying. And I have to admit, I recently was doing a thing where I wanted pictures in the text, and in LibreOffice getting the text to go around the pictures the way I wanted was a massive pain, whereas in Word it was merely annoying.

For a lot of stuff it really doesn't matter if you switch to LibreOffice, and someone who remembers Word with drop-down menus may well actually like it better overall. But if you have to be compatible with other people in an office, I would suggest doing whatever fiddling you need at setup to make sure you have the fonts everyone else is using; that should minimize little differences in how files display and print. And find out if they have to use any weird advanced features from MS Office, because those might not have a match at all.

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Well, no, I don't think this campaign is going to bring about a wholesale switch from Windows to Linux. It does, however, provide resources and a starting point for those who have decided to make the switch, whatever their reasons. So, yes, I do think the campaign is worthwhile.

My employer will not be replacing their hardware and they are in no rush to abandon Windows 10. Most of our business administration is managed through the cloud anyway, so as long as the browser can be kept current, we should be fine.

Near as I have been able to determine, most older versions of MS Office will run in Linux via Wine (2016 and down). As long as the activation servers are still operational, I imagine.

I have noticed inconsistencies with LibreOffice and MS Office files too.

The biggest concern I have encountered is reliable WiFi drivers in Linux for older hardware.

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re:Libreoffice compatibility issues, especially with respect to sharing comments & such -- this is true, unfortunately; and it highlights, IMHO, a challenge for the free software movement which doesn't seem to get as much attention as it should.

pdf and docx are both 'open' formats, but they're incredibly complicated. For an application made by an independent organization to be *fully compliant*, a gigantic effort has to be put in place, essentially to reverse engineer an easy to use API for that supposedly 'open' format. MS and Adobe not only have the resources to deal with that complexity, but they're the ones who cooked it up in the first place; so their bloated software can deal with the innumerable 'edge cases' that might come up in actual usage, while the independent project is content to implement the bare minimum.

Just today I confirmed to myself once again that the disgusting piece of 'free as in beer' adware known as Adobe Acrobat is the only, well, 'free as in beer' pdf viewer that reliably exports annotations from a pdf, straight from the viewer, without writing into the pdf file first, in a well formed xml. There are other ways of 'exporting' annotations from a pdf, but they all involve writing inside the pdf, thereby changing its index, which is risky, because one program's changes on that fragile index may render the file corrupt for another reader. Exporting annotations is a crucial feature, because it allows the user to take his notes & highlights, and feed them into a full text indexer for later search; or, to produce a worksheet of quotes and comments for a course by simply applying an xslt stylesheet on said xml; or export all the notes into markdown, or org, an continue writing in a sane editing environment like emacs as opposed to the little textboxes on the pdf software.

I'd go so far as to say that the ultimate end of FSF's '4 freedoms' is the availability of properly intelligible APIs into programs that deal with *humanly meaningful* data -- the availability of the source isn't an end in itself, it's to allow us sovereignty on what the algorithms in that source *do* - control what we DO and DON'T want them to do. When it comes to desktop applications that deal with directly human-facing data, FOSS software is open alright, and we know at least that it's not stealing that data to train some matrix-multiplication cluster in some secret data center, so it allows sovereignty in the limiting, 'DON'T DO', sense; but control & sovereignty in the positive, or 'DO' sense ... well, it usually comes short.

I think we should be campaigning for the latter a bit more, is all I'm saying, I guess; otherwise it really sounds like the FOSS community is after some sort of ritualistic purity for its own sake.

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It's in line with what most of the industry is doing lately. With Proton now being able to run pretty much any game on Linux, they don't see a solid reason for a native Linux port anymore. "Linux support" is now equivalent to making sure it runs smoothly in Proton.

Personally, I can live with it. If a game runs on Linux I don't care about what makes it run.

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speaking of Fedora KDE, I've installed Kinoite on my mom's laptop after manjaro finally died in a tragic update, enabled automatic updates, and today I looked at this laptop for the first time in a while, and it was actually updated (except still on F41 which is fine) while completely unattended and perfectly safe I guess, great stuff

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It could have sold even more if Valve expanded its sales to the entire world, instead of only in selected markets. Here in Brazil, for example, you cold only get one in the grey market. But we can get a Asus or Lenovo portable from official resellers if we want. But, you know, they are not a Steam Deck.

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This is tempting to grab as I just finished Ori and the Blind Forest and might jump straight into Will of the Wisps

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If PDX is switching engines for the game, that would explain why they dropped Mac + Linux and also give me hope for a more optimized game client.

They probably are using a bumped version of Clausewitz.

But if in 2025 the boardroom approves a new engines that does not support linux it doesn't bode well for PDX long term. They are in full short term cashgrab to appease the stock market. Which btw is the signal they are giving since quite a few years already (as I said before, I grew tired of them sistematically not delivering what promised time ago). They are regularly offsetting poor DLC quality with more aggressive commercial campaigns.

It will work until it breakes. When it does, there will be no fallback. It sucks because there aren't many grand strategy alternatives of this magnitude around. So one virtually has to give up the genre entirely.

On the bright side, should EU4 be somehow decent on its last patch, I might buy the last DLCs on some post eu5 release sale and have illimited playtime on EU4.

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RE: switching, anecdotally, one of my relatives does computer repairs for a living and says he has been switching a lot of people over to Linux based mainly on the spying "features" being added in W11 and the considerable boost to performance on existing devices by running Linux versus having to buy new hardware to install W11. As others have said, it remains to be seen whether those people will be happy with the change and stick with Linux, but there’s certainly an openness to it. Remember that for a lot of people, the very existence of Linux is unknown, so any opportunity to teach them about it is progress in itself. I don’t think a campaign like this can "fail" unless it somehow results in a net loss of users and/or goodwill. The goal should never be to get *everyone* to use Linux, but to empower the people who want it to make that choice.

RE: LibreOffice, as much as I support it, it pretty much always has compatibility issues when I have to work with clients’ .docx files, especially when frames or advanced layout options are involved (which is most of the time). I have to request PDF copies to annotate, otherwise the files I send back are completely mangled for them. I keep hearing the argument that it’s feature-complete or entirely compatible, but that has never been my experience and I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who has a real need to work collaboratively and seamlessly on .docx files.

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It's odd seeing Paradox not supporting Linux - especially now that Steam Deck is a thing (and it's a success). Go figure...

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We get excited every time Microsoft screws over its customers, thinking it will finally compel a significant number of people to flee to the greener pastures of Linux, but it never happens. Unfortunately, Bill Gates was excellent at his job and convinced multiple generations that there is no viable alternative to Windows.

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