Powered by Nakama from Heroic Labs, it's something PDS has been working on for some time now, which enables players to "be able to connect and play with others from any Windows, MacOS, or Linux platform where the game is sold, including the Paradox Store, Steam, GOG.com, and any other digital retailers where Imperator: Rome may appear".

This sounds awesome.

Cross-platform multiplayer is a pain, because devs make assumptions about determinism that don't necessarily hold on different platforms, so you get games where players on different platforms can't play against each other. Plus matchmaking, which tends to heavily use the platform infrastructure (like Steam), so doesn't translate to other platforms that don't have it (like GOG).

If it's easy to integrate and saves devs from having to roll their own, that should be really useful. With it being open source it shouldn't go the way of GameSpy, either.

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Quoting: scaineOne thing in particular I hated is that both Kate (the text editor) and Dolphin (the file manager) are crippled to disallow running as sudo.

I agree on Dolphin: I think it was short-sighted and daft. You're much more likely to mess things up having to do things as root from an unfamiliar command line than doing so with a file manager that's easy to understand and familiar.

For Kate, I believe it does the standard authorisation thing when you try to save a root-owned file now, but before that you had to use sudoedit.

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Off Topic:

Quoting: scaineAnd I just can't enjoy my desktop when it's Gnome3. It doesn't gel, despite my giving it 6 months to do so.

But Mint! Holy cow, what a slick, beautiful experience it is. Better... better(!) than Unity, in my opinion. I have fallen in love with my desktop all over again. So, giving up Mint for a slightly better VR experience isn't on the cards, I'm afraid!

I was in a similar position to you. I had Cinnamon on my laptop because, at the time I got it, the high-DPI support was best, and I was getting increasingly annoyed by Gnome 3 on my desktop.

When I built my new desktop I gave KDE a try. Within a week I decided to switch my laptop to KDE as well, since I liked it so much more.

In particular, and the reason I'm mentioning it, the out-of-the-box audio configuration for setting device priorities - and having different priorities for different classes of audio application if you want that - is way better than what you get on the GTK side, since they had all that already for Phonon.

If you do get itchy feet to try something different, that's the direction that I'd suggest you try.

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Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoI repeat: We need a third player in the GPU market.

Intel have been working on Xe for quite a while now. Actual real-world performance, and how much it's directed towards gaming rather than machine learning, are still to be determined, of course.

Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoThey should calm down and release new GPUs every three years and not every year.

I'll freely admit that I find AMD's products and release schedule confusing, but on the Nvidia side:
Fermi 2010
Kepler 2012
Maxwell 2014
Pascal 2016
Turing 2018
Consumer Ampere? 2020

You don't have to buy a new card every generation if you don't want to.

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Quoting: scaineStill my number #1 game of all time. Although I played mouse/keyboard, so I didn't have the controller issue you're seeing.

It's not an issue issue, it's just that devs are lazy. As I understand it, Windows support for the PS3 controller was really inadequate compared to the Linux support for it, and Microsoft were pushing the Xbox controller as the One True "Standard" for controllers on Windows, so it makes sense that that's what they were lazy about. It's just irritating that they were lazy, and a bit of a pain that the game says that I should press X when it actually wants me to press square.

Also, if you like the campaign, I HIGHLY (HUGELY, DEFINITELY) recommend the Witches DLC. The play mechanic is even better in the DLC (time freezes when you blink). It's amazingly good fun, and it's a long campaign. Highly recommended.

The bundle that I got has the DLC as well as the games, so I'll look forward to it.

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I've been playing Dishonored. I got most of the way through it on the PS3 back in the day but got distracted by something else and never went back to it.

That one and the sequel had good reports on protondb so I picked up both of them on Steam, although I've only tried the first one so far. It works perfectly in Proton, although the Xbox button prompts when I'm using a PS3 controller are quite irritating.

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Quoting: Liam DaweHere here.

It's actually, "hear, hear," from the earlier, "hear him! Hear him!" [/pedantry]

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Quoting: JanneDoes the new game have a wider array of different challenges, or does it suffer from the same issue?

It's still really the same game, with the same sorts of objectives. There are some new mechanics, but it's mostly big quality of life improvements and more deterministic physics. If you don't have either the second one is the one to get, but if you've already got the first one it's a more tricky decision.

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Quoting: Alm888Seriously though, this hardly matters. So far we did not see many core underlying shifts in OS distribution channels, with only one company (I forgot which one, Dell or Lenovo) starting to optionally provide pre-installed Linux on some notebooks. The rest are just "recommending" (yeah, we know of the deal they made to get certification/cheap licenses) "Windows™ 10™". ;)

Actually, it's both of them. Dell have been doing so in earnest for quite a while with Project Sputnik, and Lenovo have started doing it recently. Both of them are upstreaming any changes they need to make.

That's showing good prospects for the professional market segment. Boutique and build-your-own has generally been fine, and still seems to be doing well.

Chromebooks have got the cheap-and-nasty segment (the old low-margin netbook segment of things that people will buy on a whim) covered, which will help lower expectations that all computers must come with Windows. Those customers have zero interest in Operating Systems in any form.

The last segment is the "gamer" pre-built segment, and that will take longer. It's reliant on AMD getting more penetration - since Optimus has always been a disaster - and more recognition of Linux as a gaming platform, and manufacturers actually giving a damn. Given that the market is simply a higher-priced version of the cheap-and-nasty segment, and manufacturers can't currently be bothered to even make their blinkenlights work, that's still quite an uphill task.

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It's a shame they faltered so close to the finish line. Hopefully they'll have enough sales to keep going.

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