Quoting: KohlyKohlI get the survey on Linux all the time. I'd say once every 3-4 months.

Do you reinstall or distro hop a lot? My understanding is that Steam is only supposed to ask at most once a year.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyEdited to add: On the other hand, the new GoL article about LeNovo adding Ubuntu and RHEL to a bunch of workstations . . . I wonder if that's related?

It certainly seems feasible: if you're going to make your hardware work with Linux anyway for the domestic market, why not try to leverage that work into a wider market? Or they could just be competing with Dell, or it could be an independent move to start offering Linux.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuySecond, I note that in tandem with the rise of Linux share on Steam there is, as usual, a decline in simplified Chinese share. So again, this may not mean much except that the Chinese don't use Linux (more fool they--if there's one bunch that would benefit from ripping out Windows and replacing it with Linux, that would be China).

China's mandating that government computers stop using foreign proprietary software for the same reasons other governments do:

Beijing has ordered all government offices and public institutions to remove foreign computer equipment and software within three years, in a potential blow to the likes of HP, Dell and Microsoft.

Report from the Financial Times. [External Link]

They have their own distros in Kylin and Deepin already. Whether that will translate to more people using Linux in their leisure time it's too early to say (or even if they'll manage to achieve it for government computers) but people wanting to use the same system at home that they were used to at work was a part of Microsoft's desktop dominance back in the day.

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Quoting: F.UltraJust guessing here since I'm #1 not a Windows dev and #2 not a Game dev, but this could be due to some high hopes optimizing since the library calls perform some sanity checks and massaging of the data that you send in so a direct syscall is some ns faster.

Me either, but historically there have been some really elaborate things done with games because you really need the performance - timing your game output by where the CRT electron beam is, for example - and you're optimising for that rather than maintainability. On a console it's probably (relatively) legit (and probably took quite a lot of work), since you've got limited hardware configurations and a fixed software environment, any changes to your assumptions come with a whole other console, and if the performance isn't quite there you can't tell your customers to simply buy a better computer. It's not legit when you don't know the hardware, you don't know the software, and all your assumptions can be completely ruined by an OS update, or driver update, or any number of other things that can happen without warning and completely out of your control.

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Quoting: EhvisIt's safe to say that giving a game away on day one is going to cost Epic. There are two options, either Epic pays per freely given game, or they paid a fixed price. If the first is true, then having as many people get it as possible would increase the cost for Epic. For the second it might make the deal for CA a bit less interesting than they thought it was. Either way could lower the chances of it happening again.

The thing that would stop it happening again is if no one (relatively) plays it for a year, and particularly at launch when they're trying to build hype. An Epic flop.

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Quoting: MohandevirAfter that, will porting the game still be profitable to Feral, if the game is not sold at the initial launch price?

It's going to be (at least) a year late, and a bunch of people are going to have already got it for free. Feral's chances of making it worthwhile to do it have been completely torpedoed.

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Quoting: GuestNot sure what you're driving at here, you want us to get it free on Epic Store?

I think (hope) they're saying to wishlist it for Linux on Steam so that Feral don't get totally dumped, but I could be wrong.

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While we know that some of you won’t like the Epic Games Store exclusivity, we feel like this is a great opportunity for us in a lot of ways

... because Epic gave us a big bag of money.

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That really sucks for Feral.

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I'm not sure why this didn't occur to me before.

Using system calls directly seems like a very silly thing to do with a Windows game, but that's not necessarily as true for an Xbox game. I think the developers that have done this will still get bitten by the support costs caused by the fragility of their chewing-gum-and-string coding method, but it might not be as insane as it might first appear.

So perhaps Quantic Dream have an Xbox version that they haven't released yet, or they found it easier to go PlayStation -> Xbox -> Windows for some reason.

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