Quoting: liamdaweAlso, I'm surprised MATE is as low as it is, it's great!

Part of it might be the overlapping "target market" with more established traditional DEs like Xfce. Well, more established only if you forget that MATE is basically GNOME2, but my point still stands.

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Quoting: NovenWhich controllers are you talking about? I would love an excellent controller because my Logitech F310 does not work.

Weird. My F-310 works perfectly (in XInput-mode) on Mint. Out of the box, even. Either there's something missing in your setup or your controller is broken. Have you tried if jstest-gtk detects it correctly?

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Quoting: NovenThis is why I am glad the Steam controller will be out eventually. Having a native supported controller will be very nice.

There are already several controllers with excellent native support in Linux (with SDL2). Sadly that does not translate to universal support in games. Even some big budget titles/ports manage to mess things up. I doubt this will change overnight when the Steam Controller comes out. I also doubt the dual touchpads can beat more conventional controller designs in certain types of games, but we'll see.

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Quoting: EKRboiI tried Mint once, I remember having a terrible time getting rid of/blacklisting nouveau in Mint over its cousin Ubuntu..

The weird thing is, I haven't had a single problem with the xorg-edgers ppa since I switched to Mint a few releases ago, and I had tons when I ran Xubuntu.

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Seems really nice. I don't do early access, but I'll definitely check this out once it's done.

Quoting: liamdaweI've always had a love for these first person dungeon crawlers since the early games on Amiga, so to have a sci-fi version with guns and RPG elements, it was far too good an idea to pass up.

You never played Captive [External Link] on the Amiga then? Excellent sci-fi crawler from 1990. Unless this is just nostalgia, as I haven't actually played it in a couple of decades.

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Quoting: neffoYou were limited in your use of the product though. You were limited to a single physical copy, physical media typically had to be in the drive for the game to work. If that copy was lost, destroyed you lost your access to the game. Backup copies of the physical media weren't allowed, and were typically very difficult to make regardless. Physical media wasn't exactly what I'd call freedom.

You're pretty much wrong on all accounts where I live. It might have been this way for you, but many countries held out well into the "noughties" before giving in.

It was perfectly legal for me to make any number of physical copies for backup purposes, to "crack" my game to play it without the installation media and use whatever means were necessary to circumvent copy protection to do this. As long as I respected copyright and didn't provide - let alone sell - illegal copies of my games to others. This was tested in court, so it's not just speculation. Yes I know I'm being deliberately vague here. That's because I find the specifics incredibly boring.

BTW, I don't understand where you got the idea that I miss physical copies. I'm perfectly fine with and actually prefer digital distribution. That's got nothing at all to do with what we're discussing here.

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Quoting: neffoThe idea of games as an explicit license rather than a physical thing has existed longer than internet distribution has existed. It's been that way since at least the early 90s, but physical ownership never gave you implicit rights over the thing you owned.

That idea didn't creep into law in the early nineties though, at least not where I live. And of course physical ownership didn't give me the copyright, nor should it have, but at least the seller didn't retain the right to tell me which or how many computers I was allowed to play the game on or come and confiscate my copy whenever they felt like it. Nor could they insist that I log in every time I want to play. The whole concept that the seller should be able to dictate the way I privately use the product after the sale is quite new and frankly absurd.

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Quoting: DrMcCoyThe intend of the law is to give you the ability to observe and inspect the item as if in a brick and mortar store; not to give you 14 days of free use.

This might be the intent of the law, but this clearly differs from the way returns are handled for other types of goods. And as you said, this law is very recent.

The erosion of consumer rights and inflation of corporate influence in the EU over the last few years has been obvious. There are too many glaring examples to even list. The current push for TTIP and it's so called investment protection rules are the icing on the cake. European lawmakers are keeping true to their "let's copy every mistake the US ever did" credo and treating the average consumer like a criminally minded idiot while pandering to big business in hopes of grabbing the marginal amount of tax money they don't manage to evade (perfectly legally, of course).

I'm going to bow out of the discussion now, as it seems this is turning into a one-sided debate on the letter of law, when all I expressed was my disagreement on the general idea of modern subscription services vs. the classic "buy a game, own a copy" model.

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Quoting: GuestYou always buy a licence to play the game, no matter where you buy it…

And this EU law is actually recent, not centuries old.

Well, obviously it's quite recent. This whole conversation would hardly have been even relevant until a few years back, when advances in Internet bandwidth and availability finally made digital distribution viable.

Still it has not been that long since you actually bought a copy of a game or let's say a musical recording (physical or digital, shouldn't matter) instead of the right to play or listen to them. A right the seller can legally revoke whenever they wish without so much as an explanation, mind you. But you can still buy games you can legally backup and play on any system of your choosing for as long as you see fit from GOG et al.

Quoting: DrMcCoyThis is not Steam gaming the law; this is the exact intention of that law.

And that law was brilliantly written and lobbied by these same businesses that now reap the benefits. I do not see why our rights as consumers should be dependent on distribution mediums.

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Quoting: neffoIt's not really a loophole, and it's perfectly legal.

It's not a loophole in the legal sense, but it's hard to think of it as anything else. The entertainment industry has managed to persuade most of their clientele that a subscription to games/movies/music/whatever is worth the same as actual ownership of said media.

I can't say I'm convinced, partly because I don't care about their "value added" services. I just want the games, and maybe an easy way to get updates. Couldn't care less about multiplayer lobbies, workshops or any of the social stuff. Don't get me wrong, I do have and use Steam. It is convenient despite their business model, not because of it.

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