Quoting: vic-bay

Quoting: ShmerlI think it's good — looks like they made GOG private so they can pursue their own vision and not be pressured by shareholders of CDPR.

I.e. may be they can spend on Linux now more, while before shareholders could tell them not to prioritize Linux support. Just my guess. In the end, it's really up to what they want.

yeah, looking at valve and other game companies, private company is a better model for company-customer relationships. it allows for following long term strategies without being pressed by shareholders.

In my experience it really depends. Private is great but usually only when a company starts. Not speaking about GOG specifically, but in general, when a public company "goes private" the $$$ often comes from private equity firms which in turn is typically absolutely terrible for everyone - meaning both consumers AND employees, especially employees - other than the top-most leadership themselves. When you work for a public company that announces going private, it's frankly a good idea to start brushing up the resume and looking ahead to your next career move, even getting a jump on it, before you get surprised.

Anyway, at least with GOG it sounds like it's probably fine or even a good thing. Reads to me like this move is just saving GOG's existence before future changes occur; Which is great.

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I long ago gave up using the actual client, I don't need fifty different browsers disguised as apps running.

Works fine, and frankly better performance-wise, as a pinned tab in Firefox.

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My understanding of Fedora is it's essentially a test bed for Redhat. As in it's generally stable, but if you want to depend on it, you should... probably use something else because things will happen sometimes and they will fix it, and repeat.

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Calling out Linux always just feels like vendors convincing devs that their windows-only Anticheat is the best choice for them and are just closing sales/driving adoption.

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Might be a matter of preferred genres. I'm mainly playing point and click and puzzle games.
I also usually play a game until it's finished and don't come back.
There's enough new stuff to play.

Could be. Or it could be the same popular games, that kind of thing. I know a while back I was playing through Black Mesa, which has native linux support, which became completely unplayable in some scenes for me if there were too many particle effects. I switched to the windows version/proton to work around it and playing it that way worked perfectly with no issues. I did see a major patch came out for this game a while back, so maybe that fixes those issues?

I guess off the top of my head that's truly the only one that comes to mind for me, at least via Steam, so perhaps it's the Steam Linux Runtime working wonders. I've certainly seen news blips of developers dropping linux ports due to bugs/maintenance, but I'm not positive those are ever games I actually play myself.

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Just to those worried that Proton kills native ports. That may be true, but I'll remind you that...

• Many of the native ports lag behind
• Or, they're buggy
• Rolling distros along with non-rolling distros make Linux difficult to support in a single "Linux" build. Not a new issue, but much more prevalent now than it used to be.
• The Steam Linux Runtime solves some of the previous issue, but if you require Steam, what's the difference at that point to using Proton practically speaking.

That said, I'd also like people to consider the possibility that things change over time. A big issue for most developers/publishers when supporting Linux has always been whether it would be worth the resources to do so for the limited customer base. Remember that the goal is to grow Linux market share, it's only us nerds that care about native or proton. Ideally, if Proton can bring more people over to Linux as their daily driver and grow that market share, than more power to Proton.

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If you don't need HDR and/or "actually good reasons" for using Wayland, IMHO Mint is absolutely the best choice for most users beginner and power alike.

I'm a big fan of Mint XFCE in particular, and really, edition is important as well. Many of the times when people say what they use instead, they include/say a particular flavor, but often don't when they talk about Mint for some reason.

Ubuntu/Canonical needs a buffer, and the Mint team does an excellent job of it.

Talking about this Mint release however, I was very pleased to see the changes in Software Manager clarifying flatpak usage, and what that means, though I think it can still be clarified further (to a certain degree, I'm not sure just how much of that is really the distro's responsibility beyond what they're now doing). In particular a rather systemic issue with flats and similar is it can be unclear who is really maintaining those, and whether the maintainer in question even has permission to do so, etc.

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I disagree with "What a messy situation this emulator has been.", while it has been a source of strong opinions in the past, I can't get behind that view this time.

I've seen variations of this exact problem kill projects in the past, and unfortunately the loudest people rarely side with the project/often-single-person otherwise trying to mind their own business. Either they just one day suddenly close a project, or sometimes they'll lash out first with the predictable retribution (since lashing out is RARELY well thought out, and you can never "undo" what you say on the internet, no matter how fair it is).

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Agreed with the other comments.

This reminds me of the evolution of the Amazon website over the years, where modern UX tends to eventually turn sites unusable for browsing.

Now the Steam store is just a bunch of wasted space with things stuffed together in an inconvenient way. I don't see myself ever browsing the store like it is in the Beta, I would search for what I want specifically, go to it, and that's it.

At least they still use actual words in their interface, and the new one -- despite not caring for it at all -- is at least consistent in placement. Small victories I guess.

If they keep up with modern UX trends soon enough it'll be icons-only that don't mean anything, aren't obvious, be over-simplified in a frustrating manner, and be all over the place because some UX designer thought their unique take on things is more intuitive then familiar flows that people would just understand immediately versus having to learn their #901358 interface of the week.

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Good detail on how to proton things directly in Steam; I follow the exact same procedure for regular windows games too and just skip Heroic/Lutris/Similar entirely.

Personally I can't stand the UIs of either Heroic or Lutris, and the vast majority of the time it's simple enough to just add them to Steam with most of my other games anyway.

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