Quoting: 14What is up with you guys having to download all the updates as soon as you know they exist? I let my "queued for later" list do its thing. It's called letting a computer be a computer. Am I going to play like 5 games in the same day? No. Am I even going to play one of those games in the next week? Unlikely. Let it be.

You know an application hasn't gotten a facelift in a long time when a tiny UI change with no new functionality is newsworthy! Ha.

I know I do, but for me it's a combination of having slow internet for a very long time (not so much anymore, still slower then "city-folk" speeds along with my complete lack of ability to stand pending anything). Some people can ignore pending notification/unread counts on their phones for instance, and some cannot (of course, on my phone, this is solved by just turning the notifications off). When you have slow internet, you think differently, because if an urge to play a game comes up you typically want to play it now-or-soon, not in a day or two. This is also why I have ~1500 games installed at once. I routinely run through all my clients and install any updates that are pending.

That said, I'm surprised so many people here don't seem to grasp why Steam doesn't update games immediately. Of course they wouldn't, they're pretty obviously staggering updates to ease pressure on their network+servers, but _giving the option to do it now anyway_. I'm sure it's the same reason an update all button does not exist (although I would love that as well, but I do understand it).

I assert again that it's still friendlier then other clients, take uPlay for instance. That one only auto updates games you recently launched; If you haven't, you actually have to launch the game to get the current update to download.

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Complaints about the steam downloader aside, it's still the best downloader among all of the big-name game clients. Frankly these screenshots don't seem all that much different then the old version, just a somewhat boring refresh.

But Epic, Uplay, Origin, EA Desktop, Battlenet, Amazon Games, MS Store + Xbox PC, even GOG Galaxy? I'd say Battlenet is the least awful of those, but we're talking king of the poo-pile among that bunch.

Of all of them together, the only one I never have problems with updating, pausing, stopping, altering queue order at all, installing, verifying, is Steam. Just these basic functions. I could break down my problems with every one of these clients, and it's amazing how the industry has settled where it has.

Honestly I have strong suspicions as to why, being adjacent over the years to a bunch of devs of different ages but not being one myself, and I don't see the trend getting better any time soon; It truly is an industry thing.

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[quote=Guest]

Quoting: Mohandevir...no quality control on the store, etc...

I hate to pick on a particular point / do the partial quote thing myself, but can you imagine the shit storm if they DID start enforcing some sort of quality control beyond what they already do (they do, it's just only rather extreme examples that ever get pulled). I think most people would love it, but talk about asking for it. The persecution-complex-social-media-campaigns would go through the roof and nobody would ever be allowed to hear the end of it.

Unless you mean like, "does this windows game actually work on windows 10"... then yeah, that could do with some love. None of the stores really do that, but being the biggest-store-in-the-room the problem shows the most there. That's a pretty common issue w/ like GOG too, and I believe uPlay has some questionable compat issues as well. No clue about the rest.

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Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: dibzI mean, does virtually anyone come across a game where they don't go to Steam and read the reviews + view the rating for regardless of where they actually make the purchase?

I even heard about people asking for support on Steam forums for games they bought on the Epic Store.

Exactly. And by that logic, I wouldn't even put past companies like Epic to be downright predatory towards Steam -- they don't need to add reviews or pay for the infrastructure to support a better store. Steam does it for them, for *free.

*: Honestly, I feel like younger generations are entirely clueless about the costs of things. Older people too, for that matter.

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Price binding and frankly the entire lawsuit aside, I am curious about the whole "Steam doesn't earn it's cut" thing making the rounds lately with this being the instigator.

I mean, does virtually anyone come across a game where they don't go to Steam and read the reviews + view the rating for regardless of where they actually make the purchase? I know not all games are on Steam, but I know I've often looked at a game, proceeded to google said game, then used the steam result to have another look at said game. Does anyone else do this? It's easy to break down the pluses and minuses, of which there are plenty of both, to someone doing this -- but the fact is, they still do.

Frankly, being invited to the party is part of Steam's value in the end. You can just flip the script and ask a slightly different question to see why -- if they chose not to sell on Steam, would if negatively effect sales on any platforms they do decide to sell on? My crystal ball would say severely reduced sales likely. If that's not "value", I clearly don't know what is.

*** Let's be clear that I'm not necessarily in favor of the current situation of things in general, I'm simply being frank about the "what is" versus the "what should be".

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Quoting: NeverthelessI like that you're talking detail. I think the classic Win95 style desktop has some big advantages!
1. Closing maximized windows by clicking in the top right corner without having to look.
2. Opening the system menu by clicking in the bottom left corner without having to look.
3. Favourite apps in the bottom panel. Why bothering to add an extra dock, dash, panel or whatever?
4. Workspace switcher in the panel.
5. Window list in the panel (no clicking, or using the keyboard).

I don't get what a top panel is good for. And even when I move it down in Gnome, the window close button is in a position that can not be reached with a click in the top right corner.
I absolutely love Cinnamon because of it!

Frankly this is why I like XFCE so much. I prefer a "classic" method of panels on the bottom of each monitor, no more, no less. Each monitor shows it's own windows in their respective panels' window list. You can do plenty of fancy things if you really want to, but I don't want to; It's not broken, and more importantly, the "new fancy" is not better. I swear half the changes they make for newer things is just for the screenshots.

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Good luck to them I suppose.

I have my doubts regarding long term support, with them being commercial I actually see it as more likely that this'll be dropped like a hot potato in a few years when the tech debt is deemed not worth the cost to maintain.

That said, I'm always in the mood for a pleasant surprise. More power to them.

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[quote=Guest]

Quoting: damarrinWhat bothers me about this change is that they don't take much into account multiple monitors and things get messy.

During the original shift from Gnome2 to Gnome3, awful multi-monitor support was why I jumped ship back then. After trying various alternatives, I discovered XFCE was "a better gnome2 then gnome2 ever was" and never looked back.

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Quoting: KithopI didn't really have any huge issue with either the old radeon or even proprietary fglrx drivers back in the day, and it's not that nVidia's are broken or unworkable (unless you like to keep up with kernel development)... but AMD invested a ton into mainlining the amdgpu drivers, while nVidia still refuses to release the firmware that would allow nouveau to enable reclocking.

That's true, AMD certainly does deserve some good will. As far as AMD goes, the big issues at least I had had to do with multi-monitor support "back when". Still, I don't see why it has to be a scale that tips in one or the others favor; Nvidia has provided solid drivers for linux for a long time even if AMD has (fairly recently) raised the bar.

Quoting: KithopAny other system builder targeting Windows, sure, nVidia is more popular. But for a Linux-first integrator pushing for openness, it's just odd to me to not even offer the equivalent hardware that doesn't require a binary blob. I'm not even saying not to sell or even default to nVidia if that's what they want, but I suppose there might be a way to sweet talk them into letting you order a GPU-less system and then BYO card.

We can only guess really. GPU-less certainly seems like a reasonable ask to me.

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Quoting: KithopEven if the Radeon options were just greyed out for now with 'out of stock', it's just so odd to push for openness everywhere else in the system...and then only offer nVidia's binary-blob-driver cards as GPUs.

Honestly I find it kind of strange the hate nVidia receives over their closed drivers recently. For a long, long, time ATI could've cared less about linux and while nvidia's drivers were closed they offered very good support (at least for my consumer desktop cards, I do understand that not-those cards weren't supported as well).

I've been a linux guy a long time so I get the whole frowny-face about it, but I mean like, ATI hasn't been friendly for all that long either. To the degree that I've used my nvidia cards for a long time, so long in fact that when I bought them the ATI/AMD support was still utter garbage in linux.

Not to derail too much, but I wish those System76 cases were available standalone; maybe without the giant "watermarking". Such a nice look compared to the energy-drink-reject look of so many desktop cases today.

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