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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Quoting: GuestI really must find the time one day to sort out what is going wrong with DXVK on my system. Still cannot get Portal2 -vulkan to actually work, or newer DXVK versions in a system wine prefix, and I'm convinced that they are related.

I have the odd feeling that Valve will strip out the OpenGL backend and leave me unable to play it at all.

I can't speak for the portal2-bundled DXVK, but I had an issue with my system wine prefix a while back to watch out for -- especially since it's such an easy thing to miss. If it's an old prefix, be mindful that in recent years Wine started defaulting to 64-bit prefixes but as I'd been using the same prefix for years it was still 32-bit and I was trying to run a 64-bit app.

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Quoting: heidi.wenger

Quoting: dibz

Quoting: EikeAGS :whistle:

Speaking of! Did you see that ScummVM is working on AGS support? Well, again -- it's not new, but it has renewed interest! It's not an official announcement either, but the news came via one of the dev blogs -- https://planet.scummvm.org/ [External Link].

I'm thrilled personally. They noted in their post the same problem I had w/ using (linux in my context) native AGS builds w/ various games though -- that custom AGS plugins can be problematic at times. I'm hoping with ScummVM being as notable as it is, that it drives compatible builds of said plugins and renews interest. The last line of the blog post is especially interesting, "One day in the near future, expect to play some of the classic AGS games like the AGDI Sierra remakes in ScummVM :)". Though, since those remakes don't use special plugins, they actually work fine with native linux AGS builds already -- but exciting nonetheless!

So this (AGS) means that one can play or example Technobabylon thru ScummVM?

Eventually, yeah. Unfortunately Wadjet Eye games do tend to use custom plugins, so there is probably going to be a hurdle there. For Luxtorpeda when I initially contributed AGS support, I was able to use a replacement plugin that stubbed out all the steam-related stuff that the plugin was for (Achievements). For games where the custom plugins only do things like that it could be an option. Other games could use plugins for visual effects and things of that nature, so those couldn't be just stubbed out for instance.

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Quoting: EikeAGS :whistle:

Speaking of! Did you see that ScummVM is working on AGS support? Well, again -- it's not new, but it has renewed interest! It's not an official announcement either, but the news came via one of the dev blogs -- https://planet.scummvm.org/ [External Link].

I'm thrilled personally. They noted in their post the same problem I had w/ using (linux in my context) native AGS builds w/ various games though -- that custom AGS plugins can be problematic at times. I'm hoping with ScummVM being as notable as it is, that it drives compatible builds of said plugins and renews interest. The last line of the blog post is especially interesting, "One day in the near future, expect to play some of the classic AGS games like the AGDI Sierra remakes in ScummVM :)". Though, since those remakes don't use special plugins, they actually work fine with native linux AGS builds already -- but exciting nonetheless!

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