Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: rustybroomhandleHumble Bundle, remember they used to have keys for Steam, their own store and.... Desura. Remember Desura?

Humble ports weren't exactly great, and many left broken.

...and yet we were quite happy with them. That's saying how far we've gone since then.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: Liam DaweDon’t even get me started on the people trying to claim things were good pre-Steam 🤣

The best pre-Steam thing that I can point to was the massive progress made on emulation, driven by stuff like the GP2X (an obscure Linux-based Korean handheld with awful controls because the company didn't know the gaming space very well) and similar machines, which ultimately came into its own later when those same emulators got ported to the Raspberry Pi and making emulation-boxes became a hugely popular first project.

Prior to that, people would insist that you needed to install Windows XP for a good emulation experience, whereas today Linux is considered the go-to by just about everybody. But emulation is understandably niche, so it was never going to drive Linux gaming adoption alone. :tongue:

To be fair, the Humble Bundle in its early days also made great steps toward Linux gaming by requiring each game in the bundle to be ported to Mac and Linux. Granted it was indie games at the time, but there were also up-and-coming devs like Frozenbyte and Runic games. Another great contribution to Linux gaming was that they published figures on what each platform paid on average for the games, revealing Linux gamers were eager to pay more to support the effort.

Obviously that was nowhere near Valve's contribution, but I have fond memories of those days.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I am actually quite impressed looking at how far Nixxes have gone since Project Snowblind. Their first PC ports were not that popular and honestly were kind of buggy, but they improved a lot with Deus Ex and now they have a great reputation. Them fixing things up for Linux gamers is all the more impressive!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

So many great security issues mascots, maybe we could add them to Tux Kart?!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I played the hell out of the PS2 episode (don't remember which one it was) on a friend's console back in the day.
If Armored Core VI is anywhere near as good as the series used to be, prepare for spending hundreds of hours of refined gameplay and mech customization. This is Otaku dreamland.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I wish to win a copy because I'm pretty sure my 12-year-old girl is going to love both the atmosphere and gameplay.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I think this new effort is related to Microsoft buying them out and having a more open policy to other marketplaces than the Blizzard of yesteryears.
I'd be really happy to see more Blizzard games on Steam, despite their horrible policy with their failed remasters. If I could play StarCraft 2 from Steam I would buy the whole thing.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: StalePopcornWow. I played that on my first comp— a Mac Performa 630CD— umpteen years ago!

Played this one on my PowerMac 7200/90, so many great memories with all the additional maps and stuff!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: m2mg2

Quoting: omer666

Quoting: m2mg2

Quoting: omer666

Quoting: m2mg2

Quoting: omer666I think privacy advocacy may be going a little over the top on this subject. I'm all for it, I use a zero-access email provider, do my searches on Duckduckgo, have a LineageOS smartphone without Google services and so on, and yet I don't mind them collecting technical data. It's much less complete than Steam hardware survey and yet I'd bet every Linux gamer will gladly answer this one because they want to improve the system's visibility for game developers. Here the devs want to improve the system, but nope, no sir, this is bad and all.

Can you name anything that improved leaps and bounds after starting to collect telemetry? Gnome does telemetry but they continuously ignore the obvious will of users to do what they want instead. It's less about needing telemetry and more about following the industry trends of collecting data and IGNORING what users want in favor of what developers and platform owners want. The proponents of this over and over acknowledge they can't make it opt-in because users wont opt-in. They can't force an explicit choice because the choice will be no and they know it. This right here says it all. They should just not do it. They are already ignoring users in favor of what they want, you think they are going to completely flip and suddenly start doing things in the interest of the users? Nonsense.

They also make the arguments that users don't care, also total nonsense. Telemetry has been getting forced on users for years against their will. They are so bombarded it would take unrealistic effort to stop it so they submit, effectively by force. Then you guys turn around and say they don't care. They have never been given a choice, except in Linux and now people are trying to take that choice away as well. If you want to collect it, make people want to give it to you. If you can't do that, don't take it. Don't trick them, take via it attrition (bombarding them until they make a mistake by accident) and dark patterns. Be better, be ethical.

Well I am not using Linux just because of privacy, but also for technical reasons, so that's a different case altogether.

I never heard of GNOME using telemetry, but I have a pretty unpopular opinion about how they've been handling user requests since GNOME 3.0... I am glad they haven't listened :grin:

Pretty sure it's opt in, unlike the current proposal but I don't use Gnome and I find Gnome 3 to be an abomination. https://gitlab.gnome.org/vstanek/gnome-info-collect/#fedora [External Link]

I am fine with different people having different tastes :wink:
Following the link you provided, it seems it's never been used and it's not even in the official repos of the distros quoted (apart from Arch)

https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2023/01/18/gnome-info-collect-what-we-learned/ [External Link]

Reading the paragraph about Research Limitations, we can observe that's a far cry from the idea of hidden/forced telemetry. But that's been put to use indeed.
Also in the same paragraph they explain how having such a limited and specific public opting in may have rendered the results quite irrelevant...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: m2mg2

Quoting: omer666

Quoting: m2mg2

Quoting: omer666

Quoting: m2mg2 
"Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Edge, Windows, IOS, Android, etc. already are collecting this type of data by default."

This quote is from the opt-in opt-out thread. People want Linux to be just like Windows. We use it because it's not Windows. Please, don't make it Windows. Then those of us that care about what Linux is/was, will have to go to BSD.... and we will. Not that the ones who take it over will care.

I don't understand why you think people wanting more freedom will go to an OS which is more closed-source friendly, but why not...

OpenBSD is not closed source friendly.

They still prefer the BSD licence, so I don't see how it is any different from other BSDs in that respect (maybe you can educate me on that subject, I am not that well aware of the differences in the BSD ecosystem)

My understanding of the BSD license and I'm no expert either is that is even freer than GPL. GPL has restrictions on how you can use the code. BSD is basically do whatever you want with it. These are license issues and have nothing to do with operating system functionality, how free it is or how respectful of it's users it is.

I thought I read somewhere that due to its licensing, the FreeBSD kernel could integrate some non-free code, but I may be mistaken...

View this comment - View article - View full comments