Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: Purple Library GuyOh, Terraformers had a Next Fest demo? What's it like?

I found it quite engaging, to the point where I went back to play it probably some 20-30 times by now (the demo is a 30-turn limited slice of the gameplay). It's definitely got a very board game-like feel to it; you play in turns which are one Martian year long, and each turn you get production of resources and your choice of two "projects" (basically buildings, though some can be built in cities and some can be built on the surface of the planet). Some turns also have random events that can get you extra free resource production or an additional project or stuff like that. The game is a fun balance of building things to increase your resource production, with one resource being the happiness of your people, who come to expect more of it over time as Mars becomes more terraformed. Terraforming buildings are in the demo, but they have fairly long-term effects such that there's not much point to building them with only 30 turns, and while that limit makes for fairly quick games (<1 hour), I'm really keen to get a longer game like 100–200 turns (not sure what the optimum length will be) where the terraforming has a chance to stretch its legs and I can actually spread cities over more than just ~1/10 of the planet.

Well, maybe I'll wishlist that.

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Quoting: g000h- I'm using de-Googled, LineageOS (AOSP) mobile instead of Google Services Android. (No location tracking, etc)

I have you beat there. I don't own a cell phone. Mostly 'cause I'm cheap, secondarily because I like being alone when I'm alone, not so much because of privacy concerns.

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Quoting: whizse

Quoting: tuubiDon't worry, it'll inevitably go out of fashion. Then it'll be "retro" before you know it.

I've already got my eye on a nice little house in Flatland!

Hmmm, I wonder if property's cheaper there. After all, even if prices were "through the roof", that wouldn't be very high . . .

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"In many ways 3D has become mainstream now."
Hmph. I was living in a 3D world before it was cool.

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Quoting: StalePopcornSide news; I turned our old Acer C720p Chromebook into a Linux laptop. :happy:

I've thought about trying that with my wife's old Chromebook, but it looks pretty tricky.

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Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: Purple Library GuySo who feels like they're only going ahead with this because Stadia is failing?

Maybe, but the Borealis project was started a while ago... Even before Stadia's official release, if my memory doesn't fail me... It might be a factor explaining why they are giving up that quickly on Stadia, though.

I just figure if Stadia had really taken off they would likely have let this wither on the vine. It's a fallback. One they knew they might need, so they made overtures and started plans, but if Stadia meant they didn't need this I suspect their first preference would have been to do a kind of Apple-but-in-the-cloud thing, controlling the whole experience end to end . . . and incidentally, not depending on the little Chromebooks' actual on-board capabilities as much.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPUsing open source just because it is open source is pointless - it actually has be good software in order to improve your experience.

Using open source just because it is open source may not have enough direct benefit to make up for software that is bad for your particular use case, but it's not pointless.
So for instance, if an open source offering is in relatively early development, but shows the clear potential to end up better than closed source offerings, there is some benefit to using it, even submitting bug reports etc., in hopes that this will be some small help towards it realizing its potential and ending up being the software you want in the future. This could also have the secondary benefit of improving the general Linux software ecosystem, which in turn reduces the barriers to switching and increases the potential for Linux growth, which in turn has benefits . . . virtuous cycle.

There is also some point to using open source "just because it is open source" in that open source software is in various ways more future-proofed. The closed source company may fold, jack up its prices, try to move to Software as a Service, start to insist on your saved data going to the cloud or some dang thing. Those things won't generally happen to open source software. This might not be enough reason to use software that's inferior, but I'd say it certainly means that if all else is equal, pick the open source.
And let's not forget, "good" is a matter of use case. If the open source software is inferior, but you don't use any of the features it lacks, then for you it's just as good and you might as well use it. For example, LibreOffice is still in many ways not as good as MS Office . . . but for me it's actually better, because I don't use the extra MS Office features and I hate the Ribbon.

Open source software also tends to be free of charge, whereas closed source software tends to cost either $$$ or at least have ads or spy on you.

All that and I haven't even mentioned ideology. So yeah, there are reasons to use open source just because it's open source.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: elmapulthat make things... interesting.
google is struggling to sell stadia, so steam is quite important for chromebook gamers, google will have to work harder on making sure steam work flawless on chromebooks (aka, make sure their sandbox for linux native apps dont have any major flaw) if they want to enter the operating system market.

Now imagine if Stadia would have gotten the publishers to publish the native Linux version of the games running on Stadia how much easier it would be for Google to have some games on their Chromebooks right now :-)

So who feels like they're only going ahead with this because Stadia is failing?

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Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: riidomDoes Valve know what a median is? Because this white line in that graph does not look like one to me. Which leads me to wanting to see their calculations on the 30% cut. Maybe there is a mistake too and it should have been 50% all the time!

I think the bars are the median increase for each event, and the white line is not the median of the bars but the median for all events combined.

Maybe but it really feels like it's actually the mean or something.

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Nocifer

Quoting: Guestto Capcom this isn't GNU/Linux, this is something closer to Just Another Console(tm).

And that's more than fine for the time being. Every journey begins with a first step, does it not? At this point all we really want and all we can really ask for is that games can run in an easy and competitive (performance-wise) manner on Linux, so that PC users aren't forced to use Windows if they want to also play games; and the Steam Deck's success will facilitate that. If and when this success becomes a reality, then we can start asking for more.

Sames arguments were made for Stadia too.

The Deck might differ if people are convinced to use the desktop mode, but phones have had exactly that and it's changed nothing. There's just no incentive that I can see.
Purely guesswork on all our parts of course, but I'm going with it won't change anything on the desktop.

How will this not change anything on the desktop? Will it bring more users to use Desktop Linux? Probably not. Will it bring more games that are playable on Desktop Linux? 100% it will, as it's using the exact same software on the Deck. That's where Stadia was garbage, it's all hidden on Google's servers, never to be seen by us 'normies'.

Google in general seem to be very good at making use of Linux in ways that you would think would be good for Linux more generally, but managing to avoid letting that happen. I don't know if they have some reason to want to do that or if it's just by accident, but so far they've been pretty consistent about it.

Proof is in the fact that they have a Google Linux (Android), that is incompatible with normal Lunix distributions. Then people complained, so they created yet another Google Linux (ChromeOS) that qlso is incompatible with normal Linux distributions. They added some stuff to run normal apps, but it is still a closed system. Google has basically become experts at taking Linux and closing it off for their own purposes.

Ayup.

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