Quoting: rcritAm I the the only one hesitant to remove native games in case they disappear from Steam?

Dunno. I, um, play new games at a slow enough rate that usually by the time I'm running out of space it's time to get a new machine with a bigger hard drive anyway. So I actually hardly ever remove games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: PJ

Quoting: Purple Library GuyMint with Mate is IMO good, and very familiar to a classic Windows user, right out of the box.

Look for example at OSX - it is completely different from Windows, but quite a bit of pros (for example musicians, graphic designers etc) use it as it offers them a better experience.

OK, look at it. So, first of all, every time I try to use OS X it drives me nuts. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to find a damn file, for instance. Lots of people like it, I'm sure it is excellent in its way, but the idea that it's just inherently intuitive and stuff is a triumph of marketing and socialization over real lived experience.
Second, there are two main reasons musicians, graphic designers etc. use OS X. The first is that it has an excellent software ecosystem for that kind of people. The second is the excellent and very expensive marketing that have successfully drummed it into the heads of artistically inclined people that they are not cool if they don't use Macs.
The actual user interface is a marginal factor.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: PJ

Quoting: Purple Library GuyMint with Mate is IMO good, and very familiar to a classic Windows user, right out of the box.

but IMO that's the wrong approach. Why would you go for a Windows clone if you can actually use Windows?

Because Windows friggin' harasses you all the time.
I have no problems with the basic "stuff you do with a mouse" of Windows. Neither, I might add, do most people who already use Windows, who you're trying to get to move over. You are not going to generate enthusiasm for Linux among Windows users by saying "You'll get to do your whole workflow all different! Woo!" Nobody wants that. Even if it's an objectively (whatever that means in UI terms) better workflow, they still don't want it.

What's annoying about Windows is mostly all the Xtra Proprietary-ness. The way if you're not using Microsoft Edge as your browser (and who does?) it will keep on badgering you to start. The way it keeps popping up weird notifications that sound like something dire but if you think about it for a while is actually just them complaining that you set your settings not to hand over all your data. The other popups that are basically just incomprehensible and almost certainly irrelevant, but which sound like your computer is on fire or something. The "We just locked up your computer for a while so we can do updates" BS.
There's also the way that, since most of the software you're using is not open source and comes from various different vendors, they all separately and individually bug you about software updates (which half of them probably do badly), instead of your distro handling it all together. Software on Windows updates the way my games would if I bought each one individually from its vendor's own website instead of having Steam. Heck, even on my work machine, which is centrally updated by our fairly competent IT people, I still get a bunch of popups, from Firefox and Adobe and various ones that don't even say who they are just that it's desperately important for your software to update. Of course I have to tell them all no, because I know that if anyone's going to be updating any software on that desktop it'll be our IT people--but clearly they have no way of getting all that shit to shut up. Never have that on Linux. Just the little icon on the taskbar shows me there's updates I could install, and I can do them all at once when I'm not in the middle of something.
I also don't like the Windows non-tabbed file manager, and I don't like the way when I plug in a USB it just doesn't do anything, so I have to open some random folder and go find the USB in the Windows file manager's little list o' drives at the left side. And I'm pleased with Linux being somewhat less vulnerable to malware. And I like most of my software being open source and installable from one GUI. And I like that it doesn't phone home. And I'm pleased that, having the base vaguely Windows-like behaviour that I'm used to, I can then tweak things to suit, mostly in small ways, if I feel like it.

But the basic way stuff operates--what a left or right click does, the existence of the task bar that shows different things I have open, the menu at the lower left and so on, I have no interest in all the gee whiz clever stuff that people have come up with to make better, and I'd wager that if you took a poll among Windows users the majority would also be in that camp. So if you want to bring over Windows users to Linux, you might want to consider that they may not think their fundamental UI is broken and that therefore you might not want to try to fix it for them.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: kuhpunktIsn't the Steam Deck also just a Steam Machine? It's a PC with SteamOS preinstalled.

Technically, yes. A really little one.
In terms of market success prediction, I'd say no, for reasons people have mentioned.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Mal

Quoting: sub

Quoting: Eike

That led us down this path of Proton

Yeah, "down" seems fit for me...

Still excited for what will happen this time.

Let's also not forget that while Steam Machines were a failure, Proton wasn't available at that time and WINE was simply no match.

That one was the defeat condition for SM. It still is for the Deck unless they can bribe or work around EAC somehow.

They say they can and will; I have no particular reason to doubt them.
I'm more worried about the continuing existence of, you know, ten thousand little corner cases. There are still loads of games with little hiccups, games that don't run unless you hop up and down and then stand on your head while uttering a prayer to the Steamo Loas, and games without anti-cheat or anything that just don't run. The question is how much of all that they can clean up by launch time. If by the time they launch most of the remaining games with problems are older and not that popular it might be OK market-wise.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Dan_igrokI wonder how those results are computed. Are these based on total connected users every day? Are they based on a sample of users? On all users at one particular moment?

Many factors could explain the "up-and-down" pattern shown on the graph.

One possible explanation could be that many Linux users aren't hardcore gamers and don't connect to Steam all the time, which could explain the pattern. If we have a small sample of users, then the amount of Linux users fluctuate more.

I don't think over a million is a small enough sample for a whole lot of that.
I'm wondering more about what's happening with Chinese users. Very often when Linux % surges it's because Chinese user share dropped and so that very-low-Linux-use group was taken out of the pool. Someone needs to get Chinese gamers using Linux.

Of course it's also still true that the Steam Survey, which these numbers are based on, is opaque. We have no way of knowing how accurate it is or how it selects the sample; we do know that Valve has publicly mentioned correcting errors in it before now, which if you're an optimist means that after all these years of error correction it's probably pretty much OK, and if you're a pessimist means that all we know about it is they do make mistakes.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: PJ

Quoting: SchattenspiegelLet's hope the ones crossing over do not come into contact with GNOME desktop first. Otherwise they might start to find windows 11 not so bad after all. ;-)

and that's debatable. My personal experience is that when I introduce some non-techie to Linux Gnome works best (with addad dock and some minor tweaks).

Which is fine if you're introducing them to it and doing that for them, but if someone tries Linux by themselves the Gnome user experience will be quite different.
The other question is, as opposed to which other options? If it was me, I'd put new non-techie Linux users on Mate or Cinnamon.

IMO one of the issues with Linux desktop is by default every single DE sucks... even though every single one (among the major ones) is actually awesome.

Mint with Mate is IMO good, and very familiar to a classic Windows user, right out of the box. Taskbar that shows tasks, at the bottom by default, windows that act normally, menu on the left end, the good old fashioned WIMP stuff. You can change it, I personally tweak Mate to give me an extra taskbar up the right hand side where I keep launchers, but how it starts out is the basic Windows style deal (only without various Windows-style annoyances).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: s8as8aIf you don't need macro compatibility, perhaps you would also like ONLYOFFICE?

Maybe. Looking at those links, it seems potentially decent. But I like LibreOffice fairly well, and I have confidence that it will continue to exist and see updates, and it's open source--does ONLYOFFICE get me anything LibreOffice doesn't?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: KlausThe other part (mostly relevant for corporate environments) is that a natively or indistinguishable-from-native running version of Microsoft Office releases from the last ten years isn't optional. I tried with OnlyOffice and LibreOffice, but the moment your working with a customer who uses Microsoft Office, you will need it somehow, or the customer will be annoyed at you for breaking their documents; The only solution working properly here is a virtual machine with Windows and native MS Office.

Office is for sure a big issue. Luckily my work doesn't really fiddle documents in that kind of detailed way where an odd looking font here and there will cause any problems, and I don't use any really advanced spreadsheets, so I can get away with LibreOffice. Which is nice, because I hate the bloody ribbon; at this point, I actually like LibreOffice's UI better. But none of that changes the fact that Office remains the standard and for a whole lot of work-type requirements, from document exchanges to high-end Excel features, you really need it.
Does Office work in Wine these days? Man, if I were massively rich I would pay some outfit to get Office, Acrobat and Photoshop all working hiccup-free on Wine, no muss no fuss, maybe with special installers or something just to give people a button to click.

Office365?

Dunno. That's the web thing, right? Does it have all the features of the real thing?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: KlausThe other part (mostly relevant for corporate environments) is that a natively or indistinguishable-from-native running version of Microsoft Office releases from the last ten years isn't optional. I tried with OnlyOffice and LibreOffice, but the moment your working with a customer who uses Microsoft Office, you will need it somehow, or the customer will be annoyed at you for breaking their documents; The only solution working properly here is a virtual machine with Windows and native MS Office.

Office is for sure a big issue. Luckily my work doesn't really fiddle documents in that kind of detailed way where an odd looking font here and there will cause any problems, and I don't use any really advanced spreadsheets, so I can get away with LibreOffice. Which is nice, because I hate the bloody ribbon; at this point, I actually like LibreOffice's UI better. But none of that changes the fact that Office remains the standard and for a whole lot of work-type requirements, from document exchanges to high-end Excel features, you really need it.
Does Office work in Wine these days? Man, if I were massively rich I would pay some outfit to get Office, Acrobat and Photoshop all working hiccup-free on Wine, no muss no fuss, maybe with special installers or something just to give people a button to click.

View this comment - View article - View full comments