Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: CatKillerPeople have already experienced what it's like to have the whole industry under Microsoft's control, and I don't think they're keen to have that continue indefinitely.

Honestly, IMO, most people do not care about underlying technology.

I think CatKiller was referring to developers, not "most people".

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Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: GuestPretty sure CDProjekt wouldn't speak in German to GOG.

Did not want to use the infamous polish curse word there.

Overall, if we look at the picture as a whole, it seems this is a market share war and Microsoft seems to be the lead in this "dance". Valve does not act; it reacts to Microsoft's input.

That's because the market share involved currently all belongs to Valve. The quarrel isn't about who owns the desktop, the quarrel is about who gets a slice of the revenue from PC games sold. Right now that's Valve, and so they have no need to change anything unless their 30% gets threatened.

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there's no light indicators for caps and num lock.

There's no numpad, so would there even be a num lock?

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This doesn't actually tempt me because I like itch and I want some of the revenue to go to them.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: slembckeOn the other hand, Proton is really running a fine line as Microsoft could really screw them over if they wanted to. They will also be playing catch up indefinitely.

It's not as simple as that. The problem for Microsoft is, they change Windows to make new Windows software (temporarily) incompatible with Proton, I believe they've just abandoned backwards compatibility with Windows software too. They could find themselves in a situation where all the old Windows software runs better on Proton than on latest Windows. And I'm not just talking about games. That would be bad for them.
And then Proton would catch up, and it probably wouldn't even take that long because Windows is a big old beast that isn't simple to make workable changes to so whatever they did couldn't be that big a deal. Then Proton would be working with the new stuff and working with the old stuff, making it definitively a better Windows than Windows.

Windows breaks compatibility between versions sometimes. To their credit, Microsoft put an effort in to minimise such things, but it does happen.
Microsoft can make it very difficult for future games to run through wine. That's enough to bury Valve's efforts, before even considering legal challenges they could make. Don't even have to be particularly valid legal challenges - Microsoft could just drag it on, and that alone would also be enough to bury Valve's efforts.

Windows do try to avoid breaking compatibility, though. They know it's a big problem for them when they do, because one of the biggest things holding people to Windows is all the back catalogue of software that runs on Windows but not elsewhere (well, as far as they know, or easily). As I understand it, the last time they did was because they were desperately trying to get Windows 7 out of the way because nobody wanted to upgrade.
Breaking compatibility exactly because something exists that can run all that old stuff might make people think about taking a look at that something. Could backfire. Imagine Wine ran existing versions of Microsoft Office, but the latest Windows didn't, and everyone knew that was because Microsoft was afraid of Wine.
No doubt they can make it very difficult for future games to run through Wine--but at what cost? What else stops working? How difficult does it make it to write those future games for Windows? I just don't think it's as simple as some people suggest. You can't actually move the target that much, because doing so doesn't just mess with the emulators, it messes with your whole ecosystem.

As to the legal thing . . . they can drag things out in the courts, but that only matters if they can make an injunction stick. Otherwise Valve can just go along doing their thing while fighting it. I don't know, but I would imagine that you have to have at least a sort of workable case to get an injunction to stick if the defendant has good lawyers and is not indigenous or something. Otherwise every company would just sue on some spurious basis every time a competitor started to eat their market share, and shut down for years whatever it was that the competitor was beating them with. Maybe MS could muster something good enough to actually get an injunction that would stop Steam Deck production, but I have doubts. If all they could manage was to be annoying in court for a few years and cost a few million in legal fees, that would be irrelevant.
Now if they could win, that would be pretty disastrous--presumably that would make Wine itself illegal, and arguably the whole concept of reverse engineering, every emulator of everything. But I really doubt we've gone all this time without that kind of thing ever being tested in court, and there are still emulators.

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Quoting: EikeI'll link an article here. Heise is the publisher of Europe's biggest (paper) IT magazine, "c't".

Steam Deck: Linux gaming made easy

With the announcement of its mobile game console, Valve is making its Steam library mobile and, on the fly, makes the buyers Linux gamers.

Original, in German [External Link]

Google translation [External Link]

That's actually a pretty solid article. It's like the person writing it had some idea what they were talking about. What a weird feeling. Is this normal in German IT news?

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Quoting: Appelsin150 000 units accross the US and EU isn't enought to entice anyone.

They had 110,000 pre-orders in the first 90 minutes. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict more than 150,000 total sales. Call me a starry-eyed optimist.

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Quoting: slembckeOn the other hand, Proton is really running a fine line as Microsoft could really screw them over if they wanted to. They will also be playing catch up indefinitely.

It's not as simple as that. The problem for Microsoft is, they change Windows to make new Windows software (temporarily) incompatible with Proton, I believe they've just abandoned backwards compatibility with Windows software too. They could find themselves in a situation where all the old Windows software runs better on Proton than on latest Windows. And I'm not just talking about games. That would be bad for them.
And then Proton would catch up, and it probably wouldn't even take that long because Windows is a big old beast that isn't simple to make workable changes to so whatever they did couldn't be that big a deal. Then Proton would be working with the new stuff and working with the old stuff, making it definitively a better Windows than Windows.

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Quoting: Mohandevir

Go 1v1 against another player (or a CPU) in a fighting mode. With cars. I dunno either, I came up with it while in the shower.

This one is pretty hilarious and sounds really spontaneous! :grin:

Outside the digital realm, there was a classic tabletop tactical game called "Car Wars" which eventually got a roleplaying game version. Just saying, there's always been an appeal to fighting cars. Taps into primal urges to machine-gun that fink tailgating you on the freeway.

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Quoting: Lofty

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Lofty

Quoting: Lofty(other thoughts, Steam is not the only way to game on Linux. Perhaps one day we might see some sort of opensource gaming store that is fully independent of anything we have now but the question is would you actually want to play any of those titles?)

Quoting: GuestI think it's generally called a package manager.

Do they feature exclusively non foss gaming software?

I dunno about your distro, but on Mint if I go to my "Software Manager" (which uses the package manager under the hood of course), and look at the "Games" category, all the games there will be FOSS games and I can readily download and install them. Of course they don't cost any money, so as stores go it's a store where everything's on a 100% off sale. But other than that I don't see much difference from a "Game store".

I just a couple of days ago finished (re)playing a game I installed that way--"Ur-Quan Masters", the FOSS port of Star Control II.

im okay with just using steam TBH.

Star Control is one of the best games ever made for the Amiga.. fond memories. I shall have to try Ur-Quan Masters.

Really, IMO it stands up surprisingly well. I still find it a lot of fun.

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