Quoting: CyrilActually there is one thing I don't really understand...
You "Steam guys" are happy that us "GOG guys" are unhappy or what?
It seems that so many times you are happy to have a Linux version only on Steam and the others can fuck themselves.
I don't know any GOG user (Linux or not) who is unhappy that a game is also available on Steam, it makes no sense.

GOG types have a tendency to badmouth Steam. And while most Steam types would also prefer less or no DRM, they feel GOG types tend to unfairly discount the basic fact that Valve has done about 10 times as much for Linux gaming as anyone else, probably even after accounting for relative size, while GOG has done . . . um . . . have they done anything at all? Well, they don't outlaw Linux builds on their store. Um, hurray?

And so on the other hand, GOG won't be all nagware-ish if you try to play offline. That's a good thing, don't get me wrong, but not such an incredibly big-picture thing as to make me have massive love for GOG. Not enough of a good thing to make me majorly upset if some game studio decide not to put things on their store for reasons they have not seen fit to share with me. And weighing in the scales versus what Valve have done for Linux, not enough of a good thing to leave me patient with people badmouthing Valve and minimizing their contribution.

I'm certainly not actually in favour of things not being released on GOG. But even if I could wave a magic wand and make it so that all games would be (also) put on some store that wasn't Steam . . . that store would be Itch.io, not GOG.

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Quoting: IggiI guess my bitterness is coming from the fact that almost all of their physical games are bound to Steam (which imho totally defeats the purpose of a physical medium - why would I buy an offline media if I have to be online to be able to use it anyway?)

I understand it depends on the game, but I have never been unable to play a Steam game offline. Sure, it grumbles a bit--the popup message is like "I can't find Steam! The horror!! (sigh) OK, all right, do you want to play offline?"
And then I do. I don't do this all that often, but I sometimes do, and as I said, I've never had any problem doing it.

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But . . . but that's impossible! Didn't Proton kill native releases?!?!
:whistle:

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Hrm. We're doing a bit of retro gaming lately, AD&D first edition style. So the map on Roll20 is something the GM drew with a pencil on graph paper and scanned, to give that old school touch. Kind of a different direction from this . . .
(All the corridors are exactly 10' wide :grin:)

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Quoting: KithopThe #1 reason why Stadia != Desktop Linux, in terms of support? It's, well, support.

Stadia build has a bug because of the peculiarities of their specific hardware/distro/etc. combo? Google could help the dev fix it, or the dev can at least reproduce it easily, because of the console-like nature.

Desktop Linux? Oh, that bug only applies to people running... say Manjaro, who have this specific nVidia driver and kernel version. When the moon is full. On Sundays only. But damn if the people affected aren't going to complain, refund, etc. and tarnish your game's reputation for being buggy.

People are more accepting of a weird Windows glitch messing things up, and with more people running it, there's more incentive for a dev to squash bugs that could be affecting 20% of their players. But for a vocal 0.1% running that Frankenstein's monster of a tricked out Gentoo build? Not only do they likely have no hope of reproducing the environment, they likely can't afford the time to care.

How many times have we heard the 'dev drops/abandons Linux build because they can't support it' song and dance, now?

Stadia may have the tools and trappings of a Desktop Linux distro under the hood, but it's a single, console-like platform with a huge corporate behemoth and technical expertise behind it. Only Valve and the Steam Linux Runtime are sort of close in scope, but even using that specific set of libraries doesn't help if things like kernel drivers suck. Only devs who are committed to the ideal really stick it out.

It's better than it was, even 5-10 years ago, sure, but 'Linux' as a platform is way more complicated and fragmented than even Windows is, let alone a standardized, console-like environment, regardless if it's Stadia, or say, PS4/5 (BSD + OpenGL and Vulkan)

I don't really buy the "Linux support way higher than other OSes" thing. People on minor distros know perfectly well nobody's gonna support them. Nearly all Linux people don't particularly expect devs to support more than Ubuntu and SteamOS, and I think most devs are realizing that that's the expectation. (What people using other distros expect is that their distros will try to make sure games that work on Ubuntu will also work on their distro) And anyhow if devs are worried about support across distros, or time, they can release as a Flatpak--bundle all the libs you can imagine the game caring about and it still would barely budge the download size for a typical game.

But any support is a lot for a market as small as Linux. The thing about Stadia is it actually has practically zero support, even compared with say Windows. Sure, if you release a game with bugs it has bugs, but in theory there should be no problem that one user has that all other users don't also have, even more so than with consoles.

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Quoting: TheRiddickI still don't understand why this game is so popular, is it the large coop functionality?

Yeah, well, when you start keeping chickens pretty soon you understand how important the large coop is.

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Lasers make everything better!

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Quoting: Dunc

Quoting: ArehandoroVideo-conferencing: https://meet.jit.si [External Link]

I first used Jitsi before Zoom and honestly prefer it, regardless of the open source angle.

Of my three tabletop RPG campaigns which met in person in the before times (mostly the same people in all of them), all use Roll20; one uses it by itself, one alongside Zoom, and one alongside Jitsi. Jitsi seems pretty good to me.

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Quoting: Dunc

Quoting: gradyvuckovicIt will still take years to happen but I believe it's already started.

I agree 100%. Blender was “never” going to challenge the likes of Maya for ages until, really quite suddenly on the great scale of things, it became almost the default choice. It's certainly respected as an equal peer to the commercial offerings, at least. I can absolutely envisage the same thing happening with Godot.

(Incidentally, with just a few additional features - some of which are already here - I can also imagine the same for GIMP. It's taking longer because development on that project is slower, but Blender shows that it's possible.)

Yeah, I feel like if just a couple of outfits with deep pockets took an interest and dropped a solid developer in to push forward key issues, GIMP would suddenly be a contendah.
Godot already feels like it's on the trajectory--it's been moving fast and everyone seems to have really good things to say about it.

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Y'know, it occurs to me that it would be a lot easier to break up email than a lot of the other stuff. Email doesn't really have any "network effects" in the social network sense because it's standardized--you're not going to find that if you use a small player's email client you somehow fail to receive email from Google.

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