Quoting: EikeThe trouble with both tactics, "No Tux, no bucks!" for more native games as well as Proton for more Linux gamers is that they didn't work. We tried the former one for years, and Linux ports were on a decline lately, then Proton arrived over a year ago, and the number of Linux gamers didn't rise.

You may be right but I think it's still a little early to tell with Proton. I mean, for most of that "over a year" it's been in beta. Is it out of beta yet, even? And for the most part, the only people who have heard of it are people already running Linux. That obviously isn't going to help people to think of trying Linux.
Proton isn't going to significantly accelerate Linux adoption unless/until some kind of product is released that runs Linux and uses Proton's ready access to Windows games as a selling point. And there's not much point in a company funding Proton (as Valve have) unless they plan some such product (or, OK, maybe just to use the threat of such a product to keep MS from pushing them). But I don't expect Valve, or anyone else, to try to release a product that significantly requires Proton as a selling point until anti-cheat issues are resolved. Anti-cheat just blocks too many of the most popular games.

So I'd want to claim the jury's still out on what effect Proton is going to have. We won't know until someone tries to use it for something, and either succeeds or fails.

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Quoting: WorMzy

Quoting: Cyril

Quoting: WorMzyMeh, uses gtk3. I'll keep running teams at work on a Windows client.

Why you don't like GTK3? What would you prefer instead?

Mostly historical reasons -- I'm still bitter that the gnome devs just unceremoniously threw gnome2 out the window and said that everyone should use the monstrosity that is gnome3 instead. :sick:
I also particularly don't like Gnome devs hostile attitude towards end users who don't want to use their defaults, their tendency to break themes every six months (allegedly they've stopped doing this now?), and them telling application devs that they should only have code for gtk/gnome-specific "features" (instead of coding for multiple DEs), etc..

What I prefer instead is anything that isn't gtk3. Like I said, I'd rather run a Windows application than a native Linux gtk3 app.

I too can't stand Gnome3. So instead I use Mate and occasionally Cinnamon . . . both of which, I believe, use gtk3. So I feel you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater there.

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Quoting: GuestPushing Linux games with Linux support = growth. Pushing Windows gaming = recession. We grew because of Valve and other devs, but now we're in a recession because of Valve no longer encouraging developers to support Linux gaming and instead providing them with ways in which they can avoid doing so.

This is wishful thinking. The brute fact is that our current market share is not enough to encourage native ports even if we all buy only native Linux games. And Valve asking people to is also not enough. There was a big burst of interest in native ports related to the Steam Machine, which has been gradually losing . . . ah . . . steam ever since. We are in a chicken-egg situation, and the only way out is an increase in Linux desktop(ish) use, either independent of games or due to some market share shock like a successful Steam Machine.

In theory, things like Proton could make things even worse, but I have seen no particular inflection point where after Proton became viable there was a sudden increase in the downward trend. I myself have never actually used Proton and used Wine for exactly one game, but the strategy associated with Proton is clear and reasonable: Drop the barrier to using Linux low enough that uptake will increase, resulting in more reason to do native ports in the long term. Whether it will actually work is another question, but emphasizing native games has been proved not to work. Insisting on native games would also be a reasonable strategy, if our market share were significantly larger. Unfortunately, it isn't.

The only thing that could make insisting on native games a workable strategy for Linux gamers at 1% market share would be if it was combined with a successful developer push to make Linux an incredibly easy development platform so that it actually definitively cost less than 1% to release for Linux. So like if you used a game engine like Unity or Godot it really would be almost clicking the Linux button, and there was a sort of standard Linux gaming environment you could aim for, whether by saying "Just targeting Steam Linux" or via a standardized Flatpak to stick games in or something, so that complaints about Linux support and such basically evaporated. I'm not at all sure this is plausible, although as far as I can tell the costs of releasing on Linux are way lower than they used to be and it's just continuing to drop; there are developers working on lowering that barrier. But 1% is, like, really low--how do you push costs that low for releasing on a whole platform? If we were at 5% we'd have a way, way better case.

So yeah. Bigger market share is our only hope. If Proton can help get us that, it will be worth any dilution in our purchasing power for native games. If it can't and nothing else happens, we're probably doomed anyway.

Right now, the only thing I see actually doing anything that resembles increasing Linux desktop share is . . . not my favourite thing to see doing that. Specifically, I see Google's Chromebooks, which are now going to be able to run Google's Stadia games. If ChromeOS was going to move past its little niche it was going to need to be able to run games. Typical of Google that they found a way which wouldn't require them to un-cripple the little buggers.

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Quoting: CFWhitmanI wanted to point out that trademark law is probably the most supportable form of so-called "intellectual property." Trademark law is a consumer protection law. The purpose of trademark is to prevent dishonesty in the marketplace. Trademark is a way of making sure that you are dealing with the company that you think you are. Without it, anyone could pretend to be representing a company that they have nothing to do with. With trademark you know that the mayonnaise that you bought is Hellman's or Cain's, the car you bought is a Toyota or a Chevrolet, etc. Without it you can't be sure of any of these things.

You need something to stop that kind of thing, but I'm not clear that that something would have to look very much like current trademark law. Rather than the lawsuit system, the actual legal system might be better; simply have laws against such misrepresentation. For one thing, then it wouldn't only work for people with the money to sue. For that matter, what you're describing is probably covered by the actual legal system in many if not most jurisdictions.

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Technically, it's some character having the adventure, not you. So how about, "Choose Someone Else's Adventure"! :wink:

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I'm thinking I might want to get this for the sound track. Got some catchy salsa going.

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Quoting: AlexGamechuckAs for the 2 year thing that bums people out, yeah, it's a long long time, but we just started, and we really have big ideas so we're just trying to be realistic with time. Maybe it even turns out to be 3, who knows :)

I think it's good to be realistic about that. Promising things that can't be done just leads to burnout trying and loss of trust.

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Quoting: chr

Quoting: Purple Library GuyMmm, I think this conversation is over.

Quoting: DesumOh? Alright then~

I don't mean to intrude on your conversation which is over, but if either of you have some links to some videos or articles or podcast episodes or something which to some high degree overlap with your complicated but interesting-sounding views on the copyright system, then I might appreciate links (private or public). Not insisting though. Also don't easily forget to value your time and give it away to internet strangers who might not even watch your link. :)

I have no such. My concrete ideas don't really mesh that closely with any I've seen suggested or discussed. Here's a quick precis of a notion I've been mulling for copyright:

Spoiler, click me

You do a sort of giant, government-funded Patreon. The government assesses about how much gets spent on the media overall in a year and sets aside about that much in taxes. Then, they set up a giant Patreon/crowdfunding style website, ideally using open source technologies. Every would-be creator can make pages for their projects. Every citizen gets an equal share of the tax dough which they can allocate to any creators they want. The cut of everyone who doesn't bother tops everyone up proportionally. There might be ceilings, soft or hard, or at least notifications along the lines of "This project is considered fully funded" to soft-encourage people to diversify their contributions.

Then creators go do their thing and create stuff, having been paid to do it, and it's all released creative-commons-ish; everyone gets access to everything. No piracy, no DRM, no DMCA; it's your privilege as a citizen to access all the creative stuff done in the country. No superprofits for shareholders and layers of executives; the money goes to the creators. At the same time, the government isn't running the industry--the people get to decide what they want to fund.

In the case of online games, the business of running servers would be basically decoupled from the business of creating games in the first place.

Full disclosure: I am a radical leftist with a preference for relatively bottom-up, participatory stuff over centralized statist forms of leftiness. If I got to wave a wand and re-write society the setup I describe would be run in a less centralized way that was related to how the whole shebang was operated, but the popular participation and the access to everything would still be there.

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This looks very interesting. An ambitious vision; I hope they succeed.

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Quoting: Perkeleen_VittupääThis is great. Looking very much forward to this, as also Cyberpunk 2077.... (Linux)....

But hey what's with that "PC" on the announcement? Commodore 64 is labeled as Personal Computer too :wink:

The devil's in the system requirement details.

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