Quoting: gradyvuckovicTo say Linux is on life support is pretty harsh and unjustified. Linux is in a better position now than ever. More work in recent years has gone into making Linux stable, user friendly, supporting more hardware, simplifying developing for Linux, and simplifying installing software, improving the whole user experience of getting/installing/using Linux, etc, than ever.

I think it's true enough, but only in a very specific sense and context. Linux in general is healthy as a horse; whether it's servers, cloud (which I still don't quite get the difference between "the cloud" and "a server somewhere I don't happen to know where it is" but anyway), supercomputers, embedded, mobile (sort of), "internet of things" or whatever the heck, Linux is huge and often dominant.
Linux on the desktop is not healthy as a horse, but it's self-sustaining and functionally just fine. It works well, it's easy to use, it has many advantages, I strongly prefer it to the alternatives and there are enough people who agree that both Linux, various desktop projects, and the open source software ecosystem keep chugging along and even continually improving. More users and more coders would be better, but the Linux desktop doesn't need any change, or depend on any particular factor, to keep going.

Linux gaming, however, is, how to put this . . . artificially healthy. The number of native games available for Linux, the degree of game engine support for Linux, even to some extent the health of gpu drivers and things like Vulkan, are all dependent on a single source: Valve. There are more games for Linux by massive multiples because of interventions and support from Valve. The big engines might well not support Linux if they hadn't been nudged into it by Valve. We have one fifth or less representation on Steam as Mac, are generally seen as having one fifth or less the market share, and yet nearly as many games come out for Linux as Mac these days (and with Proton etc, likely more games can actually be played on Linux than Mac). This is not a natural situation, it's because of Valve's backing.
Gaming on Linux wouldn't die if Valve suddenly turned against Linux. We wouldn't even be back to the era of Tuxracer and Frozen Bubble. But the pace of Linux releases would die down a lot; the criticism that you (more or less) can't game on Linux would get far closer to the truth, and the industry would gradually forget about gaming on Linux being a thing. In that sense, Linux gaming is on, if not life support, certainly health support, and that support is Valve.

My feelings about this are mixed. On one hand, all those games and engine support and working drivers and Vulkan being cool are all real and I'd much rather have them than not. Better artificial health than no health, and thanks Valve for arranging it. On the other, I'd certainly be a lot happier if we were getting all the support just because Linux market share warranted it. And I'm getting more and more impatient and curious for Valve to make its move. I mean, they must be backing Linux for some purpose, right? Surely they have something in mind besides just an insurance policy against Windows stores, and eventually they'll decide the pieces are all in place and they'll mount the big push to do something which will in some way mean lots more people using Linux to game? Right? Right?!

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Quoting: Alm888And Steam is only a temporary ally, IMO. Steam /= Linux gaming. We were doing just fine without it

We most certainly were not. As far as gaming specifically goes, we were doing bloody awful--I remember.

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Quoting: MaathIt is unfortunate the level of ignorance and animosity exhibited by the general public regarding Linux gaming.

Regarding Linux in general, it would seem. I went to the article, read the comments (with difficulty--that site handles comments a bit weird) and there was a lot of hostility based on really old ideas, from people strongly resistant to the notion of changing them.
But I'll disagree on one point: Those comments aren't from "the general public". The general public has either never heard of Linux or doesn't know, doesn't even think they know, enough about it to have much of an opinion. Most such people didn't bother to read the article, much less comment, because it wasn't about something they were interested in. The hostile people are the opinionated Windows power-users who are invested in Windows and their knowledge of it--computer-oriented people for whom Windows is their "team", who know enough to know there are other, enemy, "teams" out there. Those are the people who would see an article about Linux and consider it important to read it, or at least a bit of it, and go put in their few cents' worth to smack down the enemy.

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Quoting: PatolaThe idea is indeed nice, the execution seems ok, but I think being endless will put off lots of people, me included.

Yeah, it'd be nice to be able to win. Exterminate the Hoomans!

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Quoting: zimplex1This may be autistic, but I'll never pair anything by AMD with NVIDIA or Intel. Which is why both my CPU and GPU are AMD.

So stuff has to match? Not so much autistic as OCD-ish, I guess. Kind of gives AMD the advantage there, since they're the only outfit seriously doing both things at the moment. But with stuff like this article, you could end up in position to go Intel + Intel.

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Fight with other castles? How does your castle fight with other castles?! Does it, like, get up and stump over to the other castle and they play Regular Human Basketball or something?

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Quoting: 14I don't enjoy having a 50 GB game backup eating up disk space.

50 . . . gigs. For one game. I've had hard drives way smaller than that. I've had adventure games I plugged away at for hours and never finished that were 16K. OK, I didn't finish them mostly because they were badly designed, but still. What is the excuse for a game taking up 50 gigs?
Sorry, my old curmudgeon is showing, but really . . . 50. gigs.

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Quoting: MaathI wonder why Valve is putting so much effort into supporting Linux. My theory is that, currently, Valve and Microsoft are in direct competition, since Microsoft also develops games and I guess they even have a digital storefront. They could really use their ownership of the primary platform to make things difficult for Valve, and really other developers like Epic.

So, to have Linux support seems like having an alternative in your back pocket, preventing Microsoft from overreach.

Just a theory.

The bad news is, you're not the first to suggest this. The good news is, many people consider your theory pretty sound.

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Quoting: razing32

Quoting: Purple Library GuyIncidentally, a little known piece of context about the Terror: It didn't actually execute more people than were normally executed in France before the revolution. The pre-revolution French state killed a lot of people, usually in ways that were a whole lot more gruesome and painful than the guillotine. Basically torturing to death as judicial penalty. It's seen as such a huge deal because the people killed during the Terror were important people instead of being mostly peasants and the urban underclass, and because they were killed for political reasons instead of for, say, stealing a loaf of bread or not paying their taxes or annoying somebody higher status or whatever.

Which isn't to say the Terror wasn't real. There is a definite difference between something like the Terror and the state killing people as part of the normal operation of the machine, just sort of grinding off bits of humanity that grit the gears--people don't like that, but they know the score: If you're poor, and you're trying to make a living by whatever means necessary, you run certain risks. If you're a peasant, and your local noble is an asshole (as most of them were), you run certain risks. It was the game as they knew it. The thing about the Terror is it changed all the rules, and people who had previously assumed themselves to be safe, people who had previously assumed the state was more or less on their side, could suddenly be killed for things that had been perfectly OK, even the basis of respectability, a year ago. That's going to lead to some fear and paranoia. It's just that people tend to think of the Terror in terms of unprecedented numbers killed, and it totally wasn't that.

Ok , I am almost about to put money on the fact that you are a history major.

Nah. English Lit. I learned history mostly to get better background for game mastering my paper & pencil roleplaying games. Plus smatterings of 18th century and newer from being a lefty radical and reading economic history sort of stuff. Uh, and I'm a Horatio Hornblower fan so I learned a bit about Napoleonic. And tourism--I love castles, and when I go visit them I like to get some idea what they were for. Bits and bobs all over the place, really.
Although you get some history from English Lit if you study the old stuff--need a bit of background to dig where Shakespeare, Chaucer etc. were coming from.

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Those are some very shiny space marines.

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