I'm really not sure what to make of this. Some of the suggestions about what Microsoft might be up to that's nefarious make some sense, but others seem a bit unrealistic. Maybe they do have plans to reduce "Windows" to basically a desktop environment a la KDE or Gnome running on top of Linux. And OK, maybe their cloud server business is really so big now, or big enough and so fashionable inside the company (the sexiest department often gets its way) that they're just doing this because they really want to be Linux citizens. Or maybe they'll just not attack Linux with patents themselves, but somehow lend their patents to trolls who will. Maybe maybe maybe.

But none of the takes on it really feels solid to me, I'm quite nonplussed.

One thing I will say: If they are planning something nefarious with this move, I'm not convinced it will work the way whoever is planning it thinks it will. MS have never really wrapped their heads around how Free Software, the GPL etc. work and their plans to mess with it have never to date been entirely effective. They always seem to underestimate or misunderstand Open's ability to work around Closed. I don't see why this time would be different.

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Well, my lid is officially flipped.

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80

Quoting: GuestI still think Valve should release a SteamOS/Linux exclusive title, say, for a month, before hitting losedoze. If you want to play it within the first month you'll have to do it on SteamOS/Linux. Would shake things up a bit for sure.

More than anything, it would be a shot across the bow that doesn't just threaten the Windows/Microsoft Store's potential monopoly, but would threaten Windows' existing monopoly itself if any AAA title was a SteamOS/Linux exclusive.

Granted, I know most people hate platform/OS exclusives. But literally everyone else has done it except SteamOS/Linux (ok, excluding the small FOSS games out there). What better way to show the market potential; or better, to show that for many gamers, there's no such thing as platform/OS loyalty if there's an awesome game out there to be played.

Fairly soon, there'll be a day where enough devs use cross-platform tools and APIs. Compilers and Debuggers will work the same for all targeted platforms, API calls work the same across all platforms (Vulkan<3<3<3). Middleware won't rely on some archaic, unstable and proprietary framework that is only supported on the big OS.

We're not there yet, and have a ways to go. But look at how far we've come?

Valve wont do that thought the bigger market by far is on the windows platform they would lose so much money making a big game like half life 3 linux exclusive. The issue is if they did that you would get a bunch of dual booters the majority of which would ditch linux as soon as they finish the game.

Well, yeah . . . but they'd be sort of acclimatized. They might keep the Linux partition around in case of another exclusive. And then, they might use Linux to browse for a bit next time Windows did something annoying. And then, who knows? After a while they might notice Linux was better.

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Mind you, I have to admit there's something fitting about Microsoft owning Tyranny.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: tmtvlkotaku lol.

So chances of MS actually buying Obsidian are like... what, ~3%?

I hope you are right.

That said M$ is active on many fronts and they do not need to be dominant on "PC" to make lots of money. They will happily sell you cloud computing with Linux on it if that makes them earn dough.

They sell cloud computing with Linux on it because otherwise they would be cut out of the market. But the bottom line is their biggest cash cows have traditionally been from monopolies, where they can jack up prices and you buy them or you have nothing. They got the desktop OS and office software, and these have been reliable cash cows for them and formed their springboard for doing many other things.
They tried real hard to get browser monopoly, and for a while it looked like they would succeed. For you youngsters, look up "Spyglass browser" sometime. They tried strenuously for quite a few years to kill all the Unixes and dominate the server space. Fortunately they sucked too bad to compete effectively there; efficiency matters on servers. They didn't notice search as being important until it was too late or they would have tried to monopolize that too.
They would much prefer to monopolize the cloud, sell it with only Windows, create corrupted "standards" jimmied to be impossible for competitors to use, and jack up their margins. They don't do that because they can't, not because they don't want to. So instead they sell what people are buying, and a lot of what people are buying is Linux. And then to make a bit of lemonade from those bitter lemons of defeat they're sucking on, they get some propaganda value from it: "Look! We're not big bad ugly monopolists any more! We luuuuv Linux and open source and open standards (even if the Open Document standard still doesn't work worth $#@! in Office)!" None of this makes MS unusual; all companies would like to have a monopoly on something people need, that's how you make windfall profits. It's just for most, it never comes up.

Mind you, there are probably lots of people working at Microsoft who actually do like Linux and open source and open standards, because Microsoft tries to hire skilled people and skilled tech people tend to like that kind of stuff because as far as I can figure, the more of a techie you are, the more you will find closed getting in your way. And there are doubtless a fair number of others who believe their own company's propaganda. But at the core, MS as a company will stop trying to acquire monopolies and shut down open things around the time of their final de-listing from the stock exchanges.

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No elder god, huh? Clearly not one of the "Sunless" games.

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Quoting: SalvatosThat was to be expected. If Valve don't have the workforce to vet every game that is added to the store in the first place, they certainly won't pay an army to retroactively test everything on even one "standard" Linux configuration. I'll be surprised if we get more than a handful of additions to the list per month. That's why I'm curious to know how they choose which games to vet first, and why I was surprised to see something like Commander Keen there.

But the thing is, for Proton to be a serious switching incentive and/or a strong asset to future Steam Machine-type things, the whitelist needs to be big. That suggests to me that with the best will in the world, their current process is not adequate to their own purposes (let alone ours). They need to come up with some way to leverage crowdsourcing. And I mean, the energy is clearly there, there's lots of people busily trying to establish lists of games that work or don't--the problem is that the results are not that useful to Valve. But if they could channel that in some way that gave them more usable results, it could at least take care of triage.

Like, say for every Steam user who does the thing they have to do to use non-whitelisted games in Proton, they sent a thing kind of like the hardware survey except it checked for all the Proton requirements like graphics driver version and stuff, and asked permission to use the info for improving Proton and expanding the whitelist. And then they gave those people some easy feedback methods for every game they play in Proton, like a "Does it work?" checkbox and a text entry for problems encountered and maybe a 1-10 slider rating for how well it ran, stuff like that.
Stuff all the info in a database and then they'd be able to set aside data from people with the wrong specs, sort out games that ran well for most people as whitelist candidates, spot patterns in games that ran for some but not others, like where a particular graphics driver was associated with problems and so on. Probably end up well worth the work of setting it up.

Edited to add: Const may be right that they're currently going slow on the whitelist because they're still getting the whole thing solidified. But I'd still say that because there are so many games, and so many players, it would be a good idea for them to come up with some way to outsource a lot of testing to those players.

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It does occur to me that while it's nice that the Whitelist is growing, it's probably adding games slower than new games are being published on Steam . . .

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Quoting: Hori

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: elmapulso...
they ignored our list
https://spcr.netlify.com/needs-testing [External Link]
and they are going with steamdb list instead?

If it is the case, it is a pity

Quoting: HoriQuestion: Does buying them now count as a Linux or Windows sale?
They don't have the Linux icon yet.

They explicitly said it counted as a Linux sale. :)

All I could find was "Steam Play whitelisted games will not be offered for purchase or marked as supported on Linux on the Store during the initial Beta period." in the initial announcement - which to me it only says about the icon's appearance but not whether it counts as a Linux sale or not.

Is there any other place where they discussed about this?

In terms of places you can go look, not sure. What we know is that Liam asked if games played on Proton counted as Linux sales and they told him unequivocally that yes they were and so he reported the news to we lucky GamingOnLinux fans.

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I've been playing FreeOrion, actually. There was an article here a little while ago and I added the repository and gave it a whirl. Not bad. It has the basics, you know--colonizing, growth, big tech tree, hostile and nice planets, enemies to kill. Kind of bare bones, the way open source games often are, and certainly still developing. But you can do all the four Xes, and you can say, "In one more turn I'll have that colony, take that enemy planet, develop that tech, terraform that world".

Still, you can certainly see places where it's not finished. Like, there's Happiness, but all it does is start from zirp when you first start a colony or conquer a world, and then go up 1 per turn until it reaches standard level, and until it gets to 5 the world won't do certain things. So there's no such thing as problems that make worlds unhappy or changes to productivity from happiness levels or, for the most part, techs to improve happiness, or anything. So thus far, Happiness is basically a stub, and there are other things like that.

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