Quoting: Ne021 pages in 9 hours ? WOW !
This is a SUPER HOT thread !

No, this is a Super Hot thread. :D

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestTo all those who have concerns about linux native games, keep in mind that the vast majority of games never come to Linux anyway. If they are playable in some automagical way with acceptable performance, that will still remove a huge roadblock that prevents a lot of people from installing Linux. It only gets better from there.

The thing you need to understand is that we need to reach "critical mass" on the Linux desktop. We need a valid percentage of users so more proprietary companies can take us seriously and provide native ports, like Adobe for example, and proper hardware drivers for niche hardware. Once that happens, even more people will install Linux and it will snowball from there.

Linux native will always have the benefit of better performance + less bugs. So developers will still prefer this choice if they can, especially if Linux gets more marketshare.

So stop crying and support this move.

Not only that, but greater market share means more users and developers on Linux, which means faster development of the Linux Free Software ecosystem as well. It's always amazed me that Linux manages to have pretty dashed good desktops and pretty solid office, graphics, music etc. open source software at 1-2% desktop market share. What would we produce at 10%?! MacOS, MS Office, and Adobe would be left in the friggin' dust.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Well, well, well. Very interesting.
This is a Good Thing. Yes, native ports may suffer in the short term, and that is not good. But network effects rule. If we get market share, games will in the end be routinely released natively on Linux. If we do not, they won't. It's that simple.

If quick availability of many games helps get us market share, all drawbacks are inconsequential in the end.

So. That's nice for us (if it works), but what does Valve get out of it? First, there seems to be a general vision of everything seamlessly cross-platform--Windows, MacOS, Linux, whoever else joins the party, all unified by Steam. Slightly more short term . . . does anyone else have the feeling this represents the clearing away of an obstacle to doing Steam Machines again? I see someone with a list, saying "Complaints about game availability, check."
There have been overhauls to the Steam interface lately as well. Person with a list, saying "Objections that the UI lacked polish, check."
Just maybe in a year or so, I can see Valve mounting the Steam Machine push again with all the boxes checked.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: jordicomaAnd remember, linux support probably will be in half a year (or more), and it wont have wayland,

I'm surprised nobody's made more of this. Sure, Wayland has taken forever in snail years to arrive. But it's pretty much there now, and Canonical has finally given up on their NIH syndrome and adopted it too. Going forward, I expect X to be deprecated more and more. We're gonna need hardware that deals with Wayland, aren't we?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Doc Angelo

Quoting: GuestAnd i doubt that many miners are tech savvy enough to undervolt correctly their cards. I know some are.

I bet if gamers can follow a guide to get more fps, a miner can follow a guide to get more money. I think money is a better incentive to maximize

You'd be surprised. Turns out money is only an effective maximizing incentive for really rote tasks.
RSA Animate: What really motivates us [External Link]
Based on that, the drive to game well is probably a better motivator.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I remember this game coming up here before. It does sound rather cool . . . but I'm still sort of on the dogs' side. Don't suppose there are any plans to play the dogs overthrowing the vile state capitalist human exploiters to set up a true Communist utopia in space?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestLaptops are expensive portable toys, no serious gamer uses them. All that I know who had a gaming laptop are using a desktop computer now.

Ah, are we at this kind of discussion? Well, my hard drive is eight inches long.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I read Moby Dick long ago and found it really, really boring. Slow, relentlessly discursive, with whole chapters about the minutiae of whaling gear or why the whale being white is supposed to be spooky (hint: If it's actually spooky I'll find it spookier if you don't spend ages telling me so). Damn thing spends less time on anything happening than a Wheel of Time novel. I remember quite liking one story-within-the-story set on the Great Lakes, though. And the maybe one fifth of the time where there's something going on. Don't get me wrong, some of the discursion isn't bad . . . but when I read through a chapter of nothing at all, only to find that the next chapter, and the chapter after that, are also about nothing, and no Seinfeld in sight to liven the nothing up a bit, I start to hit my limit.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: kazrikoIt seems like a short term benefit, with a potential long term downside.

In a universe dominated by network effects, short term benefits cannot have significant long term downsides. Short term success sets you up for further success, short term loss sets you up for losing some more. Other things can be wrangled one way or another. Side issues (like the Wine disincentive to native development) are real but ultimately unimportant next to brute percentages.

This is not a way I like thinking, but it seems to be how the world of networked things works.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Purple Library Guy...or, hate to say it, the GIMP for Photoshop.

I actually prefer the GIMP to Photoshop, although admittedly I am not a graphic design professional. When it comes to post-processing my photos, I find that it produces results just as good as anything I've done with Photoshop. Plus, you can't beat the price, especially when you consider Adobe's onerous subscription model that effectively locks your intellectual property behind a paywall.

I don't doubt that the GIMP is really good. But at the professional level it seems image fiddling is dominated by various proprietary schemes which the GIMP can't pay to use--or at least, that's how it was for a number of crucial years in the early evolution of Linux. And certain famous features of its UI (which, again, have changed rather these days) were very much of an acquired taste by all accounts. Between those things and a few others, the GIMP was just not as workable a substitute for Photoshop (to a lot of Photoshop users), as OpenOffice was for Office.

GIMP is a lot better than it used to be to the point that I think it's a viable alternative to Photoshop, assuming you don't rely on some of Photoshop's proprietary features.

All very true. But it seems as though many users of Photoshopp-ish programs take their cues from the pros, and the pros often do rely on the proprietary stuff. So many people for whom the GIMP would be fine often turn up their nose at it, and in turn on Linux, because the pros do. It's a barrier.

View this comment - View article - View full comments