Quoting: lucifertdarkThis is the game version of the tv series The Prisoner from the 60s, right down to the main character trying to escape from The Village while they try to break him with mind altering drugs & force him to stay, the only difference is he has a name instead of a number.

Needless to say I love that series & I can't wait to get my hands on this game.

Well, it is a British game, so I'm sure there's an echo there. But it's different too; The Prisoner was this separate space from the world, this elite prison thing run by the near-infallible organization. We Happy Few is in the world, a dystopia thing where the government is doing this stuff to everyone--plus the trailer gives me the impression that, being British, it's done pretty inefficiently, so rather than near-infallible things are going to crap. Rather "Brazil"-esque.

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It just struck me that "redemption" is one of those weird words, like "disgruntled". Like, people often get "redemption" but you never hear about them getting "demption" in the first place. Or de-demption.

I, myself, am feeling quite gruntled this morning by the way.

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80There are a lot of barriers to coming over to linux full time, there is a learning curve I remmeber using wine for the first time i was looking at people talking about wine bottles and depenendancies and i remember thinking fuck this am out. At least on windows all i have to do is double click and wait until it installs then am free to play. But i stuck with it because well windows 8 was an abomination and windows 10 is even worse and learnt a new platform from scratch.

To this day I basically avoid using Wine. Only thing I ever used in Wine much was Starcraft (I). I mostly just made do with whatever software was available on Linux; before there were games on Linux I pretty much didn't play games. Except Alpha Centauri and one other title from back when Loki was a thing, before it imploded.
That used to be something of a sacrifice, but these days (for my use case) it really isn't; the Free Software ecosystem for (everything except games) has matured and the games are now well past the "more than I can ever play" level. Meanwhile, Mint at least is a really easy transition from Windows (which I use at work, more's the pity). Both Cinnamon and Mate are old style interfaces like a nicer, prettier, more powerful and more configurable Windows 7. Everything works about the same except a bit better; there are occasional minor polish issues but they pale in comparison to the issues Microsoft deliberately builds into Windows. I started using Linux for political reasons and it's really been great in recent years finding that the OS I was using for theory had delivered on its promise and was now the OS I would use purely from preference.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYou have, like, SteamOS (or, better, Mint--heh) bundled with the new game. So then, when you go to install the game from Windows, the game installer defaults to installing SteamOS as a dual-boot and then installing the game on it. You can choose to install it differently, such as on Windows as a Windows game, but you have to make a positive choice to do that.

I know it's Linux we're talking about, but a game installer messing with my partitions and boot loader to install an operating system? Evil! Okay, maybe that's a strong word, but I really think the backlash would be worse than any positive effect.

Well, perhaps you're right.

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: KetilI don't think daily active users mean too much when it comes to active users in general. There are plenty of users on all platforms who play a few days a week, or even a few times a month who should be considered active, but doesn't contribute much to the average daily active users.

It is an interesting thought yes, but we don't really know what Valve is counting here. Are they only counting users on every day, at least once a week or what? As usual, a lot we don't know :)

However they count it, it doesn't matter that much as long as they count it the same for every platform (technically, we don't even know that that's the case although it would be pretty ridiculous otherwise). I suppose it's possible that usage patterns on Windows, MacOS and Linux are quite different, such that "daily active users" (however counted) had a different relationship to "total users" on each platform, but it seems kind of unlikely.
Also, I can't prove, but I would suspect, that on average there is a rough correlation between frequency of play and frequency of purchase. If that were true, then someone only on a few times a month would on average be less $$ worth of customers than someone on nearly every day, and even if usage patterns were different on different platforms a plausible version of "daily active users" would say something fairly consistent about purchasing power of consumers.

Here's a heaping spoonful of salt to take all that with . . . one counterpoint would be the possibility that, for instance, a big proportion of that still-very-significant 30%-ish Simplified Chinese Steam users, almost all on Windows, (thanks for the figure anth) spend a lot of time online while buying relatively little. That would skew what "daily active users" represented on different platforms from a "selling games" point of view.

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Quoting: bradgyBasically, has the increase in Linux users over time kept up with the increases in costs required to port games to that platform?

Has there been an increase in costs required to port games to Linux? The impression I've had is that, to the contrary, technological barriers to porting have been shrinking for the most part.

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Valve say they fixed it, so it should mean the April 2018 number is actually correct.

I would say rather, it should mean that particular counting error is no longer affecting the totals. Doesn't mean it's correct--we still have no idea how things are counted and so what other sorts of errors and/or biases may be lurking in the methodology.

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Quoting: skinnyrafFor something as big as HL3, timed exclusivity would be enough, especially if first reviews were good.

Remember, Linux is free (apart from the time to learn how to install it), so if HL3 was released on Linux 2 months before every other platform millions would install Linux. If Valve announced the next generation Steam Machines in October, preloaded with HL3, and it was released for major platforms only for Christmas, thousands of Steam Machines would sell. Even if some folks would wipe SteamOS and install Windows, some would stay.

Hell, you could bundle a Linux with a (timed) exclusive game release.
. . . come to think of it, there's a way to do something like an exclusive without being evil. Or at least, without being as evil as exclusives. You have, like, SteamOS (or, better, Mint--heh) bundled with the new game. So then, when you go to install the game from Windows, the game installer defaults to installing SteamOS as a dual-boot and then installing the game on it. You can choose to install it differently, such as on Windows as a Windows game, but you have to make a positive choice to do that. And, maybe if you let the installer do its thing and play the first time from Linux, you get a special 'hat', so you feel exclusive and badass rather than herded and put upon. A lot of people would end up with a Linux partition on which they played their game, and might start doing other things with it.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: qptain Nemo

Quoting: Sudo_halttrash calendar support (dont even get me started)

Well now I'm curious.

I assume he means that support for the persian calendar used in Iran and Afganistan is lacking under Linux. I see a couple of dedicated calendar applications like Gahshomar [External Link] but I wouldn't know how well they integrate into the OS. I also see a Thunderbird persian calendar plugin and apparently Google calendar has support as well. But again, no first-hand experience.

Thing is, whenever I hear something like this, I wonder, how to put it . . . like, not so many years ago it was like that in English. But it's open source. People, starting mainly in universities and such, built up a software ecosystem and now an awful lot of stuff is pretty dashed good. All this, starting from when Linux was completely a hobbyist OS, not even used in servers, not relevant to anyone's employment really, not capable of doing very much.
All a place like China has to do is take existing desktops and software and man pages and whatnot, and localize 'em; with Chinese writing that's a bigger challenge than its seems, sure, but still, the compilers and spreadsheets and kernel and desktop environments and blah and blah and blah are all already done. And China has masses of high tech university campuses full of students, and they're gonna be using some Linux because it's the OS for servers and the cloud and supercomputers and robotics and often science. So why the hell aren't they fixing it up? Same goes for a place like Iran--educated population, plenty good reasons not to be dependent on US software, source is open, what's the problem?
In short, I understand that Linux is in many places not that polished for the desktop, but why not?!

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Maybe it's just the dramatic music, but the end game felt surprisingly ultra-violent for a bunch of buildings sitting there. I'm interested.

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