Quoting: Hamish

Quoting: SalvatosAm I a poser for not going full Stallman? If so I don't give a damn, these are my opinions, choices and preferences and I'm not trying to conform to anyone's model of who deserves free software.

Even Stallman does not conform to the "full Stallman" strawman:

Quoting: Richard StallmanHowever, if you're going to use these games, you're better off using them on GNU/Linux rather than on Microsoft Windows. At least you avoid the harm to your freedom that Windows would do. Thus, in direct practical terms, this development can do both harm and good. It might encourage GNU/Linux users to install these games, and it might encourage users of the games to replace Windows with GNU/Linux. My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.en.html [External Link]

If I remember right, Stallman also considers the art, story, dialogue, voice acting and so forth in games to be somewhat different from the code itself in its copyright & freedom implications, and that because of the importance of that kind of thing to games they need to be considered a bit differently from most software. So while I'm sure he would support opening the code of games, and absolutely would consider that game engines ought all to be Free software, he would not necessarily oppose relatively normal copyright restrictions on the creative assets in games.
Stallman considers code to be rather like recipes in its ability to be shared and improved. So if you publish a recipe book, he would say your pie recipe should be shareable and maybe someone else would change it to have a bit less sugar or a dab of ginger or something. But he wouldn't say the picture in the recipe book of you making the pie, should be shareable. Game art assets and such are like that.

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I fear Crusader Kings II. I own it, and I have this feeling that if I ever really start playing it, I will never get another constructive thing done with my life.

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Quoting: Salvatos

Quoting: ArthurBut it's become clear to me that a lot of the Linux community is not very consistent. Free and Open Source only matters to some, while a good bunch are just posers.

Is it a bad thing that not everyone in the Linux community is a hardcore activist, that some are just looking for a more respectful system than Windows and Mac OS or simply can't afford proprietary software and rely on FLOSS to have access to computing?

Well, it would certainly be a good thing if everyone who used a computer was a firm believer in Free Software, and Open Source ruled the computing universe. :D
But, well, life is what it is, eh? Maybe after the revolution comes. :D

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This is one of those times when the reasons for mixed reviews are important. If it's because of bugs and instability, it could be a great game underneath that, which will show its worth once they get things fixed up. If it's because it's lame, that's harder to fix. I hope it's the former because this really feels like something I'd like.

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Quoting: Hamish

Quoting: EikeWhile there's different reasons people don't want to do that, there's at least (!) one very good one: People should refrain from doing stuff in the command line they don't understand. And no, most people don't know, don't care and shouldn't need to care about 'compiling'.

This actually feeds into a wider point I was thinking on while reading Jason's articles. The reason why people feel that using a GUI is easier than the command line is that in order to use the terminal effectively you do by and large have to have a more intimate knowledge of the system you a managing.

GUIs by their very nature obscure things to the point that they are easier to fudge, and for most users that is more than good enough. Experienced users don't just gravitate to the console because they are masochists, but because once you have that knowledge it is often the simplest way to do things. And simple is a synonym for easy.

I myself as a rule prefer to avoid the command line for that exact sort of reason, even though I know that many GUI tools to get things done are basically wrappers for fairly simple command line, um, commands.
Although I will say one thing: Troubleshooting is much better via command line. It's so much more stable and so much easier to convey. If you have problem X on Windows, a fix for Windows 7 will involve quite different fiddling around with submenus and weird little GUI tools compared to Windows 8 or Windows 10--and the instructions will be extremely complex and easy to get wrong. But with Linux, typically suggestions will be like, "Paste this into the command line" to either get some diagnosis or fix the problem. Many of these things to paste will work across most distros and versions, and intuitive though GUIs might be it's way easier to follow the instructions "Copy&paste this text" than "Go to this menu and do this and then pick that tab on the thing and do the other thing and then uncheck the dealie that should be here on that popup and . . ." Plus, it is much more likely that the GUI tools simply won't have anything that solves the particular problem; the command line is much more complete and powerful in what it can do. I just don't normally need to do the things it's good at, is all.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: HamishI have been seeing people get blown away by Linux package management for as long as I have been using it.

There is no doubt that Linux has come a long way in the last ten years, and I am glad to see that people like Jason are recognizing this and enjoying it, but I can't help but feel that it often does not get enough credit for what is has been doing well for decades.

Linux software has never been that hard to install. I mean:

./configure
make
make install

This isn't rocket science. The problem is that people seem to have an irrational fear of the command line.

Ehhh, my experience back in the day when I was driven to that sometimes was that it was one of those "works in theory" things . . . half the time it would turn out that no, there was something else I had to get first, or I was supposed to be doing it somewhere else in the filesystem, or some damn thing. Never seemed to just end at those coupla commands. And once I did it, it still didn't have an icon in the menus so I'd have to fiddle with that.
Even .rpm stuff got really annoying. I envied Debian the dependency handling, but not enough to switch from Mandrake which was the only halfway usable desktop distro at the time.
Nowadays . . . smooth as silk and convenient as being handed a drink with an umbrella in it while lolling on the beach.

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Quoting: Madeanaccounttocomment

Quoting: Mountain ManMy wife recently bought a new laptop with Windows preinstalled. I spent a couple of hours uninstalling all the junk software that it came with and configuring the OS so that she could use it.

I had another older computer that needed a fresh OS install, so I put KDE Neon on it. The whole process from start to finish took about 30-minutes, and it "just worked".

I hate Windows.

Couldn't you have just wiped the computer and installed Windows from scratch? The fresh installs don't have any of the manufacturers bloatware. I personally dislike the invasive data collection, having antivirus software, and miss the linux command line when I use Windows but it's stuff all non-linux users are completely accustomed with.

Anyway, the stuff Windows has historically beaten linux hands down on are actively being worked on so hopefully the linux desktop will eventually catch on. Honestly, the last things linux needs to really take off are more OEM's willing to preload it, support for apps that keep people constrained to windows like Office and the adobe suite, and maybe its own exclusive killer apps.

Well, improvements to Wine don't just apply to games . . . and for everything short of rendering video, productivity applications generally make a lot less demands in terms of speed than games. Nobody's going to be worried if Acrobat is a few frames per second slower in Linux . . .

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I don't know why, but there's something about this thread--I really like almost every single comment. Even the ones that are nominally disagreeing with each other, I like both perspectives.

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Quoting: ArehandoroI hear loud and wide how Forbes nowadays it's not what it used to be anymore*.

Was it ever?

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Where is the Holy Hand Grenade when we really need it?

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