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

Quoting: g000hI've been using The GIMP happily for years. Recently, Krita free open source art software came to Linux (and Windows and MacOS) and is a pretty good Photoshop replacement. Yes, it would be great for Linux if more decent art and design tools came to the platform, and not necessarily from Adobe.

I've heard Inkscape is good at what it does, which is a somewhat different niche.
Don't get me wrong--I would far prefer Linux dominate with a set of open source art/design/graphics applications that blow the doors off their closed competitors and in particular anything Adobe. I don't like Adobe, and I don't like their attitude towards Linux. Even some of their half-hearted gestures in the Linux direction seem to have been less with an eye to do us any good and more just to take the wind out of our open alternatives, to sucker us into relying on crippleware rather than building something solid.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: jarhead_hHonestly, people wondering about GIMP v Adobe should look to Blender. 10 years ago it was a punchline to a joke, not even the whole joke. Five years ago it was amateurish, something for hobbyists. Today it's used in small studios for TV work. Where will it be in ten years?

GIMP is there now, too. You CAN make a living using GIMP, just maybe not as well as Adobe. Not yet.

This is how open source works. First they mock you. Then they dismiss you. Then they hire out small jobs to you. Then world domination.

Very much in agreement about this general trajectory. Closed source development tends to happen in rapid bursts which revolve around big releases intended to result in sales. In between such selling events, closed software tends to stagnate. In the runup to such selling events, there is a tendency to concentrate on features which are perceived as likely to drive sales--sexy features, gee-whiz features, in some cases features which enhance lock-in. The window in the process during which creativity can happen is typically narrow. Developer pride inevitably intrudes, and more enlightened companies will emphasize polish to avoid bad buzz, so the results can be good.
Open source development tends to happen fairly steadily, although there still are often quieter periods punctuated with bursts of enthusiasm. They are more open to creativity more of the time. The "scratch an itch" ethos arguably tends to result in a more balanced, practical feature set. And because of this relatively constant development, open projects above a certain size do seem to gradually catch up to and eventually pass their closed cousins--it just isn't profitable for commercial products to do those bursts of activity often enough to keep up in the long run.

That said, people we are .5% of Steam. Forget GOG, Steam is the big dog, the one the industry looks at. At the moment it looks REALLY stupid for Valve to have sunk any money in Linux at all. We are not holding up our end of this computing revolution. AMD has put out their ray tracing demo in Vulkan a few months back, was that a mistake? Should they be basing it in DX12 like NVIDIA?

Probably not a mistake even if Linux didn't exist. Vulkan runs on Android and older Windows.
I'd certainly love to see Linux with a bigger share on Steam. Any ideas?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThis seems like fun. I am wondering about something, though . . . so, it's a platformer. But, it's got turn-based combat. How does that work?

Maybe a bit like Steamworld Heist?

That would enlighten me more had I played Steamworld Heist.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: AkienI played this game on Linux and loved it, but indeed there were quite a few issues. You had to use a beta branch to get things to work kinda, and the performance was quite bad, with strong memory leaks that would bring my laptop to a crawl after an hour or two.

It's a shame that they couldn't continue working on that port, and I'm sad that I can't play the follow-up games, but I understand their reasons. Adobe is definitely not Linux's friend.

I sometimes think Adobe has been a bigger bane to Linux's existence than Microsoft. Consider all the troubles with (ritual spit over shoulder) Flash. Linux office software has always been a better substitute for MS Office than our .pdf wrangling software has been for Acrobat, or, hate to say it, the GIMP for Photoshop. If Adobe had decided they liked Linux a few years back and had ported their stuff solidly over, I bet our market share would have been way, way higher now than it is.

View this comment - View article - View full comments