Quoting: ajgp

Quoting: Purple Library Guy. (Shrug) Language is weird.

The English language is especially weird as alot of words can have several interpretations depending on context(some as in this case conflicting), often this is at odds with other languages that do not have so many words open to interpretation and this means what you think is a clear translation means something radically different in actuality.

However on topic its good to hear this is resolved I need a space fix since elite isnt available to me anymore.

English is particularly weird because it comes from two main languages and a couple of secondary ones, with different grammars, all mooshed together (Old English, French, a bit of Old Norse, some Latin, miscellaneous stuff). We ended up with tons of extra words and smashed grammar.

Um, right, on topic--yeah, I think I was looking forward to this one although I might be getting it mixed with Shallow Space.

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Quoting: EikeI'm not a native speaker either, but to my understaning, their wording was not wrong (just missinterpretable)?

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/could [External Link] :
"past of can"
‘We could hear the clear belling from inside the patch of forest in the valley.’

No, the wording was wrong, or at best a usage so rare that nobody would ever expect that meaning from that phrasing. Yes, could is sometimes the past tense of can, but there are problems.
One is simply the meaning of "can". It means there is an ability for something to happen, not necessarily that it does. Set in the past, that ability would be gone by the time we reach the present. So for instance, in your quotation, it is likely that we can't hear the clear belling any more. We could in the past, but not now. Similarly if I were to say that I could have fixed that kind of problem in the past (back when I still had the right tools, say) it doesn't imply that I actually fixed any problems and suggests that I can't any more.

The more relevant problem is that that's not what that construction normally means. You can say "could" in ways that mean past, but that isn't how you do it. If I say something "could be fixed" it isn't normally a past tense. It's more of a conditional. The difference between saying a problem "can be fixed" and that it "could be fixed" is that, while both say the capacity to fix exists, "can" suggests at least a strong likelihood of the fix taking place, quite likely here and now. "Could be fixed" does not. It implies that while the capability exists, it either won't actually happen or will only happen if some other condition is met. As in, "I could help you, but I won't" or "I could help you, but you'd have to do something for me in return".

Oddly, the negation can be a past tense. If I say "The engine damage couldn't be fixed" that generally means we tried and gave it up as impossible. (Shrug) Language is weird.

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Hmmm . . . No elves, huh?
Yeah, yeah, I know, it's fashionable these days to look down one's nose at elves. Don't care, still like 'em.

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Quoting: SgtRomeo9

Quoting: FredOI didn't think we'd see the day that a Total War game comes to Linux before the MAC. This blog post from Aspyr seems to sum up the situation well though: https://blog.aspyr.com/2016/11/01/state-mac-gaming/ [External Link]

Anyway I'm getting this for sure - I've been drooling over it long enough.

Haha what are the odds I was reading the exact same post just now and even thought of adding it to my comment :)

I have to say recently I've been more upset with Apple and Mac than what I am with Microsoft and Windows. Vulkan had a real shot of being the hands down graphics API of choice for all games fullstop. With DX12 being Win10 only and Vulkan being cross-platform across all systems including Windows up to XP, Vulkan could have been the one reason we saw a lot more PC game releases (Linux, Win, Mac).

However with Apple choosing to block Vulkan and have this Metal crap on their systems, they have effectively created this wonderful divide, again leaving us all back at square one. So devs are going to do the following: Vulkan or DX12 for Windows? Lets go with DX12 besides we don't really wanna support Android and Linux isn't really a deciding factor. Besides if we decide to go with a Mac version aswell we have to use Metal so there really isn't any need for Vulkan. And thanks to Apple that is where it ends. No Linux version once again.

Agreed.
There's a difference, I think, between the mindset of the Linux community on this stuff and the mindset of the honchos at Apple. We have our differences, serious differences, with Apple--walled garden and all that--but still we see it as "us smaller platforms vs. the leviathan monopolist" in the end. The Apple honchos don't, I think, see it that way. They see Microsoft as something they can co-exist with, and they hate open source. They see "open" and "free" enthusiasts as a dirty rabble at the gates threatening to mess up their beautiful curated garden. When you layer this on top of Apple's massive raging case of Not Invented Here syndrome and the impression I get that they don't care about the desktop much any more so all their moves are really to benefit mobile stuff, you get things like this.

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Well, as I said,

I have yet to see a smidgen of evidence that Steam Machines in specific helped foster game development on Linux.

So yeah, I think your talk about all the games and so on, implying that they are there because of the Steam Machine, is simply wrong. No doubt many of the other moves Valve did, such as SteamOS, were done as part of a push to make the Steam Machine work out. But, just because something didn't do what you intended it to do, doesn't mean it's useless. Those moves did not drive the Steam Machine to success, and the Steam Machine did not in turn drive further success for desktop Linux because it created negligible sales of either hardware or software and so the size of Linux overall as a game market was not appreciably increased. If that positive feedback loop had taken hold (Steam Machine market share significant --> Makes Linux platform a bigger game target --> More games for Linux & Steam Machine --> Desktop Linux & Steam Machine more viable --> Steam Machines, and maybe desktop Linux computers, sell more --> Steam Machine market share even more significant --> and so on) we would be looking at a very different situation for Linux gaming right now, one where Linux as a gaming platform was growing rapidly rather than coasting at the "new normal".

But the moves still in themselves helped Linux gaming massively. They did create that somewhat fragile "new normal" we are inhabiting. It's just the Steam Machine itself didn't end up contributing.

As to a hedge--one might argue that a platform which has failed to sell once makes a less effective hedge/threat than a platform which is as yet unreleased and so an unknown quantity. The Steam Machine might actually be more effective at the role you point to there if it had never been released yet and Valve were still just talking about the possibility. It's hard to call that success.

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Quoting: EdmeneWell the few gaming related things in Win 10 are dx12 (didn't show any major improvement in comparison with dx11 in general) and the xbox app (make the performance worst due to game recording if you don't disable it).

I'm no expert, but it seems to me the general consensus is that DX12 is quite good, very similar to Vulkan, and is in fact a significant improvement over DX11.
While as near as I can make out Windows 10 is worse than Windows 8 in many ways, I can see the argument that it is better from a gaming/game developer perspective.

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Quoting: Redface

Quoting: barotto

Quoting: wleoncioit's up to Valve to create a suitable competitor

Valve cannot create a suitable competitor to Windows.
Why the hell should I use SteamOS, which is nothing more than a crippled console OS, when I can use Windows, a full blown operating system??? Which, by the way, allows me to play the entirety of the Steam library at full speed.

We need a polished and complete desktop OS.
Ubuntu was promising 10 years ago, now it's a clusterfuck.

SteamOS has its flaws, but being a crippled console OS is not one of them.

Well, you can force it to act like a real desktop Linux if you know what you're doing. But its reason for existence is to be a console OS. It is almost certainly easier to wipe it and install Mint or something than to get SteamOS itself configured to be a good desktop.
But it's ludicrous to complain about it. Valve took Linux and used it to create a console OS so they could ship a console. Now barotto is complaining that (shock! horror!) SteamOS is a console OS. Well, duh. There are plenty of good Linux desktop distributions; SteamOS isn't one of them just like whatever they stick in routers isn't one of them--it's not supposed to be.
Valve has not so far attempted to create a competitor to Windows; they seem to have assumed that Ubuntu, Mint, and so on were handling that side of things. Valve adding one more desktop Linux distro would have just caused resentment and it probably would have sucked anyway because that's not their expertise. Instead they tried to create a competitor to Microsoft's Xbox, which would synergize with desktop Linux. They didn't succeed, at least not so far, but SteamOS has acted as sort of a reference implementation for gaming and a target for game developers. I suspect that nowadays distro rollers who care about desktop users try to get in sync with SteamOS for the gaming-relevant stuff so games will run.

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Shouldn't your character float and have a lot more eyes? ;)

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As to the privacy, I've noticed a trend. Basically, each version of Windows invades your privacy more thoroughly and tries to control your updating and whatnot more aggressively than the version before.

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Quoting: chrisq

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe future is unknowable, therefore you can never say anything has failed, ever. We may be back to horses and carriages in a few years after civilization collapses.
But this is not a useful way of thinking about the issue, certainly not from the perspective of a Linux enthusiast who is assessing whether Steam Machines have made any real difference to Linux gaming.

I could just as easily turn you bs around and say that something isn't a major success in the first hour it's released, then it is a failure.

The problem is the people saying the Steam Machine has failed are saying "Well it failed to do this, and it failed to do that, so it failed", and the people saying it didn't are saying, "Well, you can't say it failed just because it failed at this and that, that's too narrow" but you're not suggesting any alternative measure. You're not saying "Well, if it had failed in these other ways, that would be failure". You end up effectively just saying there's no such thing as failure. It's a cheap way for it to be impossible to lose an argument--no matter how many more areas people point to where the Steam Machine failed, you can always just say "Nope, still too narrow, you can't say it failed just because of that". But it's bogus, your position becomes meaningless. If you won't allow some set of criteria we could judge success or failure by, your denials of other people's criteria are empty.

Your problem is that he didn't make that distinction, it was about if stream machines were a success or not, not whether they made a difference to Linux gaming. If that was the case it would have been even better though. Steam machines are the natural conclusion to valve's Linux gamble. It has taken us from a handful to 3000 games in a couple of years.
Obviously there greatest thing to ever happen to gaming on Linux.

Except the current pace of games arriving for Linux was basically reached well before the Steam Machines were released and then continued even after it became clear to game developers that the Steam Machines were not going to impact game sales. Valve's push for Linux more generally had a big impact; I suspect that had a lot to do, for instance, with creating enough pressure to put Linux enthusiasts in major game engine producers in a position to make them work for Linux. And those engines themselves supporting Linux was a huge win; it brought the cost of cross-platform down to where even the small Linux market share was likely worth it. Even Valve's creation of SteamOS was significant. Even though it's not really a major distribution in terms of actual users, it does I think create a target for game developers so they can ignore the mass of distros if they want, and a centre of gravity so that people doing Linux distributions can say "OK, if I want games to run, make it compatible with SteamOS".

Steam Machines themselves, not so much. I have yet to see a smidgen of evidence that Steam Machines in specific helped foster game development on Linux. Maybe a little bit before the release, but not after their (lack of) impact had been seen. Current pace of games being released for Linux is if anything in spite of Steam Machines, not because of them.

I cannot think of a relevant measure by which one could say Steam Machines were a success. Things could still change in the future, and if they did that would be a Good Thing. But it would take a concerted effort by Valve that tackled the weaknesses of the product--effectively a re-launch. After which we'd be able to say the new Steam Machines were a success. But the first iteration have not been.

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