tl;dr: Snaps suck.

I've tried several snaps for as far back as they've been offered, and I've removed them every time. I keep everything on a data partition, separate from my OS partition, and NONE of the snaps I've installed can even see my data partition exists, let alone access it.

Fuck. Ing. Use. Less.

Canonical likes to say that snaps'll be uber-up-to-date, but --- from what I've observed --- do nothing to make that happen. Frankly, I've rarely wanted or needed anything to be so up to date that I can't wait for the next version of Ubuntu to come out in six months. For those cases where I do want or need new-ish versions, I'll use a PPA, an AppImage, Flatpak, or even clone a Github or Gitlab repo --- anything else before I install a Snap.

I install Flatpak on my Xubuntu as part of my basic set up and read the source of an app before I install anything in "Software." Most of the time I just go to good ol' Synaptic when I want to find a thing to install. If the only way I can find to install something is via a snap, then I'll just live without it.

Snaps feel like part of whatever back-room shenanigans Canonical and Microsoft seem to be involved in. I can't address the technical side of Snaps the way others here have, but I can say that so far they've reduced choice, reduced transparency, and reduced openness. In short, Snaps stand opposed to the very essence of Linux and the open-source movement itself.

Boo, hiss Canonical. Boo, hiss I say.

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I've been playing with it on my tester laptop, and it works really nicely; though, admittedly, I don't play anything on emulators, so I can't speak to that function of it.

I know I've not had any luck with its "automatic" Wine function working so far, but that's fine; it does a fantastic job of bringing games from disparate sources together under one slick-looking banner.

I'll have to fire up my ol' lappy and update GamerOS and check out the rings and toots of these newest bells and whistles.

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I turned off shader pre-caching so long ago because whatever benefits it was supposed to impart were offset by having it interfere, waiting for downloads just before playing a game (or something like that ... it's been so long I can't even remember what the problem was exactly) :P In fact I don't even remember what shader pre-caching was even for --- lol. Nevertheless, it sounds like this is a nice thing.

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I'd like to set aside the VR non sequitur for a nonce to ask, "Just what is the Steam Game Festival, precisely?"

Also, Eteria added to wishlist, defo. Vagrus, not so much.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: STiAT150k for over 100 patents does not sound a lot. It isn't. The walk away settlement speaks of that.

Seems this company wanted to make sure their patents are not used by commercial big players, and realized there is little gain not providing it for open source since it helps adoption. Restricting would mean they just do not support it.

I still struggle with patents overall, I still think they prevent innovation. But a kind of deal where they are free to use for free software but not commercial products, well... I understand that very well. If someone wants to make money using your innovations.. though, that's not the OSS paradigm... it's fine for me.

We see all the open source development bringing big business to global players. Not a bad thing if they fund it too, which for some projects is true. For many it isn't.

But I think we live in times where the paradihm shifts. And we'll see more of it. For the better or worse, we can't say yet.

Software patents should never have been allowed by the USPTO in the first place. The only thing that saved the US software industry from total collapse was that no one in the industry really understood that there where such a thing as software patents until very late, if this had been found earlier then we would most likely still be left in the pre MS-DOS days still.

And take not just my word for it, here is a direct quote from Bill Gates himself in a 1991 internal Microsoft memo:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.

I feel certain that some large company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique.

If we assume this company has no need of any of our patents then they have a 17-year right to take as much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can. Amazingly we haven't done any patent exchanges that I am aware of.

Amazingly we haven't found a way to use our licensing position to avoid having our own customers cause patent problems for us. I know these aren't simple problems but they deserve more effort by both Legal and other groups. For example we need to do a patent exchange with HP as part of our new relationship.

In many application categories straighforward thinking ahead allows you to come up with patentable ideas. A recent paper from the League for Programming Freedom (available from the Legal department) explains some problems with the way patents are applied to software.[1][2][3]

Agreed. The USPTO failed everyone by declaring software code to be patent-able though it should be no more patent-able than logic or math --- because that's really all it is. The very idea of software patents is entirely unsound, unethical, and socially irresponsible. I believe this and I urge others to consider it as well.

Regardless of whether anyone agrees with my stance or not, there can hardly be an arrangement of legal or moral reasoning invoked in which the creature known as the patent troll can be understood as anything but deeply sociopathic and entirely parasitical, its sole raison d'être being to feed off the creativity and labour of others. I'm glad Gnome won and that their victory involved this particular troll relinquishing some psudo-property into the open-source reality, but the troll still drools and breathes to sling shite upon other hapless souls.

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Quoting: LiamSadly, they removed mention of both Linux and macOS from the Steam store page back in April

Aaaand I just removed it from my Steam Wishlist.

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I'm delighted by the resemblance the reviews graph has to !blood pouring from a wound

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My wife saw this article's title as I was skimming the GoL headlines this morning, and she said, "Lair of the Clockwork God? What's that book about?"

I said, "It's a game, but it does sound like the title of a good sci-fi novel, doesn't it?"

"It needs to be a book. I want to read it," she said.

Typically I'm not much for platformers or point-and-click adventures. I'm simply not very good in the first case, and I'm always clicking on the wrong bits in the second case; by the time I get to the right bit, all the adventure has gone out of it.

But with a name like "Lair of the Clockwork God," I may just have to give this game a closer look. Wishlisted.

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Pity about the inability to voice chat. This was something that was broken in the Linux port of Payday 2 and it was endlessly frustrating. I myself can't type messages nearly fast enough to critically communicate in FPS co-op shooters like this where team coordination can be mission critical.

Does anyone know why voice chat doesn't work in DRG? Perhaps it's something that could be changed in the official Steamplay build of Proton or maybe brought to the attention of the devs. If the fix were minor enough, who knows, they might consider it.

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I put dozens of hours into the first alpha release on itch.io. I loved chopping down trees in this game because the gigantic logs could roll and kill you if you weren't careful. (I often used them to kill game and enemies alike.) I'm really looking forward to their final release, to be sure.

Now, what is that big curved thing in the sky? That was decidedly not a thing I saw in the alpha. Any guesses anyone?

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