Quoting: scaineSo choice is good, but not when Canonical provide it. Because... reasons, or something. Gotcha.

That's like the the drug dealer in the dark alley offers you some drugs... but no one else has those drugs. So you get addicted to it, and it's such a bad addiction that if it goes away, your way of life will change. Then that drug dealer decides out of the blue to no longer provide those drugs, so your life has to change to suit their whim.

Yeah, I'm talking specifically about Snap. There is no alternative 'store' for it. So you're stuck using Canonical's for those specific pieces of software that no one else wants to package / distribute elsewhere.

But hey, if you don't want to look at any reasons people have for not using it or for using it, that's not on me to point them all out. I'm not the only one who feels this way about Ubuntu. Otherwise all the different 'based on' systems would only change the DE instead of dropping things that are very Ubuntu specific (like snap).

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: mylkafor how long gaming on linux is a thing and nothing really changed?!?!

Nothing really changed? Are you serious?

Ha, yeah someone has been a little blind to all that has happened...

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Quoting: mylka

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: mylka

Quoting: DebianUserExactly what i was afraid of, and why i can't say if Proton is a good thing or not.

on the one hand you have 1 game from feral and maybe some other devs not porting their game to linux

on the other hand you have 1000s of games you can play, including the ones they would have ported.

imho the answer is pretty clear

I mean... maybe to be a little gross. But isn't this sort of like the short term gratification of getting a hooker... but then later down the road you figure out you caught something nasty and long term are forever cursed? That's kind of what this seems like, bad things long term, for short term solution.

For me, the specific use case of Proton is for games that would never even remotely get a native port. Games that are years old, and no longer supported. Or for games that won't even run on Windows 10.

what is long term for you?
for how long gaming on linux is a thing and nothing really changed?!?!
do you wanna wait another decade? or 2? or 3?

linux needs market share, which you wont get without games/software. with a bigger market share the native ports will come back

Isn't that basically what I said? The problem is we get the short term 'fix' by using Proton. The longer term may never happen now because developers code for 'Proton-friendly' vs 'Native-Friendly.' so we're stuck with never getting the full performance of the Linux system. But instead of longer term becoming a healthy thing where people start seeing the benefits of releasing native software, they just figure they'll sell one version, everyone will buy it anyhow, and there will be no incentive to make a native (hence better performing) version for the Linux users.

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Quoting: mylka

Quoting: DebianUserExactly what i was afraid of, and why i can't say if Proton is a good thing or not.

on the one hand you have 1 game from feral and maybe some other devs not porting their game to linux

on the other hand you have 1000s of games you can play, including the ones they would have ported.

imho the answer is pretty clear

I mean... maybe to be a little gross. But isn't this sort of like the short term gratification of getting a hooker... but then later down the road you figure out you caught something nasty and long term are forever cursed? That's kind of what this seems like, bad things long term, for short term solution.

For me, the specific use case of Proton is for games that would never even remotely get a native port. Games that are years old, and no longer supported. Or for games that won't even run on Windows 10.

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So... if Feral isn't porting it for Linux due to Proton... that just means they make no money on the sale of the game, right? As it is published by Sega. Sega gets that money. Sounds like Feral is going to give in and try to survive off the Mac? Most macs can't even run the total war games...

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Quoting: sub

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: subIf Valve is serious about Linux, I'd still propose charging like 5 % less Valve fee if the published game features a Linux build.

That wouldn't help.

Sure, it would encourage them to press the "build for Linux" button for some free money, which is more than many devs do, but it wouldn't encourage them to do any testing or provide any support. At all.

"But," you might say, "the discount should only apply to proper Linux versions, not those other ones," and suddenly Valve has to be a gatekeeper, creating lots of uncertainty for devs as to whether they'll have their funds withheld, and Valve are having to do (a lot) more work in exchange for less money.

Hmm, what about 5% less Valve fee on every Linux purchase only? Then developers have incentive to make a good Linux version and to get people to buy it on Linux, without Valve necessarily having to play gatekeeper. Players can vote with their wallets and refund if they don't like it. Hearing devs begging players to buy on Linux would be amazing. :whistle:

Of course, the time to have done something like that is a few years ago, since any purchases on an unmodified Steam Deck will be a Linux purchase anyway, which would skew the numbers somewhat once it comes out (I think that's how it works even if you play on Proton, right?). But maybe that'll make developers more interested in a Linux version if the fraction of Linux purchases goes up over time even without any direct monetary incentives on Valve's part…

Wouldn't really work, as the purchase is multi-platform. People would install a Linux VM, buy it for 5% off, then play it on Windows...

Who says the cut is forwarded to the customer?

It should be an incentive to the dev/publisher imho.
That's why I suggested to lower the fee for all platforms if the publisher provides a Linux build.

I see the point with the gatekeeper argument, but if it turns out to be required (wouldn't start with it),
then okay. I mean Apple is checking apps in their store, so is afaik Google.

Oh, I misread. Yeah that's much better. I'm hoping with the Steam Deck, developers will actually start to make Linux more of a primary concern than the 'also runs on' that some of them have been doing. As much as Unity and Unreal try to make things easy to just export to Linux, some stuff works for a while, then the developers run into some bugs and just give up. Supraland comes to mind...

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Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: subIf Valve is serious about Linux, I'd still propose charging like 5 % less Valve fee if the published game features a Linux build.

That wouldn't help.

Sure, it would encourage them to press the "build for Linux" button for some free money, which is more than many devs do, but it wouldn't encourage them to do any testing or provide any support. At all.

"But," you might say, "the discount should only apply to proper Linux versions, not those other ones," and suddenly Valve has to be a gatekeeper, creating lots of uncertainty for devs as to whether they'll have their funds withheld, and Valve are having to do (a lot) more work in exchange for less money.

Hmm, what about 5% less Valve fee on every Linux purchase only? Then developers have incentive to make a good Linux version and to get people to buy it on Linux, without Valve necessarily having to play gatekeeper. Players can vote with their wallets and refund if they don't like it. Hearing devs begging players to buy on Linux would be amazing. :whistle:

Of course, the time to have done something like that is a few years ago, since any purchases on an unmodified Steam Deck will be a Linux purchase anyway, which would skew the numbers somewhat once it comes out (I think that's how it works even if you play on Proton, right?). But maybe that'll make developers more interested in a Linux version if the fraction of Linux purchases goes up over time even without any direct monetary incentives on Valve's part…

Wouldn't really work, as the purchase is multi-platform. People would install a Linux VM, buy it for 5% off, then play it on Windows...

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: slaapliedjeHa, I would interpret it as being for full sized adults, and not kids that would drop it. I mean we should face the fact that the Switch, and Nintendo in general targets more of kids and grown kids... the joy-cons are absolutely too small for my hands to comfortably use, and I have to use my Pro controller to play games on it (at least it is one of the nicest controllers I have.) Gabe probably has the same complaint about the joy-cons as I do. They are made for smaller hands.

If anything he is implying that the Steam Deck is for men and women, not boys and girls.

Sure, intending it to mean "this is a premium product made from premium materials, offering premium performance at a premium price, for grown-up gaming," is also a perfectly plausible interpretation, and is likely what he was consciously intending.

We all know of PC gaming's widespread reputation for welcoming inclusiveness, of course.

Ha! Yeah. This is kind of embarrassing to point out, but one of the reasons there is the reputation with PC gaming really stems from the absolute pain in the ass it historically has been to get working right. You have to deal with getting appropriate hardware, get the right drivers... hell even the operating system.

Then you have console gaming. Stick the cart, disk, etc in, and away you go. The sad thing is the two have been merging for years. Now you have your video game console that has to be connected to the internet, has to download patches for the games and OS constantly, and in general is far less stable than the ones from yesteryear.

So yeah, there's an elitism from people who game on the computer, as there are challenges to be met, but also rewards as they are very much less limited to resolutions and effects, based on how much $$ you're willing to spend. Consoles are much easier to develop for in this regard, as everyone can just target the most common. Sure computers have APIs and such to try to make development easier these days, but it wasn't always so.

The Steam Deck is the second attempt at making a console out of a PC, instead of a Console becoming a PC like the last couple generations of consoles (with the exception of Nintendo's as they like to do their own thing. Ha, well you even have the Atari VCS now which is just a console or a PC depending on how you want to use it. One guy is turning his into a MIDI music station with Linux installed, and it is introduction into Linux and he's very excited about the prospect.

Hopefully people are excited about the prospect of a Linux handheld!

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Quoting: scaineStandard? What standard? Linux doesn't have a standard. It has choice.

Yes, standards are the things that pretty much every Linux distro decides should be the way forward. Like systemd, libc, openssl, etc. Sure there can be alternate libraries for things, but in general why not try to improve the one everyone uses instead of trying to 'do it your own way'? Most projects are very much open to new help.

Quoting: scaineThis is such weird mixed messages. Mint seems to get a pass, which does its own desktop (Cinnamon), but you don't like Ubuntu, because it did its own desktop (Unity)?

Cinnamon is a continuation of Gnome 2. Unity is some bastardized Gnome shell based thing, that even Canonical eventually killed because no one else wanted to use it. Cinnamon I can install in Debian just as easily as I can install Mate (which is what I thought Mint used?) or KDE or Enlightenment, etc. Can't install Unity in it. I think someone attempted to package Unity for Arch for some reason, but I don't think it got very far.

Quoting: scaineCould Canonical have contributed to Wayland? Nope. They tried to, and their patches were rejected. What were they supposed to do?

If their patches were rejected, there's likely a very good reason this happened. Maybe their code sucked? Or they insisted on attaching any of their agreements to the code?

Quoting: scaineYou don't like Ubuntu because it did Mir, but back when it did Mir, Wayland wasn't even a thing, and everyone was using X. In fact, Mir was announced three YEARS before any distribution ever tried to use it. In fact, outside of Fedora, the only other distributions to go near didn't do so until 2019.

Ha, well in my mind Wayland still isn't even a thing. But Wayland for sure was being worked on before Ubuntu popped up and said they had Mir. Wayland has been in development for a very very long time. Of course distributions didn't try to use it yet, it wasn't ready (and still isn't in many user's minds). The point really was that while everyone else saw Wayland as the way forward, Canonical wanted to go their own way, potentially making an incompatibility between distributions, so you'd end up with having to package for Ubuntu, and then everything else. Also potentially making some just package for Ubuntu and no one else... Doesn't leave much choice in that scenario, now does it?

Quoting: scaineI mean, why does Debian get a pass for using apt, when RPM was available the year before? Sounds like NIH syndrome to me, right? Hell, they went with Gnome instead of XFCE, which had been around for three years by that time.

Ha, This was literally the wild west back when Debian and Red Hat came about. There were so many different package managers. We're left now with mostly tar ball, deb and rpm. With the 'universal' packaging of Flatpak, AppImage and Snap (Ubuntu controls all the repos). Apt is still better than dnf / yum. But .rpm is still better than .deb (at least from my experience. .debs are close, though .rpm has a nice feature I wish they'd snag, where you can have a dependency on a library as well as a package).

There is just other shady things Canonical have done over the years, like implement Amazon search within the Desktop Environment that was an opt out thing... But sure, I can give Mint a pass because they do just use the repositories, and try to undo all of the Canonical stuff. I just tend to think they'd do better if they just based off the source instead of having that added layer of Ubuntu. And they do try to maintain that as a possibility in the future with LMDE. Smart. Being held to the shifts of a company that has historically shown that their interest is more in becoming the defacto distribution of choice for everyone, and incompatibilities with other distributions be damned. You already, in general, can't take an Ubuntu package and install it in Debian without some sort of issues that'll creep up along the way.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: CatKillerGabe Newell should probably try to avoid implying that the hardware is only for boys, though.

In case anyone thinks I'm just being random here, it was an interview with IGN [External Link], talking about the Deck and the Switch, where he said

So I think Nintendo does a great job targeting the audience they do with the content that they have. And that's going to be different. Like when you pick this up, it feels much more like the ergonomics for somebody who's used to playing with an expensive game controller, right? Because it's bigger and it's bulkier than a Switch. And if we're right, that's the right trade-off to be making for the audience that we're going after

A perfectly reasonable interpretation of his thought process here (although not the only one) is that "the Switch is for filthy casuals with their childlike and girly hands, but the Deck is for PCMR with their big manly hands."

I doubt it was a conscious thought, but biases rarely are. The Valve promo videos show girls being allowed to play, at least.

Ha, I would interpret it as being for full sized adults, and not kids that would drop it. I mean we should face the fact that the Switch, and Nintendo in general targets more of kids and grown kids... the joy-cons are absolutely too small for my hands to comfortably use, and I have to use my Pro controller to play games on it (at least it is one of the nicest controllers I have.) Gabe probably has the same complaint about the joy-cons as I do. They are made for smaller hands.

If anything he is implying that the Steam Deck is for men and women, not boys and girls.

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