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Latest Comments by mcphail
dosbox-staging, a 'soft' forking of DOSBox to work on advanced features has a first release
9 May 2020 at 8:00 am UTC

Alan Pope has released a snap version. Worth trying out if you don't want the hassle of compiling.

The Linux 'Desktop Entry Specification' gets a way to automatically use a discrete GPU, merged into GNOME
6 May 2020 at 10:30 pm UTC Likes: 2

I package a few games. I'm not sure whether to add this to the .desktop files. Would it be seen as user-hostile if I was making this default decision for users? Most of the games I package would run satisfactorily on integrated graphics but might be better on a dedicated gpu.

dosbox-staging, a 'soft' forking of DOSBox to work on advanced features has a first release
6 May 2020 at 10:21 pm UTC Likes: 3

I've been bundling this as my dosbox-of-choice for my snapped games for a while. It is a huge improvement over the upstream project, most significantly from the switch to sdl2. All the issues with broken multiple monitor setups and resolution switching have resolved. It is a real pity that forks have become necessary to support modern requirements but I suppose it means we still have the older project to support older hardware, where there isn't sdl2 support.

Distro News - Ubuntu 20.04 'Focal Fossa', Ubuntu MATE and other flavours released
24 Apr 2020 at 9:07 am UTC Likes: 9

I like snaps. They're convenient to install, use and create. There are still a lot of problems with the confinement, performance and ecosystem but these are improving. Canonical know, from their own survey, that about one third of users are positive about snaps, one third neutral and one third negative. If you follow the forums and IRC channels you'll find they are trying hard to improve things.

Thousands of people run the snaps I've packaged, including games like Wolfendoom: Blade of Agony, Quake Shareware and Tales of Maj'Eyal. Some people love them, some people hate them. Some of the hatred comes from my incompetence in packaging and some comes from flaws in snap technology. But we're all learning and trying to improve. This is a community, after all.

Upgrading to 20.04 will break some games (such as those linking to older versions of libssl) and Steam Controller users may be dismayed to find that sc-controller no longer runs. This is because of the deprecation of python2: something Canonical has no control over. I'm working on an sc-controller snap which will allow it to run on 20.04. It requires a bit of new plumbing to come to snapd before it will be ready to use, but the snapd guys are working on this. As I said, this is a community.

Being a community, it would be nice if we could be kind and respectful to each other. Ubuntu (and its flavours and its remixes) offers plenty of scope to run without snaps. It offers plenty of scope to use PPAs, Appimages and Flatpaks. Maybe the whole snap experiment will be abandoned further down the line but that will be dependent on what the community wants. Canonical are asking them and are being transparent about the results. Is that worth the anger? Let's enjoy what has been created, uninstall whatever annoys us and thank our respective $DEITYs that we have the freedom to do so.

Distro News - Ubuntu 20.04 'Focal Fossa', Ubuntu MATE and other flavours released
23 Apr 2020 at 7:59 pm UTC Likes: 3

I'm running Ubuntu Mate 20.04 on several machines and Ubuntu Server 20.04 on a raspberry pi and a VPS. It is a super release and I can't thank Martin Wimpress and the team highly enough.

Google has opened up their Stadia game streaming service, two months free Pro too
8 Apr 2020 at 6:38 pm UTC Likes: 3

If nothing else, it has allowed me to confirm that my internet connection is too poor to play this. Yay for free trials :)

Looks like there's going to be a 'Streets of Rogue 2' and I'm definitely happy with that
5 Apr 2020 at 7:34 am UTC Likes: 1

If your kids are old enough to tolerate a bit of naughty language and gore, I can recommend the original game as an hilarious family activity to combat the lockdown woes. Hope the sequel does make it to Linux.

Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition continues advancing, cross-play with consoles now up
3 Dec 2019 at 10:24 pm UTC

As has become customary, no update for GOG users yet. Hope we don't have to wait weeks for this to land once again.

Some thoughts on Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power
26 Nov 2019 at 6:47 pm UTC Likes: 1

The biggest disappointment for me was how awful co-op play was in this third instalment. I played the - then - trilogy with my kids and in the first 2 we could pick our characters and come up with inventive ways to get everyone through each scene. In the third, we spent far too much time being rotated out of the screen or all having to play as the same character and following in each others' footsteps. Fatally, without cooperation and invention it is boring. Maybe it is better as a single-player campaign?

The deep roguelike Tales of Maj'Eyal has a big update out now, new DLC on the way
25 Oct 2019 at 3:50 pm UTC

I have a new snap cooking just now. If anyone wants to test it in the "edge" channel I'll be pleased to hear the feedback.

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