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Latest Comments by MintedGamer
The GOG winter sale is on, you can grab Grim Fandango Remastered for free
15 Dec 2017 at 11:04 pm UTC

Quoting: throgh
Quoting: MintedGamerI'm done with GOG thanks to their Linux Galaxy client farce.
Perhaps you have noticed, that there are other ways to keep your installations on-track? And updates are not always welcome when changing games too much. So why having some client to manage this? :D
I find Steam so much easier to manage my installed games, perhaps I'm missing something but my non-steam Linux games tend to get forgotten and end up just wasting space. Its also not just the file management, but the cloud game saves for peace of mind, auto-updates, screenshots and the like.

Steam is leagues ahead of GOG now, so I always use that instead. Also Valve has been very good to Linux gamers and has been helping promote Linux gaming, where GOG and CDPR have been breaking promises and ignoring Linux for a long time, so I'd rather fund Valve than a company that has no real interest in Linux.

The GOG winter sale is on, you can grab Grim Fandango Remastered for free
12 Dec 2017 at 8:28 pm UTC Likes: 3

I'm done with GOG thanks to their Linux Galaxy client farce.

Looks like the 4X turn-based strategy game 'Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War' will come to Linux
24 Nov 2017 at 9:13 pm UTC

I love Linux, I love W40k and I love 4X games so will definitely be keeping an eye on this.

Oxygen Not Included from Klei Entertainment is starting to show signs of Linux support
23 Nov 2017 at 9:12 pm UTC Likes: 1

Thats great news, this is one of my most anticipated games at the moment.

SteamOS is still alive with a new Beta, although it's a rather uninteresting one
12 Nov 2017 at 9:06 pm UTC

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: MintedGamer
Quoting: Purple Library GuyI had not been paying attention to developments in Windows land. That does not sound that good for Valve; they may want to sit up and take notice.
Yes, Microsoft continue to slowly boil their captive frogs with the 6 monthly updates. They're playing the long game as described by @danniello after their attempt to strong-arm metro and the store/UWP/Windows Phone failed.

With regard to Linux as a whole growing, the OS tracking stats show that it is continually steadily growing.
Well, I guess . . . but it's like, for the last few months a number of sites have shown significant growth. And back I dunno, like 10 years ago for a while there was significant growth, back when we started from zero and edged up to the 1.5 percent-ish range. But in between, well, yeah, probably Linux was growing, sorta, but it's been like up a tick here, down a tick there, and if you graph it . . . OK, maybe this thing has a tiny slope up but if we kept on "growing" at this rate Linux would be a significant desktop platform around the time everyone's moved to doing their computing by telepathy. Linux was certainly improving through that whole time, but desktop growth was pretty flat. So I'm certainly happy that it seems to be speeding up, plus on top of the actual Linux growth, Chromebooks seem to be carving out a little space. Some say Chromebooks are Linux, some say they ain't, but in terms of platforms being supported by hardware vendors and whatnot they sort of stand or fall together whether they're "actually" the same thing or not. So for some purposes I think it's certainly legit to add Chromebook uptake to Linux growth when you're figuring effective Linux size and impact as a platform. What with one thing and another, I think Linux-(ish) desktop growth is looking a lot more growth-y than it has for quite a while, and I really hope it keeps up. Still don't know why, though--maybe it's just that some key improvement levels have been quietly reached, where little pain points (like "no games") that kept people from switching just aren't there any more.

(On Chromebooks and Linux gaming--if I were Google, I would definitely make sure Vulkan ran on Chromebooks so in the end I could make the little buggers run Android games. They're not much of a computer for full scale PC games, but should run phone stuff fine, and in general surely the mid-term plan for Google on Chromebooks has to involve letting users run Android stuff so they can buy anything in the app store. I've seen the Android point made a few times. If they do it, then that's one more platform using Vulkan, and probably a growing platform because Chromebooks are doing OK already and Android integration would make them more useful so they'd probably grow faster.)
That's very true, the growth is very slow compared with the overall desktop marketshare. I can't see how it could significantly change without some serious marketing or another major cock-up from Microsoft (like Vista and Windows 8) or some other big catalyst. Despite how malware-prone Windows is, people still use it en-mass. I think that most people will just use the OS the PC is shipped with, so its a difficult market to break into.

Chromebooks do seem to be quite popular, I'm not sure if the OS supports Vulkan but many of the chipsets in the Chromebooks definitely do, and there are drivers already available, plus Android supports Vulkan so theoretically I imagine it should be straightforward for Google to support Vulkan on ChromeOS if they don't already. I do think that's one of the things that would help gaming on Linux, if the development costs reduce to make it very simple and low cost to support Linux platforms, the larger developers and publishers will have to seriously consider it as another revenue stream at some point. Like you say, I just wonder if/when that tipping point will come.

SteamOS is still alive with a new Beta, although it's a rather uninteresting one
12 Nov 2017 at 12:02 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI had not been paying attention to developments in Windows land. That does not sound that good for Valve; they may want to sit up and take notice.
Yes, Microsoft continue to slowly boil their captive frogs with the 6 monthly updates. They're playing the long game as described by @danniello after their attempt to strong-arm metro and the store/UWP/Windows Phone failed.

With regard to Linux as a whole growing, the OS tracking stats show that it is continually steadily growing. I think Linux gaming is also still growing and improving, I wouldn't say it has stagnated. Feral had an absolutely stellar year last year that set the bar very high and I think they've done an awesome job supporting our community again this year. Companies like Aspyr and Paradox also continued their strong support for Linux, plenty of other developers too, just a few years ago you could pretty much kind of keep a track in general of what was releasing on Linux, now there's far too much to keep a track of - if you look at the "New Releases" in Steam and sort by date there are tons of new games being released for Linux all the time.

What are you playing this weekend?
10 Nov 2017 at 11:55 pm UTC

If I can tear myself away from Mario Odyssey for a bit I will change the pace by playing Observer.

Steam for Linux entered Beta five years ago today
7 Nov 2017 at 11:49 pm UTC Likes: 1

5 years, Wow! doesn't time fly when you're having fun :)

Intel announce a new CPU with AMD graphics and HBM2 memory
7 Nov 2017 at 11:20 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: sub
Quoting: 14AMD has been winning the nice "package" setup for a while. Think about consoles. I think all of them are AMD this generation and most of last gen were AMD as well.
Nintendo Switch?
Yes the Switch uses a Nvidia Tegra X1 chip. Damn fine console it is too.

At first I thought hell had frozen over with this deal, but I suppose it makes sense. Intel drops its rubbish inbuilt graphics, and Nvidia loses sales, win-win for AMD.

Linux marketshare on Steam dropped again in October, as China takes a massive chunk of the market
2 Nov 2017 at 8:31 pm UTC

Quoting: peterp771This article makes a lot of sense and confirms what many of us suspected for a long time.

I never did believe the arguments that Linux Steam market share is low because of driver issues or not enough games or performance issues etc as others often say. Linux started off at 2% and drivers today are much better than they were in 2013 and we have lots more games including several AAA titles. Linux gaming has made huge strives since then and to go backwards in marketshare makes no sense, unless you count all the new Chinese users coming online.

If the Steam survey didn't count the hordes of Windows users in China, I reckon the Linux share could well be around 4% by now.
This. It just proves the Steam stats are inaccurate if they can change by 26% / millions of users at the drop of a hat.