Efforts like this are very important, I think. From what I understand it enables us to point developers at this and say "target this, it's easy" which has positive consequences that I don't think I have to explain. :V

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Looks like a very nice type of deal. Interested.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: TheSHEEEPThe one thing Wine truly needs is a good UI. Prefix management, vital software installation, etc. is so far purely done on the console - and not really in an intuitive way.
Winetricks isn't exactly easy to use, either.

And PlayOnLinux is just years behind in maintaining a useful list of games.

They should really invest some time to "just make it work" or easy to use.
Right now, you always have to fiddle around with it to get anything to work.
That is the number 1 reason many people don't even try use it even if it could run their games.

I kinda agree, but on the other hand modularity solves this just as well. Check out Vineyard and Lutris.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The Hunter Classic [External Link] now runs in Wine, for the first time as far as I'm aware. Has some visual issues but it runs! It was my favorite "just wander around and chill" game, I've been waiting forever for it to work, almost lost hope.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: JmsnzThe conspiracy theories are stretching it.

Apple report how many macs they sell per quarter. You don’t need to guess from net marketshare. Why didn’t Apple have it corrected to 7%? Why not 20%? Please.

Linux almost doubling in markshare in one month was never going to plausible. Especially with only one data point.

So your counterargument to Apple fudging the numbers is that Apple are reporting their sales honestly elsewhere... because they just do? (also wouldn't the relationship between sales and current OS adoption be complicated? everybody who bought a Mac in the previous quarter and likes it, will still be using it in the next, but those who didn't have since switched, neither of which you can possibly predict and so on)

Also correcting it to 20% would require either removing 20% of Windows users which would raise eyebrows or completely eradicating Linux and then still eating 17% off Windows which would raise even more eyebrows. Definitely nobody would believe any of that unless it's discovered to be actually close to the truth.

Lastly I never said I think it doubled. I'm just skeptical it crumbled back and even if it did that the people lost deflected to Mac for that matter. But as I said in the previous post, all this could very well be real (as real as such statistics go anyway). As could be interference by Apple. Powerful people with tons of money and influence interfering to protect their interests isn't exactly an outlandish alien lizardmen scenario, you can't dismiss it just by mentioning the word "conspiracy".

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: doomiebabyif all linux desktop usage is within their margin of error, that's one hell of a margin for error.

Yeeaaah, that's not ideal.

And I have to say, going from significant growth to losing ~0.30% to Mac is a really odd correction. And if you look at the trends from this period from Novermber 2016 to September 2017 that we are all looking at, "Apple complained" seems like a plausible theory. Windows is on a slow but steady decline, Linux lingers at 2% with a slight decline that rights into a pretty steady-looking incline, Mac is balancing around 6% but nonetheless is noticeably declining. Except according to current data in September it's suddenly fixed. Windows continues to decline, Linux loses some of its recent gain, but Mac is back to its 6+%. This could be reality but it's undeniably a very convenient scenario for Apple. "Macs are totally still popular, all is well for Mac, nothing to worry about"

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoConsole gaming must back to cartridges and problem solved...

You rent it, you play it... You buy it, you own it.

I like your optimism but just look at optical discs. If big companies made cartridges now, half of the cartridge would be hardware DRM, a quarter would be filled with software DRM and the remaining quarter would contain the game. :D

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: slaapliedjeAnd why is that? Because I point out that people who sit in a coffee shop just to use their wifi (why don't they use the one in their office, dorm room? They can afford that shiny macbook and overly expensive coffee, why couldn't they also afford Wifi or work in a place that has it?) A coffee shop used to be a place where you'd sit down and meet someone, and have a nice light chat.

Instead it's filled with people sitting on their laptops only because they may want to be around other humans for a while.

How dare they spend their own money on what they like and want to be around other humans! Such twisted villainy!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Even if lower than originally stated, remaining in the 5% ballpark is still a big deal, it puts us on the same scale as Mac anyway.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: vlademir1Typically it's not the intended use case but the common in practice use cases these arguments are made from. It's reasonably simple to show that the most commonly discussed use cases for game system emulation in the public sphere online either directly involve or else encourage DRM circumvention.

So the argument will rely on finding more mentions of people talking about wanting to circumvent DRM rather than just playing it on another platform using the emulator in Google?

View this comment - View article - View full comments