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Latest Comments by Johners
Building Mesa from source, a guide
13 Jan 2017 at 10:14 am UTC

I personally don't see why Canonical can't push the latest stable Mesa build to their users. It only makes the experience better as there have been massive improvements to Mesa over the past few years.

As for other distributions, it would be nice if they did the same as well but seeing as Ubuntu is the go to the choice for a lot of developers and end users it makes sense for them to do it at least.

Motorsport Manager updated with a 2D race mode for lower-end computers
21 Dec 2016 at 11:38 am UTC

Quoting: laghYay... that mode is just right for me.

First: My laptop is not that powerful. So this mode helps a lot...

Second: I don't really need fancy graphics in a management simulation game. It is a nice to have... but I usually prefer a clean
interface that gives me an overview of all the necessary information I need to make my decisions. Fancy graphics are just eye-candy.

I'm glad that the developers feel the same way and opened up the market for their game to include fans of management-sims with not so powerful PC setups. ^_^
Football Manager also have a similar 2D option for people with lower end PCs. Seems like it is (or at least should be) a standard feature for management games of this kind.

What one game would blow your mind if it came to Linux & SteamOS?
1 Dec 2016 at 2:41 pm UTC Likes: 6

World of Warcraft as it would show great progress to have games from another large platform outside of Steam to have games from Linux. It is also my most played and favourite game so it would be fantastic if I could play it on Linux without using WINE or GPU Passthrough.

Feral Interactive are requesting that Canonical get Mesa updates into an official PPA
18 Nov 2016 at 12:26 pm UTC Likes: 3

I do agree with this but the PPAs should also have the option to be enabled from the Additional Drivers program to make it even easier for the end user to enable these updates on their system.

Canonical should also provide the same option for AMDGPU-PRO and the nVidia drivers. I know there is already a PPA for nVidia but my biggest complaint about that is how it splits off each driver branch into its own set of packages which makes updates annoying at times because you have to switch from one branch to another.

Dear Valve and Steam Machines OEMs, you have it all wrong
11 Jul 2016 at 10:31 pm UTC Likes: 2

The hardware configurations will eventually sort themselves out, like Android devices have, once Valve sort the software out.

There are many flaws with the actual software itself and Valve appear to have done little updating long-term. I know they operate in Valve Time but to get more than just the enhustiasts to buy your product, you will to actually become a customer focused company with actual support and a decent release/update schedule for the software.

As for SteamOS it, well I'll give my faults on what Valve can do as a company to improve what they currently have.

1) The acutal OS itself. currently SteamOS is nothing more than a stripped down Debian Linux that boots to Steam in Big Picture Mode. This needs to change. You still have the option to drop back to the desktop mode. While this should exist, it should be hidden behind a developer section of the option menu that is hidden by default. While it would still be Debian running Steam, at least make an attempt to hide that to the end user.

2) Streaming Services. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 do well in having a range of applications to enjoy a wide range of stremaing services that are available. To do this on SteamOS, you have to use the web browser and hope it works. This is pretty poor and has a number of issues (such as videos not pausing when you leave the web browser).

3) Multimedia Support. This is, again, non-existance without installing software outside of Steam. On both of the consoles (those that actually complete with Steam Machines in a way) you can put a CD, DVD or Blu-ray in and they'll play. Most Steam Machines don't ship with drives for physical media but this is still something that needs to be considered for those who do make use of them.

4) Triple A games. Being able to play big games like Grand Theft Auto V, FIFA, Call of Duty (still popular in the console crowd) or DOOM would do well for both desktop Linux as well as SteamOS. There are some big money games realisitcally we need native ports by developers who will take the time to make a good product.

5) Drivers. You guys all know the drill with this but having more incentive to use the platform will provide greater encouragement to the vendors to put more resources into drivers.