I'm not entirely sure why they can't just open-source all their drivers? How are they making money or whatever by not open-sourcing them?

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Agree with everything you said Liam

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: Ads20000Am I understanding this right? These guys port other companies' games to Mac and Linux with their permission?

Feral? Yes. They are buying the right to port the game, get the source (and hopefully some support) and then publish these versions for own account (I hope my translation website is right on the last one: they have all expenses and get all the money). Feral is the main publisher of big games on Linux.

That's awesome!

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Am I understanding this right? These guys port other companies' games to Mac and Linux with their permission?

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Quoting: natewardawg

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: natewardawgAlso, I think from now on if I do put someone on Ubuntu I'm going to set the "Notify me of a new Ubuntu version:" to "Never".

If you can't be there to provide support, just stick to LTS releases (or Mint, or even Debian stable). Doesn't sound like these users need all the latest bells and whistles anyway. That'll give them years of safe security updates and not much else.

It was actually set to "LTS releases only", this is what caused the machine to break. :(

edit: It was being upgraded from 14.04 to 16.04, she saw the button to upgrade and pressed it. Now she has an unusable machine. "Never" would have been the better option in this case. I've personally had LTS upgrades break machines in the past. So, IMHO it's better to either nuke and pave or, since I'm not there to provide support, to just not allow the upgrade at all.

That's sad :( I suppose they (or 'we'? I'd like to consider myself part of the Ubuntu community!) can't test every different set of packages installed and hardware configuration and see if an LTS update breaks each particular set up. I think by default the Backup program appears when you've had Ubuntu installed for a while so people should keep their computer backed up and then it's not *so* much of a problem. Still, if you're on Ubuntu LTS at least if you upgrade your computer every 2 (or every 4) years then if it breaks each time it's only breaking that much. With Arch/Antergos/Manjaro any update could break your system (there was a recent Antergos update that broke LightDM, for example). Some say it's stable, but that might only be for their particular configuration or they're manually selecting what updates to install rather than doing it automatically or they're doing some other manual configuration which a Windows-level knowledge user would not know how to do. Ubuntu remains the most user-friendly-yet-advanced Linux distro in my opinion (though granted it hasn't seen much development recently because Ubuntu's trying to get Unity 8 on Snappy to work).

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Quoting: CFWhitmanOpen source software solved this problem a different way with dependency managers, like apt, yum, etc.

Yeah, but I think Snappy/Flatpak/AppImage do this better because different apps can share dependencies where the developers know this to work and bundle their own dependencies/dependency versions otherwise. Also it means they don't have to resort to their own scripts but there's one packaging system that does it all (though granted it's split between these three different systems at the moment).

Quoting: CFWhitmandisadvantages outweighed the advantages when it came to open source software

Well maybe they were wrong, the new system, as I said, resolves the old rolling vs stability dilemma (and before people argue rolling=stable, firstly tell me that you've used rolling for a while and you've come across no bugs or manual config - i.e. a complete noob would've been able to use it - and secondly consider that it might not work perfectly across different hardware or sets of software installed (for EXAMPLE, it might work worse with KDE since their packages might find new dependencies more troublesome etc) Granted, cadence releases have not really achieved this either, but given their testing schedule they are more likely to do so).

Quoting: CFWhitmanFor example, whatever version of OpenGL your systems supports isn't going to change because you run a program from a Flatpak, the same as your version of DirectX doesn't change with an application in Windows. Basic system component updates will still have to be managed by the distribution.

Well yes, if your graphics driver doesn't support the latest version of OpenGL/DirectX then yeah it won't. Still, you don't need your whole system updated with upstream packages from the ground up all the time with only a few days to see what's messed up - it's a recipe for disaster, unless you're already an experienced Linux user who knows how to get around issues.

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The big problem with rolling is the potential dependency hell/lack of stability. On most modern operating systems (Chromium OS is an exception, I think?), the 'core' OS is updated at a slower rate than the applications on top of them. One reason is that if an application depends on a certain shared dependency and that dependency is updated and changed, the application could break/behave differently to what the app author intended - and non-technical users don't want that to happen. Targeting Windows as an app/program developer is easy enough since there's only a certain number of releases to ensure your software works on and it's worth the time to test because there's so many users. Same for macOS, probably Android etc. With traditional desktop Linux distributions it's not the same, there's many different distributions all with different versions and an app developer has to make packages or hope packages are made for all of them and hope their program behaves well with the packages the distribution has bundled as dependencies.

The new Snappy/Flatpak/AppImage formats resolve the problem. App developers can bundle dependencies, thus they can depend on specific versions if necessary, or depend on the core system which has been tested as a unit rather than releasing updates for random libraries as they come in - if they happen to be OK with the core system's dependency versions. There's a cost to the size of applications, but given people have big hard drives and fast Internet these days, that's not really so much of a problem. I think the new Snappy/Flatpak/AppImage approach is a much better way to get stable, up-to-date applications and system than rolling releases are.

Edit: Just seen an example of why the rolling release system has problems, the first news article on the Antergos site is this: 'Updating to the latest version of the webkit2gtk package breaks the login screen (for users of lightdm-webkit2-greeter). We are currently investigating the issue.' When updating core OS libraries it can break programs that depend on it (in this case, another core OS feature, the login screen), as I was arguing, and I don't think these can be adequately tested in the very short period rolling releases give for testing the updates. Perhaps the testing period could be longer, but then you'd just be having a cadence release system with more frequent releases. Mark Shuttleworth did ask (when the rolling release idea was hot in the Ubuntu community) whether interim releases could be sped up to be monthly or even weekly - which is probably a better approach than pure rolling, but not as good as Snappy/Flatpak/AppImage.

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You can get Age of Empires II HD for under £4, at the moment, and it works great using the PlayOnLinux installer after you rename AoK HD.exe to Launcher.exe and launch that directly :D

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Quoting: Hori(and I really, really like Evince - Linux's default GTK document viewer)

Second that! I was using the version of it on PortableApps when I had to view PDFs on a Windows PC and despite that version being from GNOME 2 it was amazingly fast and useful!

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