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Latest Comments by Pikolo
GOG and Steam are both running a Polish celebration sale
8 Nov 2018 at 9:41 pm UTC

I've bought Tower of time and King Arthurs gold. I've been meaning to get ToT for a while, since I've not played RPGs for a long time and the reviews looked good.
I really wish there were more CCGs for Linux. Artifact has my hopes quite high up...

Squally, a 2D game which has you hack it will be on Linux, demo available
19 Oct 2018 at 3:29 pm UTC Likes: 3

It looks extremly cool, especially Binary Gwent:

Images from kickstarter

The Linux market share on Steam is at a 14 month high as of September 2018
19 Oct 2018 at 12:00 am UTC

Quoting: ageres
Quoting: PikoloI fully expect more states to start their national distro's as a cost saving measure, with business licenses for Windows increasing as a proportion of software licensing cost. This won't happen in the USA, but it might happen in Europe(France already provides Linux as one of the two OS's on parliamentary laptops) or in China/Saudi Arabia/Brazil.
I don't think deputies and bureaucrats are PC gamers and would evolve into Linux gamers if there was Linux on their computers at work.
Bureaucrats totally would if that was what was preinstalled on computers they've bought, and governments could make that the easiest way to access government IT systems. But a far more important battleground is education. Just look at what is starting to happen as American teens who used ChromeOS at school go to universities - ChromeOS is on the rise.

This could 100% be utilized to push national Linux distros if governments were forward thinking, but they weren't. With Windows 10 being banned on Russian govn't computers and China developing Ubuntu Kylin, they might just be waking up to digital independence. And Linux happens to be the easiest starting point for any such efforts.

A Chinese company who bought VIA(one of the three companies in the world with a license to use the amd64 architecture) has recently licensed Threadripper(or possibly Ryzen too, I'm not sure) from AMD and got Linux support for their modified version into the mainline kernel in 4.18.

Canonical have released some statistics from the Ubuntu installer survey
18 Oct 2018 at 11:47 pm UTC

Even Microsoft just calls every virtual cpu thread(if you have simultaneous multi threading(hyperthreading is what Intel calls it), there is more than one per core. While on amd64 it's usually double, newer POWER and MIPS architectures have quadruple SMT) a CPU.

It's just something you learn the first time you run lscpu(?) or open Hardware manager

The Linux market share on Steam is at a 14 month high as of September 2018
2 Oct 2018 at 11:07 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: TPhaster
Quoting: SadLWhat I see is a massive 30% still using Windows 7. This might be our ticket to success. We got one year to improve Linux gaming. Windows 7 EOF is January 2020. If we could get even 1/10 of those users.
Aren't most of these people Chinese? If so, they almost certainly won't switch to Linux.
Why wouldn't they? Ubuntu Kylin is sponsored by the Chinese academy of sciences and Windows 10's snooping is a competitor to the great firewall. There is a reason the only North Korean OS was Android based - Linux is the easiest place to start. A Chinese company recently bought the license from AMD to make Ryzens and 4.18 saw them supported in the mainline Linux kernel.

I fully expect more states to start their national distro's as a cost saving measure, with business licenses for Windows increasing as a proportion of software licensing cost. This won't happen in the USA, but it might happen in Europe(France already provides Linux as one of the two OS's on parliamentary laptops) or in China/Saudi Arabia/Brazil. It's an interesting tactic to keep homegrown IT talent in the country.

An update on the status of porting Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation for Linux
22 Sep 2018 at 10:18 am UTC Likes: 5

It will be very interesting how Ashes of the Benchmark Vulkan performance compares between Linux and Windows. I've heard Stardock literally set the bar on performance optimizations in the Windows version of the game, so it should give us another interesting comparison between different Vulkan drivers.

And obviously, it's lovely to hear about their "Linux as a bridge to consoles" approach and I hope more studios take it - more games are always welcome

Valve have been fined 147 thousand euros in France
18 Sep 2018 at 6:21 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: x_wingWell, today I was reading about refund policies for Windows OEM and end up reading Microsoft EULA:
By accepting this agreement or using the software, you agree to all of these terms, and consent to the transmission of certain information during activation and during your use of the software as per the privacy statement described in Section 3. If you do not accept and comply with these terms, you may not use the software or its features. You may contact the device manufacturer or installer, or your retailer if you purchased the software directly, to determine its return policy and return the software or device for a refund or credit under that policy. You must comply with that policy, which might require you to return the software with the entire device on which the software is installed for a refund or credit, if any.
So, if you're lucky enough, you can actually get a Microsoft refund for an OEM key you never used on your computer. The ugly part is that it could also mean that the manufacturer could decide to ask you to return the whole computer. Maybe in first world countries you can refund the key... would be nice to know if this refund policy works in the EU.
The EU law did at one point state that you can't be required to accept all parts of a package deal and can return parts of it, provided that you can't obtain a part of the the package otherwise. There was a case of a french woman who managed to refund her OEM license, and soon after Dell started the Developer edition, to show that you can buy their laptops(at least the non-gaming ones) without a Windows license.

To put that into human words: if you can't buy the same product without Windows, you might be able to get it refunded.

GOG have gone on the offensive with their new 'FCK DRM' initiative
22 Aug 2018 at 7:00 pm UTC

Quoting: einherjarI don`t trust them.
I AFAIK the witcher 2 and 3 where Denuvo tempered.

Cyberpunk will surely not be DRM free in the first weeks.

I can`t remember that CDPR does something for Linux since the one port of Witcher 2.

So no Bucks from me. (Except old games for less then 5€ to try them on wine - maybe there is no need for this anymore because of Proton)
The official version is that the Witcher 3 CD release had DRM which got cracked while the online(aka. through GOG) release didn't. And I think both happened simultaneously

Valve officially confirm a new version of 'Steam Play' which includes a modified version of Wine
21 Aug 2018 at 11:08 pm UTC Likes: 3

I think Wine will be the biggest benefactor... it might even be more stable than Win 10 in the long run. Though I'm happy to see Valve setup Wine for me. It'll save me quite a bit of time

The next Linux patch for Civilization VI will be out soon with cross-platform online play
21 Aug 2018 at 10:46 pm UTC

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: MayeulCAlso, 64-bit is not a big performance boost for games that are GPU bottlenecked. Civilisation actually is CPU bottlenecked on enemy turns, so in this instance, it could be... if Civ 6 already wasn't 64-bit.
There's no severe performance boost to be expected on CPU either.
This actually comes down to the implementation details. 64 bit doubles the number of registers you have and guarantees AVX2 support, so there are non-trivial gains to be made by making tight loops contain slightly more variables and vectorising calculations, but I doubt they'd do such a fundamental engine rework as a patch.