Quoting: mao_dze_dunNot to mention it's unfair to charge gamers from richer countries more, either. We should all pay the same price for a game.

My post about "Memoria" nonewithstanding, as someone who likes the idea of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need", I certainly wouldn't necessarily agree with you on that point.

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I wonder how long it's going to be until we see shit like this: http://store.steampowered.com/app/243200/?snr=1_7_15__13 [External Link]

This game here is 40€ in Germany and 20€/$20/20£ everywhere else, on account of that being a Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye) game; and that name has quite some pull in Germany.

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Quoting: commodore256McCoy, Do you not remember when a sudo-apt-get remove gimp in Ubuntu would uninstall Gnome and Xorg?

How should I? I never used Ubuntu.
I have used SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, Arch, LFS.

And if that did in fact happen, that sounds like a bug in the dependency of that particular package to me. Like I said, mistakes happen. This is not a fundamental problem with package managers in general.

From what I know about apt, the only way this could happen is if
1) Nothing else depended on Xorg
2) Xorg was not properly recorded in the profile(*)

(*) Whatever that was called in Debian; profile is the Gentoo term for it. A bundle of packages defined as the "base" for a certain use case. I know Debian has that as well, but you just select that once at the installation phase and then you can forget about it.

In that case, apt would decide that Xorg was not used, and automatically remove it. In either case, should be a) a very uncommon thing to occur b) not fatal since apt asks your okay before it does anything.

Do you have any sources for that story?

Quoting: commodore256The only way to remove broken packages 100% is to have all of the dependencies in the same package like how when you install Gimp on Windows, it installs a local version of GTK.

That's not a feature, that's a braindead idea.

First of all, this leads to increased HDD usage, as you're going to have multiple copies of the same thing. Yeah, not quite that important anymore nowadays, but still, icky.

Second of all, this leads to increased memory consumption, since you will need to have in memory each distinct library in use.

Third of all, and most importantly, you will then have several slightly different version of the same library with different patches applied all over your system. An old version of GTK had an usability bug? You need to manually update all copies you've got on your system. There's a security issue with, say, libssl, openssh or gnutls? Congratulations, you now have multiple attack vectors open on your system.

Do you actually advocate that as the way to go, to do away completely with package managers and shared libraries? Seriously?

Also, again, no one is stopping you from shipping your game with all its libraries. You can already do that if you want to. You do not need to rely on any external library at all. Repeat after me: You. Can. Already. Do. That.

Quoting: commodore256Also, GlibC changes have broken the old Loki binaries.

Yes, that was an oversight in glibc 2.3.2 that broke backwards compatiblity for certain binaries compiled against 2.2. We've been over this already.

You can use the old libraries, and they still work perfectly. But wait a minute, this is what you're favouring in the first place; a binary shipping with all its libraries. Why are you upset that the binary doesn't mesh with the system libraries you don't want anyway?

The proper fix of course would be to just recompile the thing. Unfortunately Loki was already dead when glibc 2.3 came along.

Now stop gish galloping [External Link]...

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Quoting: commodore256It's because no two distros are the same.

*sigh* You again.

That's the point of distributions.
No two graphics cards are the same. No two keyboards are the same. No two Mac systems are the same. No two Windows systems are the same.

All distributions are still binary-compatible with each other (provided you're not crossing hardware architecture boundaries; an ARM ELF won't run on an x86 system, yeah)

Quoting: commodore256Linux has no Standard API

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API [External Link]

Linux implements several APIs, like big subsets of POSIX [External Link].
There's also the LSB [External Link] ABI most distributions provide.

Quoting: commodore256shared libraries have caused dependency hell

Libraries on POSIX systems are actually handled way more dependency-friendly than on Windows. You know, since they are uniquely numbered, and you can have different versions of libraries installed on your system at the same time, and the dynamic linker finds them automagically.

Shared libraries on Windows never worked well. There was never a standard system to manage different versions of the same library. There was never a way for a program request a minimum version. Or a central place where an application could register which version it installs, and deinstall it again without breaking other applications using the same library. As such, the only solution Windows ever had was to just for programs to bring all their libraries with them, installing them into their own path. Each minor version of DirectX installs their own support library for finding and connecting the different DirectX DLLs.

And guess what, if you want to ship a Linux game with all its required libraries, you can still do that as well. In comparison to Windows, Linux has a better solutions at hand, and still supports the only clunky solution Windows has regardless.

Quoting: commodore256But Windows Programs from 1995 are more compatible with modern Windows than a Linux Binary from 1995 is with Modern Linux.

We've been around this same fucking issue the last time. You are talking bollocks. Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth won't run on modern Windows systems. Urban Runner won't run on modern Windows systems. While many Linux binaries will still run on modern Linux systems.

Old Windows games have a big track record of not running on modern systems. That's why ScummVM exists. That's why ResidualVM exists.
Hell, that's why a big part of why GOG exists.

Quoting: commodore256what you need to run a binary and having video card specs, cpu specs and OS version is technical enough. any more technical like kernel, glibc, xorg, mesa, alsa and OpenGL versions is way too technical

This is literally nonsensical gobbligook. Stop before you embarrass yourself further.

You don't need to know which kernel version you're running for a simple user application.

You don't need to know the glibc version, provided the person who compiled the binary did 5 minutes of googling to check that they are not using the latest beta-branch (and yes, there were a few faulty/buggy glibc versions in the past, but mistakes happen; the very simple fix is a recompile away).

You don't need to know which ALSA version you're running. Never did, never will. Hell, I never even cared and never knew, and I wrote code that directly called the ALSA API.

The Xorg version is also completely irrelevant to what applications you can run. Again, I don't know which version I run (I'm only vaguely aware that there was a renumbering after the XFree86 to Xorg change, something from 0.7.x to 1.x?), and I wrote code doing direct X calls. Creating windows, handling signals, drawing pixels, lines and circles. Good old days. :)

You do kinda need to know which OpenGL version your graphics card and drivers support, yes, if the game is dead-set on wanting a certain minimum version. Just like you need to know which DirectX version you can do. Interestingly, converting a "Won't run" to a "Will run" is often just a drivers update away, not even a full reboot required. Contrast that with DirectX 10 never working on Windows XP.

Quoting: commodore256The only Linux OS I see them supporting is SteamOS because it's standard

Saying "We support SteamOS" is no different than saying "We support Debian". Or saying "We support Ubuntu". Or hell, "We support Linux".

Quoting: commodore256with different places where libraries are located.

This has been a solved problem 30 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_linker [External Link]

A program does not need to know where the library is located. At all. In the linking stage of the compilation, the name (which includes the version number) and all used symbols are recorded in the ELF binary. When you run the program, the dynamic linker knows where it can look for the library (which is configurable, and every distribution provides defaults that fit with their layout) and will automatically find the library for you.

This even works when you use dlopen() to dynamically load a library:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_loading [External Link]

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Oh for fuck's sake, it's the same stupid bullshit "reasoning" again. I'm so fucking tired of their shit.

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Yeah, no, King Art games is not going to get any money from me. Their costumer service / bug fixing behaviour is horrible.

For example, there a crash when clicking "Settings" in the main menu of The Book of Unwritten Tales on Linux. The bug has been known for over a year now, with backtraces and solutions (looks like one of the Ogre libraries they ship is broken; replacing that with a stock Ubuntu one from 1.5 years ago works) posted on both the Steam and their own forums. But do they care? No, not a bit.

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Quoting: LinasBut how do I get a list of Linux games now?

There's a "Browse by Platform: Linux" at the bottom of the "Games" menu there.

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Yes, exactly. I always hated how you could only place a game under one category, and how it often failed to sync properly. Ideally, I want that to be completely replaced by grouping the games by your own tags (switchable to popular tags made by other people or friends). Add a way to filter out certain tags, and I'm happy.

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Would be nice if they could integrate that into the client to replace the awfully limited category system. :)

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What if I bought it using a browser? Or they checking my User-Agent string? What if I bought the game on a mobile phone?

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