Hey, I guess this means I can claim to be a great old timer, although I was only an occasional visitor on here until the forums initially launched in 2010.

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Quoting: CimerydIf we do a survey, it would be fun to see who used Linux before and recently started gaming, and who played games before and recently switched to Linux for it.

Or those of us who have used Linux and played games on it for quite some time now - we do exist you know. I do accept that we are less interesting from a population change point of view, however.

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If this becomes native and is not tied to Steam I will probably give it a go, since I have never actually played a Bioware title despite them being loved by so many people and actually being based nearby in Edmonton. Got into Linux gaming too late for Neverwinter Nights, so maybe this can be my introduction.

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Quoting: BraqoonWho really uses non Proprietary drivers for gaming. I know there are games that are not 3D, but c'mon.

One of the Editors of this very website, including for a wide assortment of 3D titles, and I am far from being alone on this. To me, the choice of drivers is at least as important a statistic as whether or not someone is dual booting (which I do not do) or uses WINE (which I only do for old titles).

Still, the main reason I am posting here is to throw my support behind the idea of a GOL survey - it does not need to be monthly if that is too much work, but even a yearly GOL Linux Choice Awards like I recall Linux Journal doing back in the day would be interesting, if tiered more for gaming.

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Quoting: scaineWhy do you think he's anti-OpenGL?

He is not anti-OpenGL, but he does mention that he thinks the future is in lower level APIs such as a Mantle, Metal, DirectX 12, and interestingly enough OpenGL 5, which he seems to think will go in a similar direction as well.

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Having actually listened to it the most striking thing to me was some of his more "diplomatic" phrasings about certain things, such as Humble Bundle getting more lax on what games they included, and other disappointments which at this point are thankfully mostly muddled out by the optimism.

He also gave namechecks to a lot of good things, and about the only thing that made me grit my teeth was that in his response to the free driver question at the end he mentioned the attempts to reverse engineer Nvidia hardware and the fact that Intel pays people to work on their free drivers, but made no mention of AMD, despite the fact they do the same thing. I know it is not his job to correct people's bullshit, but given the amount of FUD going around about that, I would have appreciated just that tiny extra bit of clarification.

This is not the first SELF talk he has given by the way, and I recommend people going back and taking a look at them all just to see just how much progress has been made over the past few years. There is always one bit of the earlier history he always gets wrong, but I will hopefully be able to expound upon that at a later date.

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Never played xbill, but I have of course heard of it. It probably is a good video for getting them youngsters up to speed on Linux gaming history.

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Most games do not even show up on my radar until after the Linux port is released anyway; I do not really follow non-Linux gaming news apart from occasionally watching Zero Punctuation (which increasingly has games I actually own now, shockingly enough). Because I demand to play DRM free games as well I also have to be very careful with my purchases because of that, so I doubt I have ever fallen into a trap like the ones mentioned here myself.

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Quoting: STiATI don't really take a difference there. Critism can be trolling.

So how can concerns be expressed apart from criticism? It can be constructive.

Quoting: STiATIn fact, trolling is mostly based on the product, not the person. "Critism" can often be a personal attack ("are you incompetent or just retarded? the feature XY didn't work again as I expected";).

What is objectionable there is the personal attack, not the criticism, which is separate.

Quoting: STiATThough, despite the feature was never intended to work that way it was used which certainly was a fault on checking for the way to use it. I got personal mails like that.

Critics can be at fault without trolling. If they were harassing you over it though that is trolling.

Quoting: STiATMaybe you see it the other way around - but I consider trolling as something which has no context, just telling everything bad because you like something else. In example, trolling would be "fuck the linux port, go for more features on platform XY".

Thing is, while we may disagree with the statement, suggesting that a Linux port is less important than something else is not trolling in of itself. What is trolling is the attack on Linux in the context of the quote, which makes it a personal attack in its own way.

My apologies if this is drifting off-topic.

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Quoting: STiATSaldy, most of the critism guys are the very outspoken and loud ones. The ones quietly waiting are hardly recognized. If you ever developed open source - you probably have thousands and even hundred thousands of happy users who won't loose a word about it - and a few outspoken guys with a lot of critism and judgement - even about your person. I withdrew of a project because of that reason years ago.

To be fair, there is a fine line between criticism and trolling, which in this instance seems to have been quite heavily crossed (especially by the derogatory private emails) but does not apply to all criticism or opposition to something. Going after the person certainly is objectionable, but taking issue with a project on certain grounds is not, at least not when handled in a professional and suitably respectful manner.

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