Gotta give it to steamplay. Just this summer I had to install windows to run DooM, Dark Souls and Homeworld Remastered. Now, I don't need squat, it all flipping works, as if there was a native port. Sure it loads more slowly, but the last time I booted into Windows was this August.

And now, I'm not even sifting through the list to find good native ports, I'm just looking for games I like, and checking Linux compatibility later (if ever, 'case most of 'em just work).

Now we need a decent video editor and some official driver front-ends, and we'd be on Windows parity in terms of games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Dead Space and Dead Space 2. Not a single hitch with Proton, actually runs better than on Windows with less mouse lag.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Don’t know what to think about it. EA has both some of the worst and some of the games in my experience: I loved the era of Dead Space, Mirrors Edge, Burnout, Mass Effect, Dragon Age... I think if they really wanted to fix their image they could go on, and release something good.

That being said, no origin for Linux, no Linux support in any of their games, and increasing popularity thereof in Indie game development. Maybe they’ll win us over with some original game... that doesn’t skin your wallet.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: appetrosyanA CPU core is a CPU core, and a thread is a logical Processor

... which, from a programmers perspective (where the term stems from!) is a crazy misnomer to begin with.

As in thread the lightweight process. Yep, there’s a lot of misnomers out there.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: appetrosyanLiam, Thanks for removing the comment explaining what the terminology means. I really appreciate it when I don't even know whom I've offended and how.

The original 5 comments were completely going off the road in regards to what this was about, due to my own confusion and how I wrote it. Hence their removal and the re-posting of this article.

Ok, in that case explaining it again: their terminology is perfectly fine, albeit a different convention to what you as a user are used to.

The confusion as red193 had pointed out numerous times, rises because users tend to call the CPU package, the Just CPU. A CPU core is a CPU core, and a thread is a logical Processor, I.e. CPU. So a hexa core with multi threading provides 12 CPUs to the kernel.

That’s it. Since this is a technical statistics overview, I hardly see why they need to conform to our wrong conventions. Or in, fact, how this explanation of “you’re confused because your convention is not the same as theirs” is “off the road”.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Liam, Thanks for removing the comment explaining what the terminology means. I really appreciate it when I don't even know whom I've offended and how.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Leopard

Quoting: GuestWith these changes they could whitelist quite a lot of games soon!

Witcher 3 being first , many Unity games included. Also Quake Champions.

Amen to that!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

How exactly are the games being whitelisted? I imagine the game has to be thoroughly tested by Valve, it has to not have any significant bugs related to proton (let's face it, some games are plain buggy, and their Wine versions can actually be more stable).

I'm just hyped. This is the way forward. We need to build marketshare and momentum, and this is the best way. Sure, we'll be getting fewer SDL ports, but considering they essentially do the same thing, and cost a lot more to maintain, it's a big win.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: TheSyldat

Quoting: appetrosyanWell, AMD isn't all roses, and Intel hardly does less than AMD in the OpenSource arena. I think it has more to do with anti-monopoly on the Laptop market, but even that ignores the x86 monopoly on Laptops and above.

If there are alternative architectures to x86 (which is closed-source BTW), and a decent Graphics chip architecture manufactured by a different company, I'd rather go with that, even if that means last era performance, and very few binary packages. Xonotic, 0AD and a bunch more will be ported quickly, SDL ports can be modified to work, and I'm sure if Linux has an official architecture with official hardware support, Wine will have builds too.

Honestly this is wishfull thinking to think that the vast breadth of applications would be ported to a new architecture for a better or for worse a mass scale architecture migration would require some real downtime for just about everybody. I'm not saying it won't happen. But in the mean time the most realistic approach is to do what System 76 has been doing being a manufacturer and slowly but surely pushing the envelope and showing x86 manufacturers that it is in the end in their best interest to simply just open the platform so that roadblocks stop being thrown at them.

I disagree. The things that need porting are the things that generate/execute machine code. For compiled software it’s the compilers, most interpreters can be ported by simply recompiling, and given open hardware/software it won’t take much time.

The key point is allowing most people to modify the source code and not distribute machine code directly. It doesn’t even have to be open source, just a form of bytecode that can be reinterpreted on the spot.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: TheSyldat

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: stankalovichI want to believe, but its probably going to be all Intel and Nvidia and really just going to be a marketing gimmick. If they really cared they would've made an AMD based product by now.

Doesn't the AMD graphics still require binary firmware blobs? Fairly certain they're still not 100% open source. And there is always the microcode.

To answer your question simply put let's summarize it that way.
1 ) When Linux users buy hardware they have a tendency to buy at the top tier of our catalogue
2 ) Being a bit less cagy and parting ways with the old days of putting patents on everything give us good image
3 ) Said newly acquired good reputation seems to sway linux users towards us rather than Intel
4 ) How about we very slowly point for point cater to them to see where it goes and if the trends keeps on making us money.

In other words AMD just like Intel is playing the incrementalism game ... Fine let's play it then. And Well AMD is just playing a faster incrementalism game than Intel is ... let's reward them then .

At least that's how I see it.

Reasons I stay away from AMD.

1) Their chipsets are still crap. Everytime I use an AMD system, it has random issues. Like USB randomly dying until I pull out the CMOS batery.
2) nVidia simply has better cards/features. For example, G-Sync is supported on Linux, Freesync is still questionable last time I looked it up.

I try to switch it up every few builds or so, but keep running into these problems. I really wish we had an alternative. RISC-V have all the Spectre issues?

Well, AMD isn't all roses, and Intel hardly does less than AMD in the OpenSource arena. I think it has more to do with anti-monopoly on the Laptop market, but even that ignores the x86 monopoly on Laptops and above.

If there are alternative architectures to x86 (which is closed-source BTW), and a decent Graphics chip architecture manufactured by a different company, I'd rather go with that, even if that means last era performance, and very few binary packages. Xonotic, 0AD and a bunch more will be ported quickly, SDL ports can be modified to work, and I'm sure if Linux has an official architecture with official hardware support, Wine will have builds too.

View this comment - View article - View full comments