Patreon Logo Support us on Patreon to keep GamingOnLinux alive. This ensures all of our main content remains free for everyone. Just good, fresh content! Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal Logo PayPal. You can also buy games using our partner links for GOG and Humble Store.
Latest Comments by kaiman
What are you clicking on this weekend? Come have a chat in the comments
2 May 2020 at 1:23 pm UTC Likes: 2

For the majority I've been playing The Bard's Tale IV. It's plenty fun, but plagued by technical issues.

Yesterday I went back to F1 2017 for another race, but still a couple more to go before I can complete the season.

Also started playing Counterfeit Monkey, a text adventure with quite interesting puzzles.

Distro News - Ubuntu 20.04 'Focal Fossa', Ubuntu MATE and other flavours released
25 Apr 2020 at 8:07 pm UTC

Quoting: RedfaceI had a look at my 20.04 installs regarding python. My desktop has /usr/bin/python which dpkg -S /usr/bin/python says is from the package python-is-python2. The description of that package is:
[...]
This package will be installed upon upgrades to Ubuntu 20.04, if
DEPRECATED python2 was installed.
[...]
That explains that. It was easy enough to figure out and fix the problem, so no big deal. I just checked and mercurial is on the way to add support for Python 3, so hopefully 2.7 can finally die, at least on my system :-).

Distro News - Ubuntu 20.04 'Focal Fossa', Ubuntu MATE and other flavours released
25 Apr 2020 at 10:11 am UTC

With all the positive reactions here, I forced the upgrade from 18.04, as it was a relatively fresh install anyway. I think it's the first time that upgrading from one LTS to the next didn't break the graphics driver, so that's a positive :-).

It didn't, however, go totally smooth. For one it came up with python2 as the default interpreter instead of python3 (the only package actually still depending on python2 being mercurial, which I cannot get rid of, unfortunately). That caused unity-mail to crash, which is still my preferred notification app.

My gnome extensions also weren't updated automatically, and while a notification popped up that updates were available, it took me a while to figure out that what looked like a settings button was actually the button to load the update. But that's on Gnome, not Ubuntu. Also, for some reason, gnome-shell-extension-prefs was not or no longer installed, so extension preferences did not work initially.

But the worst was the new theme. I hate black in particular and dark themes in general. So I switched to the light variant, only to find that all console windows still sported a black window border. Well, turns out console has its own theme settings that for some reason is not following the system default. At least the upgrade preserved my desktop background, but I still have to change grub to show something other than black & white.

And finally, none of the few PPAs I use is yet available for 20.04. Though I guess this will be only a matter of time.

On the whole, I'm content with the updated system, but there's nothing to be ecstatic about.

Distro News - Ubuntu 20.04 'Focal Fossa', Ubuntu MATE and other flavours released
25 Apr 2020 at 9:51 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: MohandevirSorry for my ignorance, but is there some kind of appimage store? I really find the appimage concept convenient, but is there something for the automatic updates aspect?
The one I'm aware of is AppImageHub [External Link]. Not sure about automatic updates, though. My own stuff is no longer in active development, so I never really have given that aspect much consideration.

And as a user, I try to get everything from either the official repository or a PPA.

Distro News - Ubuntu 20.04 'Focal Fossa', Ubuntu MATE and other flavours released
24 Apr 2020 at 6:04 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: SchattenspiegelStill don't see a usecase for snap (or fatpak) on the desktop that would not be better (less time, less space, more reliable functionality) solved by Appimage if you do not get a native package.
Amen! I've been distributing Linux binaries in AppImage format for quite a while, and I really like how they're small and self-contained, with no daemon required in the background for them to run.

I had looked at both snap and flatpak as alternatives, but the whole idea of distributing binaries in the first place was for stuff to just work across distributions with minimal dependencies.

In general though, I'll want to use the regular binaries, managed via the package repository. With the image based applications, if some library they include has vulnerabilities, all the applications need to be patched and updated individually. With regular programs, the library in question can be updated and all the dependent applications are golden.

Unique and stylish looking survival adventure 'Help Will Come Tomorrow' released with Linux support
21 Apr 2020 at 5:48 pm UTC Likes: 1

I've had my eyes on that for a while, but I fear it could be quite depressing ... will wait for some reviews. The style looks ... stylish, however!

Minigalaxy, the FOSS Linux client for GOG adds support for Wine
21 Apr 2020 at 5:38 pm UTC

Quoting: scainewhich is based on Ubuntu 18.04 - which MiniGalaxy doesn't support due to, apparently, a lack of an up to date pygobject
That's what broke it for me as well.

While Wine support is nice in theory, in practice if I have to use wine for the game, I can also use wine to run the official GOG client.

Support for (incremental) updates of Linux games would be a more valuable feature in my opinion. But as it stands, plenty of games either have their final patch available by the time I get around to playing them, or, if it's really a game I must have at release, I might already be done before the first patch is ready :-).

FOSS Ultima 7 game engine 'Exult' has a new big stable update after 16 years
21 Apr 2020 at 5:00 pm UTC Likes: 2

Nice to see an official release, though at least on Linux, compiling from source wasn't that hard.

As for Ultima VII, that's still one of my favorite RPGs of all times. There are games with better graphics, games with better combat (definitely!), probably games with better anything. But there's hardly a game that beats the package as a whole.

So I'm immensely grateful to the Exult team for all the work they did so far to keep that gem alive on modern hardware!

City-building strategy 'Kingdoms and Castles' adds Steam Workshop support ahead of AI kingdoms update
6 Apr 2020 at 8:43 pm UTC

Quoting: ChronariusSure, will be lot of fun if you have bought it on GOG!
My thought exactly.

Wine 5.5 development release out with new features and fixes
28 Mar 2020 at 12:39 pm UTC Likes: 4

The ongoing MediaFoundation work is the current highlight for me. Apparently, a lot of modern Unity-based games without native support rely on that for video playback. I have set up a prefix with native (Windows 7) mf dll overrides, which plays these games just fine, but getting it to work was nontrivial and required grabbing the dlls from an actual Windows 7 installation. So I am looking forward to this work being complete.

Mostly though, I'll hope that developers using Unity will export their games for Linux as well :-).