Quoting: KohlyKohlI still remember seeing Quake in a game store in 1999.

Before Steam it was very difficult to get games running under Wine. I remember breaking my system many times, especially in the early 2000s, trying to compile the right libraries and still not being able to get most games working right.

Cedega existed to try and make it easier to run Games (and software but that was an even worse experience) and even that only worked slightly better than manually trying to get games working.

In the end, I mostly just played Blizzard games because those were the ones that worked mostly out of the box with Wine.

It is really impressive today that I can play just about any game I want without having to do anything to make it work under Linux.

Yeah, those were the days alright. Some games like City of Heroes though ran better under Wine in Linux than on Windows for me. When I discovered that I would always reboot into Linux before starting a session of crime fighting.

There is this strange sense of nostalgia and adventure whenever a game requires fiddling with Wine to function these days. Digging through stack dumps and logs, hours spent digging through forums and Microsoft documentation... Ok, it wasn't great. But it was educational! :grin:

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Quoting: sarmadSomehow Valve's games continue to be popular. L4D, Counter Strike, Portal, Team Fortress, Dota. For some reason people don't seem to get bored of these games.

Kinda like fast food, I guess?

It isn't the most exciting food around but it is comforting and you know what you get.

Also helps that the games are very just-pick-up-and-play™. You can just fire it up, play a couple of hours and get the full experience immediately. We played a lot of L4D on a whim like that back in the day.

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Quoting: hardpenguinStill fun and also you can play it in split-screen - there is a mod to be downloaded from the Workshop that enables it :)

Sweet! :woot:

Now if only I can find somewhere to download another player.

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Dink Smallwood! :woot:

Man that takes me back... Used to love that game as a kid.

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Quoting: dibzI appreciate the explanations. Though, my use of "Borderline Autistic" is actually close to home for me. Without airing my laundry on the internet, I will say that I used the term in the context that I learned it in the first place -- in a healthcare setting when diagnosing one of my children who I could absolutely see being a "strongly opinionated linux user" like many of us, heh.

Fair!

If you feel it appropriate and you think your child would like it, say "Hi!" from me. You do not have to state your decision on this on the public forum.

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Quoting: CyborgZetaI am not a software developer or a progammer; I am just a regular computer user. So please do not get angry at me for asking this, as I probably don't know what I'm talking about.

But wouldn't running games, and programs/applications in general, inside containers fix this kind of issue? Isn't that one of the goals of Flatpak?

A great question CyborgZeta!

Yes and no. It is really quite overkill to use something like flatpak for the use cases we are talking about, the industry have dealt with this issue for decades and the solution (which is typically used on the windows platform) is to bundle your dependencies either statically in your binary or as dynamic libraries next to your binary.

There are pros and cons to that, for something like a game it is usually "good enough" to bundle only some dependencies given the non-critical nature of games. Programs written in Go(lang) are built as independent static binaries by design. As far as I know this means that they will run pretty much on any system as long as the architecture is compatible (linux x86, windows x86, linux arm, etc).

For drawbacks there are three big ones, one is size. Statically built binaries are larger in size since they bundle everything the program needs inside the binary itself. Another is that if the assumptions those dependencies made about the platform were to change they would still break. Lastly, security. If my program uses curl dynamically and a security flaw is discovered in curl that can be updated independently of my program.

Containerised solutions share the same first two drawbacks and has the third built in "by design" (both good and bad).

Another one you can make a solid argument for is that containerised applications like flatpak add a lot of unnecessary complexity to an already complex chain.

An advantage that a statically linked binary have over a container is reduced resource consumption and a smaller size on disk. A container needs the entire runtime to be present, which will include a ton of stuff the program won't need. Granted, if you install enough containerised applications that rely on the same runtime the differences go away.

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I wasn't going to comment on this because it is way off-topic, but having thought about it for a while I decided to do so anyway, in the interest of public education on neural diversity. Liam or moderators may remove this if they think it inappropriate.

Quoting: dibzYeah, one of the best and worst things about Linux is the vocal community. And let's be honest, the people that flock tend to have very strong personalities -- borderline autistic at times.

Autistic is not the word you are looking for here. It is a common and widespread misconception, but it really isn't what you are looking for to describe the individuals you are hinting at. Autistics are often asocial [External Link], generally not antisocial. Typically, if an autistic person learns they have said or done something that have hurt someone, they will feel intense remorse.

A "borderline autistic" person is a perfectly average person, you likely won't even notice anything different except perhaps slightly increased anxiety compared to baseline human their age. At most you might describe them as someone who likes to stay home and read a book on a Saturday every now and then.

They are not people who will try to rally the masses, they will probably just stand at the sideline wishing they could contribute more. There are exceptions though, a certain fellow countrywoman is a strong personality who does quite a bit to hold people accountable for the climate.

Quoting wikipedia [External Link],

The autism spectrum is a range of neurodevelopmental conditions generally characterized by difficulties in social interactions and communication, repetitive behaviours, intense interests, and unusual responses to sensory stimuli.

The difficulty in social interaction and communication refers to discomfort and avoidance and reduced body language. But many autistics won't put themselves in most social situations to begin with, either because of a lack of interest in social activities or because it confuses them. Even mailing-lists, or forum posting is something that scares many.

Source: I've done a lot of reading on autism, I have talked to a lot of professionals, I have friends who are autistic and I am autistic myself. I am however far from an expert, and open to learn more.

PS. What I have described as autistics above is not a set of all people with autism spectrum disorder, it is a generalised set of the ones who are high-functioning enough that you are likely to have been in contact with them in something as complex as technical online discussions.

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Quoting: DerpFoxBeing an admin too, I can relate to that. The only thing I can maybe "critic" is that here you are talking about Windows Server. So, I don't know if M reverting to the previous version is due to the company you worked for being huge or the problem being on Windows Server. On the server side, stability is an important thing.

Fair critique.

Quoting: DerpFoxThis year, an important software, of a company I used to work for, randomly ceased to work on Windows 10. Fortunately, they produced a patch rapidly. "Something" was changed in Windows 10, and they had to update sone of their code for it.

Aint that a blast. Gotta love the "something" part. :tongue:

Quoting: DerpFoxBoth you and I have stories about zombie systems still maintained because something was broken in the Microsoft APIs. So, when I hear Windows API are more stable, I'm a bit sceptic. Particularly when I read people writing things like "I can still run software from Windows 3.x on Windows 10". Yes, they can run some, but the vast majority won't work any more. I think 3.x software started to break around Windows XP era. Even as gamers, how may of our 90s game, can we still start today on Windows 10/11? Not much, same is happening or has already happened with 00s games. And I think I have a couple 2010s games that are starting to act weird.

I'm not sure if that is because of the Win32 API or some other APIs but that was definitely already a case with XP as you noted. For the uninitiated (I envy you) this was when Windows stopped being built as a DOS application and moved to the NT-platform.

And to add to what DerpFox said, it has also been a big pain point for many gamers with the switch to Windows 10, as $SEARCH_ENGINE can tell.

Quoting: DerpFoxI'll now say monster names that will make some Sysadmins have cold sweat. AS400, Sun Solaris, OS/2, HP-UX, DOS.

Geez.. Language, man!

Since you love to throw around scary words like that on poor unsuspecting strangers; I'm gonna have to pay you back and ask if you have read the fine blog by Raymond Chen [External Link]? :grin:

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With my sysadmin/support tech hat on all I can say is: breaking userspace is an absolute NO-NO. If it aint broke, don't break it.

Case A:
At one point Windows server had an update with a breaking change which crashed our test machine; we reported to Microsoft, two days later we got a new update reverting the previous update. Business as usual. We were just one company out of the many many companies that run on Microsoft's platforms, yet they immediately gave us a quick-line to their experts and made a revert because breaking applications is not OK.

Case B:
We had another issue with a small application that relied on an external device to access a proprietary system. The driver for said device only supported Windows 2000. Thus that machine had to be completely quarantined and we had to keep using an old Win2k system just so we keep the application running. Could not get the hardware devs to ship updated drivers or the application devs to ship and update with support for newer hardware because both companies had gone bankrupt and disappeared a decade earlier. Now a decade later I expect that this application is still crucial even though all it was used for is one small function of the application.

This is reality. This is how the situation is for professionals, whether you are talking about IT systems or heck even infrastructure.

PS. Yeah my customers were not your average Pa & Ma's Baking Corner but a global enterprise so yes we had a bit of weight to throw around in case A, and they absolutely had the finances to make a replacement software in case B, but that would take years of development and testing to make sure it still worked the same, and since it was a proprietary system they might not even have been legally able to do it.

PPS. We have seen an analog version of this recently with trains to/from Ukraine and the different gauges for rail tracks. I found a good map on jakubmarian.com [External Link]. Now replace that with glibc versions.

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Quoting: BlackBloodRumIn my view the players who were running with modified clients and harassing people got what they deserved. Should have just kept it civil and not abused the developers trust/acceptance.

Honestly, from what has been said / what was happening this sounds reasonable to me. Shouldn't have abused it..

If abusers got, say banned, that would be fair. But the "issue" is all the innocent that get caught in the crossfire. As the developers wrote on their blog, there are people that make use of modified clients for accessibility issues for instance. They are no longer able to do that.

In other words, the situation is much more shaded than just "derps are upset they can't be asses anymore".

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