Quoting: STiATHmh, I could not find why they forked it from wine. As a dev branch to be faster paced than wine or is it for technical reasons?

I know wine is quite conservative, but was that the reason for the fork?

Most likely for organizational purposes. Doing a fork gives you a clean environment for bug reporting, pull requests, branching etc. It can then easily be turned into a pull request for merging back into upstream.

It is a very common way of doing development. And is often the recommended approach.

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Quoting: x_wingthere is a chance that a third party can exploit this backdoor and create a business around it that will definitely simplify the steps that a user has to follow in order to get their games for cheaper.

Correct.
This is a basic property of free market capitalism.

The solution to this is for publishers to lower prices to the lowest common denominator. If this leads to their products no longer being profitable, then the product is unsustainable and they will have to either lower production costs or pick a higher price and focus on a different subset of the market.

One example of the former is indie-games, an example of the later is Apple.

Quoting: MalHonestly as a European I don't dislike the single market. The implementation though is sloppy in multiple ways. But it would be unfair to deny that it improved over the years and it will likely improve more in future.

Agreed.

For anyone unfamiliar with EU, a lot of the mess comes from it being a democracy. Don't get me wrong though, democracy while not perfect is the best we got or as Churchill put it 'Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.'

Here is a rough diagram:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Organs_of_the_European_Union.svg

Basically everything is a compromise between different member states (recursively), with "EU" as a concept being represented by the EU Commission.

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Quoting: x_wing

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: x_wingBased on what it's written here Steam may not be able to restrict the access to the Russian store nor reject a credit card that is located in the EU.

But what's written there applies only to the EU, except if I missed or misinterpreted something.
I don't think anything in there applies to outside of the EU (like Russia).

You're right on that. Applied EU rules to any country of Europe... silly me.

Don't feel too bad, geo-politics are a mess... :/

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Supranational_European_Bodies-en.svg

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There is so much wrong with this thread it is honestly kinda scary.

Quoting: mphuZ

Quoting: TheSHEEEPThis is NOT about regional pricing, it is about region locking within the EU.

Do you understand that one thing leads to another? No?
What do you think will happen if the geo-blocking is removed? That's right - everyone will run to buy games from other countries at a reduced price.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope

The geo-blocking has been removed for more than 5 years, and it didn't exist before Steam implemented it back in 2010. It only existed for 5 years and gaming did fine before and still does fine. The EEA has been around since 1994.

Quoting: mphuZ

Quoting: TheSHEEEPwent shopping (groceries, etc.)

Why are you comparing grocecies and digital products? You will not constantly order products from other countries for the sake of saving? I agree that this is not fair to honest users who bought the game on the territory of their country, and could not play it on a business trip because of geo-blocking. But this geo-blocking is aimed at freeloaders who want to get games for 10% of the price in their region.

Because that's how an economic area works, anyone living in the EEA have the legal and moral right to go shop wherever they want within the EEA, any company can choose to market their goods in the EEA as long as they play by the rules. We here might enjoy games more than most in the world but games are just another goods. Nothing special about it.

Quoting: mphuZ

Quoting: TheSHEEEPThose of us within the EU who know how to make a deal...

It is because of people like you that geo-blocking was created.
Can you suggest a better solution for sellers and buyers - suggest.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem

QuoteThe elimination of region locks will also mean that publishers will likely raise prices in less affluent regions to avoid price arbitrage.

Regional locks where never allowed, the companies listed broke pre-existing law and had to pay the consequence. If you are a EU-citizen and disagree with said law, contact your representative. But you better prepare some better arguments to get through the queue.

Regional prices for less affluent areas in the EEA or any other part of the world are not going anywhere. There are over 400 million people living in the EU, no sane publisher will limit themselves to only a quarter of that market.

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Quoting: dpanterBTRFS as default on a desktop distro... guess we'll find out how that experiment turns out before long.

openSUSE have done done it for a few years now, seems to generally work fine. It is also better tuned to be used as a default for the general masses than ext4 these days since it allows things like checksumming, compression, snapshots and copy-on-write while still being a widely used and integrated system compared to say ZFS.

Your average user or gamer will not be limited by the performance difference compared to EXT4 or XFS and can in some cases actually benefit from compression for reduced load-times on rotational drives.

For average Joe it doesn't really matter which file system crashes, they are not going to be fixing attempting to fix it regardless so the confusing docs are not really an issue either.

With my support-technician-hat on, I think it is a rather good default, and those that know they have specific demands also have the know-how to choose one that suits our workload better.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeWelcome to the USA. Where ultra violence is fine and sometimes encouraged. But don't you dare say a naughty word or try to see anyone fully naked!
(Had to bring that up as I was just getting into Conan Exiles again, where I had to order the UK version of the game so that the glory of full nude option is there on the PS4).

Good old Puritans.

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In general this sounds good to me.

The only thing I'm curious about is the international aspect. A lot of these filters tend to be very Anglo-centric which can be annoying when trying to converse in a native tongue. For instance one that has frequently tripped me and my friends up is the Swedish word for end which is a homograph of an English word that is sometimes used as an insult to a woman and thus understandably filtered.

There is also a similar issue within the Anglo-sphere, for instance with the common British word for a cigarette is a homonym of a derogatory term for homosexuals in the USA.

So if I want the filter to apply even to Friends, I won't be able to see or use that word while speaking my native language unless Steam is able to account for that, which sounds like a hard nut to crack for sure. Sure glad that isn't my job...

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Quoting: SchattenspiegelWhen did it become ok, for companies, to openly post data, that they have needlessly mined from single player games, as advertisement?

It not really needlessly mined. Paradox actually uses that data to guide their development, you can see mentions of that in the developer diaries for all their games.

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Holy Moly, that is a lengthy patch note!

Time to bring out the larger coffee mug and get to reading.

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This seems like an interesting project. Will give it a go for sure.

Quoting: fagnerlnThis GameScope looks really interesting, it really needs a specific release of Mesa? I don't want to mess with Mesa driver, I'm already using the Oibaf PPA

It works fine here with normal Mesa 20.1.7 or above, the tricky part is really just that it isn't wildly packaged yet. I put some details on how to get it compiled on Ubuntu and Fedora in a previous thread here.

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