In addition to the other package formats, user An0n3m0us on the Minetest forums maintains an Appimage version of Minetest [External Link] on Github.

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Thanks for pointing this game out, I'll have to play it later.

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Wow, this is an incredible bundle for such a low price! Most of these games I have never heard of. Of the ones I had played before, Super Hexagon is probably my favorite.

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I have been a fan of Terry Cavanagh games since 2009ish. I don't have a gamepad, though I'm glad this game is getting support for people who do. Now I got to go replay DD to see the new enemies.

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I think anti-cheat is likely to be the biggest threat of the things you mentioned. Not just to Proton, but to Steam and all Linux gaming. To see why, take a look at Android.

Right now, a lot of big-studio mobile games use a very simple mechanism to detect cheating: they check (or try to check) whether the supposed owner of the phone has root access. If you have root access to your device, they assume you are cheating. If you don't have root access, they assume you aren't cheating.

This method of anti-cheat doesn't always work. For example, in Pokemon Go and other location-based games, the most common type of cheating is location-spoofing, which is possible to do without rooting. Some users have reported location-spoofing without being banned. It's particularly embarrassing on the part of Niantic, because it should (in at least some cases) be possible to detect location-spoofing server-side: if a player travels from North America to Europe to Australia and back to North America in a matter of seconds, they are probably cheating, and you don't need to know what other programs are installed on their phone to figure that out.

Anti-cheating has also become common in single-player mobile games, thanks to the dominance of pay-to-win. In a pay-to-win game, there is already a publisher-approved way to get an in-game advantage: buy IAPs. Publishers are likely to view cheating in a pay-to-win game in a similar manner to how they view illegal downloads of a premium game.

And the vast majority of smartphone-owners don't care. The general public has come to accept that a company who "sells" them a device still has complete control over the device.

Given the increased popularity of iOS and Android among non-techies, and given the fact that the global revenue from mobile games keeps increasing, I think it is only a matter of time before an AAA publisher attempts to do the same thing on PC, and makes a game that can only be played in S Mode. The deciding factor in the future of AAA gaming will be how Windows users react to such a restriction.

In the best-case scenario, most Windows-gamers won't be willing to give up the ability to install apps from outside the Microsoft store just to play one game. Hence, whichever game is S-mode-only will be a commercial failure, and publishers will be discouraged from trying to do the same thing in the future.

In the worst-case scenario, Windows users will willingly enable S-mode just to play one AAA game. Since s-mode only allows users to install apps from the Microsoft store, that could create a death spiral for Steam and other storefronts: anyone who switches to s-mode for one game would have to buy all of their other games from the Microsoft Store, which would increase the market share of the Microsoft Store, which in turn might convince other publishers that they wouldn't lose many customers if they made their games s-mode only.

If the worst-case occurs, I think that would be the end of (legally) playing AAA games on open platforms. Publishers will get the idea that they can prevent cheating or illegal downloads by making their games playable only on console-like locked down platforms. If they ever allow their games to come to Linux after that, it would only be to a variant of Linux that was as locked-down as iOS and Android.

As a Linux user, I really, really, hope I am wrong about all of my predictions above.

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I hope UE5 has good support for both Linux and WebGL (and WebGPU when that eventually becomes a thing). But I'm not particularly optimistic about either given the state of UE4.

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Quoting: SeegrasFinally...

https://web.archive.org/web/20100301103851/http://www.minecraft.net/about.jsp [External Link]

"Once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source. I'm not very happy with the draconian nature of (L)GPL, nor do I believe the other licenses have much merit other than to boost the egos of the original authors, so I might just possibly release it all as public domain. "

Notch only said he would release the source once sales died down. Minecraft is still selling a lot (at least Bedrock Edition is).

And in any case, Notch is no longer in charge.

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I'm excited to see, it's really impressive that they managed to make an open source engine with this much quality. Debian Unstable/Testing seems to have fallen behind in updates for Flare--I hope they get caught up soon.

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I'm curious what exactly is meant by "Dwarf Fortress inspired." My favorite aspect of DF is the rich fictional history of the world and the procedurally generated stories in adventure mode. A lot of games that are "inspired by" Dwarf Fortress don't have that. Minecraft, for example, has essentially no generated story or characters. I like all the procedurally generated terrain and enviroments in Minecraft, but what I really want is another game with DF-esk world story/history/character generation that is somewhat easier to play than DF itself.

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