The number of people who have stuck with Windows 7 is a blessing for Linux since it's held back adoption of DX12. It's made a more stationary target. Hopefully those people stick with Windows 7 a little longer or switch to Linux, so we can keep it up, and hopefully if DX12 does become mainstream we'll be ready before it happens. It really does help with pushing Vulkan too, the longer Windows 7 survives and the more users Linux can get, the more attractive Vulkan becomes. If only Apple had gone with Vulkan for Mac.. x_x

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Quoting: Salvatos

Quoting: gradyvuckovicSee this is one of those things that doesn't look "sexy" in a changelog for a distro and which most Linux distro users aren't crying out for, but look at how much it's hurting us. If Linux had great multilingual support, we could boost our numbers much higher and maybe already be at 2% on Steam. We have to address this problem somehow and make it a priority.

It's just one more area where fragmentation isn't doing us any favors. Every different desktop manager translates its own menus and configuration panels from scratch even though they all control pretty much the same settings, every take on a Bluetooth manager needs interface strings to describe essentially the same controls, every image editor needs its own documentation translated... Launchpad alleviated this problem in part by suggesting existing translations from other projects on the platform, but it has been largely unusable for years and many projects have moved out to other, more modern translation platforms. Some of those can leverage their own translation memories or pull suggestions from machine translation systems, but they're still scattered and often retranslating the same things over and over. Many smaller projects just give you a .po file to handle on your own or just expect you to search through their git repository and make pull requests for whatever language files you can find.

In many cases I've seen, joining and keeping up with a project's translation efforts is also more of a hassle than it ought to be. You have to create new accounts here or there, get approved, build a program from source (reminder: we're translators if even that, not programmers), use this or that translation tool, upload your translations as git pull requests or e-mail them as attachments to a random guy... It's a goddamn mess and more often than not you get no context for the strings you're translating (I'll never stop saying that context is *everything* in translation) and you don't have any style guide or term base/glossary to reference to ensure consistency with the rest of the project. Often as not you're not even sure whether you're supposed to escape quotes with a backslash or use HTML entities for things like non-breaking spaces. Every damn project has its own workflow and expects you to hit refresh regularly on whatever page their translations or code live on to see if there are new untranslated strings that need attention. As a result you have unfinished translations sitting idly for months just because nobody noticed that a dev added a couple lines of code and pushed a new release three months back, until one of the users notices English text in one of their apps and goes to fix it, after which it takes another six months for the localized text to make it into a release (true story).

It would be a *dream* to have a monolithic platform like Launchpad take the stage again and not only standardize the translation interface itself but really encompass and streamline the entire workflow and create an extensive, shared repository where, over time, localizers would spend more time reviewing suggestions and less time rewriting the same stuff or jumping through hoops.

Wow, I needed to vent.

Anyway, all this is to say that it would be easier to get translation workforce on board if the relevant people didn't have to go through all that, and easier to make a concerted effort (possibly via bounties or other types of crowdfunding) to enhance the Chinese corpus for example if you didn't have to settle on a limited set of distribution/desktop/programs to work on at the detriment of all others (i.e. if your contributions to one project's localization could be largely reused in several others).

Thankyou for venting you raise amazing points. I really love your ideas, they deserve to be spread far and wide. This is absolutely something we should all be paying attention to.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: gradyvuckovicIs there anything which could be done to make Linux more attractive to use in China? Because as a free to use OS it could do very well in China if it gained some popularity. Are Linux distros perhaps lacking in some translations for Chinese? Because that's seriously a big potential market for users and it is in fact the Chinese market that seems to pull down Linux's userbase numbers everywhere, including on Steam. We really need to do something about that.

I'm no expert on it, just started learning Chinese, but I already noticed a bit:

Certainly a large number of apps lack localization, including but not limited to Chinese. Basically, using linux at the moment assumes you know English rather well if you use anything that goes beyond large apps like Steam.
Adding to that, I'm sure fonts are a problem with some apps as well. Especially with somewhat older apps, I don't think too many could even display Chinese.

As further proof of how fragmentation hurts, there are basically two standards for language support, ibus and fcitx (there are actually more [External Link], but afaik those are the big ones). Needless to say, that isn't helping anyone, just making things more complicated.

None of the input methods I tried are as good as the one in Windows. None look as good, nor are they as smooth.

Hotkeys to change between input methods vary for distribution/window manager and/or installed input framework. It's a mess. At the very least, distro devs should stick their heads together and set some standards all adhere to. We all know this will never happen.

Honestly, if nobody takes some cash into their hands and funds some serious effort, I do not think this will ever improve too much.

See this is one of those things that doesn't look "sexy" in a changelog for a distro and which most Linux distro users aren't crying out for, but look at how much it's hurting us. If Linux had great multilingual support, we could boost our numbers much higher and maybe already be at 2% on Steam. We have to address this problem somehow and make it a priority.

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So next major update for Proton, expect a rebase of Wine up to version 4.2 and rebase of DXVK up to version 1.0!

That coupled with some other improvements and whatever magic Valve can add on top, and tada, can't wait to watch those stats on protondb slowly rise up!

And thankyou YoRHa-2B for your fantastic work, you're doing amazing stuff and we love it.

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Is there anything which could be done to make Linux more attractive to use in China? Because as a free to use OS it could do very well in China if it gained some popularity. Are Linux distros perhaps lacking in some translations for Chinese? Because that's seriously a big potential market for users and it is in fact the Chinese market that seems to pull down Linux's userbase numbers everywhere, including on Steam. We really need to do something about that.

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That's fantastic.

If you want to see Linux succeed and you're a gamer on Steam, buy buy buy! Grab all those native Linux games. Hopefully by being generous with our wallets we can make up for our smaller userbase and devs will recognise that we're worth selling games to even if we're a smaller number of users on Steam.

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I think the key takeaway is that Linux isn't dying but it isn't growing as much as we'd like either.

We can either argue over who is to blame for that and complain about the unwillingness of companies to support Linux and whinge about ignorant people spreading FUD about Linux and refusing to give it a go..

Or we can try to change the situation by focusing all our efforts into making Linux even better.

Valve has the right idea of trying to improve the UX of gaming on Linux and get it up to par with gaming on Windows. They know Linux has potential but they also know no one was going to switch to Linux without the gaming situation improving first. We all need to adopt that level of realism. But there's only so much Valve can do, at the end of the day the Linux community needs to all be focused 100% on constantly improving Linux and making it easier and more inviting to use and develop for every day, to be self critical of its flaws, to fix them as fast as possible. We have to make Linux so damn good that no one will want to use anything else.

To say Linux is on life support is pretty harsh and unjustified. Linux is in a better position now than ever. More work in recent years has gone into making Linux stable, user friendly, supporting more hardware, simplifying developing for Linux, and simplifying installing software, improving the whole user experience of getting/installing/using Linux, etc, than ever.

And Linux is a stronger desktop OS competitor to Windows/Mac in 2019 than its ever been before. Of course there's a lot more to do but desktop Linux is far from on life support.

We just need to keep at it. Every little thing we can do to help the cause is worth it. Donations to distros/open source software projects, buying games and software for Linux from commercial companies, even just web browsing using Linux so it shows up stats, talking about it online, contributing feedback to devs for UX improvements, Linux 'HowTo' videos targetted at everyday users, etc. Every little bit counts.

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Darksiders 3!

Runs almost flawlessly through Proton and looks wonderful. Absolutely loving it, awesome main character and story, fun and challenging combat. I think it's underrated but then I never played Darksiders 1 or 2..

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Non-gaming related, but good news regardless, I noticed a serious improvement in the stability and usability of Photoshop 2015 with Wine 4.1. I'm not sure exactly what they fixed which did it, but several of the tools in Photoshop just flat out didn't work before, like the clone stamp would produce an error every time you tried to use it. Now it seems most of those errors have stopped, and it's mostly just minor UI related bugs that are an issue.

Overall I'd say it's gone from "This is unusable, it's nearly functional but it's not practical to use this, especially if you're a professional graphic designer in an office." to "This is actually functional, I could just get by with and manage using this in an office."

I haven't tried other versions of Photoshop but that's still a great sign anyway, since really 2015 isn't that different to 2016/2017/2018, it's not like they rewrote the software every year. So yeah, that's huge for me, it means if I need Photoshop, I no longer need a VM! :D

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Gofundme for EAC Proton support when?

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