The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!

I'd love to see Bethesda, Ubisoft or EA test the waters with a GNU/Linux release or two this year. To be fair, Ubisoft already did in late 2015 with Grow Home, but then for 2016 decided not to bother porting the sequel Grow Up (yet, at least). Too bad they didn't try porting a more well known title, and too bad they released the GNU/Linux port so long after Windows, so not exactly a fair test.

Bethesda is in the best position to start adding GNU/Linux ports. Surely Bethesda took note of how much interest there was in running Doom under Wine - many months after the game was released, no less. Further, unlike EA (with Origin) and Ubisoft (with Uplay), Bethesda don't have a store client. That's one big road block they don't have to contend with. Lastly, Bethesda is the most likely of the three to release a Vulkan-only game, which presumably means less QA work for them to deal with. If they released a game with GNU/Linux support this year, I wouldn't be too surprised (but would be very happy).

Despite my general pessimism, it still looks like 2017 has quite a lot going for it.

Gosh, I so wish you'd be right about that. Bethesda is literally the only publisher not yet on Linux I would love to see starting porting their games. Personally, I couldn't care less about EA or Ubisoft games (I don't own or want any Ubisoft games, and the newest EA game I have is SWTOR, which just had its 5th birthday...). I realize that having their mass-market games would be helpful for our platform in general, but these two haven't made any truly good games in a long, long, long while. What they are churning out is the video game equivalent of Michael Bay movies: Lots of explosions and no substance worth mentioning. Don't need that.

But Bethesda? I am keeping a Windows partition around just for their games. In all honesty, I don't quite understand why some of the bigger publishers are so reluctant to support Linux when they already support Mac. The economies of scale work in their favour even. Our 1-2% market share would translate into a nice extra profit for them, and for a company their size the porting costs would be laughable.

Normally I would say chances to see Beth jump on the Linux train anytime soon are a pretty close approximation to zero. It's not that their CEO had overly nice things to say about Linux. But then again...I didn't think we'd see Square Enix porting a large portion of their more recent AAA catalogue, either. But they did. So..who knows! We're about to get the single most important game of 2017 soon (Civ VI), so we had a good year already and it's just January! Let's see what else will happen. :D

I'm surprised for the best audio, I interpreted it as best audio quality, not necessarily best soundtrack. Deus Ex was the most surprising game I've ever heard on linux, in terms of quality of the audio source. Mad Max was already quite good on that aspect, but wouldn't thought of Life if strange ^^

I'm surprised that Shadow Tactics didn't get more love. I guess there just wasn't enough hype about the game, and thus, not enough people playing it. It's such a fantastic game!

I didn't find Deus Ex: Mankind Divided to be a surprise release. We knew about it coming out for quite some time before it did come out. I personally found Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II to be the biggest surprise. For me that game just came out of nowhere. Have to say I was very happy when it did show up in my library :)

I had a hard time casting my vote for the favorite FOSS project. I probably spent most time with Rebirth over all those years and it was my first impulse to chose it here again. But Dolphin made some pretty amazing leaps the last year so I finally changed my mind. Please put Rebirth up again this year so I can even it out ;)

On the other hand I was surprised to see Wine take the lead. Sure, it is a great project and they manged to surprise everyone with lots of high quality updates last year, but we are finally in a position that lots of games run natively, so I thought this community would show other projects some love.

Regarding the favorite porter, I think we should award Icculus with a lifetime achievement.

Hello, have you got in touch with Feral Support about the download issue? If not, please email [email protected] and we'll do our best to look into it, but it may be an issue with Steam and therefore out of our control.

Yes. Well, there's a big thread about it on the Steam community forums where someone from Feral have responded and said they are looking into it with Valve's help, but it's been silent for quite some time now.

We've had feedback about the warnings, so based on that we've added an option to hide the warnings forever in newer versions of our game launcher. This new game launcher may make it into some of our older games.

That's really good news. Thank you!

We do update the specs for games if we've tested and confirmed that performance is up to our standards (e.g. XCOM 2 recently gained AMD support

That's great, but it seems to be the exception rather than the norm, at least in my experience. I've seen comments from Feral in the Steam forums that basically say the game works fine if you use the proprietary drivers, but not if using an old Mesa version as provided by some distros by default, so maybe you could just say that in the requirements?

I get the 0 byte W: DoW download bug every time I open Steam, too.

I just realised that I had four "updates" of 0 bytes yesterday. If this is what is meant here, then it's not just Feral games. I'll have to check later to see if keep coming back.

Only one thing triggers that for me on other games; I have my games library shared across multiple distros, and if I update a game on one and then go to the other, it has to check that it's up to date - and it'll end up downloading nothing. Of the well over 1000 games in my library, DoW2 is literally the only game that downloads 0kb every single time regardless.

That was just an example of an issue I've had with Feral ports, because it's an issue heaps of people have surely noticed. I've pointed out a number of other issues I've encountered over the year, such as the update to Shadow of Mordor that broke Ubuntu 14.04 just the other day (where you need to copy the Feral game libraries from DoW2 to get it working again).

Like I said previously, receiving frequent updates is great, but I'd rather not receive them if they're not going to get the same level of QA.

It's not just Feral at fault here either. A few days ago there was a big update to Slayaway Camp that broke Steam Cloud on GNU/Linux and made me lose my saves - unless I manually went in and created some hard links on the filesystem to work around the mess. It was otherwise a really neat update - but I'd rather not have had the update at all given the hassles it caused.


Last edited by boltronics on 30 January 2017 at 9:22 pm UTC

I get plenty of games that do a similar thing

Really? Not that I've heard of or seen. Which ones?

people get really freaked out over such tiny things. Would love to have so little on my plate to worry about a random zero byte update in a Steam list...

Way to troll your audience mate.

Bah, Star Citizen is the one of the BC3kADs of our time along with No Man's Sky, a game that promises everything under the sun and probably can't deliver. I'd advise people to tune down their expectations for it until they see what it's ultimate form will actually be. Much more reason to be excited by Torment or any good title that doesn't promise the moon.

Feral's porting pace really does amaze me. It seems like there must be a serious learning curve--once you've done a few games there must be things you know to look for and how to fix so you can get them out of the way quick, or something, because it certainly seems as if Feral can port a game way quicker than, well, most anyone else.

people get really freaked out over such tiny things. Would love to have so little on my plate to worry about a random zero byte update in a Steam list...

Way to troll your audience mate.

It's called a joke, mate. People get irate about such small things. A zero byte download is nothing to get flustered about, so it pops up and does nothing, so what? Yeah they should fix it, but it's not exactly breaking or harming anything is it? It's so low on their list, they have tons of other stuff to fix.

I get zero byte downloads on plenty of workshop items most days, so what?

I get plenty of games that do a similar thing

Really? Not that I've heard of or seen. Which ones?

I get this occasionally too - couldn't even tell you what games, I just ignore it. I had two such zero-byte downloads on Sunday just gone, with two "real" updates. It happens occasionally.

As Liam notes, it's odd how worked up folk get over such a things.

It's called a joke, mate. People get irate about such small things. A zero byte download is nothing to get flustered about, so it pops up and does nothing, so what? Yeah they should fix it, but it's not exactly breaking or harming anything is it? It's so low on their list, they have tons of other stuff to fix.

I get zero byte downloads on plenty of workshop items most days, so what?

You call it a joke, and then go on to explain how it's not a joke. So which is it? Maybe you just call it a joke because you enjoy laughing at people?

I'm opening up Steam all the time when I'm running Wine tests, which I sometimes spend all weekend doing. I used to be able to see immediately what had changed, but now it's not so clear unless I click on Downloads every time. It's particularly annoying because it takes time for it to determine it's a 0kb download, so I basically need to click Downloads maybe a hundred times over the course of a day to check if I'm good to close Steam (or just ignore keeping my prefixes up updated) - yes, I literally have hundreds of Wine prefixes with individual Steam installations for testing. It's not the end of the world, but it's an annoyance. Obviously more for me than for you, but that doesn't make it any less real.

What seems to have been forgotten was that I already explained it was just an example. I gave a second example in a later comment to further illustrate this, which was ignored. Oh well.

I'd love to see Bethesda, Ubisoft or EA test the waters with a GNU/Linux release or two this year. To be fair, Ubisoft already did in late 2015 with Grow Home, but then for 2016 decided not to bother porting the sequel Grow Up (yet, at least). Too bad they didn't try porting a more well known title, and too bad they released the GNU/Linux port so long after Windows, so not exactly a fair test.

And too bad the EULA for Grow Home said "we can install whatever DRM crap we want on your system", which is the reason why I didn’t buy it.

That's a fair point. The game still runs unprivileged, and I have Steam installed under firejail to restrict whatever damage and access Steam has (so it can't see my home directory files, for example). But it doesn't prevent DRM schemes from messing with your ability to reinstall or whatever.

You call it a joke, and then go on to explain how it's not a joke. So which is it? Maybe you just call it a joke because you enjoy laughing at people?

Really...? Are you seriously comparing poking a bit of fun at us all to a complete lack of respect on Liam's part? Is there no part of you that can accept that a zero byte download in your Steam queue is a /r/firstworldproblem and getting worked up about it is a bit silly?

Really...? Are you seriously comparing poking a bit of fun at us all to a complete lack of respect on Liam's part? Is there no part of you that can accept that a zero byte download in your Steam queue is a /r/firstworldproblem and getting worked up about it is a bit silly?

"poking a bit of fun at us all" - that's what you call it? I pointed out an obvious bug (clearly so since apparently everyone knows about it) and then pointed out a second recent bug - which I have indicated multiple times were examples. I could list more, but Liam even said himself, "they have tons of other stuff to fix". Not sure why you feel the need to hassle me for this.

As two of the people who run the site, I would expect more professionalism. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and of course I have no objection to Liam and yourself stating that you disagree. But there's no need to belittle other people in doing so. If you can't see how it may look like that's what you're both doing, then perhaps I'm on the wrong website?

[quote=boltronics]

Not sure why you feel the need to hassle me for this.

You insinuated a lack of respect I didn't agree with. That's not me "hassling" you any more than you were "hassling" Liam in the first place.

As two of the people who run the site

Liam owns the site and I support him via Patreon and contribute the odd article, as indeed anyone can. To be clear, if I step out of line, I'll be banned as quickly as anyone else.

As for being "professional", I personally value the discussion that this site provokes and, unlike Steam, or Reddit, that discussion is usually based on respect, with perhaps a few heated exceptions! If you occasionally don't like the tone of a comment, that's not unprofessional, that's opinion, that's real life. Call it out, by all means, if you find it offensive, but it's easy to lose tone and nuance in a comment, easy to assume insult when none was intended. In the three or four years I've dealt with Liam, I've never found him to be the person you're suggesting he is; someone who laughs at other people for kicks.

To be clear: any porter is on the top of my most favourite list. Icculus has done so many good ports before it was even a thing. So anyone doing ports, thanks!
Furthermore: I mostly disagree with the lists, but heh, I should have taken the time to help compile the list.
Any game that takes more than 100h of my time is a good game I guess. Rocket League was "bundled" with my controller, and I think I looked at it for 10 minutes. As such I am surprised that no-one had mentioned Saints-Row... Which was definetly the surprise of the year 2016 for me. Alien Isolation, tomb raider, mad max, they were all surprising, but still, the biggest surprise was Saints-Row (early 2016), all others were big and happy surprises, but SR just showed me something has really changed. Deus Ex just was the final confirmation.
There were so many top titles in 2016, I cannot play all of them. Each game needs at least 100h from me to enjoy.
FCE for instance is at 1250 hours, Ark probably more than 100, each of the SR series probably all over 100h.
Man, this has to stop, I also need to work!

FCE for instance is at 1250 hours

Suspect the answer might be obvious but... what's FCE?

[quote=scaine]

Not sure why you feel the need to hassle me for this.

You insinuated a lack of respect I didn't agree with. That's not me "hassling" you any more than you were "hassling" Liam in the first place.

From your previous post:
"Really...?"
"Are you seriously"
"Is there no part of you that can accept"
"getting worked up"
"a bit silly?"

I wasn't looking for a debate. You're hassling. It seems you don't even recognize that you're doing it.

We're done here.