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Thank you for your response.

Quoting: TechnopeasantThe main issue is that Linux has never really had any exclusives. For most of our history we have been a very small fish in a large pond, so the majority of our commercial titles have been ports or developed cross-platform.

We didn’t have too many exclusive titles for Linux, but we had some commercial games developed on Linux and ported to other systems.

I switched to Linux because I noticed that I can play commercial games on this system, and I didn’t have many games from Windows that I wanted to play. I didn’t have these issues because I couldn’t be an experienced Windows gamer after more than a year of using it.

In 2004, I noticed that I could play Serious Sam, SOF, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Majesty and many companies were releasing new games for Linux every year. Many source ports for AVP, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen, and others were available for Linux. It wasn’t a system for users playing the very specific genre of games, including World War 2 first-person shooters, because we had a few of them. I had to be less picky and choose between different genres of games if I wanted to have a better experience with Linux. Next, it wasn’t a system for users interested in playing AAA games every month. Rather, some of them + indie games.

Sadly, we didn’t have the online store with more than 40 games because everything was fragmented, and the majority of companies had their own online store with 1-3 games. Desura and USC partially fixed this problem, but they didn’t survive.

Quoting: TechnopeasantMeanwhile, our independent games have largely been free and open source (Tux Racer, SuperTux, Tux games in general), which is objectively great, but it does mean that most of these also saw releases on Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, and your toaster.

Indie games are a very interesting topic when it comes to commercial games for Linux.

Let’s focus on Linux without looking at Windows, Mac, AmigaOS, Morph OS, AIX, or even HP-UX with two commercial games (SimCity and Dominions). We had some well-known titles released for Linux between 1994 and 2000, with some rare releases of indie games. I only focus on comparing games released for Linux, including triple-A titles and indie games, released every year.

In 2001, indie games had become more noticeable on Linux with Mobility, Bunnies, Odyssey By Car, Absolute Patience, and many others. From now on, small companies have started releasing more indie games than commercial triple-A titles for Linux. Back then, every company released one or two indie games for Linux. Meanwhile, the popular games had been published mostly by LGP, Runesoft, ID, etc., and some of them were frequently ported to Linux by Ryan Gordon. They gradually became a minority among indie games.

Companies like GarageGames and Absolutist were among those with the highest number of indie games published for Linux. The general growth of commercial games continued to 2010-2011. In 2010, we didn’t have any triple-A titles for Linux, but just indie games, and we had many more of these.

For example, Kristanix Games released 11 games for Linux, which was incredible.
Many new companies joined, including Blendo Games, Kot-in-Action, Lost Luggage Studios, and Red27 Studios, among others. The success of HIB and the availability of Desura and USC probably motivated Valve to release Steam for Linux.

Quoting: TechnopeasantThe only ones that didn't were either games that were never popular enough to begin with (and so were forgotten regardless), or titles that were directly tied to Linux/Unix only libraries such as the early X11 games (which were mostly clones of arcade games anyway). Simply put, there has never been a reason by and large where you HAD to run Linux in order to experience a given game.

What was more important for me was whether Linux had more or fewer commercial games released every year. For example, Voltley, which was exclusively available for Linux, was an interesting tidbit. However, we had some games developed on Linux, including Inner Worlds, Professor Fizzwizzle, and, less popular, The Last Sorcerer. Maybe, more.

Quoting: TechnopeasantMeanwhile, Mac OS had a shareware scene even during the darkest of times for that platform, through the likes of Ambrosia Software and similar (most notably early Bungie), not to mention all the amateur games made in Hypercard. The Amiga meanwhile had developers that adopted it when it was genuinely a leading game platform (and had many releases where the Amiga version was considered the superior version to the DOS release), and even in its twilight its attempts to keep up with the PC were still unique, such as Doom-clones like Gloom and Alien Breed 3D.

I don't think it's necessary constantly look back at other systems. Many users are unfamiliar with commercial titles released for Linux in the past. In this discussion, @Technopeasant found a game, Last Defender, which I never heard of during 22 years of using Linux.

Comparisons to other systems are important and interesting, but are too well-known topics for many who read these comments. I can give you more examples. However, it's difficult for me criticize companies for just trying to port more games to Linux. Many other systems existed years before Linux.

Sam Lantinga and Loki developed libraries that became more successful for other systems. Linux has survived many difficult situations, including the disappearance of major companies like Loki or LGP, as well as the loss of interest in porting games by notable developers such as ID Software or Runesoft. There were many others, but it's not part of this discussion. I appreciate every one of them for doing what they could and helping me play many great games.

Quoting: TechnopeasantLoki's Sam Latinga even touched upon this when he admitted that if he were to do it all over again he would have developed original Linux games instead of ports. Maybe he was right.

It's an interesting opinion from a person who created SDL, and we didn't have most of these games for Linux without his project. Everyone can agree or disagree.

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Yeah, sure the diehard privacy enthusiasts will move to self-hosted, the intermediates to Stoat or Matrix, but the vast majority will stay on Discord. Remember when Minecraft was bought by MS and then required XBOX Live accounts for signin? Most people didn't care, some complained, exceedingly few switched.

I think the solution could be to fund some privacy advocate group that would identify likely flash points of (privacy) enshittification and direct resources to preemptively making the open-source alternative comparably good enough (like OBS, Blender, Firefox). So that when there is a point of community lash back a clear outlet alternative exists, covering not 70% but 99% of use cases.

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So the Valve parity allows that on steam a game can be sold at any price. Then Valve gives publishers steam keys, the only requirement of those steam keys is that if they sell them elsewhere they must give as good of a deal on that market as they do on Steam and vice versa.

Now the publisher can still sell their game on any other platform/market (xbox, playstation, Epic, EA, etc.) and sell it at any price to include free (Epic Games). There has been many games given away free on Epic Games which is also on Steam but has never gone free on Steam. Recently there was a video on YouTube that I watched that talked about how a publisher had a free game on Epic games but had way better reception and sales on Steam during the same time. https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/turns-out-having-your-game-be-free-on-epic-is-great-advertising-for-steam-sales-new-blood-chief-says-blood-west-sold-like-200-percent-more-the-day-it-was-a-freebie-on-egs/

Slay the Spire has been noted for having a significantly lower price on mobile than on Steam.

Blood West, games are regularly given away for free on the Epic Games Store while remaining at a price on Steam.

Ubisoft and EA often run sales on their own launchers (Ubisoft Connect, EA App) that are not mirrored on Steam, even for the same game.

Now anti steering. Below is a list of games on Steam that steer you to their own website for in game content that you can buy.

Final Fantasy XIV, Warframe, Eve Online, and Elder Scrolls online. There are more but I think this shows that they allow off Steam in game microtransactions.

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Quoting: Linux_RocksNow if we could only get The Back to the Future and Jurassic Park Telltale Games relisted somehow. Might just buy them physically for the Xbone at this point. D:

I had totally forgot about Back to the Future! Amazingly my 17 year old Telltale account is still active, and downloads work....

I even unknowingly had Puzzle Agent on there! Here I was convinced I pirated it back in the day! That's one less crime to do penance for come next confession! 😇

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Quoting: ArehandoroWhat's the main difference between The Last Express and The Last Express Gold Edition? Is it a good remaster? Although, at that price, not that it matters... 😅

The Gold Edition isn't supported in ScummVM, if that's important for you?

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finished the episode today! Just want to say I think you did REALLY well Liam. You have a very down to earth, calm, and educated stance on things that comes across very well. Keep doing more episodes please!

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Quoting: Axel Ekholm I like the art style. Waiting for reviews 🙂

Not surprising. The "moomin" art style has been widely beloved for decades. I have the books on my shelf from when I was a kid, must have got them like 50 years ago. I should really have another look.

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🧀🔫🐁

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Now if we could only get The Back to the Future and Jurassic Park Telltale Games relisted somehow. Might just buy them physically for the Xbone at this point. D:

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How lovely, I had no idea these were a thing! Quite appropriate too as I'm in the middle of (re) reading the books!

It is available subtitled in Swedish too! Anything else would just be plain wrong. I still consider it heresy that the Moomin cookies (produced in Finland) say Moomin Biscuits on the box and not Muminkex! 😫

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Definitely going to buy this. Don't care much about co-op, but stoked in general. There's so many games now sortakindamaybe like it, but I've never found myself sinking the hours into other ones I've tried. Slay the Spire just gets things very right somehow.

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Quoting: GustyGhost

Quoting: Jarmerall models out of stock in the usa still.

I'm gonna just keep saying it:

BURST BURST BURST!!! LETS HAVE A BURST PARTY!

This will likely be the new landscape indefinitely. Gaming and client devices will have to battle for scraps as they get pushed out to far orbit from the interests of industry. I think we are entering a period of time where innovation in software is going to define successes in gaming and in end user devices.

Dunno about indefinitely. There are two sources of inflection in this situation. First, the AI bubble will very likely burst, and it's a big bubble, and there are various other instabiliities in the world economy which may get tipped over by the AI crash. All those data centres no longer getting built, combined with a major worldwide recession, may result in a shift from undersupply to oversupply of hardware.

In the slightly longer term, China's gonna start making all this stuff because their access to foreign supply is either already being restricted or they don't trust the world, particularly the US, not to start at some point. They're ramping up efforts to be self-sufficient in production of high end computer stuff, and they are succeeding pretty fast, and we know that when China starts producing something for itself it then makes masses more and sells it to everyone else. So, at some point Chinese supply will glut the market.

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^ yep. ebay is climbing up towards 1000+ for used models. New / unused ones forget about it.

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Quoting: mr-victory

Quoting: scaineBut... again, this isn't what I'm talking about when I disparage genAI. From the article:

I tried to find a short source as I recalled that something akin to GenAI was used in this specific discovery, instead of checking the content of the source. My bad.

PS: If I use at least 2 quotes or links, do I end up in the mod queue?

It's just any external link, or embedded picture, I believe. Sadly, quoting a post with a link in it will also trigger the queue.

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Quoting: ArehandoroI wonder when will we start seeing crazy pricing for second hand devices in 2nd hand markets because of this.

Already happening. I see scalpers already, pricing just under 1000€ for a unit.
Take techdweebs latest video and see if you can get by with a pocket handheld instead. :D

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Quoting: clatterfordslim

Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: princecThe latest drivers from Nvidia completely ruined my XFCE experience unfortunately, entirely breaking the compositor, which had to be turned off. Attempting to drop back down to the (known working) 570 drivers left me in "broken computer hell", booting to a black screen, which took a couple of days to fix. Grr. I am loathe to try the new 580 drivers as it's probably still the case that XFCE is broken.

I will probably have to accept that Mint really wants me to use Cinnamon instead, which I suppose is no great hardship.

I am running Linux Mint 22 XFCE with the 580 series driver. I haven't experienced the problems you've described. I'm on an older GPU, however. I also run at a resolution of no more than 1920x1080 (usually 1440x810 in game). Perhaps that accounts for the difference.

Maybe try @clatterfordslim's suggestion? Might work with the 580 series driver as well.

Quoting: jkaart

Quoting: clatterfordslim

Quoting: princecThe latest drivers from Nvidia completely ruined my XFCE experience unfortunately, entirely breaking the compositor, which had to be turned off.

You have to turn the inbuilt v_blank off inside of xfwm to fix the screen flickering, after installing the newish 590.48.01 driver.
Here is the fix, unless you already know then ignore.
xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/vblank_mode -s off
Then reboot your system. Switch on Pipeline Composition in NVIDIA-Settings and you won't have any more problems.

Have you give any source for this fix?

Originally Leo the AI companion in Brave-Browser came up with it, but here is where he got it from.
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=311088

Scroll down the page you'll see someone had posted the solution. It worked for me too and have no more screen flickering.

Interesting. I'm pretty sure I'm not using the nvidia-open-dkms driver. Sounds like that might be the source of the problem. At least there's a fix.

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The 1977-82 stop-motion tv series (shown in the UK between 1983-85) scared the underwear off younger me :-) This one sounds less scary!

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Quoting: ShadowXeldronI'd say this is fair. AI generated contributions have significant quality concerns so I'd probably block them as well if I was a maintainer.

Not sure how to phrase that without being overly mean to the visuals of that game... But I am not sure in much danger it is from AI generated content having a negative quality impact on its looks.

That they want to play it safe until the legal side is sorted out is a different topic. I probably would, too. Cases currently making it through the system do not indicate any change in the status quo: AI generated content isn't copyrightable, and thus no claims against its use can be made, unless in extreme cases (e.g. using a model to generate images of Queen Elsa, which is a copyrighted character). But I can still understand why they play it safe.

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I like the art style. Waiting for reviews 🙂

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Quoting: Jarmerall models out of stock in the usa still.

I'm gonna just keep saying it:

BURST BURST BURST!!! LETS HAVE A BURST PARTY!

This will likely be the new landscape indefinitely. Gaming and client devices will have to battle for scraps as they get pushed out to far orbit from the interests of industry. I think we are entering a period of time where innovation in software is going to define successes in gaming and in end user devices.

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I wonder when will we start seeing crazy pricing for second hand devices in 2nd hand markets because of this.

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Quoting: scaineBut... again, this isn't what I'm talking about when I disparage genAI. From the article:

I tried to find a short source as I recalled that something akin to GenAI was used in this specific discovery, instead of checking the content of the source. My bad.

PS: If I use at least 2 quotes or links, do I end up in the mod queue?

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What's the main difference between The Last Express and The Last Express Gold Edition? Is it a good remaster? Although, at that price, not that it matters... 😅

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Quoting: g000hPeople are already being manipulated into not having fully functional computers any more.

i wouldn't say manipulated. Most everyday 'consumers' are completely tech illiterate & just use what they see as a great way to communicate as easy as possible.

That said the current Ai push just feels like a giant ponzi scheme.

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Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: hardpenguinIf you are not hating on AI yet, you have a good reason to start now.

I don't hate "AI" as a tech. Machine learning/neural networks have had very good applications for decades since it is very effective in certain tasks. What I hate is the LLM/GenAI fueled hype machine that is created as a smokescreen over unrealistic promises of future potential. An attempt to try to bind as many people as they can before the house of cards collapses. Luckily this hard push is causing serious quality issues, which at least turns a significant portion of the public against it even beyond those wanting a new GPU or extra RAM.

Oh, you can definitely wholesale hate "AI" as a tech, as it doesn't exist. "AI" is a buzzword that means nothing concrete. If something is selling itself on "AI", there's a good chance it's smoke and mirrors. As you touched on, the actual technologies are called Machine Learning and Large Language Models (one could argue that "GenAI" could be a term for a category, but I'd still rather call them generative models, to not confuse things with the nonsense that is "AI").

In other words:
"The program uses ML to categorize your photo gallery locally" = fine, that makes sense.
"Our advanced AI handles all your photo needs" = marketing bullshit which may or may not include sending your private data off to a hastily built data centre that's likely not following environmental safety laws or guidelines.

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I feel I'm one bad sector, one failed memtest away from being radicalized...

Oh look at that, it's cheaper to buy an [AR-15 than 64 GB of RAM](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1r9eykc/its_cheaper_to_buy_an_ar15_rifle_than_64gb_of/?share_id=YIrgv7yXMQ6rDYsGGj-Bw&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1), how convenient!

(Joking of course!)

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Must buy on day 1 for me! So excited to see a coop mode. The board game already had this and it is so much fun! Hope it is also couch coop, so that I can play with my gf.

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all models out of stock in the usa still.

I'm gonna just keep saying it:

BURST BURST BURST!!! LETS HAVE A BURST PARTY!

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We hold that AI-generated content generally stands on dubious ethical and legal grounds, as it violates the copyright of creators whose work was scraped for the AI's training data set without their permission and without due attribution. Also, we find that it is frequently of low overall quality and/or is overly generic and fails to embrace requirements specific to Widelands.

Pull requests that have been generated by AI may in the future be closed without review.

🥰❤️

Absolutely love this. I think this is an excellent summary of the whole shebang. It's:

1- ethically wrong
2- legally wrong
3- created by stealing source material
4- resulting in low quality garbage

LOVE. I don't even know this game, but now I do, and I love it! Installing via the cachy repo right now and will give it a go.

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Quoting: EhvisI don't hate "AI" as a tech. Machine learning/neural networks have had very good applications for decades since it is very effective in certain tasks. What I hate is the LLM/GenAI fueled hype machine that is created as a smokescreen over unrealistic promises of future potential. An attempt to try to bind as many people as they can before the house of cards collapses.

Nitpicking but yes. Obviously ML can be pretty great.

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