On this game in particular, I think their realising they'd bitten off more than they can chew, early, and giving refunds to their affected customers, is over all a good thing. Upping their skill levels so they could provide a well-supported product would be better (and would help their development on their other platforms), but limping along selling a badly-supported product under false pretences would be much worse.

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Quoting: TermyNot great - but as the explicitly said they will make sure it is tested on proton, i'm halfway fine with that.

Exactly halfway for me: explicitly having Proton as a development and testing target means that I'd get a game at 50% off, rather than at full price if they'd had Linux as a development and testing target.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeThe scale difference of how much Red hat improves Linux as a whole vs how much Ubuntu does is kind of staggering.

Canonical revenue 2021: $93 million.
Red Hat revenue 2021: $5.6 billion.

Gee, I wonder why Red Hat may be able to do more than Canonical can.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guyslaapliedje might be overstating, but so are you.

Nope. The bullshit from the tinfoil hat-wearing 4chan/Reddit/Phoronix crowd is bullshit. If you want to use snaps, use snaps; if you don't want to use snaps, don't use snaps. Either way, snaps resolving their issues is a good thing.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeEvery corporation has an agenda... to make money. Canonical's best way to make money is to try to get as much vendor lock-in that they can, without pissing off the community enough that someone switches to a different distro. Snap and them being the only ones who can host a snap store is their method of lock-in.

That's just nonsense. Canonical make zero money from desktop Ubuntu users. They make money, like Red Hat/IBM do, by offering paid support and services. Snaps make that hugely easier for their actual customers, and for themselves as maintainers. They might also have made money from the Ubuntu Phone, which snaps were largely created for, but they ran out of money before that could become a thing.

Snaps only come from one place to solve the discovery issue that PPAs have, and which Fedora users experience from flatpaks where they have access to some flatpaks but not all of them. All the snaps are available in one place - accessible by default for Ubuntu users and trivial to add for users of other distros (except Mint, who put up additional barriers in the way of user choice).

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Quoting: soulsourceA Mozilla developer posted about Snap (and Flatpak) just recently, and I think it's a very interesting read.

Especially since it was Mozilla that asked Canonical to replace the repository version of Firefox with the snap.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, sure, but the existing Linux bit of that 132 million is a titch over 1%, so like 1.5 million, max. A couple of million units would more than double that. So I would have expected if sales were high, the variations in the sampling would not normally be enough to make Linux numbers actually fall.

No. The 132 million is the number of users that were on Steam in a particular month, not the total number of users. The total number of users is higher, but how much higher only Valve knows, and to estimate how much higher you'd need a model of which proportion of users would be online in a particular month, which we also don't have.

We can estimate (assuming that all Deck users are active, because they've just bought a new shiny, and that one hardware sample = one user, which isn't realistic but getting better than that approximation would be super hard) that the total active Steam Linux user base is five times larger than the number of Decks sold, since SteamOS is only 20% of the distros sampled by the survey, and the total active Steam user base is 80 times bigger than that. You get a similar Steam Deck is 1/400th of the Steam user base estimate if you look at the GPU stats: the Deck's GPU is 0.27% of the GPUs surveyed.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyYeah . . . but I was really expecting, given the apparent success of the Steam Deck, that it would kind of swamp all that variability.

The Steam user base is huge, with 132 million monthly active users. There are 20 million people on Steam right now. A couple of million units is just a drop in the ocean. If the Steam Deck sold as many as the best selling console ever (PS2, 155 million) to brand new, never on Steam before, customers, the Steam user base would be less than twice as big.

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Quoting: Eike-0.11% last month. Is a million Steam Decks or two not enough to compensate for Steam's growth?!?

Linux Steam is growing marginally faster than Steam as a whole (check Liam's trend line), but the data is just a sample rather than a continuous measurement of the whole so the data is noisy. In particular, samples with a higher proportion of respondents in China (where Linux usage is essentially non-existent) than respondents in Europe or the USA (where Linux usage is in the low single digits) will show the Linux share dropping, even if Linux is growing overall.

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Quoting: JarmerInteresting update for sure! I remember adding this to my wishlist years ago - honestly had forgotten all about it. I wonder how it compares to Space Haven.

I've got both of them on my wishlist - I don't buy Early Access games. I guess I'll see which one crosses the finish line first.

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