Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThis is the one thing you've said I can't argue with--partly because it's true, growth is there but not that high yet, and partly because what kind of numbers are exciting is pretty subjective. I can't tell you what you should be excited by.

I can tell you what I'll be pleased with (although I wouldn't go as far as "excited") - and it should happen quite soon - the Linux share being higher than "Windows earlier than Windows 10." That they're completely unsupported and yet have higher marketshare than Linux is a real drag. Passing that will be nice.

Passing Mac OS to be the biggest non-Windows PC gaming market will take a bit longer, and won't make too much practical difference IMO; Linux is already an easier target than Mac OS for those that are interested in a multiplatform PC release, so it also being bigger won't swing the needle much more.

Passing 5% would get me quite excited, and passing 10% would make a big practical difference, I think, to the amount of game developer attention we can command.

On the subject of macOS, the WWDC recently unveiled the Game Porting Kit which is supposed to make porting games to macOS much easier. They've essentially given up on making the platform attractive natively (what with killing 32-bit libraries and completely ignoring OpenGL AND Vulkan, instead introducing their own proprietary API that each developer needs to support in addition to Direct X or Vulkan) from what I can see. The newly-introduced Game Porting Kit uses CrossOver (modified WINE) as its emulation solution.

Will this make macOS more competitive than Linux? Will a rising tide lift Linux and macOS? I don't know, but it looks like Apple has yet to tap out.

Personally, the only reason I paid attention to the WWDC was to find out if my Mac was getting axed this year (it didn't, but my iPhone did for all I care, and I think the Mac's going next year).

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Wait, the DMCA can be used for Trademark cases as well as Copyright cases? I thought, you know, being the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it was only for Copyright...

Actually, you CAN'T use DMCA takedowns for trademarks: https://theholmesfirm.com/takedown-notices-why-trademarks-and-copyrights-are-so-valuable-but-can-lead-to-damages-for-infringers/

But itch.io has some guidelines in their acceptable use terms which say games shouldn't infringe on trademarks, as Tetris Holding quotes.

Anyway, this DMCA takedown notice is pretty confusing.

They say they're the copyright holders of some registrations regarding Tetris:

Quoting: Tetris HoldingTetris Holding is the owner of copyright in the Tetris® game throughout the world, including U.S. copyright registrations PAu 1,214,036; PAu 1,214,035; PA 412,169; and PA 412,170.

So I looked up PA (Performing Arts) 412170 on cocatalog.loc.gov, the US government's copyright database for works registered after 1978. You haven't needed to register copyright for your works for about 100 years because it is applied automatically, but it's useful in the US if you want to litigate. No other countries have a copyright registration process anymore.

Anyway, the website is pretty terrible and confusing. Once I figured out how to search the site, I realized there is next to no information about these records, so that was pretty pointless. Setris was not redistributing Tetris, nor did they reproduce Tetris assets like the images, so this is irrelevant anyway. Copyright infringement exists in only a limited form in video games (game mechanics, and any other functional elements—in addition to the overall idea—of a game are not copyrightable). Not grounds for a DMCA...

Quoting: Tetris HoldingAdditionally, Tetris Holding is the owner of a sound trademark registrations throughout the world for the Russian folk song that plays during Tetris®, including U.S. Trademark Reg. No. 351007 (the “Russian Folk Song Registered Trademark”)

So, I did search for this trademark registration, but all I could find was this 1937 registration which is dead.

You can't trademark the content of songs, anyway...what are they claiming Setris did? Used the name of the song, "Russian Folk Song"? What is the name of the song? Incredibly confusing. More than likely this is standard legalese to establish Tetris Holding as the owner of relevant trademarks.

In any case, here's an interesting aside about Tetris' music in all its incarnations: https://www.kmfa.org/pages/3159-the-cross-cultural-tetris-theme-song

Quoting: kmfaThe song Type A, from the 1989 Nintendo Game Boy release of "Tetris," is a major artifact in both game music and cultural history. ... However, the true name of Tetris’ beloved theme isn’t "Type A," it’s actually Korobeiniki. Based on a Russian poem of the same name by Nikolay Nekrasov, the song is not about falling blocks but a traveling peddler who attempts to woo a woman. How did a 130-year-old Russian folk song make its way into a Japanese gaming machine?

This Russian Folk song is over 130 years old, and is well and truly in the public domain, but that doesn't matter at all for trademarks, of course.

Quoting: "Tetris Holding"and numerous trademark registrations around the world for the designation TETRIS, including U.S. Trademark Reg. Nos. 880871, 2362238, 3818232, and 3518292.

This makes perfect sense. Setris is very similar to Tetris, and it's a pretty similar game. Classic trademark infringement.

They then go on to say one of the claims they're pursuing is a copyright infringement...on their trademark?

Quoting: Tetris HoldingThis letter is a notice of infringement pursuant to § 512(c) of the U.S. Copyright Law (section 512 is known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) (“DMCA”) ... During the Infringing Game, the music that is the subject of the Russian Folk Song Registered Trademark plays.

They appear to be confused. Or I'm confused. You can't trademark the content of the music! You can copyright the music, but then why are they talking about the trademark? And I have no idea what this song is, because the only songs I can find for Tetris are extremely old ones in the public domain.

Quoting: Tetris HoldingThe Infringing Game trespasses on the copyrights in the Tetris® game because it reproduces copyrightable expression from our client’s game and was created and is being distributed on your website without our client’s prior permission or authorization.

And now they're talking about copyright again. I really have no idea what they're trying to convey here.

Tetris Holding is completely within their right to pursue this trademark violation and I have no doubt they would win any case they bring to court. The Russian Folk Song trademark is bananas though.

What I've learned from this is that navigating government sites for copyright/trademark information is not fun.

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I still get "Contacting server to get the latest matchmaking data. Please wait." on Desktop Linux with Experimental for Halo MCC. Does this game actually work online for anyone..?

Also, the Anticheat options are still swapped.

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Quoting: Mountain ManI guess I don't understand how an immutable distro is significantly different in terms of security and stability from the current way of doing it with a locked root account. Aren't they basically different paths to the same end?

Others can comment on security, but I don't think it offers many security benefits.

Stability-wise, the base packages are offered as an "image", which are core components like GNOME, Linux, GNU utilities, GRUB, GDM, and a horde of libraries. Everything else is offered in a container format like Flatpak or Snap. Whenever you update the base system, you replace the image, and you don't get the new packages until you reboot. If you reboot and something is funky, you can just rollback to the previous image and get on with your day. This makes a lot of sense for both workstations and servers because it removes the fear of upgrading because rollbacks are so easy.

Security-wise, Flatpak and Snap packages offer you the latest versions of user software, which is definitely an improvement to running years-old poorly-backported software on Debian and most other stable distributions. "Stable distributions" today are a fundamentally flawed concept because holding back security updates and porting back only some of the fixes is a pretty bad idea. With immutable distributions, you can have a stable base but up-to-date userland, and you can probably get base updates more often without fear.

I don't run a stable distribution currently, but if I did (for work), I would run an immutable distribution.

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Quoting: Mountain ManBut here is something to think about: countless works of art have been lost throughout human history, and will continue to be lost. Are we worse off as a species because of it? No, I don't think so. It's just stuff, and there are more important things in life.

I think it's sad that the same laws meant to protect a copyright holder's works are the same laws which prevented archival of many 20th century films where the studio went bankrupt, the copyright holders disappeared, and the orphaned films were thus damned them to the ether. Copyright lasted just long enough for nobody to be able to archive the film stock, and by the time they were in the public domain (back when we had reasonable copyright periods), the film stock had faded away.

On the subject of video games, I found this documentary from Noclip about GOG's archival of old games very interesting. There are some games where it's completely unclear who holds the copyright anymore, so even though the studios which helped create the game would love to publish it again, they can't because they don't know who owns it, really. GOG goes through weeks and months of investigation for some of these games, where everyone thinks someone else owns it, and in the end they might find out for sure...or they may not.

While we can argue about the value of art and its loss, I would say copyright is doing a bad job protecting these works and a great job lowering the value of our public domain. One way to fix this is to go back to reasonable copyright terms. Even though there is some support for this among publishers and copyright lawyers, it's doubtful this will happen.

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In the interest of law, I'd like to draw everyone's attention back to the '80s, where Universal (and Disney, in the background) tried to outlaw Betamax (and by extension VHS) by suing Sony in court for contributory copyright infringement. The idea was that "most" people were using Betamax to infringe on copyright. In the end, the court ruled in favor of Sony because Betamax and VHS have substantial non-infringing use-cases.

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Quoting: liamdWant help managing Wine on Linux? You can try Bottles, Lutris and the Heroic Launcher.

What do you think of CrossOver for managing WINE? It got a recent facelift. I think macOS users benefit from it a lot more, because they have far fewer options. The proprietary part of it is the UI, but all changes to WINE and other libraries are released freely, I believe. And naturally, CodeWeavers contribute significantly to WINE, so some money to them for CrossOver is going back to WINE, benefiting the whole community.

I wouldn't normally recommend proprietary software outside of games, but I feel there are exceptional circumstances here.

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Quoting: SamsaiIt all comes back to non-free codecs, which Fedora won't ship because of patents and license fees.

Eventually the codec problem will solve itself as platforms abandon H.264/H.265 and move to AV1.

I honestly believe H.264 patents will expire (2028) before platforms abandon H.264. I suppose Windows 11 is helping in that department by obsoleting fairly recent hardware and Windows 10 being 2 years from EOL, forcing people to buy newer hardware that likely has AV1 support, but I think platforms will be hanging onto H.264 for a long time. It's the most widely-used video codec in the world, after all. mp3 still won't die and it's 32 years old! Even though Opus does its job better in every way, because companies like Apple still don't support it.

One would hope Apple being a part of AOM would mean they adopt AV1 more quickly, but time will tell. Another point is iPhones are supported for an average of 6 years, and iOS 16 has no support for decoding AV1 (let alone hardware)...and that's a large portion of web traffic these days. I don't think AV1 adoption will beat H.264 patent expiry. Amazingly, Safari still doesn't support AV1, though Chrome and Firefox have supported it since 2018. So macOS is failing in the AV1 decoding department, too.

H.265 was not supported in major web browsers until about half a year ago (why now?), and adoption of this codec otherwise was low anyway, so I would declare it deceased. Windows 10 doesn't support it in its default video player, after all, asking users to purchase the codec. If that's not a stamp of irrelevance, I don't know what is. I seriously doubt H.266 will get anywhere on most platforms, either. The patent pool situation is the same. Well...I certainly hope it won't get anywhere.

Oh, and do you know anything about AAC? I can't find much information on the patents for this codec or the expiry dates, but I would like to know. I really, really hope AV1 gets wide adoption soon so I don't have to care about either of these codecs ever again, but it looks like Apple will be holding us back for a few years yet. DaVinci Resolve already supports AV1 encode/decode with NVIDIA on CentOS.

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Quoting: fenglengshun

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualIs this different from including Firefox as an overlay?

Alright, long post incoming as I try to explain everything:

You can use overlay, but when I tried to do `rpm-ostree install --dry-run` in my Kinoite image to test things, whenever there's an already installed package, it will exit saying the package is already installed, instead of continuing with installing the other packages I listed in the comment.

By contrast, the ublue builder seems to take care of duplicates easily, unless you have a version conflict due to trying to install something using COPR (tried to install steam but I think the Nobara COPR and packages I enabled caused a conflict of mesa version). Also, they automatically build things in a single layer, I think, which prevents the issue of having too many overlays due to not doing a single `rpm-ostree install`.

In addition, when I asked around, having overlays may make it hard if you want to switch base to a different system image (say, Silverblue to Kinoite, or Kinoite to Onyx, or Kinoite to Kinoite-Nvidia).

If your worry are Firefox and codecs, I believe that uBlue base images currently have firefox and the freeworld codecs installed. I think they only added the firefox and firefox-langpacks on remove list of recipe.yml as an example of how to remove package from the image and probably under the assumption people be installing Firefox through Flatpak via the yafti flatpak installer. But if anyone worries about upstream removing firefox eventually, they can just add it to the install list to make sure it remains installed.

This is the list of the packages they overlay by default on their images which you can use as your base image, this is the template recipe.yml which is applied based on the base image you chose, and this is my recipe.yml and yafti.yml for an example of how I'm doing things (sorry about the mess though, still experimenting here -- check Actions if you want to see how messy installing Teamviewer is).

I still don't know everything yet, I've only been using it for a week, but it was easy enough to understand due to the playbook-like format. Getting started was surprisingly easy, with the automated setup.

Thanks for that explanation! I'm somewhat familiar with Ansible, so that shouldn't be a problem.

I think it'll be some time until I install Sericea on that system to test it out, but I'll keep this in mind for that occasion.

For anyone interested, I found this to be a very informative guide for Fedora's immutable operating systems: https://www.dvlv.co.uk/pages/a-beginners-guide-to-fedora-silverblue.html

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Quoting: fenglengshunIf you don't like it, you can use ublue to just explicitly add it in the recipe.yml install list, so that there is always built-in firefox package installed in your image regardless of what upstream does. By default, they have firefox and firefox-langpacks in remove list, so it is literally just a copy-paste away.

It isn't as hard as you may think it is, I was a GitHub noob who didn't even know how PR works when I installed it, and now I'm slowly building up into the mix of kinoite and Nobara that I want (since Bazzite, the ublue image with SteamOS and Nobara packages which GE seems to contribute to, is still in alpha).

Is this different from including Firefox as an overlay?

Part of the reason I want to run Fedora is because I believe it has sane defaults. It's the only desktop distribution that both enables SELinux and includes profiles by default (well, Ubuntu does this with AppArmor). It also does a bunch of other stuff I frankly don't understand, because I'm not a security researcher. To replicate everything in Arch Linux would take a lot of work and I probably wouldn't do it correctly.

So, when they make decisions like this based on usability and security...I start to wonder. What else have they compromised on? They don't even seem to realize the compromise they're making, and they don't explain it anywhere. The reason I want to install Fedora Sericea is because I don't want to keep tinkering with a work computer. The rollback functionality is particularly useful in this instance, as-is the fact user software is updated independently of system packages.

Ahhh...I can't wait for 2028 when these H.264 patents expire so distributions don't need to do stupid stuff like this.

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