Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: Purple Library GuySo does anyone have a good grasp of why the Chinese seem to pretty much not use Linux at all?

I can only speculate that because Windows 10 is free of charge for all intents and purposes, why use Linux when less of your software works with it?

Perhaps I should rephrase. Does anyone have a good grasp of why the Chinese seem to use far less Linux than people in other countries do? I mean, most North American consumers are basically unaware that Windows costs money, so I don't see any difference there.

Well, as I said, it's only speculation that this sentiment is more widespread. I don't know myself.

I'm curious, too—it's a good question.

The Chinese government has likely switched completely over to Linux by now. The Steam survey only counts users who are using Steam, so really this is a question of, "why do Chinese gamers seem to use far less Linux than people in other countries do?"

Interesting question given that GNU/Linux has been labelled 'communist' in the past.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuySo does anyone have a good grasp of why the Chinese seem to pretty much not use Linux at all?

I can only speculate that because Windows 10 is free of charge for all intents and purposes, why use Linux when less of your software works with it?

Bill Gates was of a similar opinion as far back as 1998.

Quoting: Bill GatesGates shed some light on his own hard-nosed business philosophy. "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

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Quotein others, it means choosing to not support platforms that could provide bad actors with ways of compromising our own Bungie developed anti-cheat security systems.

This seems to read that they have some sort of anti-cheat security system outside of BattlEye.

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Quoting: SamsaiPutin and Lukashenko are solely to blame for the suffering their actions have caused on their citizens. So, if the citizens are unhappy, they should know well who to send their complaints.

This is the same logic used to justify terror bombing—or "strategic bombing" when you do it to other countries:

QuoteThe aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive ... should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany ... the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.

...

But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Arthur_Harris,_1st_Baronet#Second_World_War

Sir Arthur Harris later commented that the bombing did not have the desired effect because Nazi Germany was too well run a police state; they were already being terrorized by their current government, and they still didn't feel they could act against it. I can't find a source for it now, but from memory he still believes the bombing was justified, if only to prove that it didn't work.

Here's a more recent article explaining why strategic bombing often has the opposite effect:

QuoteRather than breaking popular morale in London, Berlin, Tokyo or Hanoi, it usually strengthened it. Confronted by a common deadly threat, civilians rally around the only leaders who can do anything to protect them, even if those leaders are widely disliked.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/why-strategic-bombing-doesnt-seem-to-work/article19928220/

Yes, these are video games, not civilian lives, but it's punishing solely civilians all the same for the actions of their government—civilians, perhaps, who are already being punished by their government. I'm sure Putin will be hit hard by not being able to play DRM-free games anymore. If this strategy actually works in Russia, it certainly wouldn't work in North Korea, which is far too well-run to allow this to happen.

The way I see it, the reason strategic bombing didn't work in Germany and Japan in the '40s is very simple: they didn't care about their citizens, and the citizens didn't feel they could overthrow the government, or perhaps even that it was the right choice. Even as cities continued to be fire bombed, there was no coup against the existing government. In fact, when the emperor wished to broker peace with the US using Nagasaki as an excuse, there was an ill-fated coup attempt to stop the emperor and his sympathizers from doing so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident

As a natural consequence of conflict, lives will be affected—especially the innocent ones. But going out of your way to target civilians instead of Putin and the government seems counter-productive from my perspective.

Of course, Russian citizens will simply torrent these games anyway.

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Predictable. I'm more surprised that Apex Legends has decided to opt for user space anticheat.

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I have to admit I'm surprised at how much the Steam Deck seems to get right, though it'll be a few months before we find out how the general public feels about it.

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Quoting: AussieEevee

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualTechnically, GOG is completely correct. Their native Linux builds don't officially support Arch Linux or the new SteamOS, which is a derivative of that distribution. They support Ubuntu. They can't guarantee support for an OS they've never tested their games for.

Is there really enough of a difference between an Arch derivative and an ubuntu one to worry about? I mean, obviously their client isn't going to need the package manager.

Yes, the builds will probably work, but without testing it, there's no way to tell for sure. If they guarantee it works and it doesn't, they'll get backlash, too. Never guarantee things you can't know for sure.

As for the differences, core library versions are different for one. If you look at the games on the GOG store, you'll see them tested against specific versions of Ubuntu (12.04 or higher), but Arch doesn't have any versions. They'd have to say something like "glibc 2.34 or newer".

I'm afraid I don't know much more about the innards of these GNU/Linux distributions than that. Older builds of games have been known to stop working after some time, for reasons I'm not entirely sure about. Something about newer glibc versions deprecating older features, maybe (the kernel famously doesn't break userspace; it's the userspace software like glibc that causes breakage). I don't think they do that as much anymore.

For the record, I haven't had any issue with the Linux builds on my Arch laptop.

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Technically, GOG is completely correct. Their native Linux builds don't officially support Arch Linux or the new SteamOS, which is a derivative of that distribution. They support Ubuntu. They can't guarantee support for an OS they've never tested their games for.

Whether this PR spokesperson understands this or not, I couldn't say. Clearly the diplomatic response would have been, "these games have been tested for Ubuntu officially, but they may work on the Steam Deck. We don't know; we haven't tried it."

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Quoting: fenglengshun

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualA number of things have to get a lot better before visual novels on Linux are a good experience, let alone the Steam Deck. I wish it were better.

...that's interesting, but I kinda just don't really care? If I can get a game on Steam, I'll buy it there, assuming it's uncensored or there's a restoration patch. If there aren't, then I just go to the high seas. Though it is interesting that you don't mention Johren/Shiravune (which is a spin-off of DMM/Kadokawa), the old timer MangaGamer, Denpasoft, Kagura Games, Fakku, DLSite, JAST, and Nutaku.

I did mention Johren briefly. I don't have any experience with Johren aside from the horror stories I've heard about their DRM. I don't imagine it will work on GNU/Linux, but who can say?

I also mention that DLSite is the only good site that Japanese players can get Japanese VNs from because the DRM actually works on GNU/Linux.

I think that English VN players are better off buying VNs directly from localization companies like MangaGamer and JAST, which I alluded to by saying that "Steam is not a great platform for VNs." and saying that players are better off "buying it on another store in the first place." In my opinion, JAST and MangaGamer (as well as other localization companies' stores) are much better stores than Steam because all games are DRM-Free, the prices are better, and you don't have to patch in the Adult Patches yourself...on a handheld.

It seems that you didn't read part of my response.

My point was that for Japanese players, their only good options are to either to install Windows, only buy physical/from DLSite, or, as you say, torrent the games. That's not a great experience. I don't encourage downloading games from file sharing services—particularly in an industry where a lot of the participants are from Doujin circles. If I can't play it...I'll wait until they release it unencumbered or not at all. Fortunately, most publishers do so with the physical release, so I don't feel like I'm missing out on much. The other obvious reason is that downloading executables is inherently dangerous, no matter how much you trust the release group, because unless you're a good reverse engineer, you have no way to tell what has been done to it.

QuoteI don't see it as fundamentally that different than the usual case of buying VNs as an English players, especially with Wine/Proton 7.0 seems like it's fixing codec issues now (which took the bulk of the old setup instruction.

I can open VNs games just fine with a double-click with Wine most of the time, maybe set `LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF-8` and `TZ=Asia/Tokyo` variables which is easy with Lutris (the flatpak version works fine for Wine games) and Bottles (also has flatpak version) or just with Steam's Add Non-Steam Games functions. Textractor seems to work just fine so long as you run them in the same winepfx as the game (much like running CheatEngine, which works just fine aside for the speedhack function).

I don't think this is particularly difficult myself, but I wouldn't call it a great experience on a handheld, having to type in a series of global environment variables, thumbing through your file system to find your game and link it up to Lutris, and again to find the cover art. And if you want it to show up in your app launcher, you need to create a .desktop file and edit it to manually link up the app icon by typing it in so that it's not a blank icon.

Steam's "Add Non-Steam Games" function doesn't work unless you already have a .desktop icon for the game—it can't find it. To do this, the easiest way I've found is setting it up in Lutris first and then generating the aforementioned .desktop file.

Most non-Linux users are not going to know how to do this, and are probably not going to want to do this when the alternative on Windows is "double click the .exe and click through a wizard."

I regularly link to that guide; it's the best setup guide of them all. I'd also rank it as the best overall Japanese guide.

QuoteMaybe for the Japanese people who want to buy JP games legitimately, but for that market it's only recently announced that they're going to open pre-order there. Though even then, last time I tried DMM to play Princess Connect, it managed to install just fine, with the only issue being the hand-off between starting the game on DMM to the PriCone.exe running which I wouldn't discount being fixed by Wine 8.0 since they seems to be tackling a lot of old issues this year (like WoW64, which is the other bulk of that old VN setup instruction). Besides, those market are currently mostly covered by Switch (aside for eroge, ofc).

I've purchased 4 games on DMM, and none of them work. They all use Soft-Denchi. I'd be grateful if you could confirm what DRM the game used, because that might mean that some games from DMM do work on Linux. Additionally, it is very unlikely that any DRM schemes have been fixed in the newest WINE release. I contacted Codeweavers support directly and they expressed no interest in working on Soft-Denchi compatibility, not to mention that DRM support in WINE is the hardest and most thankless work there is. An excerpt from this link:

QuoteIn an effort to make copy protection more effective (i.e. resistant to cracks), the methods used by many copy protection products have become complex, difficult to understand (obfuscated), and hard to debug. In some cases Wine would need to be altered to allow for almost rootkit-like functionality of programs to get some of these copy protection schemes to work. To support copy protection Wine developers have to contend with undocumented interfaces, code obfuscation, and maintaining compatibility with *nix security models.

If 88% of people not buying the releases for one company is any indication of how few people actually buy VNs, maybe this won't be an issue for Japanese players after all. Only the people who actually buy the games.

QuoteSo, yeah, that's some neat things to know, but a lot of that aren't particularly relevant to me, and most of the issues seems like it'll be solved or has a fairly simple workaround.

I mention the simplest workaround of them all in my response: use Windows. The Steam Deck would be fine on Windows, even for Japanese users. The issues that arise are purely due to the Steam Deck running Linux, and (by extension) the majority of the games from the VN genre not being on Steam. These games not being on Steam on a Windows version of the deck isn't an issue because these DRM schemes were built to work on Windows, as are VNs in general.

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Quoting: fenglengshunA lot of people in the visual novel community was interested in Steam Deck as a VN machine, and those people can pay a lot of money to import stuff from Japan and just want people to accept their money to get something officially. They're also already pre-disposed to like handheld like Switch and Vita, even though most VNs are on PCs. So they might be a good customer in the future if codec is really 100% working now.

I can't speak for the average reader, but I will say that Steam is not a great platform for visual novels (even if it seems convenient at first). Comparatively few are released there, and there's been outcry about removing adult content from releases due to Steam's rules about not exploiting minors. The vast majority of publishers on Steam are localization companies like Sekai Project and Mangagamer, not actual Japanese publishers.

Take the release of Wonderful Everyday Down the Rabbit-Hole on Steam. The first ~5% of the game is available on Steam for purchase, but you have to download the other 95% which includes some R18+ content from the publisher's site and move it into the game folder. This is not a great experience on PC, and it's even worse for a handheld. This type of release is not particularly unique. Publishers like JAST will release part of the game on Steam and offer Adult patches on their website, which completely defeats the convenience factor. Other publishers, like Moenovel, will gut that content from the game completely while serving customers a mediocre localization that clearly hasn't been proofread very well.

Japanese publishers don't use Steam to get their games to a Japanese audience; they use DMM. DMM doesn't have any of the same draconian temperament toward R18+ content in visual novels as Steam does, and it's HUGE. There are thousands of visual novels on DMM. And DMM games don't work on GNU/Linux, full stop. They are shipped with either the Soft-Denchi DRM (doesn't work), DMM Game Player (always-online DRM that many find annoying and almost certainly doesn't work on GNU/Linux either), Buddy (doesn't work), or something else that doesn't work. I have yet to find any DRM-free releases. Yes, you can buy your porn games on DMM, as long as you're a Windows user.

Like it or not, there's a reason that "eroge" is the term many in the community use to refer to these games. A lot of them include various detailed sex scenes. The objective of many of them is romancing a "capture target" to get to that payoff. Steam does not like visual novels that include adult content and bans games quickly and harshly, usually without opening a channel for communication with the publisher at all. It's often hard to tell whether the game will end up being banned by Steam or not, especially as it can come months after the initial release. Not to mention the pushback you get from a certain segment of readers even when you do manage to get an All-Ages release past Steam's gatekeepers.

I don't particularly care about sex scenes in eroge, but they sure can cause a ruckus, huh?

Then, there are the Japanese readers. Many releases on Steam do not come with a Japanese language option, especially the ones with adult content. These readers can't get games from DMM as mentioned before, but they can get some of them from DLSite. PlayDRM does work on GNU/Linux, but you have to be careful about which games you purchase because some can include the incompatible Soft-Denchi DRM (they do tell you on the site if it does). There's also Johren for both English audiences and (I believe) Japanese audiences, but many don't like them because of the always-on DRM with only 3 activation codes, which they probably won't give you any more of. It also probably doesn't work on GNU/Linux.

Their best bet is actually physical releases, because they tend to come with no DRM at all, but it's often hard to know whether a game will work until you try it. Dies Irae, for example, will not work because of the DRM. Aiyoku no Eustia's AlphaROM DRM doesn't work either, but you can get a file from AlphaROM's SETTEC site that you place in the same directory as the game to bypass the check (apparently it's flaky even on Windows). But the majority don't seem to include DRM at all.

Even with all the trouble you go to, you still end up managing WINE prefixes instead of just launching it with Proton because there are so few visual novels available on Steam in Japanese, the original language they were published in. I can't imagine that being particularly fun or convenient. And, of course, for those learning Japanese, setting up Textractor doesn't seem fun on a handheld either (and Textractor rarely works with VNs on Steam), but this is a niche within a niche.

I don't see the Steam Deck being a particularly good VN machine unless it has Windows on it, or the user is willing to circumvent DRM (which is only legal for this purpose in a handful of countries). I don't think Steam is a great platform for Visual Novels either, even if we take the operating system out of the equation. The moderation has been shown to be repeatedly hostile to these games, with publishers often spending months stripping the VN of content that might trip the alarms, and then having to either deal with complaints from their readers about not including content that was in the original release or offer the content separately as a patch (assuming they don't just ban your game altogether), and at that point, why not just buy it on another store in the first place?

A number of things have to get a lot better before visual novels on Linux are a good experience, let alone the Steam Deck. I wish it were better.

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