If we're only listing games that were released in 2021, this one's easy. Loop Hero. It's the only game I bought that was released this year. It's quite addicting, but it does lose its charm after a few hours. I beat the first chapter but haven't gotten around to progressing further; seems like too much grinding. It was definitely unique, and part of the reason for that is surely that I haven't played any autobattlers before because I thought they seemed boring. Loop Hero is a bit of a time commitment because you can't save a run mid-way through and come back to it, and they usually take about half an hour.

In terms of my favorite games I played this year, regardless of release date, I replayed Celeste again (this time on Linux) for the first time in a few years. It's still one of the best games to marry gameplay and storytelling, with amazing music. It really speaks to me.

This year, I finished my first visual novel in Japanese, その花びらにくちづけを. I liked it, but by virtue of being my first Japanese visual novel, it's special for that reason alone. There might have been a few too many H-scenes, but the characters are likable enough, and the last CG makes the whole thing worth it in the end. I played the direct sequel (technically the 6th game in the series) as well, and it had more depth, but I didn't like where the story went in the end. 3rd game in the series is in progress now. The chronology of this series is confusing as hell.

I played a bit of 穢翼のユースティア, a game I've owned for almost 5 years at this point, but only recently became decent enough at Japanese to struggle through, and despite the DRM hiccups in the beginning with getting it working, I'm really liking it. It has a very unique atmosphere. I'm only a few hours in, but it's very intriguing.

Huh. I guess I haven't really played many games, this year. Need to read more visual novels next year.

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Quoting: GrimfistAhh, this whole topic is pointless in my humble opinion. I love and daily use Linux, I know how to use it, and that's about it. I don't need "The Linux Desktop" to succeed, it already succeeded for me, I can do all I want with my Linux machine (gaming, programming, Netflix & chill).
Appealing to the masses always takes sacrifices, and I don't want that!

I don't know about you, but I don't want GNU/Linux on the desktop becoming the Amiga of the operating system market; everyone thinks it's dead, but a choice few stragglers are hanging onto their way of computing for dear life.

Perhaps Google moves on from supporting GNU/Linux and moves forward with their Zircon kernel and their own C library. While unlikely now, who knows what the future will hold? Why does this matter for you? Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and other platforms make use of Widevine DRM to protect their content. The only reason you're allowed to watch Netflix on GNU/Linux is by the grace of Google; they dropped support for 32-bit GNU/Linux systems earlier this year though maintain it for other, more popular operating systems. Regression is always possible.

If GNU/Linux is a shrinking niche, more software will become stale over time and proprietary software vendors will drop support for the platform.

For better or for worse, the only way to fight against this is constant progress...and part of that means catering to the needs of your target market. But that doesn't mean the Gentoos, the Arch Linuxes, and the NixOSes of the world will lose their way and start targeting different audiences. There's room enough for all of us here.

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Quoting: elmapulthat remind me of a thing...

pirating games on linux is harder, some times you have to do a bunch of steps on windows to crack an game, and the tutorials simply dont translate well to an linux enviroment.

i mean, i remember when i was trying to instal palib on linux, i dont remember if it had an linux version that i couldnt install or what, but installing on windows was already hard enough (you had to setup an enviroment variable, first time that i saw this term on an windows context), now imagine if i tried to install the windows version on linux back then...
google it "how to setup an windows variable on windows on linux"
or better "how to setup an windows enviroment variable on wine"

its an issue to specific and google might return 0 results, or tons of results for windows but only a few for linux if you dig deep enough, or maybe no one has ever tried.
now multiply that for every game you try to pirate.

regardless of what you think about piracy, this is an major issue that we have to solve if we want linux to become popular, most gamers dont purchase everything, many test drive the pirated version to know if its worth purchasing.

I never thought I'd hear "pirating software on GNU/Linux is too hard" as a reason not to use the system. I guess I really have heard it all, now.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: denyasisSome of our specialty programs we occasionally use are Windows only. I do some of our annual training. It's a 1Gb PowerPoint with embedded media, animations, everything made by a co-worker at work. It needs to be updated. Think that'll load on open office? (Spoiler: it crashes).

I seriously do not understand why Linux can seamlessly run ridiculously complex Windows games with absurdly demanding graphics requirements, and can't run the latest Office or Adobe stuff. Like really, WTF? Why can't Wine do this?

WINE can run the latest Microsoft Office. I run it through Crossover, though it's a bit dodgy and unstable. I was able to use it for half a year without any issues. The hardest part about getting Microsoft Office working, by the way, was finding the bloody download for it. It's impossible to find on any browser on GNU/Linux; I had to use a Windows computer using Microsoft Edge. That was the only way.

As for Adobe, I know of people who use cracked versions of CS6 applications and before and vouch for the experience. The reason Adobe CC applications don't work isn't, as far as I know, because of some complex win32 libraries WINE has yet to implement properly; it's because of the DRM.

WINE doesn't have a position on "DRM", but as copy protection is more or less the same thing, this is what they have to say on the matter:

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.

Wine cannot and will not break the functionality of these copy protection products. Wine's goal is to be compatible with Windows software, including copy protection. Although some would advocate the use of illegally modified or "cracked" games, Wine does not support, advocate, or even view this as a solution. The use of cracks is considered off topic on the forums, IRC channels, etc and will not be tolerated (summarily dismissed and deleted).

Full article here.

A lot of DRM doesn't work through WINE for these reasons.

The other reason, as I understand it, is because Vulkan offers most of the same featureset as Direct X > 12 and performant Direct X to Vulkan compatibility layers exist, that's most of the work already done. The most complex part of games is usually the graphics API calls. That's why a good portion of the remaining issues with games are codecs, anticheat, and DRM. Other software, like Adobe Creative Suite, depends on other core functionality that WINE hasn't implemented. I'm guessing this is why Affinity Creative Suite doesn't work through WINE...although it certainly could be the DRM as well.

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Quoting: win8linux

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualAdobe Creative Suite is not available on GNU/Linux.

FWIW Adobe is starting to explore having their Creative Cloud suite on the web, including barebones variants of Photoshop and Illustrator. It is quite likely that over time, these will become more fully fledged options and the rest of CC will follow. As much as I'm not a fan of everything moving over to the cloud, the trend will make Linux a more viable option in the mainstream.

After Effects is painful enough on fairly beefy native hardware, without a monstrosity that Parabola keeps out of their repositories because it was too large and complex to verify it was fully free software (Chromium) between it. Premiere Pro, for similar reasons, I don't see happening for a long, long time. Photoshop and Illustrator, I can see.

inDesign...the web is going to need a lot more optimization before I can start laying out books in a webapp.

Photoshop is in the best state of all of the Adobe applications, really. You've got web-based solutions like Photopea already, and Affinity Photo has great support for .PSD (except for editable text, which may or may not be a deal-breaker).

But, if they somehow manage to work it out, that would certainly be great for me. Especially if I don't have to have so many Adobe background processes...

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: CSharpI have to disagree with the sentiment though. I think the bigger issue Linux has is that it tries to cater to the mainstream too much. Most people I talk with would not buy a laptop with Linux even if I glued it to their faces.

There is no alternative. You cannot keep appealing to the same set of users, that isn't big enough to grow and attract more vendors.

In my opinion, the problem isn't that GNU/Linux distributions try to cater to mainstream users; the problem is that they're bad at it. By which I mean there are simply too many things that are janky or outright worse than on mainstream desktop operating systems; OBS, Anki, Audacity, all open source applications, are a categorically worse experience on GNU/Linux. And those are the open source ones!

Another user brought up Revolution OS (great documentary, by the way), where Linus says that users use programs, not operating systems. And this is completely true. For the mainstream user, if they can't use Microsoft Office on GNU/Linux, it's game over. Libreoffice simply cannot guarantee .docx compatibility because, even if it's an open standard, it's quite complex and it's still a moving target. Maybe other office suites are better. Is that user going to try 5 of them until they find something that works well enough?

Adobe Creative Suite is not available on GNU/Linux. No other application can guarantee .PSD/.AEP/.INDD compatibility, even if there are better alternatives, like Affinity Creative Suite (which also isn't on GNU/Linux). The problem, of course, is a reliance on an application-specific format (a moving target, never intended to be exchanged, quite complex) just like Microsoft Office instead of an exchange format like Open Raster.

And these are the popular applications—people I know are entrenched in much less popular Windows-only applications that would also make a different OS a deal-breaker.

Honestly, I see a darker future than that. Here are the headlines from 2035's newspapers (most countries have stopped publishing newspapers in print by this point and you can only get them online, and you still can't cancel without ringing up and being put on hold for 2 hours):

QuoteMicrosoft makes brave new move. Takes a page from Google and starts selling Microbooks.

These laptops run on a locked down version of Fuchsia, and after the customer pays with Google Pay, Apple Pay, or Microsoft Pay, they can gain access to Windows 365 and run a computer in the cloud! Great option for those on a budget. Microsoft also offers the same experience with Soft Desk, a tower PC option. ASUS, Acer, and other manufacturers have come out with similar CAAS (Computing-as-a-Service) hardware clients with their own branding.

Traditional computing systems are falling out of favor and are left to the hobbyist market to assemble themselves. To install Windows, Microsoft requires a security peripheral be installed and present at all times to guarantee a genuine experience.

Personally, and I try to be optimistic, I think the core problem isn't the applications, although that is a part of it. People can get over that. They do with macOS software. The real problem is a lack of interoperability between applications in the same field. The film industry has this with .AAF exchange format files, though not working in that field, I couldn't tell you how well it works. If there were a reliable, open exchange format for Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe inDesign, and Adobe After Effects, I would have absolutely no reason not to use 100% free software for my personal life and work. It would certainly allow for a more even playing field for underdogs like Affinity Serif.

As it stands, After Effects only supports AAF import on Windows, and recently removed the ability to import AAF from macOS versions.

Chromebooks have won the battle for some users by taking all these workflows to the web, where Linux shines, but there are some workflows that will never be able to be taken to the web...at least not for a long time. I mean, I guess there is Photopea...

I think the battle is in quality exchange formats that every application is pressured to support, not in porting over proprietary applications to GNU/Linux.

Of course, for those niche Windows-only workflows and software, some people will still have to have it around. But that's a far better position to be in; it's the one macOS is in now (minus hobbyist gaming; they're doing pretty well with mobile gaming).

I don't mean to be harsh; just realistic.

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This game was strangely addicting... it's not the sort of game I'd normally find myself playing, but somehow, I was playing it hours into the next day without even realizing it. And I never would have heard about it if it wasn't for this post and @eldaking singing its praises.

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Quoting: dpanterAt what point is money no longer simply money?
Being associated with crypto-whatever is apparently okay in the eyes of the Blender Foundation, so one has to wonder where the line gets drawn. I'm not judging either party but crypto is a divisive subject.

If Facebook's money is good enough...

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It's good to see that more popular client-side anticheat systems are finally running on GNU/Linux, but this is not my biggest blocker. My menace is instead DRM.

The biggest area that I am still disappointed with WINE/Proton in is Visual Novels. I haven't yet come across a visual novel on Steam that doesn't work, but Steam doesn't have a lot of Visual Novels. More importantly, most of the visual novels do not have the option to read the story in Japanese. And most crucially, I've not been able to get Textractor to work through WINE on most games (aside from Higurashi? which actually crashes when I try to insert a hook now), which makes looking up words significantly harder.

I experimented briefly with trying to get Textractor to run through the same Proton version as the one running the Visual Novel, but I just couldn't figure it out and gave up. I suspect that the reason it doesn't work is some kind of obfuscation due to DRM. I tend to use Gazou-OCR, which has worked great so far (much better than KanjiTOMO ever did for me, for instance), but it's annoying to use on a GNOME desktop and often inserts bizarre spacing, making lookup more of a chore in Yomichan.

There is perhaps some irony that the only way to get Textractor working is to run the visual novel through WINE, and running it natively on GNU/Linux won't work.

The only visual novel experience that has been great on GNU/Linux is DLSite games. They give you a serial code, you start the game, you put it in, and it just works. Textractor inserts hooks without any trouble. The worst experience has to be DMM, which unfortunately has the biggest library of Japanese VNs. To play a game, you have to download a separate Soft-Denchi (software battery) runtime, which is purely DRM designed to watch you from the time you boot into the operating system. You're able to install it, but WINE is not able to successfully setup the UCManSVC service. So, when you open the game, it doesn't prompt you to login to DMM; it just crashes. So nothing from DMM works on GNU/Linux. They also have an even more invasive form of DRM which requires internet access to play the games.

Perhaps the worst part about all of this is that, after checking with some local Kopimists, I found that the cracked versions of these games work perfectly well on GNU/Linux. At least DMM lets you know whether the game requires DRM to function before you purchase it, unlike Steam. DLSite also tells you whether PlayDRM (the DRM that works with GNU/Linux) is required for a game, although not all games require it. I have yet to find a DMM game that does not require either invasive form of DRM.

Finally, buying a VN on disc may not work either. The most common form of DRM, AlphaROM, does not work with GNU/Linux. After spending several hours messing with aaru and mdf/mds in an attempt to copy the disc, DRM and all, and get it to work virtually, I found that visiting the SETTEC site and inputting a code that came with the game let me download a "profile" that I could put in the game directory to run the game. So, while it doesn't work on GNU/Linux, SETTEC (developers of AlphaROM) give you a way out. No guarantee as to how long this activation method will continue to work.

And then there are, of course, visual novels like Rewrite which require Japan's version of Windows; I doubt these will work on GNU/Linux. Changing your locale on Windows won't even bypass this because they don't want anyone outside of Japan to play the game; you need to download Japan's version of Windows from the outset.

So, my advice to anyone who wants to play Japanese visual novels on GNU/Linux is to buy from DLSite, maybe Steam if it has a Japanese version and you don't mind using Gazou OCR for lookups (or know the language well enough already), and be careful about buying physical.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualChromeOS is a good example of how usable GNU/Linux can be with the right motivation. Android is another example.

My wife has a Chromebook. I actually think it's a pretty bad example.

I've never used the operating system or one of the myriad devices, so I couldn't say. I also haven't used an Android device before.

These are just opinions I've heard repeated often—though I've never been a fan of Google's user interfaces. My question is: are there any GNU/Linux distributions with a better user interface and experience?

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