Completely unrelated, but I can't see the word 'Sandstorm' and not snicker any more.
View video on youtube.com

...and yet I can't not listen to it and bob my head. ;)

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Ooh. I absolutely loved playing that old Sierra 'Outpost' game many years ago, despite its flaws, bugs, and entire missing features, and was wondering if anyone else had thought of going the same route. One to keep an eye on, it seems.

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I'll admit, having hosted a lot of modded Minecraft servers, this sounds right up my alley, but at the same time, it's also... not quite.

Similar to the promised Linux version of Star Citizen, I'd rather host my own server, separate from the big 'MMO' universe, just for me and my friends to play on without worrying or dealing with any sort of online store or copyright issues ('you connect to my server and upload things, they're there for everyone else who's playing'). I wouldn't even want it to be 'attached' to the global MMO universe.

However, having an Oculus DK2, I'm torn here - a Linux-native VR game with support for it would be awesome... just as Oculus has dropped official support for anything but Windows for the forseeable future. Granted, the dev SDK in its current form definitely 'works', but for how long is yet to be seen.

I love the style, I love the idea, and the fact that they're developing on Linux, but some of the design choices are... not up my alley. Oh well.

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The SteamOS / Steam Machine question was interesting... I was running Xubuntu 14.10 before, backed up my home folder and Steam library, etc., and then gave SteamOS a brief try. It's actually pretty slick, how they've done the dual accounts, full-screen Steam Big Picture mode on its own VT... but then I realised that like they have been insisting, it's really not a 'desktop' OS.

It is Debian-with-tweaks, but you can't simply Alt-Tab from your Steam game to your desktop to check a browser or messages - I have a dual-screen setup, and that took a bit of tweaking to fix the Steam mode (adding xrandr commands to the startup script to force one screen off; otherwise Steam was trying to centre itself across the middle of both displays)... but that means you couldn't, for example, have a browser on one screen while you're gaming away on the other.

If I were to get a big-screen TV, though, SteamOS actually seems fairly viable if your primary thing is gaming, with maybe a bit of YouTube using their built-in browser. I'd be tempted to try hacking together some sort of Kodi(XBMC) / SteamOS kludge and make a hybrid HTPC / gaming rig for the living room... I'd almost go as far as to say that's how Valve should be going. If you've got a decent gaming rig for Steam, it's more than enough to replace a Slingbox/AppleTV/Chromecast/etc. and there's some decent open source projects doing just that that they could try and integrate. One box to rule them all, sort of thing.

Of course, the community can always figure out how to do it ourselves, and I'm sure someone already has. :) The joys of open source!

Since I actually use that machine as my main desktop, though, I ended up switching back to Xubuntu, but rolling forward to 15.04 beta 2 since that's out this month anyway. Copied my home folder back across, and pretty much everything 'just worked'. I love that. All my settings, configs, profiles, just... dropped right back in as if nothing ever happened.

Unrelated: Though I'm running Intel + nVidia at the moment, in my heart I'm still rooting for AMD to come up with something awesome, particularly because they're working on (almost) fully open source video drivers for their upcoming cards. Being able to drop the proprietary blobs and still be fully supported like the Intel guys sounds pretty sweet, particularly with all this talk of Vulkan. AMD could do some real good for Linux gaming with that.

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Well, the posting they had for a Linux dev at CryTek seems to be filled, so hopefully it means they're still working on it! ;)

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Random note re: tearing and VSYNC, too. I use Xubuntu, and I've found that regardless of whether I have XFCE's built-in compositor enabled or disabled, I'd always get tearing. Games, videos, whatever. I knew VSync wasn't working because every time I'd fire up EUIV, my video card would whine like crazy drawing some ridiculous numbers of frames at the main menu.

I forget where I saw it now, but I'd heard that using 'compton' as your compositor would help, and in my testing it actually works, or at least, it may be forcing Vsync always on. I just literally did an apt-get install compton, disabled XFCE's compositor, then you can background it by adding a startup/login item to run 'compton -b' (or run that on a terminal to test).

Whatever config defaults it ships with, at least in Ubuntu, seem sane enough (no wobbly/flaming/sparkling windows or anything gaudy like that), and it's fixed both video tearing (YouTube + VLC) *and* actually makes Vsync work in-game, without any noticeable performance hit that I can see.

YMMV, and I'm not entirely sure if this is an issue solely with multi-monitor setups on the binary nVidia blobs (GTX 980), but it works for me and may be worth a shot!

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I dual boot to play all the old games I bought before moving to Linux pretty much full time. And that pretty much means Skyrim, SimCity 4 (now moot with Cities: Skylines), and, uh, Star Citizen (that should be getting a Linux port later). Hmm.

To tell the truth, I spend more time patching Windows than using it for games now, so I guess I'm weaning myself off of it? But a lot of old games probably will never be ported, so it's nice to be able to still boot them and fire them up. The really *really* old games work in DOSBox, at least (yay GoG!).

Two other random things I've found I need Windows for, still? Ripping Blu-Rays with MakeMKV and re-encoding them with Handbrake because they only support the Intel QuickSync hardware H.264 encoder on Windows so my dad can watch his legally-purchased movies and TV shows on his iPad for flights. If you guys know of a way of getting both of those working with a 100% Linux workflow, then I really would touch Windows outside of patching maybe once every 3 months. ;)

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I do remember at some point Blizzard had said while they didn't officially support it, they did have some people testing WoW on Wine to make sure their patches didn't horribly break compatibility there, and that they weren't going to inadvertently flag Wine users as cheating/hacking.

With it 'mostly' working there, I don't see them wanting to spend the effort in a port, sadly. They'll just tell us to go use Wine like we have done for years.

Their loss, though - there's so many other awesome native Linux games on Steam and elsewhere that I don't miss it!

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