Quoting: TheBardI'm really sad for the people at Feral. They did a wonderful job with all their ports. They made among the best native ports and their support is excellent. I only had to contact the support once. They managed to find that my keyboard was making the game crash. I don't even understand now how they were able to find it but they were right.

But the next step for Linux gaming is definitely Proton so I guess we will see lesser and lesser native ports. Maybe if the Steam Deck becomes a massive success and the next version Proton's compatibility isn't perfect, then native ports may become a thing again.

I'm quite sure that native ports or rather native versions from the ground up will be a thing again. We are now in the middleground where things like proton is good enough but the userbase is still too small, at some point IF our userbase raises then some publisher will move away from being dependent on a 3d party (proton) to be in better control of their own software as well as being able to push things to their technical limits.

The huge problem with native ports now is not really proton, it's the fact that our userbase is still so small. Proton just made it more apparent/transparent.

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Äntligen! (Finally!)

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Quoting: kuhpunktEmbrace, extend, extinguish?

It's a publicly traded company as of yet, 61% of the share votes are held up by two owners, the founder Lars Wingefors controls 48% of the votes and S3D Media Inc controls 13% of the votes, the rest 39% is held by mostly pension funds.

They are also profitable and all except one subsidiary (Deep Silver) increased turnover this year so extinguish would be foolish on their part at this time. Before this recent acquisition they employed 5115 game devs, that quite a bunch :)

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Quoting: antisol

Quoting: F.UltraNah winter is -30°C and 20h darkness for 3 months straight, you should try that sometime ;)

I'd really love to, actually: Arctic winter is very high on my list of things I want to see. That's pretty far north, right? Norway Or sweden, perhaps? Canada or Alaska maybe?

I can't even conceive of that kind of cold.

Quoting: F.UltraNow during the heatwave I've had about 32°C at my computer desk, now that was horrible.

I once rode my motorbike from Uluru to Alice Springs on a particularly warm day. I was wearing full bike leathers and the air temp guage on the bike was reading 49. That was a bit hotter than the actual air temp that day because I was getting more heat from the road - the official temp in Alice was "only" 46 that day.

THAT was warm.

Sweden. Had a shop keeper in a local store when I lived in a different part of town that had escaped from Iran back in the day and he told me that when they travelled through Iraq it was so hot that they had to keep the windows of the car closed as to not get burned by the wind. They had then stopped at a store to buy some water but found the store empty except for a huge bucket in the middle of the store filled with water, out of the bucket a man sprung up and told them "no more water left in store" :-) That kind of heat would have instakilled me.

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Quoting: antisolBloody whinging pommies - 27 degrees is "hot", Lol. That's winter temperatures mate!

Coincidentally, I saw an interesting thing about this exact subject not long ago, how e.g the houses are designed differently to keep heat in, and AC basically isn't a thing over there, so on a day where it's 27 outside it can get quite warm indoors.

...doesn't change the fact that you're whingers, though... ;)

Nah winter is -30°C and 20h darkness for 3 months straight, you should try that sometime ;). Had a family of a friend visiting in the early 90-ies from Senegal and they actually planned to buy a direct flight home at the airport when they landed :-)

Now during the heatwave I've had about 32°C at my computer desk, now that was horrible.

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Quoting: seamoose

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: seamooseThat is incorrect. What Wolfire is alleging is that Valve tried to prohibit Wolfire from selling its games on other stores at a lower price than what they are priced on Steam even if Wolfire did not provide Steam keys for purchases on those other stores (e.g. DRM-free, Epic keys, etc.)

If true, I do feel that Valve is abusing its dominant status in the PC games market. I can understand the requirement that if you distribute Steam keys in other stores then you should not price your games lower than on Steam, but that's not what Wolfire is saying.

That's confusing. I mean I could easily be mistaken, but why on earth would Valve even file the motion regarding:

Quote"Plaintiffs’ allegations that Valve's Steam Key rules amount to an unlawful PMFN* fail for the straightforward reason that Valve, which created and owns Steam, has no duty under the antitrust laws to create a method (here, Steam Keys) for game developers to sell Steam-enabled games in stores that compete with Steam."

if it wasn't involving 3rd party distribution of Steam keys? It seems extraneous and non sequitur if that's the case.

Not sure who's telling the truth, thus my use of the word "alleging", but here's some previously posted background: David Rosen of Wolfire Games explains why they're taking on Valve in a lawsuit

In particular, from Rosen's blog post: "But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM."

Yes, but then in the actual lawsuit they don't mention this case at all which is highly suspicious. I mean that since he claims that this happened to Wolfire directly then he should have access to first hand evidence but yet the single mention of anything like this in the lawsuit is point 155:

Quote155.Valve has also threatened publishers that offered lower prices on other platforms, insisting that customers using the Steam Store should get a similar deal or else Valve may remove the publisher’s games from the Steam Gaming Platform altogether.

Valve has also interrogated publishers about their deals on smaller platforms like Humble Bundle or Discord that offer lower commission rates than Steam.

For example, Valve contacted publishers who released their games at a lower price on those competing platforms to demandsimilar deals on Steam.

Because of Valve’s pressure tactics, publishers were forced to revise their deals with Humble Bundle and Discord or withdraw their games from those platforms all together.

This could also be interpreted as some publishers simply replying "its, its, it's because Valve forced us" when Wolfire and Discord asked why the publishers withdrew their games. But then in his blog he claims to have first hand experience and yet zero mentioning of this in the lawsuit, it's not even in there as a claim so Rosen cannot even be used as a witness of his first hand experience (but IANAL) by Wolfires lawyers and that is beyond suspicious.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: KlausThe other part (mostly relevant for corporate environments) is that a natively or indistinguishable-from-native running version of Microsoft Office releases from the last ten years isn't optional. I tried with OnlyOffice and LibreOffice, but the moment your working with a customer who uses Microsoft Office, you will need it somehow, or the customer will be annoyed at you for breaking their documents; The only solution working properly here is a virtual machine with Windows and native MS Office.

Office is for sure a big issue. Luckily my work doesn't really fiddle documents in that kind of detailed way where an odd looking font here and there will cause any problems, and I don't use any really advanced spreadsheets, so I can get away with LibreOffice. Which is nice, because I hate the bloody ribbon; at this point, I actually like LibreOffice's UI better. But none of that changes the fact that Office remains the standard and for a whole lot of work-type requirements, from document exchanges to high-end Excel features, you really need it.
Does Office work in Wine these days? Man, if I were massively rich I would pay some outfit to get Office, Acrobat and Photoshop all working hiccup-free on Wine, no muss no fuss, maybe with special installers or something just to give people a button to click.

Office365?

Dunno. That's the web thing, right? Does it have all the features of the real thing?

I have zero idea, have not touched Office in over 15 years. Considering that Office365 is a subscription service though I guess that it's where the future of Office lies.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: KlausThe other part (mostly relevant for corporate environments) is that a natively or indistinguishable-from-native running version of Microsoft Office releases from the last ten years isn't optional. I tried with OnlyOffice and LibreOffice, but the moment your working with a customer who uses Microsoft Office, you will need it somehow, or the customer will be annoyed at you for breaking their documents; The only solution working properly here is a virtual machine with Windows and native MS Office.

Office is for sure a big issue. Luckily my work doesn't really fiddle documents in that kind of detailed way where an odd looking font here and there will cause any problems, and I don't use any really advanced spreadsheets, so I can get away with LibreOffice. Which is nice, because I hate the bloody ribbon; at this point, I actually like LibreOffice's UI better. But none of that changes the fact that Office remains the standard and for a whole lot of work-type requirements, from document exchanges to high-end Excel features, you really need it.
Does Office work in Wine these days? Man, if I were massively rich I would pay some outfit to get Office, Acrobat and Photoshop all working hiccup-free on Wine, no muss no fuss, maybe with special installers or something just to give people a button to click.

Office365?

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Quoting: andythe_greatNot even openSUSE and Fedora can share the same spec file (a file that contain build instructions) since they some time use difference RPM macros. Maintaining a package across many distros are very tedious.

Yes that is one of the problems with rpm that is not really there with deb:s (I use the exact same files to build deb:s e.g when building for both Debian and Ubuntu). However in their defence, RPM:s where never intended as being used by third parties, they where intended to be used by the distribution maintainers only and there this problem does not exist. That said this is an are where rpm:s could be greatly enhanced, there is nothing in the format itself that prohibits the same .spec to work between distributions.

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Quoting: WorMzy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: PublicNuisanceI don't have a horse in the race but here is an article worth reading as devil's advocate.

https://flatkill.org/2020/

Yes this "next generation" packaging is really the stone age packaging while rpm/apt is the real next-generation. That said, for games the security issues are basically zero (basically but not to 100%) since few games have open external ports or handle random files/data that you feed it like it is for applications.

lol, I've never seen rpm/deb described as 'next-generation'. I can kind of see it with rpm, but deb is something that deserves to be consigned to history as a terrible mistake that future generations should learn from.

Sorry to be so "slashdot" in my reply here but saying so about deb vs rpm show that you don't know how they both actually work. The thing is that rpm and deb are extremely similar with the main difference being that deb:s have far greater helper scripts that among other things means that what does require platform specific .spec files for rpm can be done in a single deb.

RPM/DEB is "next-generation" in the sense that stone age distribution is files in a archive, then came files in a archive with some basic script (this is where the current Windows installers are), then came rpm/deb which is files in a archive with several scripts (pre-install, pre-update, post-install, post-update, post-delete) and most importantly with a dependency tracker. This makes rpm/deb next-generation functionality wise of all the types of packagers available today.

Then comes flatpak, snap and so on which are back to files in a archive but now in a sandbox (sometimes). To me this is a huge step backwards, but it allows the dumb Windows type installers that millions of developers are used to so therefore it became popular.

edit: And I should perhaps add that there are some environments where flatpaks and snaps are the obvious choice and that is for people running virtualized servers.

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