Quoting: randylI can't help but think we create our own special hell for ourselves by loudly clamoring for Linux support and then driving developers away with low sales and a frustrating development experience.

These companies operate for profit, they don't do anything because it's nice or cool. I'd bet that most of their *linux* customers bought the game since it works with proton, so they lost their incentive to port the game. They already gave their money to the company and it's unlikely that sales would go that much higher if they made a port.

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Quoting: grigiI think you may be confusing the issues here.
There is distinctly different "fragmentations" being spoken of here:

1) Fragmentation of the administative environment. Debian/RH/Gentoo/Arch bases all administrate very differently. This fragmentation is being felt, but RPM/APT and Portage/Packman solve different problems. So we actually need much of this.

2) Fragmentation of the app environment. Other than having to load styles seperately for GTK/Qt, we don't really care here. An app built for Gnome/Unity just works in a KDE enviroment.

3) Fragmentation of APIs. This has been a much bigger issue in Windows (DLL hell) than in Linux, and we have a few interfaces that are stable (kernel-userspace + libc) and you can just bundle the libraries on there, and problem solved.


One claims that fragmentation-3 is a non issue, and the other claims that is false because of example fragmentation-1.

This is about an app summit, so they are mostly concerned with fragmentation 2 & 3, and not 1.
If you solve 3, then it will run on any distribution (and run on future ones), and if you solve 2 then the experience will be consistent on any desktop.

You are right, but most people on GoL decrying the supposed fragmentation of linux as an obstacle do so only in the narrow use case of games. And that makes all the difference, because about 99% of games nowadays use a digital distribution platform nowadays, which is going to be mostly steam/gog/itch for linux. I'm not too familiar with itch, but gog and steam have their own way of installing shared libraries, so handling games doesn't go through the package manager, bypassing 1) entirely.

2) is of no relevance for games either, most games only interact with the window manager through sdl and similar libraries.
3) could be a problem but the way steam/gog shares libraries solves this too, and it is being further improved on steam as an other recent GoL article states.

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Quoting: furaxhornyx

Quoting: dvd

Quoting: randylThe one thing I hope comes out of this summit is a better way forward for application development. Our diversity is one of our greatest strengths and weaknesses (due to fragmentation). I feel like we're often so worried about courting Windows and Mac users and making our software available to their platforms that we've neglected the deep fragmentation in our own.

There is no fragmentation. On Windows every program every secon pwrusr g4m3r uses is a third party program that offers next to no integration to the supposedly "non-fragmented" desktop/toolchain.

Could you give an example of such third-party program ?

Quoting: dvdAs for support, all is really needed is that they figure out a base set of (external) libraries they want/need to support. And steam/gog provides them that already, so even them targeting ancient library versions are not a problem anymore.

To my mind every single dev/publisher that figured out that steam can ship their version of libraries and that it is enough to support one distribution to satisfy 99% of linux gamers has done a good enough job. This has nothing to do with how many desktop environments and how many "linux" distro flavours are out there.

99% seems a bit optimistic, if we look at the GOL statistics (assuming of course that those statistics are representative)

An example? Sure, every non-windows program, including the drivers. All the stuff that used to come on CDs. Then the stuff to overclock your hardware, the countless programs to clean windows, antivirus or browsers. (though i guess people just use edge and windows defender now) I don't understand how it's less fragmented than what we have. You are not forced to run a kde/gnome/xfce/openbox frankendesktop, you can just as well run one of them and pretend the others don't exist, same as on windows.

For games all of this stuff is largely unimportant, since they will only use a handful of libs like sdl to interact with your window manager/DE of choice. and any version mismatch can be bridged by the way steam and gog handle these things. It won't eliminate all possible errors under the sun but that's avoided by the existing approach to pick one officially supported distro for a game.

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Quoting: randylThe one thing I hope comes out of this summit is a better way forward for application development. Our diversity is one of our greatest strengths and weaknesses (due to fragmentation). I feel like we're often so worried about courting Windows and Mac users and making our software available to their platforms that we've neglected the deep fragmentation in our own.

There is no fragmentation. On Windows every program every secon pwrusr g4m3r uses is a third party program that offers next to no integration to the supposedly "non-fragmented" desktop/toolchain.

As for support, all is really needed is that they figure out a base set of (external) libraries they want/need to support. And steam/gog provides them that already, so even them targeting ancient library versions are not a problem anymore.

To my mind every single dev/publisher that figured out that steam can ship their version of libraries and that it is enough to support one distribution to satisfy 99% of linux gamers has done a good enough job. This has nothing to do with how many desktop environments and how many "linux" distro flavours are out there.

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Finally gave in and played the Witcher 3... Had mixed feelings about it.

Last 2 days i downloaded skyrim mods (another guilty pleasure), and atm i'm omw to the usual instant CTDs with modded skyrim.

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Quoting: GuestAfter watching this trailer I decided not to get this game due to woke propaganda.

What propaganda?

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Quoting: drlambAnd if I don't have a computer or device capable of playing ESO?

This is such a lame argument. If you don't have hardware able to run that you can't use the bandwidth needed to stream it either. A good gigabit connection needs a beefier PC than the minimum requirements of ESO. (not even mentioning the hefty prices of capable routers)

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QuoteIn other posts they also mentioned how in relation to DRM-free gaming that "98-99% of players don't care" and that if there's any "crying about DRM stuff in the gamer scene, it must come from a really vocal but tiny minority. 1-2% tiny". That's some pretty tough words for the DRM-free crowd.

Well if the DRM is obnoxious, most of the people i know are happy to wait for the DRM-free release (so to speak :) ).

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Well i think on most distros you can enable automatic upgrades, that's what i usually do on the stable variants, as they tend not to break (ever) with upgrades.

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I really like these kinds of games but i just can't get over the DLC spam in them. I gave crusader kings 2 a try since they gave out the base game for free, and almost instantly ran into content that was blocked behind a DLC. (i played a county as female and i wanted to introduce absolute cognative succession) Considering their games each cost 1k euros (if you dont want to get locked out of options by the DLCs) i just cant really bring myself to buy any of their games. It's a shame as CK2 had good addictive gameplay, and kind of intuitive too, it only took me 2 games to figure out the basics of everything.

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