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Latest Comments by Zlopez
I'm now a true convert after using a Vertical Mouse
4 August 2021 at 12:05 pm UTC Likes: 2

I'm using vertical mouse for a few years and it took me some time to get used to it, especially in FPS games, but now I wouldn't go for anything else.

I recently got myself Logitech MX Vertical, because wireless mouse is better fit for my ergonomic solution and it's a really good mouse. It fits my hand almost perfectly and I didn't had any issue with it for the last few months.

And the pain I had in my wrist from using the standard mouse for long times is gone now :-)

You can now support the Flatpak package format on Open Collective
2 August 2021 at 9:18 am UTC

Quoting: kon14
Quoting: ZlopezI'm personally running an ostree distribution...

Update your PC distro specs and join the Silverblue GoL masterrace my dude

I didn't know there is a Silverblue in PC distro specs. I will update it :-D

Frozenbyte are now telling Linux users to use Proton, even for their older games
30 July 2021 at 9:56 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: bepopProton is better than half-assed ports. I'm looking at you Total War Warhammer II :<

Hm, I'm playing native version of TW: Warhammer 2 (around 200 hours) and besides the non available cross-platform multiplayer I didn't found any issue with it.

You can now support the Flatpak package format on Open Collective
30 July 2021 at 9:48 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: superboybotI think Flatpak is fine (and to a lesser extent Snap, especially on distros that include it by default), but I don't really see the point unless it offers a package that isn't in your repo. AppImage is cool though, as a preservation method.

But other than that, what problem is it solving? It seems that some people use them for many (most?) installed packages. I find it a bit strange. For instance, why is Firefox even offered on Flathub? Are there distros that don't have Firefox in the repositories?

I'm personally running an ostree distribution, which discourages users to install anything by package manager that is outside the standard ostree image. The reason is that only the ostree is tested and works, but any package layered on top of it could cause potential issues. On the other hand it allows you to easily rollback any update and the updates are atomic, so you don't need to worry about package database corruption during update. This is really a newbie friendly distribution, although it's still in development and not everything is working as it should.

In this kind of distribution the Flatpak or similar solution is a must. The Flatpak in advance has sandboxing (although it's on the packager to set it correctly). For example I'm running Steam in Flatpak and it doesn't have access to anything outside the flatpak container it's running in (except for few media folders in home), so any game that has some tracking things inside is not allowed to get any info about what you do outside of Steam, even what operation system are you running. You can easily change those permissions by FlatSeal application, which is also flatpak.

And as Klaus above me wrote, the Flatpak solves the issue of too much different distributions by creating a unified way that works on any distro that has flatpak available.

You can now support the Flatpak package format on Open Collective
29 July 2021 at 7:35 pm UTC Likes: 3

I think the flatpaks are really great (I'm using distro, that is made for use with flatpaks), but there is one issue with Flathub regarding games, the runtimes (shared libraries between flatpaks) are updated continuously so you still have the same issue like with current Linux OS, the libraries will be incompatible in a few years. You can still make your own flatpak with old runtimes though, but they will be rejected by Flathub for security reasons, which is understandable, but it lacks the purpose of distribution by Flathub.

I would say that for game distribution the stable environment like Linux Runtime Containers provided by Steam is a must.

From current multi-distro packaging solutions the most useful for games is probably AppImage, which allows you to just package everything inside it and you don't need to install anything on the host machine to run it. There are few caveats however:

1) Often some libraries are missing inside AppImage, because there were on the OS of packager and he didn't found they are actually missing

2) No integration to distribution, at least not any I was able to found in past

Frozenbyte are now telling Linux users to use Proton, even for their older games
28 July 2021 at 2:35 pm UTC

Quoting: CatKiller
Quoting: Zlopez
Quoting: CatKillerThey haven't said that they'll bother testing it in Proton themselves, nor fix their game if it doesn't work in Proton, so that's still the 10% tier of the sliding scale - assuming it ever works at all.

I would say that if this isn't issue in Proton and it's reported against Proton it will be passed by Valve to developer. Which means it will have a much bigger weight than just complains from few users on Linux. Especially with Steam Deck being a thing.

IF someone reports the bug to Valve, and IF Valve go through the effort of determining the cause, and IF they can persuade the developers to fix their game... eventually they might provide a fix

compared to

Before release a dev sees that an update doesn't work on one of their test targets and fixes it

One of these things is much more valuable than the other.

I definitely agree that this should be a responsibility of the developer.

Frozenbyte are now telling Linux users to use Proton, even for their older games
28 July 2021 at 2:26 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: CatKillerThey haven't said that they'll bother testing it in Proton themselves, nor fix their game if it doesn't work in Proton, so that's still the 10% tier of the sliding scale - assuming it ever works at all.

I would say that if this isn't issue in Proton and it's reported against Proton it will be passed by Valve to developer. Which means it will have a much bigger weight than just complains from few users on Linux. Especially with Steam Deck being a thing.

Frozenbyte are now telling Linux users to use Proton, even for their older games
28 July 2021 at 1:33 pm UTC Likes: 9

Let's see how this goes, if the Steam Deck will really change the OS composition for gaming market (Linux will not be less than 1.0%), it could mean that more and more developers will target Linux as one of the main platforms. And with the Linux Runtime containers provided by Valve, they even have an environment that will make sure that their game will run in it even years after release. Which is unfortunately not a case today, when old game titles couldn't be played anymore because the required libraries are no longer available :-(.

Let's face it the games are usually not a kind of software that targets for continuous delivery and after it's not profitable anymore it's left to rot. In this case Proton and Linux Runtime Containers could really help.

Netflix is getting into video games, so we'll have another cloud gaming service
15 July 2021 at 12:31 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: DorritI'll never, ever, use streaming services for whatever purpose.
My movies and TV series are on DVDs, the music on CDs, the games on HDDs and the books on paper.
Streaming/cloud/online is just another way of control over the populace, together with video surveillance, facial recognition, smart phone apps...
Covid passports anyone?
Digital money Ma'am and Sir?

Shove your Brave New World where the sun doesn't shine.

I don't like to have physical copies of movies or music, it's just something you will rip (not possible everytime, because of DRM) and then just throw away (I don't even have a way to play them anymore). For the books, when they are not available in my country it's too much money for shipment so it's not feasible for me.

But I agree the streaming is killing the rights to own something and helps with the surveillance.

And with the Covid passports, you mean the same that Linux Foundation started to work on? :-D

Netflix is getting into video games, so we'll have another cloud gaming service
15 July 2021 at 11:09 am UTC Likes: 2

It looks like the games will be at the same place like movies, audio and e-books are nowadays, where you have a hard time to actually find something that is distributed in some open format. Now you can at least download games with DRM attached (praise to GOG for distributing non-DRM games), but looking at the game streaming services popping up, it seems that this wouldn't be true in the future. Let's see how this ends, but I'm afraid that in few years you will not be able to play anything AAA without streaming it from some cloud service.

Let's hope my vision is not true, but the games are the only part of the entertainment world that is not yet DRM online only in most cases.

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