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Thank You, Valve

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Re: Thank You, Valve

#441

Post by ineedasername »

account42 wrote: post #434
user432678 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recent release of the Windows 11 with requirements to have at least 8th gen CPU might help actually. My 6th gen is perfectly fine for a lot of games, and thanks to Valve I have quite a good library on Ubuntu.

Same was said for Vista, Windows 8, Windows 10 and probably many other times. Microsoft is not that stupid - they are doing these changes only after they are confident that they can get away with it and can easily change their strategy if needed.

>change their strategy if needed.

I think that's somewhat the point of what Steam is doing. Positioning themselves to exist without MS in the worst case while applying pressure that may curb MS's most user hostile or competition-limiting (in the app ecosystem) initiatives. Especially at a time of chip shortages and price premiums, users are more likely to hesitate buying a new computer just to have the latest win version when their existing hardware is still fine.

I think this is especially the case with gamers where and older CPU is much less likely to be a bottleneck in performance.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#442

Post by account42 »

quitit wrote: post #297

I'm fine with people praising Valve for utilising linux to advance their commercial interests. It's an example of a "win win" situation. However I notice on these forums in particular when other tech companies do similar it isn't seen so charitably. I speak with a slightly cynical tone because I've seen this story before - the catalyst to the changing public opinion has been less about what the companies actually do…

I think so far Valve's interest seem much more aligned with the average Linux gamer than any other company that I can think of. Valve has become a significant contributor to, the primary maintainer or themselves started development of:

* The open source Vulkan driver for AMD graphics

* DXVK, the DirectX 12 to Vulkan wrapper

* Proton

* SDL, a cross-platform support library for native development

* Gamescope display server to wrap games that e.g. have bad support for your monitor resolution

All of these are immensely useful even independently of Valves platform or proprietary software and this is by no means a complete list of the extend of their contributions. I don't think its unreasonable that they are praised even if their actions are ultimately self-serving.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#443

Post by account42 »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #170

The only thing I miss on GNU/Linux is a good alternative to CheatEngine, with popular game scripts from FearlessRevolution.org - creative use of such scripts can tremendously improve (single-player) gaming experience. For example, I used to give a huge population boost to computer opponents in Rome: Total War, so they would be able to field big armies for me to crush. Without it they quickly depleted their manpower p…

Modding in general is something that scales with the platform popularity so anything that needs to be platform specific is still lacking on Linux.

Another tool like Cheat Engine that has no Linux eqivalent is Flawless Widescreen [0], although Gamescope at least makes the games playable.

https://www.flawlesswidescreen.org/

Re: Thank You, Valve

#445

Post by account42 »

pschastain wrote: post #63

Anybody else get a "Potential Security Risk" warning for the site? Using Firefox 96.0.3 under Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon

Firefox uses Google's "Safe Browsing" list for these warnings. As someone with a website I can tell you that Google gives exactly zero shits about removing false positives from that list and keeping them off. With the rise of barely verified machine learning algorithms used to feed the list you can expect this to become a more common occurence for independent sites. My personal suggesion is to disable the feature in your browser instead of letting a private corporation with no transparency or accountability gatekeep what you should consider safe.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#446

Post by account42 »

thrower123 wrote: post #37

I still think it's a little odd that there is so much celebration of Linux as a semi-viable game platform, when no one makes native Linux ports anymore; they just target Windows, and then Proton provides a Windows API compatability layer.

I share your disappointment over the regression in native support for new titles, but "no one" is an exaggeration that does not do justice to the developers that still put in the effort to release native builds:

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC...

Re: Thank You, Valve

#447

Post by account42 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #182
thrower123 wrote: post #37

I still think it's a little odd that there is so much celebration of Linux as a semi-viable game platform, when no one makes native Linux ports anymore; they just target Windows, and then Proton provides a Windows API compatability layer.

Game (and other software) developers like to target stable APIs. Outside of the kernel, Linux has historically been incredibly unstable and fragmented. Vale shipped their own runtime libraries with Steam just to give native Linux game developers something consistent to target. If the Linux Desktop community solved that problem there might be more reason to make native ports.

You keep repeating this but have you actually tried to distribute binary software for Linux? In what way has "fragmentation" made that harder?

Re: Thank You, Valve

#448

Post by hfourm »

rnhmjoj wrote: post #246
gambiting wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, people just spamming cheater reports on someone who killed them, it's worthless without human verification and that's expensive/difficult.

It's already human verified if you require say >50% players to vote, assuming the cheater is not running a Sybil attack too.

Yea but you:

a) can't allow "vote to kick" from the opposing team in a competitive environment. That has obvious abuse written all over it, either intentionally or unintentionally (opposing team is losing or opposing player is legit good but they think he is cheating) b) when you allow vote kicking of "same team only", like CSGO, there is a lot of grief type of harassing where parties of players (like a 3 queue) can vote kick teammates just for general griefing reasons, intentionally deranking, and the like.

Re: Thank You, Valve

#449

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

account42 wrote: post #447
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game (and other software) developers like to target stable APIs. Outside of the kernel, Linux has historically been incredibly unstable and fragmented. Vale shipped their own runtime libraries with Steam just to give native Linux game developers something consistent to target. If the Linux Desktop community solved that problem there might be more reason to make native ports.

You keep repeating this but have you actually tried to distribute binary software for Linux? In what way has "fragmentation" made that harder?

A few links gathered from a quick google search as a primer:

http://stevehanov.ca/blog/?id=97

https://www.evanjones.ca/portable-linux-binaries.html

https://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2012/07/creating-portable-...

https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Portable_GNU-Linux_...

https://github.com/wheybags/glibc_version_header

In other words: there are a lot of steps and a lot of gotchyas to doing this that you're glossing over. Linux userland libraries are generally designed with the intention that an army of third-party maintainers will integrate all of this desperately developed software together and place it in a repo. Naturally every distribution wants to do things a little differently too, and they have a habit of changing it up every couple years. When you try to step out of that mold, even just to static link, things unsurprisingly become more difficult. Whereas Windows, Mac, Android, etc. have been designed since the beginning not to require that sort of thing and it is consequently a much, much more straightforward process.

I'm curious why, since you seem to believe the process is so straight-forward, you think it is that so few people distribute a simple binary? Why were Flatpak and AppImage invented?

Re: Thank You, Valve

#450

Post by neogodless »

account42 wrote: post #437
neogodless wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying it's the case that running a game on Proton on Linux is a superior experience to running it natively on Vulkan? That's surprising to me, but yes, if it's better than a native graphics API, it's probably better for everyone if developers stick to DirectX. On the other hand, I don't think you addressed my point (with my assumption that games run better natively on Linux in Vulkan). If gamers are just goi…

> If gamers are just going to skip Linux entirely without Proton Gaming on Linux was a thing before Proton and so far, it has not brought a giant jump in Linux users - e.g. Steam hwsurver still has Linux users hovering at about 1% [0]. Maybe that will change but so far this argument falls flat. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

It doesn't look like it brought about a massive increase, but Linux gaming has increased[0] about 25% over the 3 years since Proton was released.

(25% of 0.8% is 0.2%! Ha!)

[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/percentage-of-linux-gamers-on-ste...

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