GOG creating a Linux launcher and Steam Box with SteamOS coming out soon should benefit PC users in general not just gamers since Microslop sees Windows like a social experiment where they can test AI on unsuspecting lusers, as an ad platform and a store front now.
You can have free commercial software, and proprietary shareware, the opposites are oxymorons.
Funnily I also run GoG games through steam proton.. But looking forward to the GoG client working!
Like even in 2014 WINE worked well enough for most games for me. Proton just made it utterly effortless, and lets me run AAA games like RDR2 and CP2077.
First is Wine itself, with its implementation of Win32 APIs. I ran some games through Wine even twenty years ago but it was certainly not always possible, and usually not even easy.
Second is DXVK, which fills the main gap of Wine, namely Direct3D compatibility. Wine has long had its own implementation of D3D libraries, but it was not as performant, and more importantly it was never quite complete. You'd run into all sorts of problems because the Wine implementation differed from the Windows native D3D, and that was enough to break many gams. DXVK is a translation layer that translates D3D calls to Vulkan with excellent performance, and basically solves the problem of D3D on Linux.
Then there's the parts original to Proton itself. It applies targeted, high quality patches to Wine and DXVK to improve game compatibility, brings in a few other modules, and most importantly Proton glues it all together so it works seamlessly and with excellent UX. From the first release of Proton until recently, running Windows games through Steam took just a couple extra clicks to enable Proton for that game. And now even that isn't necessary, Proton is enabled by default so you run a game just by downloading it and launching, same exact process as on Windows.
And now it doesn't even split games in "Linux" vs "Windows"; it simply assumes all games run on Linux. And they mostly do! Though to be fair I had to tweak a couple to make them run, and Space Marine II absolutely refuses to play past the cutscene, but most other games "just work".
Valve has good, stable funding to pay a team full time to build and support Steam OS which, over a long period of time and with enough user uptake, I think will have better chances of getting publishers on board with ensuring their games work on something that isn't Windows. Hell, they could probably make deals with publishers to say "hey, here's a pile of money to make sure your game works on Steam OS day 1, and put it in all the ads" and get the ball rolling that way.
Gaming is a tough space to crack. I think Valve's money and their history of supporting the most popular gaming platform on PC inspires more trust needed to make their platform a standard target.
It wasn’t that long ago that Wine was only really useful for games that were at least 5-10 years old. Proton is amazing.
I don't think this is a given. I think most gamers so far haven't cared about openness because pragmatically, it didn't matter for them.
Now they're seeing the long-term effect of not caring about that though, which is why we're suddenly seeing a movement of gamers moving to Linux, and trying to get others to move with them, because they realize the importance now, as their desktops are slowly collapsing over Microsoft's decision to let AI do all the programming, and having zero QA before releasing stuff to the public.
I'm not saying there have been zero useful improvements in later Windows releases, but 7 looked good and did what you told it to. "Openness" is a very abstract idea but "Only does what you tell it to" is a selling point for Linux.
You know it's not going to upload all your documents to OneDrive and then erase them from the computer.
Not a fan of those aquarium PC cases though, they sacrifice airflow for aesthetics which isn't a great shout. I have a 5090 and a 9950X in a more traditional case and my temperatures are fine with air cooling alone. Not sure you'd get away with that in an aquarium case with poorer airflow, at least without it sounding like a hairdryer all day.
Good stuff back in the day when you could get cases with multi-layered sound deadening side panels.
There’s a whole spectrum of PC gamers, and I think Linux+Proton can appeal to most of them. Let the people spending $10,000 on a glowing case make their own bad decisions.
I also have a glowing case PC. Out of the box, it's possible to change the fan light color patterns from Linux.
I had one problem putting Devuan on it:
If you plug the gaming keyboard 2.4GHz dongle into the monitor, the bios doesn't enumerate far enough down the USB tree to find it. So, you can't enter the bios and tell it to boot from USB. Then, the windows setup screen pops up.
After a few force reboots (M$ removed the "shut down cleanly" button from the language chooser), Windows goes into deep diagnostics mode on each boot trying to figure out why it keeps crashing out during the install flow. So, each debug step of "why can't I get into the bios?" takes a few minutes.
The solution was to plug the keyboard dongle directly into the box. The only time the fan has come on after boot (I think it likes to knock the dust off itself when it turns on) was when I told it to download my steam library all at once.
This is a given. They love Discord and shit like that.
Discord is obviously proprietary but it’s actually a very modular platform that gives a lot of nice controls. It’s easy to make your own “server”, it’s easy to add whatever bots you want, it’s easy to moderate. From a consumer perspective, it’s “open”.
Also, I know that this wasn’t your point, but I do feel compelled to point out that Discord works fine on Linux.
With the Windows 11 debacle, many are learning first hand about what closed ecosystems force on you. It seems every feed I have that has gaming as an interest has an article about Linux as the future. Clearly someone is reading these articles.
Cory Doctorow is doing a very good job of that, but there is only one Cory Doctorow.
a lot of FOSS is an abstraction but even the rubes can realize that they're being spied on, that Big Tech wants to be Big Brother, and is enshittifying their experience to that end.
The PC is an “open” platform in that you can buy and choose your own hardware. Intel vs AMD vs Nvidia, Seagate vs Western Digital, etc….
Using open software isn’t really more than a few steps from that. Being able to pick how your system works and customizing it to your liking is basically the software version of picking your PC parts. Gamers also like to run all sorts of software to rice there Windows desktops and will install all sorts of abominations tha mess with the Windows desktop shell. Much easier and fun to rice a Linux desktop.
Linux enthusiasts need to just learn how to appeal to their sensibilities. Valve knows, and they are very effective at getting people excited for a Linux based gaming platform. They’ve also proven they can walk the walk, not just talk the talk.
Sure, they won’t give a crap about the source code but there is more to libre software than just being able to change the source code if you want.
We’re also at an inflection point where people are getting really really really annoyed with companies like Microsoft treating them like lab rats and shoving Copilot down their throat when they don’t want it. There is a chink in the armor; people are opening up to the idea of alternative platforms where you don’t have to worry about any of that garbage.
> making Linux unusable by using EEE or any other tactic
This will never happen because projects will just be forked.
You're making a huge assumption here. I think that's a really small percentage. Most people game on PC because certain games they like to play are only on PC, or are much better suited to PC, or because their friends are on PC, or because they want to play on the go (Steam Deck is very recent and still not widely used), or because they need to have a PC anyway. Or because they grew up with it at home/in the neighborhood because there was no money for a console. Or because "Because they like building their system", I'm going to peg at <10%.
One aspect I think will be interesting is to compare what happens to attitudes with prices changes in more affluent markets like North America or Western Europe compare to how PC has been approached in other markets like Asia or South America.
The initial cost upfront was higher than a console but if you want a lot of games it ends up being worth it.
I haven't built a PC in over 2 decades and I can't stand trying to game on a console or on a phone. I buy a stock machine like AlienWare, overwrite Windows with Kubuntu and go to town gaming.
There's a chasm of difference between a technical fork and a meaningful fork. The entire point of EEE is relying on usefulness and convenience combined with network effects to make the entire system restricted and control it. Sure, you can go and fork anything you want - nobody stops you, technically. But you're getting the rug pulled from under your feet in any case.
You can witness the early stage of subversion with very useful software (without any hint of irony) made by people who "left" Microsoft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
I am speaking as an old gamer. I no longer play.
1, because multiplayer is free. Still baffling to me that you actually have to pay to play with others on consoles
2, piracy is much much easier
I hate building it and messing w hardware. Its a a necessity pain for me
The goal has to be to make native Linux attractive, so that they actually bother to create native executables, using Vulkan and co.
Until then it is no different from playing arcade games with MAME on Linux.
There are many older games I can't install on Linux anymore, because they used an older SDL1 or some particular X11 version or some GPU driver that's no longer available for the current kernel.
The exact same game, Windows version, can be installed and runs flawlessly on both Linux and Windows.
So, native Vulkan executables? Sure, if they can continue to run in 20 years.
For them DirectX and Win32 is what matters, if folks go out of their way to run on Proton, that is Valve's problem.
Literally half the gaming/hardware focused channels I watch have run at least one, if not several Linux Gaming videos and tests this past year... mostly in the past 4 months and mostly praising the state of Linux gaming. It's not going away.
And studios definitely check out their games running on Steam Decks via Proton now, so that's good.
I don't think so. I rather do believe that many game developers would actually love to give a more native approach for writing GNU/Linux games a try (to make this point more plausible: game developers are very used to game-console-native SDKs).
But what these game developers really demand is a very stable user-space API for everything that is necessary for writing games, which will work reliably on basically every GNU/Linux distribution, and will be supported for at least 20 years.
Sure, the platform is enshittified spyware, but that only impacts the game devs on their work machines (which are probably locked down to protect secret IP anyway). Microsoft has basically lost control over their own platform at this point. The game studios have been refusing to migrate to new APIs until after they're working well in Wine.
If the rest of us can run something decent at home, that's a > 99% solution to the problem.
Put another way, for a long time, you needed to buy an SGI workstation or whatever to make assets for PC games. That didn't hold the DOS ecosystem back.
As for the ABI:
The Linux kernel has started adding syscalls to enable native-like execution of Windows binaries, and game devs are testing with Linux at launch. In the worst case, these are only used by Wine. In the best case, some good ideas from the Windows kernel will be exposed to regular Linux user-land.
I don't see how it really matters if the binaries are targeting libc, musl, or an opensource win32 / win64 layer. It's free software regardless. End-users are getting better backward compatibility under Linux than Microsoft is supporting under Windows. That one victory goes a long way towards winning the entire war.
On top of that, Linux is starting to show better framerates than Windows in the same hardware. It's not 100% of the time, but it's enough that you should run the game in both places if you really care to get that extra few percent out of the hardware.
I would say it's a lot different, since it's an API implementation, not hardware emulation.
On the other hand, they didn't go up as much as our grocery bill and other bills. So, they're not keeping up with inflation, at least around here.
They are but AI has fried the markets for RAM, SSDs and GPUs. Everything has gotten ridiculously expensive ever since the wash trading and the 100s of billions of $ worth of deals really took off.
Personally, I think at least one or two of the major GPU OEMs will go bust thanks to all of this, and I would be surprised if Framework, Pine64 and Steam's hardware line survive it. Hell, at the point we're at, I even have serious doubts the Xbox line survives.
But I still feel like we're still in the eye of the storm, and things will improve. Remember late 2020 when every useless GPU would command a fortune? I remember buying a used RX 5600 XT with a warranty somewhere around October for 300 €. A month later, it would cost at least twice as much, if you could even find one in stock. Last December I looked a bit at prices, and the current equivalent model (9060xt 16 GB) was roughly around 300 again, and I don't think it has gone up since. I understand there may be a shortage of equivalent Nvidia GPUs from a thread the other day, so this may change soon, again. I have no use for top-of-the-line models, so I'm not familiar with their prices and availability.
Truly I have seen not even a hint of reason to believe prices would come back down in the near term. Fab allocation is booked years out, and building out new manufacturing capabilities is difficult and slow. Everything I'm seeing points in the same direction: this is only going to keep getting worse for consumers month after month for a long time.
One of the major x86 manufacturers makes CPUs with integrated graphics that is good enough for gaming. It's in "Steam's hardware line" btw.
Oh yes, AAAs maybe won't run on that. But they're boring af anyway. And predatory. So not much loss.
You would struggle to play any graphically intensive game, old or new, without at least a modest GPU. It's not only AAA.
...so you do need a GPU.
Well, for modern AAAs you also need to afford to pay for the IAPs. The GPU is the least of your problems.
Besides the usual complaints about electron and CEF applications, another pain point is they work horrendously in emulation. GoG Galaxy is only available as an x86 application on Windows. I'm running Windows ARM64 in a VM on an M-series macbook to play some games occasionally, and Galaxy is the slowest piece of software I have. Ironically, it runs worse than the games it spawns, which have a much more complex rendering procedure (and, like Galaxy, they also run in emulation, since the binaries are x86).
Emulation works particularly slow with JITted languages, so having the entire UI written in JavaScript doesn't help at all.
I even checked their job posting in the hope that it will be about a ground up rewrite for GNU/Linux, without the browser (since they are looking for a C++ developer), but it seems there are no plans to change that in the porting process. Which makes senes, it's a lot of work, but still a pity.
On a tangential note, requirements like this in the job posting also do not inspire much hope for improvements in the near future.
> Actively use and promote AI-assisted development tools to increase team efficiency and code quality
Companies don't support Linux because it's not widespread enough so it can't outweigh the costs. They don't give a rat's ass for the market's resentfulness or lack thereof. The Linux market was basically not a real market before because their market share was simply too small.
There are plenty of products made for resentful markets and as long as they keep being profitable they don't care.
I'm pretty sure they made the calculation assuming the GabeBox from Valve is a success and didn't want to miss out.
- mobile game companies send free android tablets to whales to avoid paying IAP royalties
- Valve makes exotic Linux consoles to diminish the value of the piracy (PC) ecosystem, and to source players for DOTA2 and Counter-Strike which they are not allowed to do in the Sony and Nintendo ecosystems
these trends are increasing. neither audiences in those two scenarios are resentful, and of course, they care a lot, in both scenarios, if the market for those two linux deployment scenarios is resentful.
if you only mean linux in the sense of, whatever Draiken thinks, yeah, there will not be any interesting insights there. If your instinct is to say, Android isn't Linux, or to get into the weeds of distributions, you are lacking imagination. just focus on what I am actually saying that is new information to you, and think about how focusing on money can be a good thing.
And this won't change a thing: it doesn't matter if they make a Linux-native frontend to the horrible GOG Galaxy. I just want my games to launch as seamlessly as they do from Valve's UI, not yet another launcher that I have to launch on top of Valve's system UI. I am already doing that with Heroic Games Launcher, which is far better than whatever they will concoct in-house and supports many other stores.
Valve integrated steam all the way down to the OS level to do all that. GOG galaxy meanwhile is focusing more on being an accompanying app to optionally use than centralizing everything under GOG. I think Galaxy trying to strive to be as "seamless" will break the very philosophy of GOG to begin with; being a store to grab games you truly own, not a platform to immerse yourself in.
I don't use Galaxy at all. My GOG games work on Linux. It's a good company.
So yes I want gog to be native linux on things like the deck.
I don't really want to see locked down hardware in the space any more than there already has been (Nintendo, Sony, X-Box, etc)... I think the PC centered gaming community largely wants a more open platform in general. In the long run, I don't see a lot of solid competition... especially with ever growing legacy libraries of content.
If people really want Linux to be a viable alternative to Windows, run by a majority of the general public, it has to be possible to sell closed-source software that runs on it (where "it" means a broad range of different distros).
Yes, that means less freedom concerning that particular software. But without it, the platform is a tiny niche that's easily run over by the hardware OEMs.
If Poettering is signing my kernel and reporting my UUID to websites along with proof I am viewing all ads, that is dreadful.
Unfortunately it will be the latter. Motherboards already have signed binary firmware blobs, some people cannot remove the Microsoft keys and still have functioning UEFI secure boot.
The vast majority of Linux users are very happy to get an official GOG Galaxy for Linux. I hope they will plug into Proton and collaborate with Valve, but we really need official tools and brands on Linux for common users to feel comfortable enough to come over.
The latter had been designed to be a full OS but didn't have a functional kernel when Linux was released, and Torvalds adopted the GNU userland for his project.
If they then go add additional features like wine integration to that tool to make it overlap more with Heroic is something we're all assuming, but not actually a given.
If you use Linux like MacOS and only run static binaries and containerized programs via things like flatpak everything is fine.
It's totally possible to treat the distro simply as a thin base layer and get everything else from flatpak and the various container hubs. It does work great.
They're entirely welcome to do this, I just think there's room for more opportunity with combined/open effort. Idealistic? Sure.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that doing nothing remains an option.
Cheapshot: Good Old Games (as long as our proprietary software functions)
False. That's literally the point of GOG. You can download the games directly from their website, install them, and run them without running any GOG software. GOG could vanish tomorrow and you'd still be able to play every game you purchased, as long as you backed up their installers somewhere.
I appreciate the first party reference and backup, but I'll stick with this for the consolidation.
Oh to be private/not beholden to shareholders, open to build for a ~small~ growing target [that has largely managed without them]. I'm envious, really. We're looking at the next Valve, I tell you! All it will take is the one hire for this listing, a penguin, Bellevue, and Codeweavers.
Minus sarcasm: I understand their interests in this and how it might even be a net benefit for all. I won't say it will be free, Heroic users paying the toll. Oops, there I go being loose with words again.
Also, even if it was fragmentation I'd prefer competition to ensue. I don't want another Steam situation, even if in theory a launcher isn't holding any valuable data hostage.
It's not a port, but Heroic is an implementation of the GOG ~standard~ store as a Linux user. I will use it until I can't.
Why? Precisely because of what you say: I don't want another Steam. Heroic does others like Epic, too; open consolidation like this is my ideal.
I'm not really against GOG taking a swing. I'm comfortable calling it a reference/backup, but I do prefer something like Heroic.
To be clear: I'm for a first party solution. I support their efforts as much as I can. It will have considerable impact on the users. Both ways.
And what of it? Every time a for profit company uses open source they'll either create a closed fork, and if they can't they'll create closed source modules for it.
I'm not saying it's bad to wish for companies to support FOSS, I'm just saying it's an unrealistic expectation to have.
There's definitely a desire for an appliance/console like experience where all the complexity is hidden behind install/play buttons, and steam has got most of the way there. As protondb shows that can't go all the way and tweaking is needed owing to the shifting PC compatibility in general and running software from one OS on a different one, it's the nature of the beast. Personally pushing towards monoculture on an open platform needs to be tempered, and there's a lot of debate previously for other places where that's relevant.
The arguments are tired, the word serves us well. They insist, yes, and forever remain hopeful that This Might Be the Year. Meanwhile, the reality exists for plenty already.
Supporting Heroic would appear on-brand given their old game/archival messaging, but I'm not learning marketing for free.
Not really against a first-party option, even. I do, however, find the inevitable user split notable.
This is one of the areas where GOG Galaxy has tried to stand out. It supports integrations with other launchers in Python: https://github.com/gogcom/galaxy-integrations-python-api
It's intended for the other direction of other launchers (or third party integrations with other launchers) feeding data to GOG Galaxy, but it's still one of the more interesting attempts in the wild of a launcher trying to be a little bit more than just a walled garden.
I don't know if in an Official Linux port of Galaxy if they'll try to find more ways to integrate beyond what they've already done with their Python API and how much they would be willing work with other launchers, especially Heroic, but of the big game stores, GOG seems one of the few that actually wants to try. Maybe they will. It would be nice to see. It's interesting seeing so many comments assume the worst of them, as someone who has played around with that Python API a little bit. (I was toying with a third-party Itch.io integration. Didn't get very far, but it was neat what seemed possible.)
[citation needed]
GOG's launcher team is presumably already familiar with their codebase, already has a checkout, already has a codebase that's missing 0 features, has a user interface that already matches their customer's muscle memory, and presumably already has semi-decent platform abstraction layer, considering they have binaries for both Windows and OS X. Unless they've utterly botched their PAL and buried it under several mountains of technical debt, porting is probably going to be relatively straightforward.
I'm not giving Linux gaming a second shot merely because of a bunch of ancedata about proton and wine improvements - I'm giving it a second shot because Steam themselves have staked enough of their brand and reputation on the experience, and put enough skin in the game with official linux support in their launcher. While I don't have enough of a GOG library for GOG's launcher to move the needle on that front for me personally, what it might do is get me looking at the GOG storefront again - in a way that some third party launcher simply wouldn't. Epic? I do have Satisfactory there, Heroic Launcher might be enough to avoid repurchasing it on Steam just for Linux, but it's not enough to make me want to stop avoiding Epic for future purchases on account of poor Linux support.
And as the underdog it even makes sense for GOG to fully embrace cross-store launchers.
I am happy that GoG will finally make its launcher available to Linux.
It's simply to bloated.
Glad to see gog work on native.
I've been buying and playing games from GOG on Linux for a very long time with no need for GOG Galaxy -- which is a thing I know nothing about. Since this announcement, I've been trying to figure out why I'd need it.
It seems like it's just a convenience application and social connection point (leaderboards, etc.). In which case, it's not something of interest to me. However, I've also seen references to Galaxy that imply that it's necessary to play games -- which is obviously untrue in general, but perhaps there are some games that require it?
Anyway, I'm tremendously confused by all this.
I find it slightly more convenient when installing games on a new machine. I've never personally seen a game that required using it.
- Download and all the gamefiles that I am entitled to, and keep them updated.
- Show me a pretty interface to launch games from, including recent news and patch notes about that game's updates.
- Keep track of my save files, synchronize them to other devices, and make sure they never get lost.
- (linux) have some kind of per-game startup command manager because even a platinum rated proton game might need a --force-grab-cursor or something.
But I sure as hell don't want to invest howevermany weekend days figuring out how to make games from other platforms as easy to play as Steam games on SteamOS.
I imagine this is that - give me "download" and "play" buttons that let me run GOG games on Linux, even if the binaries were authored for Windows.
Cloud saves and achievements and all that are nice (and expected from something like GOG), but even just a normal launcher feels essential on Linux.
> But I sure as hell don't want to invest howevermany weekend days figuring out how to make games from other platforms as easy to play as Steam games on SteamOS.
For games that are licensed under terms that allow it, Debian's Game Data Packager has already automated that work. And- as your comment suggests- a native port is much better than running on a wine shim, which will always be second-rate.
https://wiki.debian.org/Games/GameDataPackager
List of games supported by Game Data Packager:
You can still play GOG games without any launcher, which is how it's intended to work.
Some people really like having a launcher to keep track of everything, so this isn't a nothing burger. It's one more convenience to help convince people to move over.
Heroic Game Launcher: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
RPM/Deb/Flatpack/TGZ/AppImage for Linux
DMG for MacOS Intel/M1+
EXE for Windows
Heroic supports GoG, Amazon Luna, and the Epic Game stores.
Heroic even streamlines the app updates so you don't have to figure that out.
In my experience GOG bought games handled by Lutris/Heroic/Mini Galaxy trump Steam in convenience almost every time. There's been quite a few deal breaking issues with Steam client and/or Proton that went unaddressed by Valve for months that just never happened to me on the GOG+game manager combo. (Remember the most recent Steam rewrite that made certain UI elements not work on Linux and which still needs a workaround option in the client years later?) All that on top of another application requiring full browser engine under the hood eating resources just to be able to launch a game. I don't know if I am just extremely unlucky to get hit with every Linux related issue on Steam and notice its drawbacks or if people are offering Valve unreasonably high leniency, because they see then as some sort of champion of gaming on Linux, while not giving enough to other players like GOG.
Pardon my rant.
I've always wondered were problems on Steam's side or on the side of game devs implementing its APIs?
Anyway I personally experienced scaling issues, but chalked that up to my DE being unreliable. I also occasionally can't click on certain UI elements, but I recall this being a problem in Windows as well.
... and on Mac OS. For a while i had to play games with what control has focus to PAY them.
I don't need a client with your branding all over it, that has socials and my library and all engagement bait like that.
I figure it's one step away from putting the DRM back on so you have to use the launcher to get a game from GOG.
Just let me buy games and then shut up.
Game launchers are a good idea that lots of people want. A good game launcher needs both deep game integration and an online account, to provide save game syncing, joining friends and updating games. So far, it's mainly Steam which has been able to do this on PC. If GoG wants to compete, which it does, it only makes sense for it to provide the same.
It's not some evil scheme.
I like GOG's launcher because 1) it's open source and 2) it can show other gamijg libraries thanks to fan maintained plugins. Those aspects give me a sense that the goal here (outside of to lower the friction into GOG's store) is indeed to serve the user
And if that changes, it's easy to take my ball and go home. GOG trying to push hard on any DRM is basically them surrendering to Steam.
I've got tens of games through GoG and it's always my first port of call if I want a game. Because it keeps out of the way.
If it's got value to people, fair enough, it's got value to people. That's just my opinion. All I want you to do is sell me games. But we all know about enshittification and MBAs trying to round the wagons.
But we're in this hyper optimized world where kids are literally being auto scrolled through short form content. Attention spans have been utterly shot. So yes, there's a large number of people out there that see "going into a website and finding a game" as too much friction. That's a larger societal issue that I can't do much about in times where my country needs to debate the merits of citizens being shot on the streets by federal agents. Maybe one day we can get back to a point where proper educational and parental supprt resources is, say, a top 20 issue?
I see no simpler explanation why someone would buy out a subsidiary like that.
All in all, GoG thrives on people being sentimental and it's totally in character for the owner to be sentimental as well.
Same with anti-cheat really. The most common reason I hear people don't make the switch to Linux is that certain games work only on Windows due to the type of anti-cheat they use.
I basically don't leave the Steam UX. Valve has done such a great job here I don't see why any Linux user would consider buying games anywhere else.
I don't even know how to install non steam applications on my current stepup.
The original one with detachable controllers. The SSD is really easy to replace, and my logic is the controllers have to go bad eventually.
Edit: comes with a nice case and 2 USB c ports.
Be realist with what games will work, frame gen only goes so far.
I'd rather spend 80$ on new controllers vs 600$ on a new device.
That said, Square finally released some of their Final Fantasy games on it yesterday, so hopefully that's changing.
As for fusion360... Freecad is getting mighty good these days...
* Integrations with online parts libraries don't seem to work (don't know why they didn't bother, as it looks like it just spawned a web browser anyway), and the simulation add-ons aren't available either, but the main program itself is equivalently functional.
No mention of a license, though. I guess it'll stay closed source.
It's a DRM implementation. It has to stay closed source.
https://www.gog.com/blog/what-exactly-is-drm-in-video-games-...
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/label_the_games_that_have_...
I think GOG is saying a lot of the right things in terms of Game Preservation being a long term goal for them. I think they are between a rock and a hard place that the store would be a lot less active if they couldn't offer the latest games from companies like Sony, and they want to be on good terms with such companies to get access to their giant back catalogs for Preservation efforts which also presumably includes sales numbers of recent titles for justification.
But yes, I'd also love to see them push back a bit harder on some of these publishers a bit further than "needs an offline-capable installer" and mabye include more steps towards some definition of "should run offline-capable", because yeah things like "Live Services" and account systems and mandatory telemetry systems and rootkit anti-cheat systems are often de facto DRM just wearing another hat of "user convenience" or "achievement tracking" or "game safety" tools. I don't think GOG can make that push alone, though. There are too many industry trends to try to buck to get further in those directions. (Thinking about the recent Anthem shutdown as a recent for instance of a mostly single player game that is entirely unplayable because EA shutdown live services this month.)
There's nothing in the Crime Cities GOG forum about this, nor in the various tracking threads in the main forum, and generally GOG users are extremely sensitive about anything which even reeks of forcing Galaxy, so I'd strongly expect any issue to be known.
I've seen cases where the developer implemented a bad online check, so that if you blocked the program from accessing the internet while the OS reported being online, the game would hang or crash, but being fully offline would work. Could it be that something like that was at play here? Oh, or that you simply picked the wrong installer for the game, and thus ran the Galaxy-installer rather than the offline installer?
They do this to push Galaxy for convenience I suppose as most are used to clients that handle updates but it can be confusing if some wonder why for instance their offline installer shortcut opened Galaxy instead.
I think they've recently changed this.
To be clear: if you buy Disco Elysium on GOG, download the "offline game installer" without using Galaxy, install it, and run the game on a desert island, it will work (the network requests fail open). But if you try to run the game after removing the bundled dylib/DLL, it will not.
Why do Galaxy-free games ship with a mandatory dependency on Galaxy?
Because the developer linked the dynamic library in at compile time instead of writing additional code to load it at runtime and disabling/enabling features based on its presence.
You can call it budget limitations, incompetence or lack of respect for the customer. Doubt it's intentional DRM though.
If I can send you the private key and the game and it allows you to run the game with no further inputs, then the DRM is trivially broken (even without open source).
If it does some online check, then if the source is open we can easily make a version that bypasses the online check.
If there is some check on the local PC (e.g. the key only works if some hardware ID is set correctly), we can easily find out what it checks, capture that information, package it, and make a new version of the launcher that uses this packaged data instead of the real machine data.
If you use a private key to go online and retrieve more data, having it be open source makes it trivial to capture that data, package it, and write a new version of the launcher that uses that packaged data.
Basically, DRM requires that there is something that is not easy to copy, and it being open source makes it a lot easier to copy.
- the DRM/delivery software is open source
- the game payload is sent to you encrypted using the public key of a secure enclave on your computer
- while the game runs all its memory is symmetrically encrypted (by your own CPU) using a key private to that secure enclave. It is only decrypted in the CPU's cache lines, which are flushed when the core runs anything other than the game (even OS code)
- the secure enclave refuses to switch to the context in which the CPU is allowed to use the decryption key unless a convolution-only (not overwriteable with arbitrary values) register inside itself had the correct value
- the convolution-only register is written with the "wrong" value, by your own computer's firmware, if you use a bootloader that is not trusted by the DRM system to disallow faking the register (ie, you need secure boot and a trusted OS)
That doesn't seem to fit in any of your models. There's no online check, you can't send someone else the key because it's held in hostile-to-you hardware, you can't bypass the local-PC check because it's entirely opaque to you (even the contents of RAM are encrypted). You can crack into a CPU itself I guess?
I don't think the mechanism of the DRM being open source helps with the copying AT ALL in this design.
This design is, by the way, quite realistic: most modern CPUs support MK-TME (encrypted RAM mediated by a TPM) and all Windows 11 PCs have a TPM. Companies just haven't gotten there yet.
So I guess the whole game software, or at least a significant part, is loaded encrypted and runs encrypted. It's on the users hardware but the user can't access it.
The only thing I can think of: You say the game payload is encrypted using the public key of a secure enclave. This means the open source game launcher has to pass the public key to the server doing the encryption. Could you not supply a fake public key that goes to a virtual secure enclave? I guess the public key could be signed by intel or something, is that something that happens on current TPMs?
Would it even be possible to do this if the program had to run under Proton/Wine? The original subject here is the launcher running on Linux.
I do wander about the use of an open source launcher at this point though. As someone who prefers open source software, the idea of encrypted software running on my PC makes me uncomfortable, more than just closed source software.
Unfortunately modding is reason, why switch to linux for gaming is not easy.
Hopefully they will pursue a container/Flatpak native system but probably not!
It's been... amazing. A good game, running at workable framerates, no more crashes than usual (it's a Bethesda game, after all), and the software was free as opposed to building out a new PC with Windows 11.
It's like rediscovering PC gaming after years of it becoming bloated and a cash grab.
Gamers used to own the games they purchased via cassettes, disks, and later even digital copies. Now through platforms like Epic and Steam you are provided a digital "license" to play the game.
ALL of this speaks to the "openness" of gaming and it is ALL important to gamers.
As previously stated though, game creators have been forced to choose the platforms they can create their games for. By the 90s the majority of personal computers were running MS-DOS and Steve Jobs had a base take on games being "toys" and did not belong on Macintosh products.
Fast forward to the early Oughts and you see games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush making millions by producing games on ARM technology which really pushed the entire industry forward to focus multi-platform gaming outside of the tradition routes of either PC or console or both.
Furthermore triple A studios led the charge and made big decisions that smaller studios would follow until around the release of Cyberpunk 2077. This in my opinion was the big turning point that gamers decides to act against large studios from all of the decision making that has turned a relative open system to a closed system.
The invention of the Proton protocol to allow gaming on Linux Machines is FORCING industry to ABIDE by the wishes of the customer. The gamers. The gamers are FINALLY winning!
This isn't just about openness on operating systems and being able to own the thing you purchase. Its also about efficiency. Windows is a bloat farm that has what feels like a million service hosts running in the background sending telemetry data to NOT me. Furthermore, if windows is not optimized to use your hardware efficiently, why would your favorite game?
Changes like the Proton protocol are bridges to re-align the supply/demand curve by forcing the customer and producer back to the negotiation table so the gamers voice can be heard.
In closing, gamers have had limited options due to technological limitations, vendor lock ins, corporate anti-competitive practices, monopoly exploitation, or predatory pricings.
With inventions like ARM and Proton protocol, gamers have a louder voice to force game makers implement "openness" in their products.
https://bazzite.gg/ is based on Fedora
and https://chimeraos.org/ is almost like SteamOS for non-Steam hardware. It ships a console-like UI on top of an immutable Arch base.
GOG is now providing a 'correct' set of ELF64 binaries as a client? (I guess (wayland->x11, vulkan->cpu))
Hopefully, they will support self-hosted email servers not in the DNS, mobile phone numbers, and wallet codes.
I know it's eastern Europe but that's $5000-7500 a month, barely $90k a year. It sounds like a solo job too so a lot of responsibility for this salary.
$90K a year goes much further in most of Europe barring the centres of the biggest cities—let alone eastern Europe—than it does in the US.
NYC and Bay Area salaries are outrageously inflated, with much of the take-home being funnelled into four/five digit rents or mortgages for houses built out of matchsticks, car loans, health insurance payments, and more. None of this is necessary or costs as much in most of Europe, or the rest of the world, really.
Apples to oranges.
If you account for the fact that Poland is generally less expensive than the average and that the average monthly living cost is ~900 EUR ( https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?cou... ), even the 50k lower bracket is in the higher range. You get ~2k EUR net/month in your account after pension and tax contributions, health insurance, rent and expenses (as a single). That's not bad at all. EDIT: (excluding rent)