People talk about #GamingOnLinux like it's such a new thing…
There was a company 20+ years ago (Loki Software) that chiefly ported games to linux (commercially).
There was also a wine-based #Proton-like compatibility layer called (IIRC) #CrossOver. I think it was actually an "open core" system, where sales of the software helped fund #Wine and/or older versions/portions of the software was released as source for wine.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@joel Loki's port of Quake 3 is literally what brought me into linux, I bought Redhat 5 in a big box at microcenter alongside Quake 3 Linux. I've been using linux as my daily driver since the 90's, and have not only played games on linux for decades, but also make games in linux.
With all that said, let me say that today is still night & day what it used to be. It's breathtaking how quickly went from "running a few tent pole games" to "running basically every game"
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@joel the big difference between the days of Loki vs now? Valve's pocket books. Ryan Gordon once told me that Valve is essentially the sole entity funding SDL's development, but they pay him so much for SDL that he can concentrate on it as a full time job.
Valve going all in on linux has been the single biggest boon to Linux I've ever seen. I'm so happy with the current state of linux! This message was typed from a linux HTPC under my television right now!
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@joel As much as I love where Linux is now thanks to Proton + Wine, I still hate how some companies who are defacto standards in their field, like AutoDesk with AutoCAD in construction and architecture, refuse to support linux. I still have to keep the random Windows PC around just for weird, bespoke, edge programs like that. Adobe is especially bad for how they refuse to support linux.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@joel@dexter I wish that were law. My sister's entire family is firmly in the cult of mac, and the walled garden is precisely why. She only buys things from apple, no other electronics manufacturer. "It just works."
If it looks like Blink, and walks like Blink, and talks like Blink... ;)
Yeah, it's better than Chrome. But also, it is Chrome to a large degree.
I'd love to see someone like Brave or even #Vivaldi get the cajones to replace Blink with something else, whether it be Gecko, or WebKit, or heck, khtml. XD
@sotolf@RL_Dane@GabeMoralesVR@joel@dexter
Yeah… true. Forgot that bit for a minute. Hmm, maybe I'll try again and get him to move to Firefox when I'm next on the same side of the world.
Alllllright this is the point in this branch of the conversation where I'd like to request my mention removed. Not an argument I'm willing to step into. Have fun, y'all, and be respectful of each other! :)
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@joel@dexter It's more that she views computers as a means to an end, nothing more. She and her family are not tech savvy, she grew up hating computers. She likes specifically that she can just look for the apple brand and be done with it. Essentially, the freedom I love is exactly what she hates. She doesn't really want to get out from that spell.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@joel@dexter While, on a whole, I hold a very Copyleft slant, having grown up on the internet since '89, alongside Linux, where the idea of paying for information is sort of a no-no, I also very much appreciate a general dumbing down of computing. I think million-monkeys-at-a-typewriter model works. Just because you're good at using computers, doesn't mean you're good at using computers for a specific task in a specific field.
Several years ago, I got hired to write some custom database software for a local doctor. It was simple stuff to me as a programmer, but most of my time was spent talking to him, figuring out what he needed as a doctor. It is wiser, IMO, to bring the skill necessary to make such an app easily down, rather than giving me a crash course in the daily routine of a doctor.
When average people can engage in a technical world, society sees a benefit, IMO.
I liked computing in the 1990s way better. Sure, there was a lot fewer people doing it (and yes, that is a big problem), but you didn't see people being led around to experience computing the way someone else wants them to.
Seriously, foxtrot that sierra straight into orbit. That's just ungodly.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@joel Also worth noting that many of the big people behind Loki Software are also behind SDL and DXVK. Gaming on Linux has gotten so awesome so recently largely because of those same pioneers. I respect Ryan Gordon so freaking much, what a career he's had.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@joel I saw Ryan Gordon give a lecture on all this stuff, and from what I can tell, he just genuinely loves linux and video games. It's what he'd be doing even if nobody paid, it seems.
I'm so happy he's been around for decades, he's been an overall positive force for linux for so long now.
@GabeMoralesVR@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@joel Yeah, I considered myself a Unix guy on Mac. Got unsatisfied 2010-15 as Apple started iOS-ing OS X, and locking down their hardware. Proton started to be a thing about that time so all but 3 of my Steam library ran, and obviously all of my favorite Unix tools did too. Easy decision. :)
I loved Mac OS X as a best-of-both-worlds UNIX OS between 2008 and 2019. It had a very usable commandline (homebrew made it even better) and an incredibly fluid and usable GUI.
I bought (this) Thinkpad X200 "just for writing" in early 2019, and it became a gateway drug to get me back into Linux.
When my beloved MB Air got doused in tea and died the death that same year (and Apple abandoned my 2011 iMac), my entire world became Linux.
@RL_Dane@slembcke@GabeMoralesVR@benjaminhollon@joel Apple betting Unix was revolutionary at the time. The only time I was an Apple user was in the early 2000s, I had a used Power Mac G4 laptop. Eventually moved it over to ArchLinux PPC to squeeze any performance could for its aging Motorola proc. I loved the Aqua GUI, and having a Unix terminal under Utilities ☺️ Then they went Intel and I've left it since.
I remember how disappointed I felt when I found an old Classic Mac floppy and popped it into a USB floppy drive on my Macbook. I knew it wouldn't be able to run it (there's always Mini vMac), but it didn't even pull the icons from the resource fork. It was just a blank modern app icon with a 🚫 around it.
I do want to say one thing about mac apps, particularly proper Mac OS X era first-party apps (before the crap iOSification of everything).
Mac apps were both very powerful, AND easy-to-use. Not OR.
In Linux-land, it's mainly OR. #Gnome thinks that having more than four options (or a proper menubar for goodness sakes) is anathema, and KDE (which I do love) is just married to complexity.
@RL_Dane@JSkier@slembcke
I have to admit to leaning toward the GNOME side. A few well-considered options make things easier for both users and devs (since test cases need to be made for every combination of options, in an ideal case). It can be done poorly, but it can also be done really, really well.
@RL_Dane@JSkier@slembcke
I have a rule of not using programs I can't pronunce the names of. Which is why I don't listen to my music through ncmcppcmppppcm. (I may have slightly botched the spelling there, but the spirit is the same. 😉)
@RL_Dane@JSkier@slembcke
Yeah, I'd rather have an extra syllable that flows better and has a cool sound than an acronym that is frankly ambiguous—my first thought was "Personal Computer" when I read "PC" card.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@JSkier Specific example: When I open a .zip in Files, it decompresses it into a folder named the same. In [anything else here (except Mac)] double clicking views an archive which is... unhelpful. Right clicking gives you a menu full of options that all make different messes because if you memorized what they all did one of them may save you 10 seconds someday. I have like a 10% chance of picking the wrong one and that makes me grumpy. -_-
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@JSkier In the rare case I want to merge a zip into an existing directory or something like that I'm generally doing something on the command line anyway, and that stuff makes a lot more sense to me there. Though I dunno, maybe that's CLI elitist or something? Egh, I suppose you can do it in Gnome by double clicking to decompress and then do a normal file move to merge stuff anyway. Either way, complicated GUIs don't make doing tricky stuff less tricky IMO.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@JSkier That's the one from LXDE that's used on the Raspberry Pi right? I mostly have the same complaints against that one. At least on Pi specifically, one of the only things I need it to do is decompress .zips, and it falls right into the "I found 3 ways to do this wrong so far, just open the stupid archive!!!1!" territory.
There's been four Macintosh filesystems over the years:
MFS - Macintosh File System, 1984. No true directories, I think only supported on 400KB disks. max filename length of 61 or 255 chars, depending on how you look at it (I didn't know this!!!)
HFS - Heirarchical File System, 1985. Directory support, up to 2TB disks. No more than 31 character filenames (still was a heck of a lot better than 8.3 in DOS!) Support became read-only in Mac OS X 10.6, and gone by 10.15
HFS+ - 1998. 8EB max volume size. 255 character filenames, with Unicode (UTF-16?). Journaling. Still (optionally and by default) case-insensitive (but case-preserving)
...
I remember when I was compiling kernels in the early 2000s, I would usually throw the AppleTalk module in to show my classic Mac friends, for posterity 😆 Hello, are you there? 😏
@benjaminhollon@joel@RL_Dane@JSkier@slembcke Yeah, I went 3 of my 4 years in college without a car in Austin, it was super doable because it wasn't Houston. In the big cities in Texas -- Houston, San Antonio, Dallas -- doing that is basically impossible.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@joel#Wine has been around since linux 2 or 3 (middle 90's.) It just never really worked that well. Maybe Microsoft hadn't opened up the relevant API's that much.
Oh, definitely Linux 2.x days, and yeah, this was before Microsoft adopted the "we love linux and FOSS" charade.
I don't expect they're actually opening up any really juicy Windows APIs even today, but I think they open sourced Windows 1.0?
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@joel I knew nothing about windows before windows 3. What ever I did before that was DOS or a Z80 machine running Basic. Before '83 I was working at Boeing running IBM mainframe software (assembler, PL/1, COBOL, and Fortran) as well as C on Vax machines.
@dlupham@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@joel Before Window 3, microsoft mainly flexed its muscles through Basic. They had the best Basic around, and could make or break computers with their Basic compatibility.
@RL_Dane@dlupham@benjaminhollon@joel well, "good" compared to some garbage versions of basic elsewhere haha. I tried basic on a ZX Spectrum and it was awful. They were so RAM starved that keywords were turned into single identifiers, i.e. you couldn't type "print," rather "print" was a single button 1 byte character that had it's own special graphic in the font ROM lol.
Windows XP was the last windows version I used at home (and of course, paid for). I only ever used 3.11, 95, and XP at home, which is kinda funny.
Those blue titlebars look so fisher-price to me now (that's a brand of children's toys in the U.S., to those unfamiliar), but I really loved XP at the time.
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