I'm very hopeful that Linux gaming will save the open PC desktop despite big tech is coming to destroy it. Or at least keep PCs alive for another decade. Gamers are still a huge factor as hardware customers.
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.
I also feel like this is an insane opportunity for companies who previously did not offer Linux native clients to start doing so and see some of a hike in sales specifically coming from the Linux crowd. I would absolutely pay good money for high quality Linux compatible software, after all, its not free as in free beer. I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course. I think maybe Ubuntu did? I don't know that Arch ever has. I think its a wasted opportunity to fund Linux distros by taking a small cut (probably not 30%) from commercial products directly on those app repositories.
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.
Why would a bunch of volunteers put a ton of effort to create infrastructure so people (corporations, really) can make money?
Flathub is making inroads into having paid apps but they’re explicitly not a distribution really
It would fund their projects. Imagine if more Linux distros has enough funding to fully hire part-time volunteers full time? Those companies will sell them without those stores. This at least gives them a piece of the pie.
The entire point of the free software movement is to promote free software principles and software rights. What I think many Linux distributions would prefer is a model where companies who do benefit from selling software and hardware are funding them indirectly, so they can focus on continuing to promote free software in a more neutral way, without the pressures and potentially misaligned incentives that come from running a store front can bring.
There are distributions like elementary OS which are happy to sell you things with this model, though, but I just don't think it's surprising many distributions would actively prefer to not be in this position even if it leaves money on the table. This sort of principled approach is exactly why a lot of us really like Linux.
It's really unfortunate the term "free software" took off rather than e.g. "libre software", since it muddies discussions like this. The point of "free software" is not "you don't have to pay," it's that you have freedom in terms of what you do with the code running on your own machine. Selling free software is not incompatible with free software: it's free as in freedom, not as in free beer.
Nobody in this comments thread appears to be confused by or misusing the term "free software". We're talking about free software vs (commercial) proprietary software.
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly
Free packages remain unaffected, but now there are optional commercial options you can pay for which fund the free (as in free money) infrastructure you already take advantage of so that these projects are fully sustainable. I imagine some open source projects could even set themselves up to receiving donations directly via package managers.
I promise you, everybody understands the general idea, but adding a built-in store to your operating system is far from a neutral action that has no second- or third-order effects. It isn't that it somehow affects "free" packages. Incoming text wall, because I am not very good at being terse.
- It creates perverse incentives for the promotion of free software.
If development of the operating system is now funded by purchases of proprietary commercial software in the app store, it naturally incentivizes them to sell more software via the app store. This naturally gives an incentive to promote commercial software over free software, contrary to the very mission of free software. They can still try to avoid this, but I think the incentive gets worse due to the next part (because running a proper software store is much more expensive.)
Free software can be sold, too, but in most cases it just doesn't make very much sense. If you try to coerce people into paying for free software that can be obtained free of charge, it basically puts it on the same level as any commercial proprietary software. If said commercial software is "freemium", it basically incentivizes you to just go with the freemium proprietary option instead that is not just free software, but also often arguably outright manipulative to the user. I don't really think free software OS vendors want to encourage this kind of thing.
- It might break the balance that makes free software package repositories work.
Software that is free as in beer will naturally compete favorably against software that costs money, as the difference between $0 and $1 is the biggest leap. Instead of selling software you can own, many (most?) commercial software vendors have shifted to "freemium" models where users pay for subscriptions or "upsells" inside of apps.
In commercial app stores, strict rules and even unfair/likely to be outlawed practices are used to force vendors to go through a standardized IAP system. This has many downsides for competition, but it does act as a (weak) balance against abusive vendors who would institute even worse practices if left to their own devices. Worse, though, is that proprietary software is hard to vet; the most scalable way to analyze it is via blackbox analysis, which is easily defeated by a vendor who desires to do so. Android and iOS rely on a combination of OS-level sandboxing and authorization as well as many automated and ostensibly human tests too.
I am not trying to say that what commercial app stores do is actually effective or works well, but actually that only serves to help my point here. Free software app stores are not guaranteed to be free of malware more than anything else is, but they have a pretty decent track record, and part of the reason why is because the packaging is done by people who are essentially volunteers to work on the OS, and very often are third parties to the software itself. The packages themselves are often reviewed by multiple people to uphold standards, and many OSes take the opportunity to limit or disable unwanted anti-features like telemetry. Because the software is free, it is possible to look at the actual changes that go into each release if you so please, and in fact, I often do look at the commit logs and diffs from release to release when reviewing package updates in Nixpkgs, especially since it's a good way to catch new things that might need to be updated in the package that aren't immediately apparent (e.g.: in NixOS, a new dlopen dependency in a new feature wouldn't show up anywhere obvious.)
Proprietary software is a totally different ball game. Maintainers can't see what's going on, and more often than not, it is simply illegal for them to attempt to do so in any comprehensive way, depending on where they live.
If the distributions suddenly become app store vendors, they will wind up needing to employ more people full time to work on security and auditing. Volunteers doing stuff for free won't scale well to a proper, real software store. Which further means that they need to make sure they're actually getting enough revenue for it to be self-sustaining, which again pushes perverse incentives to sell software.
What they wanted to do is build a community-driven OS built on free software by volunteers and possibly non-profit employees, and what they got was a startup business. Does that not make the problem apparent yet?
- It makes the OS no longer neutral to software stores.
Today, Flatpak and Steam are totally neutral and have roughly equal footing to any other software store; they may be installed by default in some cases, but they are strictly vendor neutral (except for obviously in SteamOS). If the OS itself ships one, it lives in a privileged position that other software store doesn't. This winds up with the exact same sorts of problems that occur with Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. You can, of course, try to behave in a benevolent manner, but what's even better than trying to behave in a benevolent manner is trying to put yourself in as few situations as possible to where you need to in order to maintain the health of an ecosystem. :)
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I think you could probably find some retorts to this if you wanted. It's not impossible to make this model work, and some distributions do make this model work, at least insofar as they have gotten now. But with that having been said, I will state again my strongly held belief that it isn't that projects like Debian or Arch Linux couldn't figure out how to sell software or don't know that they can.
Big businesses are already contributing a LOT of money and manpower into Linux development (especially kernel).
They could simply fund developing app store extensions in the same way redhead enabled systemd to happen. Both Sievers and Poettering were working at Redhat at the time.
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.
That's essentially being done with Flatpak.
Linux is largely still built on the old (and indeed, outdated) Unix trust model. The system itself is assumed to be trusted, and the primary security boundaries on the system are drawn between users. Since Linux package managers actually install and manage the base system as well as end-user software, anything the package manager installs is treated as part of "the distribution", and thus trusted. It's not a good idea to use such a thing to install proprietary, third-party software. The curation and vetting of the distro maintainers is actually vital here, and when you add a third party repo, you're giving it a lot of trust. At the same time, why would distro maintainers give free labor to integrate proprietary software? Most are not super interested in that, and even if they are, they don't generally have the rights necessary to redistribute, let alone modify, proprietary software. On the other hand, those third-party developers and publishers don't want to master and manage a half-dozen different packaging formats, and various other packaging ecosystem differences that vary across distros.
Flatpak is positioned to solve all of these problems, and it's no secret that enabling (relatively) responsible use of proprietary software is one of the goals. It enabled distributing a small number of large, common runtimes of which different versions can safely coexist on the same system, addressing fragmentation. To reduce the amount of trust given to installed apps, it separates what it installs from the base system, and offers sandboxing to help limit the permissions granted to an app that still runs under the OS user of the person using it. And it supports third-party repos that publishers can run themselves.
I'm not currently a daily Flatpak user, so idk how much the current reality lines up with that goal, but that's where the movement towards this is on the Linux desktop today.
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.
One of the advantages of open source software is the ability to distribute said software with relatively few restrictions. It simplifies life for the maintainers of Linux distributions, those who manage Linux systems, the end user, and software developers. Making a package manager a retail product store would complicate things for everyone.
That said, the only thing preventing the distribution of proprietary software by most Linux distributions is policy. If a distribution wanted to do so, and the vendor's license allowed for permissive software distribution, they could do so. The vendor could implement their own mechanism for selling and distributing license keys. The advantage to them would be using a common software distribution method without having a middleman taking a cut. (Think shareware, or even physical software that included a license key.)
It makes zero sense for traditional distros to have payments. They exclusively repackage software. You want direct to customer platforms (Snap, Flathub, etc).
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.
It's not "zero cost" but plenty of proprietary software with native linux clients will do things like set up Ubuntu package repos. You're pasting a handful of lines in the command line (or for the fancier stuff downloading the isntaller that does that for you) and you're off to the races
There might be a boutique business that could help with installer/package repo mgmt for people wanting to ship linux clients and take advantage of the auto-updaters and the like. Maybe.
Discussion against the prevalent groupthink sentiment are considered haram and shunned on HN.
I know it's unfair but it is what it is.
I wish there was some independent vote quality assessment process (a bot working on the HN backend) gently adjusting account standing factor based on their votes on the obviously true/false comments. After a while troll would simply see zero impact of their votes and comments assigned 0 karma at the outset. For not bringing the positive impact to the community.
I agree with your point on the difference between proprietary v. commercial, but it’s a bit hard to parse your example. “Free” is kind of an unfortunate word choice, as it obscures the gratis v. libre distinction you’re trying to point out.
Free/libre commercial software is indeed possible, and I’d love to see more products utilizing this model. We do need to keep in mind that “cracking” such software becomes legal (which is probably not a big deal because people would do that anyway).
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".
God I hope Valve gets serious with Steam OS and it becomes a competitive target for PC games. They're making amazing progress with the Steam Deck, and I'm so ready to be free from Windows.
Is there something wrong with the many distros that make Steam a really easy install, or in the box? I mean Bazzite literally has a FS Steam option in the box for installers that's pretty close to the Steam OS experience with broader hardware support.
I'm trying to word this without sounding dismissive of Bazzite for simply not being from a big company with money to throw around. I'm sure the people making it are doing great work. But I just don't get the feeling it's anywhere near the position it needs to be a "real platform" that could disrupt Windows. It has to be looked at from the perspective of publishers, and whether it's worth their money to target a new platform.
Valve has good, stable funds 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.
The PLATFFORM from a game publisher's perspective is still going to be Steam/Proton on Linux... More likely than not, it's all still mostly going to be Win32/64, but with improved Proton testing/targetting... this will be for SteamOS or Steam on other Linux distros... it's the same.
From your perspective you aren't waiting around for "completion" ... in terms of scope, most of it is built on efforts from Fedora/Redhat with enough customization to make it friendlier to gamers. Linux distros aren't like Windows, they share a lot and are largely interoperable or compatible with a few major camps.
But very little of this affects what will happen with games. Your experience with Steam on pretty much any Linux distro is likely to be as good or better than Steam on SteamOS.
Edit: to clarify, there are differences between Linux distros... but the fact is, that Steam on pretty much any modern/updated distro will be a very similar experience wether it's "SteamOS" or something else that you aren't having to wait around for. For that matter, you can put together a current AMD system with up to a 9070XT and run SteamOS today, the hardware is supported and you don't actually have to wait for it if you don't want to. You may find the experience better with a desktop distro, if you plan on using it more or as much of a desktop as game platform. And more so if you want to run a non-amd GPU.
The core of bazzite has nothing to do with being from a big company or not. The complaint doesn't make much sense given the foundation Bazzite is actually built on is sponsored and developed by Fedora/RHEL.
Maybe I'm downplaying what the Bazzite team is actually doing, but from afar it is Fedora Silverblue with gaming related tweaks out of the box, probably targeting handhelds and common gaming hardware in testing.
The actual issue of adopting a new operating system is already rearing its head on this thread. "What's Bazzite? What's Silverblue? SteamOS, is that linux? Is that different from this other linux?".
There's too many options for someone that wants to sit down and play a game. Unless a major OEM decides to push Linux on their systems, SteamOS is generally the only real competitor in this space due to reputation and control of the PC gaming market. Time in the market, versus timing the market is what comes to mind here.
Paradox-of-choice issues are overblown. Every Linux distro is a repackaging of the same core components and same software. The PC is standardized for the most part, there is not much commodity hardware that lacks support, and the popular hardware that needs particular support (Nvidia drivers) is catered to by any popular distro out there.
Users are mostly afraid of wasting time trying Linux (any Linux) and having to go back to Windows for reason X, Y, or Z that they didn't even know about. For my partner who doesn't game, reason Z is one particular feature of Microsoft Word (the shrinkwrap application, not 365 Copilot App or whatever) that isn't emulated by LibreOffice or Google Docs. For competitive PC gamers, it's kernel anti-cheat. The Linux desktop story in general has been to slowly whittle down these reasons until there really is no good excuse for users not to switch and for vendors not to support the OS, even through compatibility layers.
The problem I have with this approach is that ultimately you're trading one owning company for another, rather than building to a standard that anyone could build around.
Because someday Valve may no longer be privately owned, and we're potentially back where we started. If we support having strong OSS ecosystems around computers we don't have to fight this battle over and over again.
Valve slow-rolling SteamOS and being coy about it ever being released as a "standalone, supported" OS is only because they're a private company and can build for open source ecosystems.
Too bad Proton and Wine are open-source, and they can't really remove them from the ecosystem...
So if your game runs under Wine/Proton today, there's a pretty good chance that game will continue to run years from now. I've had better experience with really old games under Wine than actual Windows for that matter.
SteamOS is actively shipping on consumer hardware today, that's the real major difference here. People who don't even know how to install their own operating system are using it.
There isn't a downside to these other distros like Bazzite.
I was amazed that the PC port of Spider-man Myles Morales worked perfectly with no tweaking at all. That’s the newest AAA game I own (I think), and it runs silky smooth and hasn’t had any issues.
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.
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.
Proton is amazing and it's really three different subprojects that deserve a lot of credit each.
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.
It often is hard. If you’re using win32 APIs extensively, you’ll have to port your code to Linux counterparts.
There’s also the issue of forward compatibility. Sometimes you just can’t run an old Linux game on a newer distro, while it works fine in Wine. Or it might partially work: for example, I’ve managed to run a Linux build of Heroes of Might and Magic III, but didn’t get any sound, because it relied on some ancient sound API (pre-ALSA; perhaps OSS?). Windows version works great in Wine to this day.
For some game engines though, porting is really easy. There are some piracy groups releasing Linux ports of Unity games (that don’t have an official Linux version) by just replacing the game executable with a compatible one from another game.
Most gamers don't give a shit about openness. A much more likely outcome is "big tech" following the numbers and slowly making Linux unusable by using EEE or any other tactic under the pretense of usefulness.
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.
They don't care about it as an abstract idea, but they do notice that Windows 11 is worse than Windows 10 was worse than Windows 8 was worse than Windows 7.
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.
My opinion on that may be colored by the fact that I had a Surface Pro 3, the one place where Windows 8.1 was actually great to use, and taking away some of the focus on tablet use was a regression. Overall you're right though, outside of tablets W10 was an improvement, because 8 tried to stick the tablet UI into desktops.
I was recently connecting to some server with the Windows 8 derived version of Windows Server and gosh that full screen start menu is stupid with a mouse.
Ironically I built a Linux box for mainly local models with some RGBs because I wanted tasteful accent lights to match the room, but my motherboard isn't supported by OpenRGB so they're stuck on either nothing or 'unicorn vomit' mode until some indefinite point in the future. This is the first time I've run into a stereotypically Linux issue in nearly a decade (on sane hardware) I think!
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.
Do you run linux at the moment? I've personally found my switch to CachyOS from Windows 11 one of the biggest factors in making my PC run silent/near silent. Happy to elaborate if you're curious.
I never understood the giant focus on side windows. If you want to see your components while you're using your PC, why not just build inside a transparent case, or build on a workbench/open style (caseless)
Specifically less dust if you have filters on the intakes. Positive pressure means you'll have air coming in where the fans are blowing it in (through a filter), and any gaps in the case where there aren't filters will have air flowing out due to the pressure.
If you have negative pressure you'll be sucking in air through the gaps and that air won't go through a filter, hence more dust.
Is this really part of the ATX spec though? Or just something people have learned to do for modern cases with air filters?
I feel like that makes sense. Linux users are messing with all the control given to them in software by a free OS, while windows user get only what they're allowed in software and Microsoft has not figured out how to keep them from modifying their hardware... yet. So the flashy LED folks are making their modifications where still allowed.
Maybe the people who go hardcore like that, with the obnoxious PC cases, but there are lots of casual-to-less-casual gamers out there who will be happy enough with Bazzite.
There’s a whole spectrum of PC gamers, and I think Linux+Proton can appeal to most of them. Let the people spending $10,000 on a glowing case make their own bad decisions.
FWIW: I have a pile of old Intel / NVIDIA machines that no longer boot Windows. They're all > 2GHz, > 8GB DRAM, and have more than enough horsepower to run modern casual titles. Next to that pile, I have a pile of games that no longer run under Windows.
I also have a glowing case PC. Out of the box, it's possible to change the fan light color patterns from Linux.
I had one problem putting Devuan on it:
If you plug the gaming keyboard 2.4GHz dongle into the monitor, the bios doesn't enumerate far enough down the USB tree to find it. So, you can't enter the bios and tell it to boot from USB. Then, the windows setup screen pops up.
After a few force reboots (M$ 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.
> M$ removed the "shut down cleanly" button from the language chooser
Not sure what language chooser you're talking about here, but if you're trying to shutdown Windows without hybrid shutdown to access the uefi, there's two switches you can use with shutdown.exe: `shutdown /s /t 0` will perform a full shutdown without hibernating the system session (not hybrid shutdown, that can be done with another parameter). If you want to reboot into your UEFI menu, use `shutdown /r /fw /t 0`
I may be confusing the time parameter, it might be `/t now` and not `/t 0`; I usually use a dedicated command to reboot to UEFI via slickrun.
They don’t care about FOSS, but they care about “computer lets me do what I want”.
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.
Right, but that proves nothing, is there something that is more open and better than Discord, for this group of people? Otherwise I'd say my argument applies in exactly the same way. Pragmatism wins, so why change unless there is a need?
I actually did selfhost my own matrix server to communicate with my friends while gaming. Works great on my steamdeck and I’ve got bazzite on my laptop. Most games I’m interested in work great on Linux and anything that doesn’t I just don’t play. There are so many games that do work great, but I can see people skipping Linux because of fomo.
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.
Of course they don’t care about F/OSS — the vast majority of games are closed proprietary software. The small minority of Linux gamers are there for anti-Windows reasons rather than pro-Linux or F/OSS reasons. Which given Microsoft is now signaling a pull back on AI and a gear to improved performance/quality in Windows, if those anti-reasons evaporate, you’ll have the more frustrated Linux gamers potentially move back.
Linux needs a positive reason for Linux rather than relying on anti-Windows reasons (and there are, but I see those reasons outside of the gaming space).
There are 1B Windows 11 devices. Granted not all are for games, but it is not an unpopular OS by the numbers alone.
The phones were prior with "play protect" certification. It's all being captured. Since we can't seem to have more virtuous companies, we need more regulation.
Of the top 10 games on steam, 8 of them are multiplayer. Until they have top multiplayer games, they have nothing. The reality is most of these studios aren't going to enable Linux because they're already on record stating it would make the cheating worse.
Most gamers are idiots. They are okay paying exorbitant sums for broken games and most have no problem with forced rootkits.
I don't think gaming is or should be driving people to Linux.
Microslop turning their OS into a data mining and ad platform should and is pushing normal, rational people to Linux. But, most gamers don't care about such things as long as they are getting their sweet, sweet dopamine hit.
Ironically, lower framerates(even though they are higher than the human eye and nervous system can perceive) on Windows 11 might push gamers onto Linux.They still want their rootkits, though.
It is always the dumbest reasons that get gamers upset.
but they do care about AI slop and owning their own system.
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.
Gamers generally game on PC because they like building their system. Otherwise they would use a PS5 Pro or whatever.
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.
> Gamers generally game on PC because they like building their system. Otherwise they would use a PS5 Pro or whatever.
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%.
It's a bit on a tangent because it's about hardware rather than OS choice, but the next few years are going to be a stress test on how much people value PC versus the cash-value of components increases, and what happens to the numbers of people entering the market, staying with older systems or upgrading (or replacing/complimenting with a console). Someone saying they think it's worth a lot is different to opening their wallet.
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.
I got into PC gaming in ~2009 primarily because it is so much cheaper than console. Steam sales and Humble Bundle allowed me to buy so many more games for less money.
The initial cost upfront was higher than a console but if you want a lot of games it ends up being worth it.
Yeah, I was happily surprised to be reminded of that when I set up my NixOS Jovian box that I “consolified” by having it boot into Gamescope and the SteamOS interface.
It’s plugged into my TV, with a wireless controller, and I have direct access to around 800 games immediately.
There are consoles that don’t even have 800 games in their entire library and I have 800 I can play whenever I want, some of which I purchased almost two decades ago.
Many game mods and community maps, etc. are only available on PC. You can play the vanilla version on console, but not the mods you watch Twitch streamers playing. So, it's not b/c they like building PCs, it's because they want to play the mods with their friends.
I would not worry too much about the mod community! They are the one persistant group of people who will hack the software to their liking. Yes you can't play full FiveM GTA V right now, but it will get there eventually. There is nothing technical that is limiting the mods from working on Proton, just time from some annoyed mod dev that has had enough with windows, and it will be migrated over.
>This will never happen because projects will just be forked.
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
> Gamers generally game on PC because they like building their system. Otherwise they would use a PS5 Pro or whatever.
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 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.
Those games did weird things. Every distro still ships SDL1, x11 didn’t really break API, and requiring a specific driver is obviously broken from the start. I won’t say none of this happens but the platform isn’t to blame there.
I never understood why glibc needs to break ABI. It should not be allowed to. Ever.
You are not reinventing the wheel. Just maintain the damn thing and keep it running as is. As Linus once said "If there's a bug that people rely on, it's not a bug, it's a feature.".
os/2 2.1 was free during some periods in the 90s, I and several friends got it just for the free floppies. Though none of us paid for windows either, I guess it was free as well.
What do you mean? There is a whole library of thousands of win32 games spanning more than 2 decades and the community is tracking and reporting bugs in each and classifying their level of performance.
That’s one of the most successful computer projects I’ve heard of.
Targeting DirectX and Win32 has become targeting Linux with how good Wine/Proton have gotten. I am able to play brand new games with no Linux support absolutely perfectly through proton. These games run better than games that had linux support actually ran on linux.
Ironically, Win32 has sometimes become more universal than native Linux binaries. For example, Baldur's Gate 3 released a native Linux version only supported on the Steam Deck, whereas the Proton version is verified for Linux almost everywhere. Win32 became the stable Linux gaming ABI.
Same with warhammer, where the developers are claimed to make an actual effort to support Linux with native binaries, but the windows version are more stable than the native Linux version. Ironically.
When I played Hollow Knight some years ago on my Steam Deck, I had to switch to the Windows version under Proton because the Linux native version was giving me random graphical glitches that made it impossible to see what was going on until I moved to a different screen and came back.
You're assuming no game studio would test their windows executable on proton, just because they develop on Windows. If there's non-trivial market share to capture by being "Deck verified" I don't see why that would be the case. Game devs develop on Windows for PlayStation, Switch, mobile etc. At least with proton they don't even need to cross compile.
Microsoft test on and make considerations for Proton for a bunch of their releases. Sony do too. Cyberpunk has specific graphics presets, Baldurs Gate 3 has a native executable, indie games often do too.
There's outliers, it'd be fair to say EA don't give a damn. But a lot do and you can't handwave away Microsoft and Sony as small fish either.
I wouldn't go that far, I would suggest that any game studio interested in the next 10 years of PC gaming will need to at least start doing testing through Proton/Wine to ensure there's no clear/prominent bugs. It doesn't take a lot of vocal users to elevate or kill a game, and Linux usage has passed that mark at this point... Generally seismic shifts in politics are around the 8% mark in terms of overall population, and Linux usage in the Steam survey is close to 4% and some other metrics have Linux usage over 6%.
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.
> Thus making Linux irrelevant as target to game studios.
For them DirectX and Win32 is what matters
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.
Android NDK shares many APIs with regular GNU/Linux, in many cases it could be a simple recompile, yet no studio bothers to do so, because the incentives aren't there.
Clang can target windows just fine afaik, although I'm sure the whole process could be improved.
That said, as long as windows is the bigger more profitable market I wouldnt expect a switch, unless the dev tooling situation becomes dramatically better on linux
The only thing that will make native executables attractive is users. A lot of users. Much more than Macos, seeings as few bother with Mac clients either and there's not even a Wine equivalent.
nothing stopping them from developing on Linux workstations, cross-compiling to Windows, and testing with Wine/Proton. saves them Windows license fees too.
I don't see what the problem is with game studios buying Windows licenses.
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.
Frankly, WINE/Proton are likely more consistent targets for game dev/testing... I wish they'd at least do that much more often than not. At least smooth out any rough edges.
I would say it's a lot different, since it's an API implementation, not hardware emulation.
> Gamers are still a huge factor as hardware customers.
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.
Things have become crazy, indeed. I still kick myself for not buying the SSD I was eyeing in December, which has now went form 250 € to almost 400. I'm already maxed on RAM since a year ago, bought 64 GB for a fraction of today's cost.
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.
A bit of a nitpick - that's not what the "eye of the storm" is. In fact, if you perceive RAM prices as leveling off, that would be the "eye of the storm", meaning a brief, deceptive calm surrounded by... storm.
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.
If the current RAM heavy buyers, the AI powerhouses investors, don't get the into a profitable state of business, then sustaining this rhythm "for a long time" becomes impossible. It won't matter much that "fab allocation is booked years out" if the client that expects the goods goes out of business, doesn't it? I, for one, don't find convincing hints that this free AI crazy partying will go on for long, so then what gives?
> If the current RAM heavy buyers, the AI powerhouses investors, don't get the into a profitable state of business, then sustaining this rhythm "for a long time" becomes impossible.
Exactly that is the problem with the "pork cycle" we are seeing [1] - there aren't that many manufacturers and ODMs around nowadays for RAM, storage, CPUs and GPUs. The ecosystem was so much more vibrant even 10 years ago. When the AI bubble collapses, it will take the entire world's economy down the drain, and I think that quite a few of the brands we have now will be extinct after this iteration.
My next GPU will be from AMD, not just because I'm in the process of switching to Linux but I have a gut feeling that Nvidia doesn't see desktop GPUs as their priority anymore and support might diminish faster.
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
I always thought it was a bit funny GoG GALAXY 2.0 went the web tech route for parts of the client and still managed to get itself stuck in a place where it ships an x86 only binary on macOS anyways.
About as usual for a CEF/Electron app last I tested ~ a year ago. I.e. "impressively well considering, but still not all too great". For a while there was an issue where it was launching games in compatibility mode, but I assume that's been long fixed without needing to migrate the base app (if anyone regularly uses GoG on their Mac feel free to chime in, I only have a work MacBook these days).
A lot of hate in the comments, I think it's great that companies are in a position where they think it makes sense financially to support Linux as a target platform.
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.
It's not hate, but we are now at a point where the vast majority of games just run, mostly thanks to Valve and the Wine/DVXK community's efforts. What Linux gamers fear now (with good reason) is that increased interest in the platform from companies more interested in money than freedom will undermine these efforts with anti-consumer and anti-FOSS initiatives, such as closed source clients, DRM, signed kernels, hardware attestations.
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.
This is the mixed bag... and I'm glad that Valve is at the forefront of this one... While I feel the fees may be excessive in a lot of cases (same for mobile app stores), at least Valve seems to be good stewards of PC gaming as a whole, and building a lot of good will in the community.
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 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.
They're just trying to ride the wave of Valve's deck (and they will fail). The fact is that, since I bought the Steam Deck, I bought less from GOG and more from Valve.
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.
>I just want my games to launch as seamlessly as they do from Valve's UI
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.
While on the other hand I'm often frustrated and feel limited by a steam-only deck and am going to start installing the other store fronts. I have games there I've gotten cheaper or even free. I don't like being locked into steam and "Gabe the goodest billionaire" propaganda exists to keep people from engaging in competitor products. I also want to support stores that take less from developers, especially smaller ones. Steams 30% cut while Epic is 0% up to $1m is concerning. I want smaller devs to succeed better. Steam is a huge compromise even if its a 'fan favorite' quasi-monopoly.
So yes I want gog to be native linux on things like the deck.
I really don't care if they do it "wrong". If it's too "wrong", I just won't use it myself. Windows just needs to die. We can fight for "right" after they get on the boat.
No. Please don't. Contribute to something like Heroic Launcher instead. Don't create something new just for GOG. Help make the existing tools better. It'll mean GOG has to do less work, and the programs people are already using will get better. Or even just sponsor Heroic so they can send more time we can working on it themselves.
GNU/Linux gamers are always decrying GOG, saying they won't buy stuff from them because Galaxy doesn't run on GNU/Linux, now we're getting people saying GOG porting Galaxy to GNU/Linux is bad!? By Taranis, GOG just can't get a break, can they?
Yep, luckily they represent a very small, albeit loud, minority of Linux users.
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.
Couldn't agree more! I have been purchasing on steam due to the lack of a native client, especially save game syncing. As a bonus, as a greenfields project, maybe we'll see less cruft than the native Steam client.
It is the same thing, just emphasizing that the OS is more than the kernel, and than the userland comes from the GNU project.
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.
Linux is definitely not a "full operating system."
Here's Linux built on GitHub Actions, with Grub[1], and you can't do anything with it. I include a reference init that does nothing, per kernel.org. 17.8 MB image.
GNU is by every practical measure, everything else. People memed on Stallman for the whole GNU/Linux naming, but he's basically right. There's also Android/Linux, that another user mentioned, and some distributions which don't use a GNU userland at all.
But the wide majority of people are using GNU/Linux, or some ecosystem derivative of it, like people using GNOME, which was formerly a part of the GNU project.
They're not creating something new. They're taking their existing tool (which - for all its flaws - is still far ahead of Heroic in many ways), improving it further, and changing it to also work on Linux.
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.
Linux userspace is defined by fragmentation. Linux users can't even unify on a distro, such that significant swathes of software are incompatible for some users despite everyone using the same kernel. In that environment, and also just in general, why is anybody obligated to contribute to a specific existing project rather than building their own?
As much as i hate the pointless Linux fragmentation, I think them going down the path of steam/heroic games launcher and releasing one appimage/.deb file and letting others take on the burden for their distros should do.
I mean, the main issue with portability is the insistance on dynamic linking, far more than the distro situation.
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.
Said absolutely nothing about obligation, raising the same decades-long observation. The users will see strife [and joy], considering Heroic does decently but this will be advantaged. That's it. Forgive me if I don't want to go over it again.
> 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.
What would you prefer? I couldn't edit it now if I wanted. Is GOG, the business entity, here to defend itself? Set me straight? If so, I'd like to first express my appreciation for their efforts. Then... repeat my critical statements to them shortly after.
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.
The issue here is that this is an existing "standard", by the logic of the comic. I wouldn't be surprised if there were already unofficial Linux ports of this launcher to begin with.
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.
Like I'm not aware and it's sunshine/rainbows, actually. Competition in the GOG launcher space, huzzah. To the detriment of One Launcher To Rule Them All.
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.
If you see it form the point of view of a Linux user it's more fragmentation, but if you look at it from the point of view of a gamer it's less fragmentation. Guess who their target audience is?
Everyone in the linux world insists on fragmentation, though? It's a part of what makes it great and a mess at the same time.
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.
The impression I've had for a long while now is that just as the software side is fragmented so is the userbase in what they want, including a segment that want one true way and all that fragmentation to go away. The trouble I see with catering to all that variation is it's putting an onus for more work on the developer (which needs funding from somewhere, most likely the publisher) and while linux (and GOG) is a niche market in the present and near term it doesn't seem like a winning proposition.
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.
... and I'm concurring with the threadstarter. They could do nothing, donate to Heroic, or this. I'm not invested in this, just raised a keyword.
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.
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.
Alternatively, work on developing protocols for game launchers instead. Get the Heroic Launcher devs and devs from other launchers to work on a common interface.
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.)
I wouldn't say you need launchers necessarily, but installers/configurators maybe. Getting the directory structure and the right WINE or Proton dependencies is a bit involved sometimes. Especially when what you have are really OLD DOS or Windows installer files.
Had various issues with Heroic and whatever the other popular one was (Lutris, maybe). I personally don't need official support for a single launcher that tries to integrate every gaming platform ala Steam, GOG, Blizzard, Epic, Amazon. A single-platform launcher with native Linux support would be good enough for me.
Hopefully they'll somehow support Proton and Valve devices. Trying to run older windows-only games bought on GOG with launchers like Heroic is a bit of a hit or miss, despite the Steam releases of the same games having somehow a bigger chance of working out of the box. I guess there are some weird differences between the default Proton Runtime and the proton-ge/wine-ge builds.
I use proton experimental to run most windows tools with no linux support. Small script in the script nautilus folder and there you go "run-win.sh" for all (util a native tool emerges).
I'd love to see it, too. There are a few Gists floating around supposedly letting you run a third-party game using proton, But everything I've tested fails with little to no usable debug indications on what's going wrong.
This is one thing that's been puzzling for me ever since I switched to Linux full time a few years ago and so also started gaming on it.
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.
The Steam client was always flaky as hell - on Windows as well.
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.
I like Steam as a user. It syncs game saves between computers. It takes care of game updates. It has a decent launcher UI that I use on my living room computer so that I can launch games using an xbox controller. It makes Windows games work without any fuss. And when I play with friends, it lets me join friends' games without having to deal with in-game lobby systems. It lets me show FPS counters and system info in a unified way even in games without built-in support for that stuff. That is all stuff I want.
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.
Yeah, and there's an evil monopolistic element to Steam's forced use of the client and the DRM it enables. I'll be angry at GoG if they ever make the launcher mandatory, but it doesn't seem like that's what this is so far?
Having a downloader is a bit more convenient for getting game updates (you can always download the update manually and run it of course) and also for big games where you have to download multiple files to install. So it makes sense to want to have such a tool, as a big part of getting and retaining customers is convenience. But been there, I have done it, and it is doable, and sometimes preferable. Eg you may not want to install gog in a machine to play a game, or I may want to play a game through crossover but not download gog through crossover to get the windows version: with steam, I cannot do that. But even if you download the game through gog client for convenience, you do not need to run the gog client to launch the game anyway.
Like it or not, a lot of people love a virtualization of their library. So the option is nice.
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.
Going to a website's hardly massive friction is it ?
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.
I have 500+ games on GOG and 1000+ in Steam. I still do regular backups of GOG installers to a local hard drive with lgogdownloader, but at any given point in time I am likely to have somewhere around 30 games installed (some of which I play maybe once a month, some are just sitting there so that I don't forget to get around to them). A lot of those games have been released fairly recently and are still getting patches, and I want to have those patches, because it's fairly normal for games to release in a broken state. Given all that, having launchers is kind of a necessity (and playtime, achievements, cloud saves, wine prefix management and social features are a nice bonus to all that).
I agree with you. I'm still a greybeard who organizes my games in a folder and finds the exe to click. At best I'll keep a handy folder of shortcuts for games I play often on my desktop. I even keep my startup programs to a bare minimum of my communication lines (if I wanna boot up steam, I'll type it in the search bar or wait for the launched game that requires it).
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?
Maybe it's you and me, mate. I'm from the world before Steam. I'm from the world before computers, in fact. Atari 2600 was my first console, when it was new.
Steam is pretty popular on that though. I'm sure GoG did it following on their steps. Back when GOG started it was pretty much download from web and run.
I'm genuinely confused about all this. Can someone help me out?
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?
If native software was routinely available, launchers might not feel necessary.
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.
> If native software was routinely available, launchers might not feel necessary.
> 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.
Does that effectively replace the .exe parts of a Proton game with an equivalent Linux engine, while letting Steam et. al. manage the artwork/levels/etc?
No, it packages open source game data (which can't be distributed because it is copyrighted) so that it can be installed and will work with the games that already have debian packages.
So in the case of quake (for example) it makes a .deb file, which when installed will create the directory structure in the correct place and put the .pak files, config files, etc. where debian's quake engine package(s)[0] will look for them. This .deb file for the quake game data won't do anything on its own. You need to also install a quake engine, which debian includes.
You can create the game data packages from the installation CD, from a working install directory, or from a Good Old Games installer.
Convenience is 100% Steam’s most important feature. Finding games, installing them, updating, auto-login, cloud saves, probably more that I can’t think of right now.
Yeah, I'm remembering the time immediately before Steam launched, getting a computer set up with games for a LAN party or whatever, someone sharing a folder of installers/updates from their HDD so everyone could be on the same version and whatnot. .. and that was the best-case scenario. Sometimes you just don't play a certain game because half the people have a different version or whatever haha
People always say that Heroic or the other one (I forget the name) is seamless, but I needed to do troubleshooting with a few of the games I owned. In one case, the best solution was to install via steam as a non-steam game. So, I'm hoping for better support and compatibility.
There are games distributed by GOG which rely on the Galaxy client for multiplayer functions. For example, the GOG version of Grim Dawn needs the Galaxy client being loaded to enable multiplayer. Solo play works without Galaxy.
Gotcha. I don't play multiplayer games or want the other features that people here have mentioned, so my current understanding is that it's safe for me to ignore the Galaxy application.
It's just a convenience app, but it's a pretty nice one. When I moved my main PC from Windows to Linux, I was definitely sad to lose the ecosystem of nice launcher apps (GOG Galaxy but also others like Playnite, Launchbox, etc). The dream for me is to have all my games in one cohesive library, and that's what these sorts of apps offer. On Linux I use Lutris for this and it's fine enough, but I'll definitely be taking a look at Galaxy when it comes to Linux.
Galaxy is purely convenience. If you want to see all your games from all storefronts (Epic, Steam, GOG, etc) in one place, Galaxy lets you do that. (Along with the social stuff)
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.
also I believe it helps you track save games. I have multiple Linux boxes I play GOG games on using Heroic launcher and save game tracking is a big issue (maybe there's a way to do this with Heroic, idk). But I think Galaxy would help here.
That's very nice to hear.
But diffuclt to beat valve here, they are actively contributing to drivers and wine. When you buy even just windows software from steam you are helping funding that.
I don't think they are trying to beat valve. GoG has been like those airlines that fly where no major airlines want to fly. Filling a underserved but large market.
I have a hunch that the currently sole owner just wants to do this until retirement. GoG is financially stable so there's no pressure to increase revenue.
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.
Younger generations grew up with DRM already present.
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 have been playing Fallout: New Vegas on my ThinkPad T570 running Bazzite Linux for the last few weeks.
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.
Please make it open source. Please create an API. Please, if you feel like you have to have your own client, build it, but don't ignore the reality of Linux gamers using a whole set of tools and one doesn't need to reinvent the wheel.
Especially for the older games you will get a lot more reach. You'd even reach beyond Linux (BSDs, etc.).
Please don't forget that a big chunk of your audience are nerds and that a lot of games run on engine re-implementations by nerds.
It's great that you make a client, but if you really want to offer something that would make people get games on GOG then do something that Steam does not offer, while probably being easier for you.
If that is too much to ask, please, at least do it in an unofficial capacity.
Got a Steam Deck recently and I presume this is the power of Proton mostly but I'm amazed how it feels entirely native on everything I've tried so far. Really makes me wish games were the only thing keeping me on windows but unfortunately I use Adobe a fair bit and Cinema4D.
exactly and in case of free software it is not even competition with financial incentive and (not always) so many projects can live long without a good output because of this. i think many people do not appreciate the usefulness of 'non-useful' things
I decided I'm going to take the plunge soon. I've used Windows for my personal computers for a long time (25 years? more if you count our family computers back in the day). I have only used linux desktops for little hobby projects, in Pis and VMs, and most of my experience has been headless servers. I loaded up Mint on a thumb drive pretty recently and it seemed like it would be good enough for running my steam games and VS Code. I'm actually liking the idea a lot because while I've been very happy with WSL, there is still a wee bit of friction developing locally with it, especially for game development stuff. And when developing its usually in the linux CLI anyway. Docker usually has some bumps too.
Thankfully I have my old PC still lying around and it'll play most of the games I like, so I'm gonna give it a spin soon and see if its the right fit for me. Maybe I can use a bot to help me document setup better than I have in the past too.
I'm very excited for this. GoG is a DRM-free platform (for the most part) and I see it as the only positive competition Steam has. Imagine how bad the gaming landscape would be if a company like Epic soundly defeated Valve. They would enshittify at record pace. GoG doing well would only put positive pressure on other players. Ideally, you want your opponents to be healthy and sane, in case they win. And sane opponents drive the market towards better outcomes. I'll definitely buy some classics from GoG with their Linux client.
"GOG GALAXY is a long-lived product with a large and complex C++ codebase." Also known as a shitshow. Hopefully the new engineer(s) will be encouraged to at least add some tests and refactor things to stay sane.
No mention of a license, though. I guess it'll stay closed source.
GOG's original and somewhat current line in the sand is "must have an offline-capable installer". For a lot of Good Old Games that is enough to guarantee DRM-free. Unfortunately in the Live Service world it is a concession that allows too many loopholes such as Sony single player games that still need a PlayStation Account and a half-dozen telemetry services active before they get to actual gameplay. Sony, as a particular example worth flogging, also makes use of the loophole that an anti-cheat rootkit can be installed offline, easy.
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 are no games on GOG which require a PlayStation account for their single player gameplay. (AFAIK, but I think I'm pretty tuned in and would know.)
It was an early complaint about Horizon: Zero Dawn, especially but not uniquely, on GOG. Sony did walk that requirement back several months after the complaints started, but it wasn't directly because they thought they violated any of GOG's explicit policies, it seemed more directly due to the user complaints and review bombing on Steam from what I saw.
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?
> 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.
Many games with multiplayer features require Galaxy for those multiplayer features. You can consider this DRM-equivalent if you want. However, every singleplayer game on GOG will work without Galaxy installed, and that singleplayer gameplay will be completely DRM-free in every possible way. (That's at least 99.6% of the games on GOG, but eyeballing the 22 games which don't specify that they're singleplayer games, most of them simply have incomplete metadata, so it's really 99.9% of them.)
Off the top of my head Crime Cities on launch forced me to use Galaxy to play it. I vividly remember this because the game also ran like complete crap.
Galaxy can be required for multiplayer aspects in games, but if what you say is true for the singleplayer part of the game, GOG will consider it a bug, and will get it fixed.
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?
I think too it can be misleading since on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE (which works entirely without Galaxy and how I run games).
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.
If the wine experience is anything to go by, if you don't have Galaxy installed at all, the shortcuts will also just point to the .exe - but yeah, I suspect it must be something like this.
> on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE
I had Crime Cities lying around since it was a freebie on GOG many years ago, so I just went ahead and installed it using vanilla wine. There was absolutely no Galaxy requirement for installing or playing the single player part of the game.
Not quite. You can use Galaxy to download the offline installers (or just do that through the website), but when you install a game through Galaxy, it downloads a special build which it just copies to the right location, without running a separate installer.
The running game can also call out to Galaxy and unlock, or not unlock, ingame content based on what it hears back. It's pretty difficult to imagine a definition of "digital rights management" that doesn't include this.
As far as I remember, the only games which optionally need Galaxy running are those will online multiplayer, and only if you want to play online. This is because the original developers shutdown their own servers for matchmaking or originally used Steam servers for that. GOG servers are only replacing those.
There are also a handful of games which put some additional purely cosmetic content behind an online check. That could be the start of a slippery slope, which people are justly upset about, but they then do an injustice to their cause by generalizing from those cases.
It's not a slippery slope but already full blown DRM plain and simple. Both online functionality limited to GOG-run servers and checks for cosmetic content.
Note that for Gloomhaven, the multiplayer server is one of the players' computers. That player hosts a game and everyone else joins. There are no GOG servers and no company servers.
In version 1.0 of the GOG release, multiplayer is enabled.
In subsequent versions, multiplayer is disabled (in the sense that the button to host or join a game is greyed out) unless the game succeeds at verifying you through Galaxy. (And this is a dynamic status; you can have it enabled, shut off Galaxy, restart the game, and find that it's disabled again.
Which ones? Honest question. I only remember games for which GOG apologizes in their store page for missing cosmetics or extra features because originally tied to online services (e.g. the Mafia or Yakuza games), or ones in which they are unlocked by default for the same reason (e.g. Dragon Age Origins).
If we have DRM with some private key, then I guess your idea is I download the game files and some private key and that allows me to run the game.
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 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.
I don't know about how secure enclaves work, so this may be a solution I'm not aware of. Thank you for explaining!
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.
The public key is in fact signed by Intel and uniquely serialized to the TPM.
If the game manufacturer requires TPM register values that match Windows, it will not run under Proton/Wine (or a Windows VM). If they allow TPM register values for Linux it will run under Linux too.
I’m loving the huge uptick in coverage that Linux is getting recently, from the stories about switching from Windows, to the huge leaps made to support gaming.
I’m now hoping that this will gradually push the big publishers to go the extra mile and figure out their anti-cheat stuff on Linux too, so the remaining big games can make the transition.
The heroic launcher looks like it was trying to solve this and let you use cheaper gog games in your normal steam library. And I've seen similar tools for emulators to show up basically like native steam games
literally the only two reasons I still have windows on my laptop currently are fusion360 and apex legends. I was happily playing Apex Legends on Linux for years until EA decided to disable Linux support due to "cheating". While I understand their concerns, I can't say as a regular player the cheating problem is any better or worse than it was before they removed Linux support.
As for fusion360... Freecad is getting mighty good these days...
It's not free but...zw3d has full* native Linux support. You'd be forgiven for not knowing this because they only offer it on their Chinese website, even though it comes complete with a fully localized English version that you just have to switch on in the settings.
* 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.
One of the reasons I have not touched GOG more seriously is probably because they have no native presence. I hope they consider making it open source, so anyone from any distro could contribute to it. I feel like it would be the healthier choice for GOG.
Thank God. I know Lutris integrates with the GOG library, but having an official GOG Galaxy client and some quality assurance on the underlying wine/proton config would be the dream.
Sweet I have about 500 of games on gog and I use heroic launcher on cachyos. Probably a total of 1.3k of titles across steam, gog and epic any idea gaming isn't Linux now is dumb thinking.
One of reasons why I buy games exclusively on GoG is clientlessness. I don't like when clients messing with game updates, because of modding incompatibility.
Unfortunately modding is reason, why switch to linux for gaming is not easy.
That's also one thing Galaxy gets right. You can turn off auto-updates and that won't stop you from playing the game (unlike with Steam, which will just replace your "play" button with "update"). They also support rolling back updates, but I never tried that and I'm not entirely sure if this works for every game, or if this is something a game developer has to actively support.
Developer tools have always been pretty well supported on Linux, it seems like gaming is also getting there except for anti-cheat. Maybe productivity tools will follow.
The Linux billion dollar question is if the doubling of it's share in desktop in the last 2-3 years is going to saturate or continue doubling or exponential.
If we didn’t have Kernel Anti Cheat in Windows, it would be a godsend for Linux gaming.
It’s literally the only issue missing (and some games not available under Xbox game app but I mean it’s Microsoft as publisher so no intention for Linux version)
Friendly reminder that GOG ignored and downplayed the GOG Galaxy 0-day privilege escalation bug CVE-2020-24574 [1] for literal years. They tried to brush off the security researcher who reported the issue by rotating keys and claiming it was fixed. Their non-serious stance towards security means Galaxy isn't really software I want running on my system anymore.
Based take little dude. Gamers all care very much about "openness". Did you forget that in 1985 Nintendo created the first hardware-based security system designed to prevent unlicensed and low-quality games from running.
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.
In my experience, Galaxy works no better than a web app, unfortunately. Similarly laggy and lacks the snappiness you'd normally associate with a native app.
Once Gaming hits Linux for real Windows will simply die. Explorer takes 10 seconds to open when the folder in question has a couple of Gigs, blue screen crashes are for some reason back in win11. The entire thing takes ages to boot.
>Competitive Salary – We ensure fair and attractive compensation that reflects your skills and experience: 18 000 - 27 000 PLN/month
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.
That's in the 50k EUR - 77k EUR range which is senior-level pay in EU. Add to that it includes pension, tax prepayments and health insurance. They also seem to offer lots of perks in the office.
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)
900 EUR might be enough for student-like living if you own the apartment you're living in, or by sharing a room when renting, but it's not even close to acceptable level in Warsaw.
Ditto. It seems like the graduate wage in the US is 2x my senior salary in the UK, which sounds very similar to yours. It seems massively inflated compared to other US jobs. Tech jobs in the UK seem to be more inline with other sectors.
I'm very hopeful that Linux gaming will save the open PC desktop despite big tech is coming to destroy it. Or at least keep PCs alive for another decade. Gamers are still a huge factor as hardware customers.
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.
I also feel like this is an insane opportunity for companies who previously did not offer Linux native clients to start doing so and see some of a hike in sales specifically coming from the Linux crowd. I would absolutely pay good money for high quality Linux compatible software, after all, its not free as in free beer. I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course. I think maybe Ubuntu did? I don't know that Arch ever has. I think its a wasted opportunity to fund Linux distros by taking a small cut (probably not 30%) from commercial products directly on those app repositories.
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.
Why would a bunch of volunteers put a ton of effort to create infrastructure so people (corporations, really) can make money?
Flathub is making inroads into having paid apps but they’re explicitly not a distribution really
It would fund their projects. Imagine if more Linux distros has enough funding to fully hire part-time volunteers full time? Those companies will sell them without those stores. This at least gives them a piece of the pie.
The entire point of the free software movement is to promote free software principles and software rights. What I think many Linux distributions would prefer is a model where companies who do benefit from selling software and hardware are funding them indirectly, so they can focus on continuing to promote free software in a more neutral way, without the pressures and potentially misaligned incentives that come from running a store front can bring.
There are distributions like elementary OS which are happy to sell you things with this model, though, but I just don't think it's surprising many distributions would actively prefer to not be in this position even if it leaves money on the table. This sort of principled approach is exactly why a lot of us really like Linux.
It's really unfortunate the term "free software" took off rather than e.g. "libre software", since it muddies discussions like this. The point of "free software" is not "you don't have to pay," it's that you have freedom in terms of what you do with the code running on your own machine. Selling free software is not incompatible with free software: it's free as in freedom, not as in free beer.
Nobody in this comments thread appears to be confused by or misusing the term "free software". We're talking about free software vs (commercial) proprietary software.
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly
Free packages remain unaffected, but now there are optional commercial options you can pay for which fund the free (as in free money) infrastructure you already take advantage of so that these projects are fully sustainable. I imagine some open source projects could even set themselves up to receiving donations directly via package managers.
I promise you, everybody understands the general idea, but adding a built-in store to your operating system is far from a neutral action that has no second- or third-order effects. It isn't that it somehow affects "free" packages. Incoming text wall, because I am not very good at being terse.
- It creates perverse incentives for the promotion of free software.
If development of the operating system is now funded by purchases of proprietary commercial software in the app store, it naturally incentivizes them to sell more software via the app store. This naturally gives an incentive to promote commercial software over free software, contrary to the very mission of free software. They can still try to avoid this, but I think the incentive gets worse due to the next part (because running a proper software store is much more expensive.)
Free software can be sold, too, but in most cases it just doesn't make very much sense. If you try to coerce people into paying for free software that can be obtained free of charge, it basically puts it on the same level as any commercial proprietary software. If said commercial software is "freemium", it basically incentivizes you to just go with the freemium proprietary option instead that is not just free software, but also often arguably outright manipulative to the user. I don't really think free software OS vendors want to encourage this kind of thing.
- It might break the balance that makes free software package repositories work.
Software that is free as in beer will naturally compete favorably against software that costs money, as the difference between $0 and $1 is the biggest leap. Instead of selling software you can own, many (most?) commercial software vendors have shifted to "freemium" models where users pay for subscriptions or "upsells" inside of apps.
In commercial app stores, strict rules and even unfair/likely to be outlawed practices are used to force vendors to go through a standardized IAP system. This has many downsides for competition, but it does act as a (weak) balance against abusive vendors who would institute even worse practices if left to their own devices. Worse, though, is that proprietary software is hard to vet; the most scalable way to analyze it is via blackbox analysis, which is easily defeated by a vendor who desires to do so. Android and iOS rely on a combination of OS-level sandboxing and authorization as well as many automated and ostensibly human tests too.
I am not trying to say that what commercial app stores do is actually effective or works well, but actually that only serves to help my point here. Free software app stores are not guaranteed to be free of malware more than anything else is, but they have a pretty decent track record, and part of the reason why is because the packaging is done by people who are essentially volunteers to work on the OS, and very often are third parties to the software itself. The packages themselves are often reviewed by multiple people to uphold standards, and many OSes take the opportunity to limit or disable unwanted anti-features like telemetry. Because the software is free, it is possible to look at the actual changes that go into each release if you so please, and in fact, I often do look at the commit logs and diffs from release to release when reviewing package updates in Nixpkgs, especially since it's a good way to catch new things that might need to be updated in the package that aren't immediately apparent (e.g.: in NixOS, a new dlopen dependency in a new feature wouldn't show up anywhere obvious.)
Proprietary software is a totally different ball game. Maintainers can't see what's going on, and more often than not, it is simply illegal for them to attempt to do so in any comprehensive way, depending on where they live.
If the distributions suddenly become app store vendors, they will wind up needing to employ more people full time to work on security and auditing. Volunteers doing stuff for free won't scale well to a proper, real software store. Which further means that they need to make sure they're actually getting enough revenue for it to be self-sustaining, which again pushes perverse incentives to sell software.
What they wanted to do is build a community-driven OS built on free software by volunteers and possibly non-profit employees, and what they got was a startup business. Does that not make the problem apparent yet?
- It makes the OS no longer neutral to software stores.
Today, Flatpak and Steam are totally neutral and have roughly equal footing to any other software store; they may be installed by default in some cases, but they are strictly vendor neutral (except for obviously in SteamOS). If the OS itself ships one, it lives in a privileged position that other software store doesn't. This winds up with the exact same sorts of problems that occur with Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. You can, of course, try to behave in a benevolent manner, but what's even better than trying to behave in a benevolent manner is trying to put yourself in as few situations as possible to where you need to in order to maintain the health of an ecosystem. :)
--
I think you could probably find some retorts to this if you wanted. It's not impossible to make this model work, and some distributions do make this model work, at least insofar as they have gotten now. But with that having been said, I will state again my strongly held belief that it isn't that projects like Debian or Arch Linux couldn't figure out how to sell software or don't know that they can.
It's just that they do not want to.
Big businesses are already contributing a LOT of money and manpower into Linux development (especially kernel).
They could simply fund developing app store extensions in the same way redhead enabled systemd to happen. Both Sievers and Poettering were working at Redhat at the time.
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly
I think you're alone in this.
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.
That's essentially being done with Flatpak.
Linux is largely still built on the old (and indeed, outdated) Unix trust model. The system itself is assumed to be trusted, and the primary security boundaries on the system are drawn between users. Since Linux package managers actually install and manage the base system as well as end-user software, anything the package manager installs is treated as part of "the distribution", and thus trusted. It's not a good idea to use such a thing to install proprietary, third-party software. The curation and vetting of the distro maintainers is actually vital here, and when you add a third party repo, you're giving it a lot of trust. At the same time, why would distro maintainers give free labor to integrate proprietary software? Most are not super interested in that, and even if they are, they don't generally have the rights necessary to redistribute, let alone modify, proprietary software. On the other hand, those third-party developers and publishers don't want to master and manage a half-dozen different packaging formats, and various other packaging ecosystem differences that vary across distros.
Flatpak is positioned to solve all of these problems, and it's no secret that enabling (relatively) responsible use of proprietary software is one of the goals. It enabled distributing a small number of large, common runtimes of which different versions can safely coexist on the same system, addressing fragmentation. To reduce the amount of trust given to installed apps, it separates what it installs from the base system, and offers sandboxing to help limit the permissions granted to an app that still runs under the OS user of the person using it. And it supports third-party repos that publishers can run themselves.
I'm not currently a daily Flatpak user, so idk how much the current reality lines up with that goal, but that's where the movement towards this is on the Linux desktop today.
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.
One of the advantages of open source software is the ability to distribute said software with relatively few restrictions. It simplifies life for the maintainers of Linux distributions, those who manage Linux systems, the end user, and software developers. Making a package manager a retail product store would complicate things for everyone.
That said, the only thing preventing the distribution of proprietary software by most Linux distributions is policy. If a distribution wanted to do so, and the vendor's license allowed for permissive software distribution, they could do so. The vendor could implement their own mechanism for selling and distributing license keys. The advantage to them would be using a common software distribution method without having a middleman taking a cut. (Think shareware, or even physical software that included a license key.)
It makes zero sense for traditional distros to have payments. They exclusively repackage software. You want direct to customer platforms (Snap, Flathub, etc).
The dnf, deb, or pacman tools could point to a repo where the packages have paid activation.
Companies can already do that. This is how redhat works in its entirety.
This has nothing to do with the base distribution
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.
It's not "zero cost" but plenty of proprietary software with native linux clients will do things like set up Ubuntu package repos. You're pasting a handful of lines in the command line (or for the fancier stuff downloading the isntaller that does that for you) and you're off to the races
There might be a boutique business that could help with installer/package repo mgmt for people wanting to ship linux clients and take advantage of the auto-updaters and the like. Maybe.
Elementary has paid software.
The package manager can't help with subscription schemes based on short lived licenses.
> I would absolutely pay good money for high quality Linux compatible software, after all, its not free as in free beer.
What software are you looking for?
About the only thing seriously lacking is a proper competitor for Photoshop and Illustrator, really.
proprietary != commercial
You can have free commercial software, and proprietary shareware, the opposites are oxymorons.
Thanks, for downvoting pointing to definitions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software
https://mako.cc/talks/20031106-nten/foil06.html
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html
Oh common guys, can you at least start a discussion, why you think proprietary and commercial software should be regarded as the same, or something?
Discussion against the prevalent groupthink sentiment are considered haram and shunned on HN.
I know it's unfair but it is what it is.
I wish there was some independent vote quality assessment process (a bot working on the HN backend) gently adjusting account standing factor based on their votes on the obviously true/false comments. After a while troll would simply see zero impact of their votes and comments assigned 0 karma at the outset. For not bringing the positive impact to the community.
I agree with your point on the difference between proprietary v. commercial, but it’s a bit hard to parse your example. “Free” is kind of an unfortunate word choice, as it obscures the gratis v. libre distinction you’re trying to point out.
Free/libre commercial software is indeed possible, and I’d love to see more products utilizing this model. We do need to keep in mind that “cracking” such software becomes legal (which is probably not a big deal because people would do that anyway).
Steam developing proton was what made it possible for me to change fully. No dual boot or anything needed. It's great.
Funnily I also run GoG games through steam proton.. But looking forward to the GoG client working!
Steam with Proton is simply incredible.
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".
God I hope Valve gets serious with Steam OS and it becomes a competitive target for PC games. They're making amazing progress with the Steam Deck, and I'm so ready to be free from Windows.
Is there something wrong with the many distros that make Steam a really easy install, or in the box? I mean Bazzite literally has a FS Steam option in the box for installers that's pretty close to the Steam OS experience with broader hardware support.
I'm trying to word this without sounding dismissive of Bazzite for simply not being from a big company with money to throw around. I'm sure the people making it are doing great work. But I just don't get the feeling it's anywhere near the position it needs to be a "real platform" that could disrupt Windows. It has to be looked at from the perspective of publishers, and whether it's worth their money to target a new platform.
Valve has good, stable funds 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.
The PLATFFORM from a game publisher's perspective is still going to be Steam/Proton on Linux... More likely than not, it's all still mostly going to be Win32/64, but with improved Proton testing/targetting... this will be for SteamOS or Steam on other Linux distros... it's the same.
From your perspective you aren't waiting around for "completion" ... in terms of scope, most of it is built on efforts from Fedora/Redhat with enough customization to make it friendlier to gamers. Linux distros aren't like Windows, they share a lot and are largely interoperable or compatible with a few major camps.
But very little of this affects what will happen with games. Your experience with Steam on pretty much any Linux distro is likely to be as good or better than Steam on SteamOS.
Edit: to clarify, there are differences between Linux distros... but the fact is, that Steam on pretty much any modern/updated distro will be a very similar experience wether it's "SteamOS" or something else that you aren't having to wait around for. For that matter, you can put together a current AMD system with up to a 9070XT and run SteamOS today, the hardware is supported and you don't actually have to wait for it if you don't want to. You may find the experience better with a desktop distro, if you plan on using it more or as much of a desktop as game platform. And more so if you want to run a non-amd GPU.
The core of bazzite has nothing to do with being from a big company or not. The complaint doesn't make much sense given the foundation Bazzite is actually built on is sponsored and developed by Fedora/RHEL.
Maybe I'm downplaying what the Bazzite team is actually doing, but from afar it is Fedora Silverblue with gaming related tweaks out of the box, probably targeting handhelds and common gaming hardware in testing.
The actual issue of adopting a new operating system is already rearing its head on this thread. "What's Bazzite? What's Silverblue? SteamOS, is that linux? Is that different from this other linux?".
There's too many options for someone that wants to sit down and play a game. Unless a major OEM decides to push Linux on their systems, SteamOS is generally the only real competitor in this space due to reputation and control of the PC gaming market. Time in the market, versus timing the market is what comes to mind here.
Paradox-of-choice issues are overblown. Every Linux distro is a repackaging of the same core components and same software. The PC is standardized for the most part, there is not much commodity hardware that lacks support, and the popular hardware that needs particular support (Nvidia drivers) is catered to by any popular distro out there.
Users are mostly afraid of wasting time trying Linux (any Linux) and having to go back to Windows for reason X, Y, or Z that they didn't even know about. For my partner who doesn't game, reason Z is one particular feature of Microsoft Word (the shrinkwrap application, not 365 Copilot App or whatever) that isn't emulated by LibreOffice or Google Docs. For competitive PC gamers, it's kernel anti-cheat. The Linux desktop story in general has been to slowly whittle down these reasons until there really is no good excuse for users not to switch and for vendors not to support the OS, even through compatibility layers.
The problem I have with this approach is that ultimately you're trading one owning company for another, rather than building to a standard that anyone could build around.
Because someday Valve may no longer be privately owned, and we're potentially back where we started. If we support having strong OSS ecosystems around computers we don't have to fight this battle over and over again.
Valve slow-rolling SteamOS and being coy about it ever being released as a "standalone, supported" OS is only because they're a private company and can build for open source ecosystems.
Too bad Proton and Wine are open-source, and they can't really remove them from the ecosystem...
So if your game runs under Wine/Proton today, there's a pretty good chance that game will continue to run years from now. I've had better experience with really old games under Wine than actual Windows for that matter.
SteamOS is actively shipping on consumer hardware today, that's the real major difference here. People who don't even know how to install their own operating system are using it.
There isn't a downside to these other distros like Bazzite.
Considering the Steam Machine will come with SteamOS, it looks like they are going all in.
I was amazed that the PC port of Spider-man Myles Morales worked perfectly with no tweaking at all. That’s the newest AAA game I own (I think), and it runs silky smooth and hasn’t had any issues.
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'm still wondering why Apple hasn't taken a few billion of their trillions and just built/bought a Proton style layer for macOS.
The computing power is there, we just need the ability to run Windows-only games on Macs with a single click.
WINE crawled so that Proton could run.
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.
I would say that WINE did 90% of what had to be done, then Proton came and did another 90% so now we are 99% there.
Proton is amazing and it's really three different subprojects that deserve a lot of credit each.
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.
Im not super familiar with the space.
Is the only reason for needing Proton is to do direct x api translations?
Games use plenty of other win32 APIs. Creating windows, running processes, opening files are all APIs.
Something like wine is needed to do that translation too.
right but some games like CS have native linux clients. Is it that hard to recompile the game to run under linux?
It often is hard. If you’re using win32 APIs extensively, you’ll have to port your code to Linux counterparts.
There’s also the issue of forward compatibility. Sometimes you just can’t run an old Linux game on a newer distro, while it works fine in Wine. Or it might partially work: for example, I’ve managed to run a Linux build of Heroes of Might and Magic III, but didn’t get any sound, because it relied on some ancient sound API (pre-ALSA; perhaps OSS?). Windows version works great in Wine to this day.
For some game engines though, porting is really easy. There are some piracy groups releasing Linux ports of Unity games (that don’t have an official Linux version) by just replacing the game executable with a compatible one from another game.
Run under which display server protocol?
> Gamers are still a huge factor as hardware customers.
A drop in the bucket really, nvidia used to make the majority of their revenues from gaming, now it's under 10%
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4U09!,f_auto,q_auto:...
Most gamers don't give a shit about openness. A much more likely outcome is "big tech" following the numbers and slowly making Linux unusable by using EEE or any other tactic under the pretense of usefulness.
> Most gamers don't give a shit about openness
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.
They don't care about it as an abstract idea, but they do notice that Windows 11 is worse than Windows 10 was worse than Windows 8 was worse than Windows 7.
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.
I don't think most people would argue that Windows 10 was worse than Windows 8
My opinion on that may be colored by the fact that I had a Surface Pro 3, the one place where Windows 8.1 was actually great to use, and taking away some of the focus on tablet use was a regression. Overall you're right though, outside of tablets W10 was an improvement, because 8 tried to stick the tablet UI into desktops.
I was recently connecting to some server with the Windows 8 derived version of Windows Server and gosh that full screen start menu is stupid with a mouse.
Yes, but when they go out creating that aquarium PC tower with rainbow lights, they will install W11 Pro as usual.
Ironically I built a Linux box for mainly local models with some RGBs because I wanted tasteful accent lights to match the room, but my motherboard isn't supported by OpenRGB so they're stuck on either nothing or 'unicorn vomit' mode until some indefinite point in the future. This is the first time I've run into a stereotypically Linux issue in nearly a decade (on sane hardware) I think!
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.
Anyone know of a living successor to Silent PC Review? Was a great site back in the day but it shut down and got replaced with a marketing slop page.
Great reviews back you could get cases with multi-layered sound deadening side panels instead of windows.
Do you run linux at the moment? I've personally found my switch to CachyOS from Windows 11 one of the biggest factors in making my PC run silent/near silent. Happy to elaborate if you're curious.
I never understood the giant focus on side windows. If you want to see your components while you're using your PC, why not just build inside a transparent case, or build on a workbench/open style (caseless)
ATX spec is designed for positive pressure/airflow, so you’ll generally run hotter in open air.
Why would the hardware care if the pressure is higher in the case than ambient? How could it even tell?
Positive pressure means less dust.
Specifically less dust if you have filters on the intakes. Positive pressure means you'll have air coming in where the fans are blowing it in (through a filter), and any gaps in the case where there aren't filters will have air flowing out due to the pressure.
If you have negative pressure you'll be sucking in air through the gaps and that air won't go through a filter, hence more dust.
Is this really part of the ATX spec though? Or just something people have learned to do for modern cases with air filters?
I feel like that makes sense. Linux users are messing with all the control given to them in software by a free OS, while windows user get only what they're allowed in software and Microsoft has not figured out how to keep them from modifying their hardware... yet. So the flashy LED folks are making their modifications where still allowed.
Maybe the people who go hardcore like that, with the obnoxious PC cases, but there are lots of casual-to-less-casual gamers out there who will be happy enough with Bazzite.
There’s a whole spectrum of PC gamers, and I think Linux+Proton can appeal to most of them. Let the people spending $10,000 on a glowing case make their own bad decisions.
FWIW: I have a pile of old Intel / NVIDIA machines that no longer boot Windows. They're all > 2GHz, > 8GB DRAM, and have more than enough horsepower to run modern casual titles. Next to that pile, I have a pile of games that no longer run under Windows.
I also have a glowing case PC. Out of the box, it's possible to change the fan light color patterns from Linux.
I had one problem putting Devuan on it:
If you plug the gaming keyboard 2.4GHz dongle into the monitor, the bios doesn't enumerate far enough down the USB tree to find it. So, you can't enter the bios and tell it to boot from USB. Then, the windows setup screen pops up.
After a few force reboots (M$ 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.
> M$ removed the "shut down cleanly" button from the language chooser
Not sure what language chooser you're talking about here, but if you're trying to shutdown Windows without hybrid shutdown to access the uefi, there's two switches you can use with shutdown.exe: `shutdown /s /t 0` will perform a full shutdown without hibernating the system session (not hybrid shutdown, that can be done with another parameter). If you want to reboot into your UEFI menu, use `shutdown /r /fw /t 0`
I may be confusing the time parameter, it might be `/t now` and not `/t 0`; I usually use a dedicated command to reboot to UEFI via slickrun.
It is a given. HN is an outlier.
> I don't think this is a given
This is a given. They love Discord and shit like that.
They don’t care about FOSS, but they care about “computer lets me do what I want”.
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.
> From a consumer perspective, it’s “open”.
As open as windows that tracks everything that you do
Right, but that proves nothing, is there something that is more open and better than Discord, for this group of people? Otherwise I'd say my argument applies in exactly the same way. Pragmatism wins, so why change unless there is a need?
> is there something that is more open and better than Discord, for this group of people?
Matrix, xmpp, and probably more. The options are not lacking
Yes if gamers truly cared about openness and absence of corporate control, they would move to self-hosted Matrix channels.
I actually did selfhost my own matrix server to communicate with my friends while gaming. Works great on my steamdeck and I’ve got bazzite on my laptop. Most games I’m interested in work great on Linux and anything that doesn’t I just don’t play. There are so many games that do work great, but I can see people skipping Linux because of fomo.
> Most gamers don't give a shit about openness.
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.
Of course they don’t care about F/OSS — the vast majority of games are closed proprietary software. The small minority of Linux gamers are there for anti-Windows reasons rather than pro-Linux or F/OSS reasons. Which given Microsoft is now signaling a pull back on AI and a gear to improved performance/quality in Windows, if those anti-reasons evaporate, you’ll have the more frustrated Linux gamers potentially move back.
Linux needs a positive reason for Linux rather than relying on anti-Windows reasons (and there are, but I see those reasons outside of the gaming space).
There are 1B Windows 11 devices. Granted not all are for games, but it is not an unpopular OS by the numbers alone.
If we care about the future of computing, the future of consumer rights, we need to MAKE THEM GIVE A SHIT.
Cory Doctorow is doing a very good job of that, but there is only one Cory Doctorow.
The pretense is security, PC software attestation is already in the workings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
The phones were prior with "play protect" certification. It's all being captured. Since we can't seem to have more virtuous companies, we need more regulation.
Until it fully supports multiplayer which doesn't seem to be a thing for any major game or studio, it's a nothingburger for the majority of people.
Multiplayer games is only some specific sub-scene of PC gaming.
Of the top 10 games on steam, 8 of them are multiplayer. Until they have top multiplayer games, they have nothing. The reality is most of these studios aren't going to enable Linux because they're already on record stating it would make the cheating worse.
The most played game on Steam is CS2, and it requires Windows for the competitive servers.
> Most gamers don't give a shit about openness.
Most gamers are idiots. They are okay paying exorbitant sums for broken games and most have no problem with forced rootkits.
I don't think gaming is or should be driving people to Linux.
Microslop turning their OS into a data mining and ad platform should and is pushing normal, rational people to Linux. But, most gamers don't care about such things as long as they are getting their sweet, sweet dopamine hit.
Ironically, lower framerates(even though they are higher than the human eye and nervous system can perceive) on Windows 11 might push gamers onto Linux.They still want their rootkits, though.
It is always the dumbest reasons that get gamers upset.
but they do care about AI slop and owning their own system.
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.
Gamers generally game on PC because they like building their system. Otherwise they would use a PS5 Pro or whatever.
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.
> Gamers generally game on PC because they like building their system. Otherwise they would use a PS5 Pro or whatever.
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%.
It's a bit on a tangent because it's about hardware rather than OS choice, but the next few years are going to be a stress test on how much people value PC versus the cash-value of components increases, and what happens to the numbers of people entering the market, staying with older systems or upgrading (or replacing/complimenting with a console). Someone saying they think it's worth a lot is different to opening their wallet.
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.
I got into PC gaming in ~2009 primarily because it is so much cheaper than console. Steam sales and Humble Bundle allowed me to buy so many more games for less money.
The initial cost upfront was higher than a console but if you want a lot of games it ends up being worth it.
And those games do not die with each or every other generation of hardware. Almost my entire Steam library still runs on my latest machine.
Yeah, I was happily surprised to be reminded of that when I set up my NixOS Jovian box that I “consolified” by having it boot into Gamescope and the SteamOS interface.
It’s plugged into my TV, with a wireless controller, and I have direct access to around 800 games immediately.
There are consoles that don’t even have 800 games in their entire library and I have 800 I can play whenever I want, some of which I purchased almost two decades ago.
I'd rather say
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
Many game mods and community maps, etc. are only available on PC. You can play the vanilla version on console, but not the mods you watch Twitch streamers playing. So, it's not b/c they like building PCs, it's because they want to play the mods with their friends.
I am speaking as an old gamer. I no longer play.
I would not worry too much about the mod community! They are the one persistant group of people who will hack the software to their liking. Yes you can't play full FiveM GTA V right now, but it will get there eventually. There is nothing technical that is limiting the mods from working on Proton, just time from some annoyed mod dev that has had enough with windows, and it will be migrated over.
>This will never happen because projects will just be forked.
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
> Gamers generally game on PC because they like building their system. Otherwise they would use a PS5 Pro or whatever.
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.
Wrong, most PC gamers do not build their systems
Forgeting the part that all those parts bring in Windows drivers with them for easy installation.
I love gaming on pc because of the wealth of games, keyboard mouse setup, and less $ overall.
I hate building it and messing w hardware. Its a a necessity pain for me
There is nothing to save as long as it relies on game studios using Windows workstations, coding in Visual Studio and targeting DirectX.
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.
The most stable Linux API is Wine/Win32.
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.
Those games did weird things. Every distro still ships SDL1, x11 didn’t really break API, and requiring a specific driver is obviously broken from the start. I won’t say none of this happens but the platform isn’t to blame there.
Even glibc breaks ABI. The linux userspace ABI is too unstable and games don't have to be doing weird things to hit it.
I never understood why glibc needs to break ABI. It should not be allowed to. Ever.
You are not reinventing the wheel. Just maintain the damn thing and keep it running as is. As Linus once said "If there's a bug that people rely on, it's not a bug, it's a feature.".
Valve is working on this problem for native Linux games: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steamrt/...
This is a similar idea to flatpak/snap etc.
Just like for OS/2, what a great success it was.
It's a different situation, OS/2 was significantly more expensive than Windows, Linux is free.
os/2 2.1 was free during some periods in the 90s, I and several friends got it just for the free floppies. Though none of us paid for windows either, I guess it was free as well.
The development tools for OS/2 were worse and far more expensive.
It’s working right now, what are you arguing against.
It seems to be working, that is the thing building castles in foreign kingdoms.
What do you mean? There is a whole library of thousands of win32 games spanning more than 2 decades and the community is tracking and reporting bugs in each and classifying their level of performance.
That’s one of the most successful computer projects I’ve heard of.
Sure, if one ignores all the existing emulators for previous computer generations, and game consoles.
If you want hardware emulation you can use a vm like virtual box…
I don’t even know what you’re arguing now.
There are a lot of older games that won't run on windows 11 as well. In fact most of my games no longer work on windows 11.
Your point?
Yeah? Most? So like what?
So targeting windows isn't stable either? Which is why GOG even exists.
I'm asking what your game library is full of if most can't run on windows 11.
directX 5 :)
Targeting DirectX and Win32 has become targeting Linux with how good Wine/Proton have gotten. I am able to play brand new games with no Linux support absolutely perfectly through proton. These games run better than games that had linux support actually ran on linux.
Ironically, Win32 has sometimes become more universal than native Linux binaries. For example, Baldur's Gate 3 released a native Linux version only supported on the Steam Deck, whereas the Proton version is verified for Linux almost everywhere. Win32 became the stable Linux gaming ABI.
Valve has a containerized Linux runtime (ala flatpak) to solve this issue for native Linux titles: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steamrt/...
Same with warhammer, where the developers are claimed to make an actual effort to support Linux with native binaries, but the windows version are more stable than the native Linux version. Ironically.
When I played Hollow Knight some years ago on my Steam Deck, I had to switch to the Windows version under Proton because the Linux native version was giving me random graphical glitches that made it impossible to see what was going on until I moved to a different screen and came back.
Thus making Linux irrelevant as target to game studios.
For them DirectX and Win32 is what matters, if folks go out of their way to run on Proton, that is Valve's problem.
You're assuming no game studio would test their windows executable on proton, just because they develop on Windows. If there's non-trivial market share to capture by being "Deck verified" I don't see why that would be the case. Game devs develop on Windows for PlayStation, Switch, mobile etc. At least with proton they don't even need to cross compile.
I am willing to bet that most don't give a damm about Proton.
Microsoft test on and make considerations for Proton for a bunch of their releases. Sony do too. Cyberpunk has specific graphics presets, Baldurs Gate 3 has a native executable, indie games often do too.
There's outliers, it'd be fair to say EA don't give a damn. But a lot do and you can't handwave away Microsoft and Sony as small fish either.
I wouldn't go that far, I would suggest that any game studio interested in the next 10 years of PC gaming will need to at least start doing testing through Proton/Wine to ensure there's no clear/prominent bugs. It doesn't take a lot of vocal users to elevate or kill a game, and Linux usage has passed that mark at this point... Generally seismic shifts in politics are around the 8% mark in terms of overall population, and Linux usage in the Steam survey is close to 4% and some other metrics have Linux usage over 6%.
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.
Like the netbooks weren't going away.
You do realize that Linux is almost as old as Windows is, right? It's like 6 years younger, but considering they're both over 3 decades old now...
I don't think I'd be willing to place bets on Linux dying any time soon.
> Thus making Linux irrelevant as target to game studios. For them DirectX and Win32 is what matters
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.
I think they'll still target Windows APIs and DirectX... but that they'll test much more heavily for Proton usage to ensure good experience.
Like they were making native Linux clients before?
And studios definitely check out their games running on Steam Decks via Proton now, so that's good.
Yes, I have several from Loki Entertainment.
UE can be crosscompiled on a windows host to linux and then it's a few checkboxes to enable the vulkan RHI.
Android NDK shares many APIs with regular GNU/Linux, in many cases it could be a simple recompile, yet no studio bothers to do so, because the incentives aren't there.
Clang can target windows just fine afaik, although I'm sure the whole process could be improved.
That said, as long as windows is the bigger more profitable market I wouldnt expect a switch, unless the dev tooling situation becomes dramatically better on linux
The only thing that will make native executables attractive is users. A lot of users. Much more than Macos, seeings as few bother with Mac clients either and there's not even a Wine equivalent.
nothing stopping them from developing on Linux workstations, cross-compiling to Windows, and testing with Wine/Proton. saves them Windows license fees too.
The incentives are not there, as it is, they work as usual, and Valve is the one that has to make it work.
there will be incentives once windows becomes shit enough.
Nah, regular people buy what is on shopping mall computer stores, they don't go online ordering from Tuxedo.
They are more likely to move to PlayStation and Switch than SteamDeck, the amount of sales already show that.
The top played games are not the ones made this year
I don't see what the problem is with game studios buying Windows licenses.
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.
It is a phyrric victory, because in the end it is no different than using MAME and claiming victory.
They still aren't Linux games.
Frankly, WINE/Proton are likely more consistent targets for game dev/testing... I wish they'd at least do that much more often than not. At least smooth out any rough edges.
I would say it's a lot different, since it's an API implementation, not hardware emulation.
> Gamers are still a huge factor as hardware customers.
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.
Things have become crazy, indeed. I still kick myself for not buying the SSD I was eyeing in December, which has now went form 250 € to almost 400. I'm already maxed on RAM since a year ago, bought 64 GB for a fraction of today's cost.
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.
A bit of a nitpick - that's not what the "eye of the storm" is. In fact, if you perceive RAM prices as leveling off, that would be the "eye of the storm", meaning a brief, deceptive calm surrounded by... storm.
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.
If the current RAM heavy buyers, the AI powerhouses investors, don't get the into a profitable state of business, then sustaining this rhythm "for a long time" becomes impossible. It won't matter much that "fab allocation is booked years out" if the client that expects the goods goes out of business, doesn't it? I, for one, don't find convincing hints that this free AI crazy partying will go on for long, so then what gives?
> If the current RAM heavy buyers, the AI powerhouses investors, don't get the into a profitable state of business, then sustaining this rhythm "for a long time" becomes impossible.
Exactly that is the problem with the "pork cycle" we are seeing [1] - there aren't that many manufacturers and ODMs around nowadays for RAM, storage, CPUs and GPUs. The ecosystem was so much more vibrant even 10 years ago. When the AI bubble collapses, it will take the entire world's economy down the drain, and I think that quite a few of the brands we have now will be extinct after this iteration.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle
My next GPU will be from AMD, not just because I'm in the process of switching to Linux but I have a gut feeling that Nvidia doesn't see desktop GPUs as their priority anymore and support might diminish faster.
Thing is, you don't need a GPU.
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.
> Thing is, you don't need a GPU.
You would struggle to play any graphically intensive game, old or new, without at least a modest GPU. It's not only AAA.
modern igpus of laptops can run cyberpunk between 24-30 fps... if you target indies, your more than good
That's optimistic, and most probably 1080p low or medium without RT and with upscaling. Not exactly a great gaming experience by 2026 standards.
Do you play FPS and pixels?
I play storylines and interesting mechanics.
Intel also sees the value in decent onboard GPUs now, their newly announced laptop processors have solid onboard GPUs too
> Oh yes, AAAs maybe won't run on that.
...so you do need a GPU.
> ...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.
With GPU, ram and flash prices where they are pc gaming isn’t moving anywhere but backwards for the next couple years, unfortunately.
On the one hand, hardware prices went up.
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.
On top of that, Nvidia just released a beta version of their GeforceNow client.
Plus, the backlog of playable games is so awesome. I am working through things I always wanted to play that I can now throw on my steam deck.
Sadly, their "native" client is a web browser.
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
I always thought it was a bit funny GoG GALAXY 2.0 went the web tech route for parts of the client and still managed to get itself stuck in a place where it ships an x86 only binary on macOS anyways.
Steam's ARM support is still beta, and Battle.net is still x86 only. So it seems more typical than not for these sorts of things.
How’s Rosetta 2 handle it?
About as usual for a CEF/Electron app last I tested ~ a year ago. I.e. "impressively well considering, but still not all too great". For a while there was an issue where it was launching games in compatibility mode, but I assume that's been long fixed without needing to migrate the base app (if anyone regularly uses GoG on their Mac feel free to chime in, I only have a work MacBook these days).
> Sadly, their "native" client is a web browser.
So is the Steam client.
A lot of hate in the comments, I think it's great that companies are in a position where they think it makes sense financially to support Linux as a target platform.
I think this is a good lesson in why companies don't try to bring stuff to Linux: the market is incredibly resentful of products.
Come on... it's always the same reason: money.
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.
> Companies don't support Linux because it's not widespread enough so it can't outweigh the costs.
I'm pretty sure they made the calculation assuming the GabeBox from Valve is a success and didn't want to miss out.
> They don't give a rat's ass for the market's resentfulness or lack thereof.
Indie devs do. Some of the best selling games are made by solo devs or very small teams.
Companies? gasp corporations? Using, spit, money? HOW DARE THEY!
It's not hate, but we are now at a point where the vast majority of games just run, mostly thanks to Valve and the Wine/DVXK community's efforts. What Linux gamers fear now (with good reason) is that increased interest in the platform from companies more interested in money than freedom will undermine these efforts with anti-consumer and anti-FOSS initiatives, such as closed source clients, DRM, signed kernels, hardware attestations.
> closed source clients
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.
This is the mixed bag... and I'm glad that Valve is at the forefront of this one... While I feel the fees may be excessive in a lot of cases (same for mobile app stores), at least Valve seems to be good stewards of PC gaming as a whole, and building a lot of good will in the community.
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 I am signing my own kernel, that's awesome.
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.
They're just trying to ride the wave of Valve's deck (and they will fail). The fact is that, since I bought the Steam Deck, I bought less from GOG and more from Valve.
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.
>I just want my games to launch as seamlessly as they do from Valve's UI
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.
It's nice, Linux being an open platform, that if something isn't on Steam you can just install GOG and get it there.
While on the other hand I'm often frustrated and feel limited by a steam-only deck and am going to start installing the other store fronts. I have games there I've gotten cheaper or even free. I don't like being locked into steam and "Gabe the goodest billionaire" propaganda exists to keep people from engaging in competitor products. I also want to support stores that take less from developers, especially smaller ones. Steams 30% cut while Epic is 0% up to $1m is concerning. I want smaller devs to succeed better. Steam is a huge compromise even if its a 'fan favorite' quasi-monopoly.
So yes I want gog to be native linux on things like the deck.
GOG supported Linux from before Galaxy.
I don't use Galaxy at all. My GOG games work on Linux. It's a good company.
I really don't care if they do it "wrong". If it's too "wrong", I just won't use it myself. Windows just needs to die. We can fight for "right" after they get on the boat.
No. Please don't. Contribute to something like Heroic Launcher instead. Don't create something new just for GOG. Help make the existing tools better. It'll mean GOG has to do less work, and the programs people are already using will get better. Or even just sponsor Heroic so they can send more time we can working on it themselves.
GNU/Linux gamers are always decrying GOG, saying they won't buy stuff from them because Galaxy doesn't run on GNU/Linux, now we're getting people saying GOG porting Galaxy to GNU/Linux is bad!? By Taranis, GOG just can't get a break, can they?
Yep, luckily they represent a very small, albeit loud, minority of Linux users.
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.
Couldn't agree more! I have been purchasing on steam due to the lack of a native client, especially save game syncing. As a bonus, as a greenfields project, maybe we'll see less cruft than the native Steam client.
How is GNU/Linux different from Linux?
It is the same thing, just emphasizing that the OS is more than the kernel, and than the userland comes from the GNU project.
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.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd
Android/Linux also exists.
And Chimera Linux which is GNU-less. I guess you could call it FreeBSD/Linux but I think that'll just confuse people.
Stallman preferred nomenclature
linux is the kernel gnu is the full operating system
Linux is both the name for the kernel and the full operating system.
yah it's silly, linux typically refers to "everything" using the linux kernel. Aka Linux.
Linux is definitely not a "full operating system."
Here's Linux built on GitHub Actions, with Grub[1], and you can't do anything with it. I include a reference init that does nothing, per kernel.org. 17.8 MB image.
GNU is by every practical measure, everything else. People memed on Stallman for the whole GNU/Linux naming, but he's basically right. There's also Android/Linux, that another user mentioned, and some distributions which don't use a GNU userland at all.
But the wide majority of people are using GNU/Linux, or some ecosystem derivative of it, like people using GNOME, which was formerly a part of the GNU project.
[1]: https://github.com/andrewmcwatters/linux-workflow
Nobody cares! ”Linux” is used as a name of the OS.
GOG needs to contribute 0-day fixes to the kernel, otherwise they’re not committed to Linux /s
They're not creating something new. They're taking their existing tool (which - for all its flaws - is still far ahead of Heroic in many ways), improving it further, and changing it to also work on Linux.
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.
They could at least use Flatpak and containers instead of choosing a given distro or package manager.
A lot of words for "yes they will insist on fragmentation"
Linux userspace is defined by fragmentation. Linux users can't even unify on a distro, such that significant swathes of software are incompatible for some users despite everyone using the same kernel. In that environment, and also just in general, why is anybody obligated to contribute to a specific existing project rather than building their own?
As much as i hate the pointless Linux fragmentation, I think them going down the path of steam/heroic games launcher and releasing one appimage/.deb file and letting others take on the burden for their distros should do.
I mean, the main issue with portability is the insistance on dynamic linking, far more than the distro situation.
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.
Said absolutely nothing about obligation, raising the same decades-long observation. The users will see strife [and joy], considering Heroic does decently but this will be advantaged. That's it. Forgive me if I don't want to go over it again.
[flagged]
Compiling their own tool for linux (ie advancing cross-platform support) is not "fragmentation".
Disagree, but that's fine. Only so many users, attention, etc. Heroic will probably see degradation.
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.
Obligatory xkcd
https://xkcd.com/927/
Yea. Good and bad, I'm exhausted. The fragmentation argument goes back to the creation of 'init'.
Cheapshot: Good Old Games (as long as our proprietary software functions)
> 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.
Like I said, cheap: I didn't think much about it. I've enjoyed downloading those archives. I've really enjoyed using Heroic instead.
I appreciate the first party reference and backup, but I'll stick with this for the consolidation.
That's not what "cheapshot" means: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cheap%20shot
What would you prefer? I couldn't edit it now if I wanted. Is GOG, the business entity, here to defend itself? Set me straight? If so, I'd like to first express my appreciation for their efforts. Then... repeat my critical statements to them shortly after.
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.
The issue here is that this is an existing "standard", by the logic of the comic. I wouldn't be surprised if there were already unofficial Linux ports of this launcher to begin with.
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.
Eh, I don't need the comic to be a perfect fit.
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.
Fragmentation is a good thing, it's called competition, and user choice. If you don't like it, buy a Mac or something.
Like I'm not aware and it's sunshine/rainbows, actually. Competition in the GOG launcher space, huzzah. To the detriment of One Launcher To Rule Them All.
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.
If you see it form the point of view of a Linux user it's more fragmentation, but if you look at it from the point of view of a gamer it's less fragmentation. Guess who their target audience is?
Guess what has been serving those gamers, actually I'll be kind: Heroic.
Fellas, is it fragmentation to natively support linux?
Let me know when you finish with your 90000th spin of Debian. I'll be over here playing w/ Heroic
Everyone in the linux world insists on fragmentation, though? It's a part of what makes it great and a mess at the same time.
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.
The impression I've had for a long while now is that just as the software side is fragmented so is the userbase in what they want, including a segment that want one true way and all that fragmentation to go away. The trouble I see with catering to all that variation is it's putting an onus for more work on the developer (which needs funding from somewhere, most likely the publisher) and while linux (and GOG) is a niche market in the present and near term it doesn't seem like a winning proposition.
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.
> including a segment that want one true way and all that fragmentation to go away.
I think there are several segments that want one true way (their way).
... and I'm concurring with the threadstarter. They could do nothing, donate to Heroic, or this. I'm not invested in this, just raised a keyword.
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.
Why would they join another project that's worse than their own solution, over which they have full controll?
So many replies. Hello everyone. Beats me, just commenting as someone who won't pivot to the new thing. Outcomes matter, etc.
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.
> It'll mean GOG has to do less work
[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.
Phase Alternating Line? What's "PAL" here?
Given the context probably Platform Abstraction Layer.
Alternatively, work on developing protocols for game launchers instead. Get the Heroic Launcher devs and devs from other launchers to work on a common interface.
This comment and some of the other nearby ones have me confused if many people have actually tried GOG Galaxy?
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.)
You don't need launchers. Game is a simple application like any other. Just double click it...
In principle I agree with you. But people seem to like using a game-specific launcher for games like Steam, GOG, Heroic Launcher, Hydra Launcher, etc.
I wouldn't say you need launchers necessarily, but installers/configurators maybe. Getting the directory structure and the right WINE or Proton dependencies is a bit involved sometimes. Especially when what you have are really OLD DOS or Windows installer files.
I'm a happy Heroic user but I don't mind them porting GOG Galaxy. Makes for a smoother migration for people coming from Windows, for example.
Had various issues with Heroic and whatever the other popular one was (Lutris, maybe). I personally don't need official support for a single launcher that tries to integrate every gaming platform ala Steam, GOG, Blizzard, Epic, Amazon. A single-platform launcher with native Linux support would be good enough for me.
Why they shouldnt develop version over which they have full control?
If its open, heroic can include their code or solutions, as they do with proton. Rising tide lifts all boats.
Agreed, I don't want yet another launcher.
And as the underdog it even makes sense for GOG to fully embrace cross-store launchers.
Meh, I use Lutris instead of Heroic.
I am happy that GoG will finally make its launcher available to Linux.
Hopefully they'll somehow support Proton and Valve devices. Trying to run older windows-only games bought on GOG with launchers like Heroic is a bit of a hit or miss, despite the Steam releases of the same games having somehow a bigger chance of working out of the box. I guess there are some weird differences between the default Proton Runtime and the proton-ge/wine-ge builds.
If you have steam installed on the same machine, you can use proton runtimes from steam already.
I use proton experimental to run most windows tools with no linux support. Small script in the script nautilus folder and there you go "run-win.sh" for all (util a native tool emerges).
Hi, can you share that script ? I strugle to find simple doc on running win apps or games with proton outside of steam.
I'd love to see it, too. There are a few Gists floating around supposedly letting you run a third-party game using proton, But everything I've tested fails with little to no usable debug indications on what's going wrong.
It wouldn't make sense not to.
On the upside, this might mean I'll buy more stuff from GOG again. Steam+Proton is just so darn convenient.
This is one thing that's been puzzling for me ever since I switched to Linux full time a few years ago and so also started gaming on it.
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.
The Steam client was always flaky as hell - on Windows as well.
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.
> made certain UI elements not work on Linux
... and on Mac OS. For a while i had to play games with what control has focus to PAY them.
I always make sure to not use the GoG downloader just download the game.
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.
I like Steam as a user. It syncs game saves between computers. It takes care of game updates. It has a decent launcher UI that I use on my living room computer so that I can launch games using an xbox controller. It makes Windows games work without any fuss. And when I play with friends, it lets me join friends' games without having to deal with in-game lobby systems. It lets me show FPS counters and system info in a unified way even in games without built-in support for that stuff. That is all stuff I want.
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.
It's evil when it's not optional.
Yeah, and there's an evil monopolistic element to Steam's forced use of the client and the DRM it enables. I'll be angry at GoG if they ever make the launcher mandatory, but it doesn't seem like that's what this is so far?
Having a downloader is a bit more convenient for getting game updates (you can always download the update manually and run it of course) and also for big games where you have to download multiple files to install. So it makes sense to want to have such a tool, as a big part of getting and retaining customers is convenience. But been there, I have done it, and it is doable, and sometimes preferable. Eg you may not want to install gog in a machine to play a game, or I may want to play a game through crossover but not download gog through crossover to get the windows version: with steam, I cannot do that. But even if you download the game through gog client for convenience, you do not need to run the gog client to launch the game anyway.
Can we not allow them to continue letting you buy games (outside the launcher) and not shut up?
Like it or not, a lot of people love a virtualization of their library. So the option is nice.
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.
Galaxy is not open source, only plugins are: https://github.com/gogcom
Going to a website's hardly massive friction is it ?
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.
> tens of games
I have 500+ games on GOG and 1000+ in Steam. I still do regular backups of GOG installers to a local hard drive with lgogdownloader, but at any given point in time I am likely to have somewhere around 30 games installed (some of which I play maybe once a month, some are just sitting there so that I don't forget to get around to them). A lot of those games have been released fairly recently and are still getting patches, and I want to have those patches, because it's fairly normal for games to release in a broken state. Given all that, having launchers is kind of a necessity (and playtime, achievements, cloud saves, wine prefix management and social features are a nice bonus to all that).
It is if you have games from multiple stores and don't remember which game is from where. I don't have all the games I own installed and installed.
I agree with you. I'm still a greybeard who organizes my games in a folder and finds the exe to click. At best I'll keep a handy folder of shortcuts for games I play often on my desktop. I even keep my startup programs to a bare minimum of my communication lines (if I wanna boot up steam, I'll type it in the search bar or wait for the launched game that requires it).
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?
Maybe it's you and me, mate. I'm from the world before Steam. I'm from the world before computers, in fact. Atari 2600 was my first console, when it was new.
Having savegames online is nice. Being able to just download the game without the launcher is massive, though.
Steam is pretty popular on that though. I'm sure GoG did it following on their steps. Back when GOG started it was pretty much download from web and run.
I'm genuinely confused about all this. Can someone help me out?
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.
So to me the things I want from a game launcher are pretty simple:
- 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.
If native software was routinely available, launchers might not feel necessary.
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.
> If native software was routinely available, launchers might not feel necessary.
> 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:
https://game-data-packager.debian.net/available.html
That link is hard to follow.
Does that effectively replace the .exe parts of a Proton game with an equivalent Linux engine, while letting Steam et. al. manage the artwork/levels/etc?
No, it packages open source game data (which can't be distributed because it is copyrighted) so that it can be installed and will work with the games that already have debian packages.
So in the case of quake (for example) it makes a .deb file, which when installed will create the directory structure in the correct place and put the .pak files, config files, etc. where debian's quake engine package(s)[0] will look for them. This .deb file for the quake game data won't do anything on its own. You need to also install a quake engine, which debian includes.
You can create the game data packages from the installation CD, from a working install directory, or from a Good Old Games installer.
[0] https://packages.debian.org/stable/games/quake
As far I'm aware as a casual user of Galaxy, you're correct. It's just a convenience application with some light social features.
I find it slightly more convenient when installing games on a new machine. I've never personally seen a game that required using it.
Convenience is 100% Steam’s most important feature. Finding games, installing them, updating, auto-login, cloud saves, probably more that I can’t think of right now.
Yeah, I'm remembering the time immediately before Steam launched, getting a computer set up with games for a LAN party or whatever, someone sharing a folder of installers/updates from their HDD so everyone could be on the same version and whatnot. .. and that was the best-case scenario. Sometimes you just don't play a certain game because half the people have a different version or whatever haha
People always say that Heroic or the other one (I forget the name) is seamless, but I needed to do troubleshooting with a few of the games I owned. In one case, the best solution was to install via steam as a non-steam game. So, I'm hoping for better support and compatibility.
There are games distributed by GOG which rely on the Galaxy client for multiplayer functions. For example, the GOG version of Grim Dawn needs the Galaxy client being loaded to enable multiplayer. Solo play works without Galaxy.
Gotcha. I don't play multiplayer games or want the other features that people here have mentioned, so my current understanding is that it's safe for me to ignore the Galaxy application.
It's just a convenience app, but it's a pretty nice one. When I moved my main PC from Windows to Linux, I was definitely sad to lose the ecosystem of nice launcher apps (GOG Galaxy but also others like Playnite, Launchbox, etc). The dream for me is to have all my games in one cohesive library, and that's what these sorts of apps offer. On Linux I use Lutris for this and it's fine enough, but I'll definitely be taking a look at Galaxy when it comes to Linux.
Galaxy is purely convenience. If you want to see all your games from all storefronts (Epic, Steam, GOG, etc) in one place, Galaxy lets you do that. (Along with the social stuff)
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.
Ah, thank you very much!
also I believe it helps you track save games. I have multiple Linux boxes I play GOG games on using Heroic launcher and save game tracking is a big issue (maybe there's a way to do this with Heroic, idk). But I think Galaxy would help here.
That's very nice to hear. But diffuclt to beat valve here, they are actively contributing to drivers and wine. When you buy even just windows software from steam you are helping funding that.
I don't think they are trying to beat valve. GoG has been like those airlines that fly where no major airlines want to fly. Filling a underserved but large market.
I have a hunch that the currently sole owner just wants to do this until retirement. GoG is financially stable so there's no pressure to increase revenue.
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.
Not wanting to buy DRMed games now is counting as sentimental? I beg to differ. There are a lot of reasons for buying games free of DRM.
Younger generations grew up with DRM already present.
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.
They don't need to beat valve. The contribution made by valve is going to benefit GOG too. That's the power of open source.
I have been playing Fallout: New Vegas on my ThinkPad T570 running Bazzite Linux for the last few weeks.
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.
Please make it open source. Please create an API. Please, if you feel like you have to have your own client, build it, but don't ignore the reality of Linux gamers using a whole set of tools and one doesn't need to reinvent the wheel.
Especially for the older games you will get a lot more reach. You'd even reach beyond Linux (BSDs, etc.).
Please don't forget that a big chunk of your audience are nerds and that a lot of games run on engine re-implementations by nerds.
It's great that you make a client, but if you really want to offer something that would make people get games on GOG then do something that Steam does not offer, while probably being easier for you.
If that is too much to ask, please, at least do it in an unofficial capacity.
Got a Steam Deck recently and I presume this is the power of Proton mostly but I'm amazed how it feels entirely native on everything I've tried so far. Really makes me wish games were the only thing keeping me on windows but unfortunately I use Adobe a fair bit and Cinema4D.
I do wish more companies would bring their games to GOG.
That said, Square finally released some of their Final Fantasy games on it yesterday, so hopefully that's changing.
The so-called fragmentation people criticizes in the comments is also a strength for free software systems in long term.
Fragmentation means competition, and competition is usually good as long as it lasts
exactly and in case of free software it is not even competition with financial incentive and (not always) so many projects can live long without a good output because of this. i think many people do not appreciate the usefulness of 'non-useful' things
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I decided I'm going to take the plunge soon. I've used Windows for my personal computers for a long time (25 years? more if you count our family computers back in the day). I have only used linux desktops for little hobby projects, in Pis and VMs, and most of my experience has been headless servers. I loaded up Mint on a thumb drive pretty recently and it seemed like it would be good enough for running my steam games and VS Code. I'm actually liking the idea a lot because while I've been very happy with WSL, there is still a wee bit of friction developing locally with it, especially for game development stuff. And when developing its usually in the linux CLI anyway. Docker usually has some bumps too.
Thankfully I have my old PC still lying around and it'll play most of the games I like, so I'm gonna give it a spin soon and see if its the right fit for me. Maybe I can use a bot to help me document setup better than I have in the past too.
While you're waiting for a GoG native client, I can whole-heartedly recommend:
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.
I'm very excited for this. GoG is a DRM-free platform (for the most part) and I see it as the only positive competition Steam has. Imagine how bad the gaming landscape would be if a company like Epic soundly defeated Valve. They would enshittify at record pace. GoG doing well would only put positive pressure on other players. Ideally, you want your opponents to be healthy and sane, in case they win. And sane opponents drive the market towards better outcomes. I'll definitely buy some classics from GoG with their Linux client.
"GOG GALAXY is a long-lived product with a large and complex C++ codebase." Also known as a shitshow. Hopefully the new engineer(s) will be encouraged to at least add some tests and refactor things to stay sane.
No mention of a license, though. I guess it'll stay closed source.
> I guess it'll stay closed source.
It's a DRM implementation. It has to stay closed source.
There is no DRM on GOG.
https://www.gog.com/blog/what-exactly-is-drm-in-video-games-...
I guess depends what you consider DRM, some games appear to have problems
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/label_the_games_that_have_...
GOG's original and somewhat current line in the sand is "must have an offline-capable installer". For a lot of Good Old Games that is enough to guarantee DRM-free. Unfortunately in the Live Service world it is a concession that allows too many loopholes such as Sony single player games that still need a PlayStation Account and a half-dozen telemetry services active before they get to actual gameplay. Sony, as a particular example worth flogging, also makes use of the loophole that an anti-cheat rootkit can be installed offline, easy.
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 are no games on GOG which require a PlayStation account for their single player gameplay. (AFAIK, but I think I'm pretty tuned in and would know.)
It was an early complaint about Horizon: Zero Dawn, especially but not uniquely, on GOG. Sony did walk that requirement back several months after the complaints started, but it wasn't directly because they thought they violated any of GOG's explicit policies, it seemed more directly due to the user complaints and review bombing on Steam from what I saw.
Yet the standalone offline installed games won't run without libgalaxy.dylib (Mac) or Galaxy64.dll (Windows) which is responsible for outbound connections to https://galaxy-log.gog.com and https://insights-collector.gog.com?
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?
> 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.
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Last I checked, there is loads of DRM on GOG and most of the games that have it, force you to use Galaxy.
Many games with multiplayer features require Galaxy for those multiplayer features. You can consider this DRM-equivalent if you want. However, every singleplayer game on GOG will work without Galaxy installed, and that singleplayer gameplay will be completely DRM-free in every possible way. (That's at least 99.6% of the games on GOG, but eyeballing the 22 games which don't specify that they're singleplayer games, most of them simply have incomplete metadata, so it's really 99.9% of them.)
Depending on the launcher does not imply DRM. It could be a features-dependency to make the old games working or just allow certain features.
Really? What games are those? I've not encountered a single one :/
Off the top of my head Crime Cities on launch forced me to use Galaxy to play it. I vividly remember this because the game also ran like complete crap.
Galaxy can be required for multiplayer aspects in games, but if what you say is true for the singleplayer part of the game, GOG will consider it a bug, and will get it fixed.
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?
I think too it can be misleading since on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE (which works entirely without Galaxy and how I run games).
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.
If the wine experience is anything to go by, if you don't have Galaxy installed at all, the shortcuts will also just point to the .exe - but yeah, I suspect it must be something like this.
> on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE
I think they've recently changed this.
I had Crime Cities lying around since it was a freebie on GOG many years ago, so I just went ahead and installed it using vanilla wine. There was absolutely no Galaxy requirement for installing or playing the single player part of the game.
There isn't now. It was there at launch. It was removed at least several months after launch.
And we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Famously so. The main method of deployment was an offline installer before they made Galaxy, and AFAIK Galaxy just downloads and runs the installer.
Not quite. You can use Galaxy to download the offline installers (or just do that through the website), but when you install a game through Galaxy, it downloads a special build which it just copies to the right location, without running a separate installer.
No, it doesn't use offline installers. Source: worked on that in the past.
https://content-system.gog.com/
The running game can also call out to Galaxy and unlock, or not unlock, ingame content based on what it hears back. It's pretty difficult to imagine a definition of "digital rights management" that doesn't include this.
As far as I remember, the only games which optionally need Galaxy running are those will online multiplayer, and only if you want to play online. This is because the original developers shutdown their own servers for matchmaking or originally used Steam servers for that. GOG servers are only replacing those.
There are also a handful of games which put some additional purely cosmetic content behind an online check. That could be the start of a slippery slope, which people are justly upset about, but they then do an injustice to their cause by generalizing from those cases.
It's not a slippery slope but already full blown DRM plain and simple. Both online functionality limited to GOG-run servers and checks for cosmetic content.
Note that for Gloomhaven, the multiplayer server is one of the players' computers. That player hosts a game and everyone else joins. There are no GOG servers and no company servers.
In version 1.0 of the GOG release, multiplayer is enabled.
In subsequent versions, multiplayer is disabled (in the sense that the button to host or join a game is greyed out) unless the game succeeds at verifying you through Galaxy. (And this is a dynamic status; you can have it enabled, shut off Galaxy, restart the game, and find that it's disabled again.
But apparently that isn't DRM.
Which ones? Honest question. I only remember games for which GOG apologizes in their store page for missing cosmetics or extra features because originally tied to online services (e.g. the Mafia or Yakuza games), or ones in which they are unlocked by default for the same reason (e.g. Dragon Age Origins).
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singlep... has a full list.
This is factually incorrect. GOG famously has no DRM.
Try checking on the facts first. GOG famously has a slogan that says they have no DRM. They are lying in their slogan.
Why? Can't DRM be implemented in open source, and only have private keys kept secret?
If we have DRM with some private key, then I guess your idea is I download the game files and some private key and that allows me to run the game.
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.
How would you define it if:
- 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.
I don't know about how secure enclaves work, so this may be a solution I'm not aware of. Thank you for explaining!
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.
The public key is in fact signed by Intel and uniquely serialized to the TPM.
If the game manufacturer requires TPM register values that match Windows, it will not run under Proton/Wine (or a Windows VM). If they allow TPM register values for Linux it will run under Linux too.
Thank goodness!
[dead]
I’m loving the huge uptick in coverage that Linux is getting recently, from the stories about switching from Windows, to the huge leaps made to support gaming.
I’m now hoping that this will gradually push the big publishers to go the extra mile and figure out their anti-cheat stuff on Linux too, so the remaining big games can make the transition.
I do the vast majority of my gaming on my handheld with Bazzite configured to feel like a Steam Deck.
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.
The heroic launcher looks like it was trying to solve this and let you use cheaper gog games in your normal steam library. And I've seen similar tools for emulators to show up basically like native steam games
Okay. But I still probably have to hop into desktop mode to configure stuff.
I don't even know how to install non steam applications on my current stepup.
Heroic is the best attempt so far, but when comes to handheld UX, it’s meh.
What handheld do you use? I'm window shopping an upgrade from my miyoo mini.
Lenovo Legion Go.
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.
literally the only two reasons I still have windows on my laptop currently are fusion360 and apex legends. I was happily playing Apex Legends on Linux for years until EA decided to disable Linux support due to "cheating". While I understand their concerns, I can't say as a regular player the cheating problem is any better or worse than it was before they removed Linux support.
As for fusion360... Freecad is getting mighty good these days...
It's not free but...zw3d has full* native Linux support. You'd be forgiven for not knowing this because they only offer it on their Chinese website, even though it comes complete with a fully localized English version that you just have to switch on in the settings.
* 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.
There's some great Linux gaming distros out these days,
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.
Tons of libre game engines will work with GOG data:
https://osgameclones.com
One of the reasons I have not touched GOG more seriously is probably because they have no native presence. I hope they consider making it open source, so anyone from any distro could contribute to it. I feel like it would be the healthier choice for GOG.
Thank God. I know Lutris integrates with the GOG library, but having an official GOG Galaxy client and some quality assurance on the underlying wine/proton config would be the dream.
Sweet I have about 500 of games on gog and I use heroic launcher on cachyos. Probably a total of 1.3k of titles across steam, gog and epic any idea gaming isn't Linux now is dumb thinking.
Glad to see gog work on native.
One of reasons why I buy games exclusively on GoG is clientlessness. I don't like when clients messing with game updates, because of modding incompatibility.
Unfortunately modding is reason, why switch to linux for gaming is not easy.
That's also one thing Galaxy gets right. You can turn off auto-updates and that won't stop you from playing the game (unlike with Steam, which will just replace your "play" button with "update"). They also support rolling back updates, but I never tried that and I'm not entirely sure if this works for every game, or if this is something a game developer has to actively support.
I don't find any advantages of having client of GoG games to be honest, updates was only one, but not in case with modding.
I like seeing my achievements and playtime (but also it's more of a nice to have)
Why? I find nothing interesting about it when I play a game.
Finally. It was the reason I was always reluctant to buy something from GOG.
Go, GOG, it's so close for me to migrate.
The last obstacle will be the most working mostly effortlessly with my Nvidia on Fedora / Ubuntu.
Developer tools have always been pretty well supported on Linux, it seems like gaming is also getting there except for anti-cheat. Maybe productivity tools will follow.
Why is the launcher not at least public source? GOG's value add is the service it provides, not the specialness of its launcher.
Hopefully they will pursue a container/Flatpak native system but probably not!
The Linux billion dollar question is if the doubling of it's share in desktop in the last 2-3 years is going to saturate or continue doubling or exponential.
To the moon!
Oh wow FINALLY. the main reason why I stopped buying from gog is this. I can now buy there again.
If we didn’t have Kernel Anti Cheat in Windows, it would be a godsend for Linux gaming.
It’s literally the only issue missing (and some games not available under Xbox game app but I mean it’s Microsoft as publisher so no intention for Linux version)
As a Linux GOG user, I hope they don't change too much. It works very well already.
Friendly reminder that GOG ignored and downplayed the GOG Galaxy 0-day privilege escalation bug CVE-2020-24574 [1] for literal years. They tried to brush off the security researcher who reported the issue by rotating keys and claiming it was fixed. Their non-serious stance towards security means Galaxy isn't really software I want running on my system anymore.
1. https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-24574
Congrats! Their Linux support was behind. GOG's new owner is doing the right thing.
Based take little dude. Gamers all care very much about "openness". Did you forget that in 1985 Nintendo created the first hardware-based security system designed to prevent unlicensed and low-quality games from running.
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.
Finally. The previous hate GOG showed towards Linux was absolutely ridiculous.
What is the story behind that? I would have thought GOG would be neutral at worst about Linux as a platform considering their anti-DRM pitch.
New owner means their disgust of Linux is fading.
Geez, that headline was hard to parse.
Yay I suppose?
Thankfully it seems to be not yet another Electron crap shell.
In my experience, Galaxy works no better than a web app, unfortunately. Similarly laggy and lacks the snappiness you'd normally associate with a native app.
Oh well.
It's not Electron, however it uses Chromium Embedded Framework underneath.
Oh, another desilusion then.
Electron is best crossplatform tech available
For everyone that doesn't know anything else.
Name a better alternative that works on iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, MacOS and web.
Oh, really?
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.
What a waste of effort. Just provide your current installers or even fallback to plain old tarballs.
Once Gaming hits Linux for real Windows will simply die. Explorer takes 10 seconds to open when the folder in question has a couple of Gigs, blue screen crashes are for some reason back in win11. The entire thing takes ages to boot.
It's simply to bloated.
>Competitive Salary – We ensure fair and attractive compensation that reflects your skills and experience: 18 000 - 27 000 PLN/month
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.
$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.
> $90K a year goes much further in most of Europe barring the centres of the biggest cities […] NYC and Bay Area salaries are outrageously inflated.
Apples to oranges.
That's in the 50k EUR - 77k EUR range which is senior-level pay in EU. Add to that it includes pension, tax prepayments and health insurance. They also seem to offer lots of perks in the office.
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)
It doesn't compete with the better local companies though. It's fairly in the middle of the pack.
900 EUR might be enough for student-like living if you own the apartment you're living in, or by sharing a room when renting, but it's not even close to acceptable level in Warsaw.
$90k a year before tax is a very very good salary in Norway, and even a decent developer salary. It's much better in eastern Europe.
Yeah that's a good salary in Europe. It's only slightly less than I make in the UK as a senior.
Ditto. It seems like the graduate wage in the US is 2x my senior salary in the UK, which sounds very similar to yours. It seems massively inflated compared to other US jobs. Tech jobs in the UK seem to be more inline with other sectors.
The standard of living is higher in France than in eastern Europe, and even in France that's considered a high salary.
US devs are vastly over payed.
Welcome to Europe!
That's a very livable wage in Poland. The wages are significantly lower, but so are the costs of living.
Barely? It's more than twice the mediage wage in Poland.
This is pretty much a standard salary range for a Senior Dev in Poland. Outside of Warsaw it can be even lower.
In Eastern Europe, that's 1% level of income when measured against the quality of life you can have.
Their lattes also cost much less than a Silicon Valley latte :)