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shaddim: Ah! Yes, not needed at all! We just have to pretend altogether long enough that everything is fine, like the last 15 years. Right, at some point GOG HAS to agree.
GOG has to agree on the mere basis that an increasing amount of storefronts is offering Linux versions of games and GOG doesn't. At this point I just don't care about excuses - if others can pull it off, GOG can too. If they can't, I'll be taking my business elsewhere - I already am buying games with a Linux version at other places, so right now, GOG remains the place for old games and is utterly failing in the indie department.
Post edited January 17, 2014 by Fenixp
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shaddim: Ah! Yes, not needed at all! We just have to pretend altogether long enough that everything is fine, like the last 15 years. Right, at some point GOG HAS to agree.
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Fenixp: GOG has to agree on the mere basis that an increasing amount of storefronts is offering Linux versions of games and GOG doesn't. At this point I just don't care about excuses - if others can pull it off, GOG can too. If they can't, I'll be taking my business elsewhere - I already am buying games with a Linux version at other places, so right now, GOG remains the place for old games and is utterly failing in the indie department.
You are right, the economical reality is shifting... gog really needs to take this movement serious. Hope they wait not too long and catch the right train.
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silviucc: You speak about zealotry yet you have pages of endless ranting about stuff which *you* and *only you* consider as being roadblocks and problems. The same stuff, in every post, again and again.
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shaddim: It's neither about me, nor you, but about the skewed perception of the community who likes to ignore the hurting 2% desktop reality & likes to look for comfortable excuses ("it's the same on windows!", "pre-installtaion", "M$!" etc).
You dismiss pre-installation and the promiscuous relationship that companies like MS have with governments (and other companies) as a cause for their omnipresence in some market or another. You dismiss a company's shady, borderline illegal practices that allowed it to reach a monopolistic position and want us to believe that it's all just their technological superiority.

You need a few history refresher courses:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History

In 2002, Be Inc. sued Microsoft claiming that Hitachi had been dissuaded from selling PCs loaded with BeOS, and that Compaq had been pressured not to market an Internet appliance in partnership with Be. Be also claimed that Microsoft acted to artificially depress Be Inc.'s initial public offering (IPO).[4] The case was eventually settled out of court for $23.25 million with no admission of liability on Microsoft's part.[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS#Competition_from_Microsoft

When Caldera approached Novell looking for a DOS operating system to bundle with their OpenLinux distribution, Novell sold the product line off to Caldera on July 23, 1996,[5] by which time it was of little commercial value to them.
Between the Caldera-owned DR-DOS and competition from IBM's PC DOS 6.3, Microsoft moved to make it impossible to use or buy the subsequent Windows version, Windows 95, with any DOS product other than their own. Claimed by them to be a purely technical change, this was later to be the subject of a major lawsuit brought in Salt Lake City by Caldera with the help of the Canopy Group.[5][15] Microsoft lawyers tried repeatedly to have the case dismissed but without success. Immediately after the completion of the pre-trial deposition stage (where the parties list the evidence they intend to present), there was an out-of-court settlement on January 7, 2000 for an undisclosed sum.[16] This was revealed in November 2009 to be 280 million US dollars.[17]
The WordPerfect saga:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20121123221716522

Apparently the judge did not think that this type of behaviour is illegal:

I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for likes of Notes, Wordperfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage.
No Shaddim, this does not explain why Linux sits at 2% market share, just why Microsoft got to own over 90% of the market. Clear technological advantage right there. All hail the technology overlords.

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shaddim: Ok, how this helps us either in:

1.) understanding why linux s(t)ucks with 2% for 15 years on the desktop (& than fixing some things)
2.) find a way to motivate GOG and showing a working way to support a free and open platform (like linux)?

Ah! Yes, not needed at all! We just have to pretend altogether long enough that everything is fine, like the last 15 years. Right, at some point GOG HAS to agree.
GoG does not have to agree with anything. They either see a market and an opportunity to make money or they don't. They already gave their reasons pages ago on why they do not "support linux". The most hilarious of all being the bullet point regarding the Raspberry Pi.

People did not get angry because they said "No" but because of how they said it which proved that did not their research properly and they got called on it.

Why you feel the need to keep yammering about more technical stuff on this forum is beyond me. If you're trying to convince people that actually have the power to change things the way *you* want them to be changed then this forum is the totally wrong place to do it. You want something done in the linux kernel, go to lkml and present your case. You want changes to SDL? Please send your suggestions and patches to those guys... etc.

Do you now get it Mr. Revolutionary? Mr. Visionary. You're in the wrong fucking place and preaching to the wrong choir. If you want any of the changes you speak of to happen, provided that you can prove that they are needed, it's not us that you need to convince.
Post edited January 17, 2014 by silviucc
Microsoft has done so much illegal and immoral shit that it completely overshadows anything else they may happen to do.
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silviucc: People did not get angry because they said "No" but because of how they said it which proved that did not their research properly and they got called on it.
No, people got angry because gog truthfully told, that their analysis showed that the linux ecosystem is a unsupportable mess. Which has additionally only a insignificant marketshare. Which was taken by the proud linux egos not lightly.

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silviucc: <snip>
People, please, get over this outdated MS bashing thing from the 90s..... in comparison to the Apple locking practices now, MS was always a good guy (with their completely open windows platform, open for software AND hardware).

They seem to dwindle faster and faster into technological irrelevance, it seems every step (in the OS market) is received mainly negative. Also, they tried to do a charm offensive when they introduced the shared source initiative, which was rejected for the wrong reasons by the open source community. Therefore they responded with: "well, then try it the apple way...", understandable.

PLEASE, MS is not that all overshadowing arch-evil anymore, focus on the real shit ... the problems are somewhere else.
Post edited January 17, 2014 by shaddim
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silviucc: People did not get angry because they said "No" but because of how they said it which proved that did not their research properly and they got called on it.
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shaddim: No, people got angry because gog truthfully told, that their analysis showed that the linux ecosystem is a unsupportable mess. Which has additionally only a insignificant marketshare. Which was taken by the proud linux egos not lightly.
Other online shops prove them wrong. Maybe they need better "analysts". "Linux egos" have nothing to do with this. It's just tech and code and the opportunity to get established in a new market.

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silviucc: <snip>
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shaddim: People, please, get over this outdated MS bashing thing from the 90s..... in comparison to the Apple locking practices now, MS was always a good guy (with their completely open windows platform, open for software AND hardware).
Apple does not have a monopoly on desktop computing nor are they a convicted monopolist. Microsoft has a monopoly and has been convicted for abusing it. Bashing them for being an abusive monopolist won't be outdated until they cease being abusive or a monopoly.

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shaddim: They seem to dwindle faster and faster into technological irrelevance, it seems every step (in the OS market) is received mainly negative. Also, they tried to do a charm offensive when they introduced the shared source initiative, which was rejected for the wrong reasons by the open source community. Therefore they responded with: "well, then try it the apple way...", understandable.

PLEASE, MS is not that all overshadowing arch-evil anymore, focus on the real shit ... the problems are somewhere else.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

Take your propaganda somewhere else.
Post edited January 17, 2014 by silviucc
All of this still does not explain, why GoG does not offer the Linux ports that are already available and include no real work for them. This cloudy explanation "we want proper support" is just awkward, because it could be sold as bonus content, as said pages ago.
Post edited January 17, 2014 by Klumpen0815
shaddim, wieso trollst du so viel? Ist doch schon peinlich. Bitte höre auf mit diesem Unfug. Jeder haut dir Fakten ins Gesicht.
Shaddims argument: Ryan Gordon 2009
http://lwn.net/Articles/392862/
Opposition argument: Ryan Gordon 2014
http://icculus.org/SteamDevDays/SteamDevDays2014-LinuxPorting.pdf

As someone in another forum said:
People are allowed to re-evaluate things as they change, or even if they don't change and the person just becomes more aware.
I've been saying that fragmentation is a myth for years now. Back a decade ago when I first started using Linux there was some fragmentation, KDE vs Gnome and OSS vs ALSA, and questionable driver support (which typically meant at worst you were using old drivers), but even then it wasn't nearly as bad as opponents are saying that it is right now. I've become especially vocal the last couple years with Kickstarter, all these games claiming they want to support Linux but in order to "do the porting" they'd need a lot of money, and they mark it as a stretch goal: dude, if you want to support Linux then write your game in SDL, OpenGL, and QT (or similar cross platform tools, you get the idea), not DirectX and Windows API calls. If a Linux "port" isn't just a compile away then it's just a few tweaks and a compile away, and the resultant binary will run on any system that has the libraries you used, and if you used SDL, OpenGL, and QT (etc, the big name cross platform libs) then it's a given that they'll be available.
GoG's opposition to Linux is completely unfounded, there is not now nor has there ever been a single shred of evidence to their reasoning.
The fact that so many games "just work" is evidence: Penumbra, Amnesai, Aquaria... I could just list off all the Humble Bundle games really; Valve's recent entries; Thousands of indie games every year of varying quality. If you can't write platform agnostic code, the problem is with you, not with the platforms.

edit: and who the hell is worried about driver support? You're writing a game! You should be using a standard library! Even if you're writing Direct3D on Windows you're still not accessing the hardware, there could be just as little hardware support on Windows as these people claim there is in Linux and it wouldn't make a lick of difference because you code to the library, not the driver. Gah, that is an unbelievably painful argument to present. Why would someone do that to me?
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Klumpen0815: If you can't write platform agnostic code, the problem is with you, not with the platforms.
To put it mildly, this is ... geek shit, not reasonable software engineering. Software porting is not about if it is doable at all (it's always!), e.g. by being a experienced porting genius and experienced linux hacker (like gordon) or by investing an enormous effort, it is about if a platform allows to port with reasonable and calculable effort.

Again, Ryan Gordon knows his shit, he is experienced. He is one of the best, I guess he is THE best. He knows how to develop software in a portable way and to port, which libraries and middleware to use and which better not. A normal game developer, who just wants to develop a game, like Dave Burke and don't want to do a half year of research & testing in what libs to use and what techniques not will step into traps and end in pain and problems. That's the very reason why most of the humble bundle ports were done by few specialists (3?), it is hard and requires special, arcane knowledge to do.

But doesn't matter, at least for today, I step out to let the discussion cool down ;P
Post edited January 17, 2014 by shaddim
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shaddim: I'm not interested at all in discussing how we can achieve further polarization, I'm interested in a successful free and open desktop platform. Linux, as prime candidate, failed here, badly, for 15 years. We need to fix that. And, I'm not sure if I share the enthusiasm of many to the white knight "Valve" and their solution SteamOS. I think at least some people, especially in the gog forum, should share my feelings of discomfort on this take-over of linux as gaming platform by a commercial company who is an outspoken supporter of DRM and lock-in mechanisms.
I wouldn't call it a "take-over of Linux". To me it represents a shot in the arm to an OS that needs it. It also presents an avenue to take for those that don't like the direction that MS is taking Windows.

I'm thinking that if Linux can pick up a few more % in market share, then we could see more involvement from 3rd party developers and hardware vendors. From my experience with it, I would say that it needs that attention.
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amok: For games? I think it may end up between 3% and 5%. Depends a bit on how the turnaround of the steam machine is going to be, and how it will be counted towards any market share (i.e. under Linux or as a separate entry)
For games too. That's a decent gain if overall Linux share on Steam is at 5+%.
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Klumpen0815: If you can't write platform agnostic code, the problem is with you, not with the platforms.
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shaddim: To put it mildly, this is ... geek shit, not reasonable software engineering. Software porting is not about if it is doable at all (it's always!), e.g. by being a experienced porting genius and experienced linux hacker (like gordon) or by investing an enormous effort, it is about if a platform allows to port with reasonable and calculable effort.

Again, Ryan Gordon knows his shit, he is experienced. He is one of the best, I guess he is THE best. He knows how to develop software in a portable way and to port, which libraries and middleware to use and which better not. A normal game developer, who just wants to develop a game, like Dave Burke and don't want to do a half year of research & testing in what libs to use and what techniques not will step into traps and end in pain and problems. That's the very reason why most of the humble bundle ports were done by few specialists (3?), it is hard and requires special, arcane knowledge to do.

But doesn't matter, at least for today, I step out to let the discussion cool down ;P
You really don't need to do a lot of research to find out that peppering your code with dependencies on MS only libraries isn't going to make cross platform goals easily attainable. And if someone thinks it's takes magic, super powers to accomplish, then maybe people need a demystification message and not one about how only ubber geeks can understand it - not lowly game developers (which require significant skills anyhow.) The big three things you have to do to not screw yourself over are:
Don't Use DirectX
Know about various path separators
Know the file system is case sensitive.

These are not wildly difficult concepts for someone to grasp if they are serious enough coders to be making a game. If they aren't baking all their biscuits from scratch and decide the options they like are windows only, then it's going to be tougher. At that point it should be about having made a decision, and not about "oh I just didn't know DX was hard to port." There are people that might think it's a good idea long after they start, and find out its not worth the back porting effort, and that's fine, but that's more about ignorance than technical mountain climbing.

One of the biggest mistakes someone can make is doing something in Windows and thinking they will just try to figure it out after the fact. After the fact often has one making lots of little mistakes out of ignorance that are hard to undo. Oddly one can develop for Linux first and it will generally work for Windows with less fuss than if one starts from Windows.

I wouldn't call myself a good programmer or one well versed in "Geek Shit," but I have managed to get OpenGL programs running across the Windows Linux divide. The magic usually comes down to every time I reach for someone else's box of code I have to ask "Is this inherently cross platform?" The answer is never hard to find, and If the answer is no, then it's time to look to other options. And between Mono, Codeblocks, Oger3D, SDL, OpenGL, Unity, OpenTK, and FreeImage there are options to get passed Windows dependencies.
Post edited January 17, 2014 by gooberking
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Fenixp: GOG has to agree on the mere basis that an increasing amount of storefronts is offering Linux versions of games and GOG doesn't. At this point I just don't care about excuses - if others can pull it off, GOG can too. If they can't, I'll be taking my business elsewhere - I already am buying games with a Linux version at other places, so right now, GOG remains the place for old games and is utterly failing in the indie department.
I suppose GOG has been lucky in my case in that a lot of these games with Linux versions offered elsewhere haven't really interested me that much, yet.
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Klumpen0815: All of this still does not explain, why GoG does not offer the Linux ports that are already available and include no real work for them. This cloudy explanation "we want proper support" is just awkward, because it could be sold as bonus content, as said pages ago.
They have their policies and procedures and their way of doing things. I can respect that.

At the end of the day though, all of that shit goes out the window if it affects your bottom line very much. :D
Post edited January 17, 2014 by JohnnyDollar
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Klumpen0815: All of this still does not explain, why GoG does not offer the Linux ports that are already available and include no real work for them. This cloudy explanation "we want proper support" is just awkward, because it could be sold as bonus content, as said pages ago.
I agree, it just doesn't make sense.

They could at least add them in the form of extras (with the rest of bonus content, in the same way that some games have another game version included in the bonus section).

edit
Haha, I've only read the first half of your post, missed the 2nd one (even though the post itself isnt too long xd) but came to the same conclusions.

Anyway, it might seem like a little bit shady tactic, but I dont think Linux users would mind, especially considering the fact that most of them are propably more tech savvy than the average Windows / Mac user.
Post edited January 18, 2014 by DrYaboll
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Fenixp: ...I already am buying games with a Linux version at other places...
Just wonder which places and how many games approximately that would be..