Good old OS wars.

Okay openGL was used in the late 90s and early 00s in the gaming industry and was even preferred and had a better reliability then direct X. But then something happened. Money happened. Microsoft put lots of money into developing Direct X and when dx9 came out it was pretty much the slandered.

There a number of reasons for this. First Direct x is closed source. Fact is open source isn't always better and in this was one of those cases.

When you're talking millions of dollars and jobs riding one of the most impotent components of a PC operating system, but also needed for your product to even work.


companies will always gravitate to something with corporate funding and tight control. You have documentation, integration with tools like visual C++ and lost of support to help get your product (which you are trying to sell) in a working and sellable state. Open sources offers a lot of freedom and that comes at a price. There's no rules and so anything really goes. Someone could make a change to it and then your games stops working and the change wasn't documented so there's no details on what you can do to fix it. OpenGL isn't new it's old and there's a reason studios stopped using it over 15 years. Some people like John Carmac was in favour of openGL which is why all the quake games used it. However, none of those games (we're talking Quake on disk not on Steam) will work or work very well on a Windows system today. However Direct X games from the same period such as Unreal have much better compatibility. In fact you should install the old quake and unreals and play around with the renders and see what works better.

No I'm not a programmer nor does mincraft like that because of open GL.

Ultimately Direct X is preferred over opengl because it's more stable from a corporate political prospective. If you want games to work on opengl you're gonna have to do it your self. With so much time, money and effort however going into Direct X it's no wander it's the industries choice.

I should mention that personally I'm not happy with this arrangement, but simply demanding studios to make games for opengl and Linux when there's nothing really in it for them is arrogant and stupid. If you want more games on Linux and openGL you need to understand how to make these things attractive to both consumers and entertainment creators which is something the Linux community has a lot of trouble understanding.

So here's a couple of ways I personally think may to do that; but take it with a grain of salt. Release a commercially closed source distribution of Linux along with openGL. Or better yet released a closed version of GL that is cross platform and can be installed on any system. This way any games designed to use this new render should in theory work on any system that can run the render and keeping it closed sources means that you have control and make sure that games made for it will work.

This is how I see it. On one side you have Windows/DirectX which are both tightly controlled by Microsoft who abuse it often and try to force both consumer and the IT industry to work in a specific way.

On the other side you have Linux/openGL which isn't a salutation but just in the opposite direction. There's too much freedom and not enough direction or control to warrant a safe investment for most commercial enterprises. IE making games for Linux is risky.

I am getting into Linux and I do like but I feel that Linux's biggest problem are it's own fans. Linux really does feel like it's been over sold to the point where my expectations were set way to high and many of the issues with are either glanced over or dismissed.

Wow I didn’t expect it to be this long I might re post this in a thread one day.
No such thing as perfect OS :P

That's just a pile of nonsense. About investment and participation see
http://www.slideshare.net/NeilTrevett/whats-next-in-graphics-apis-siggraph-asia-dec14

Well then why isn't the main stream gaming industry using opengl

Inertia, plain and simple. The practice of using DirectX has built up a lot of inertia and it'll take time to change that.

That's what Valve has been trying to do with things like the presentation at Steam Dev Days where they showed trends in the availability of features via DirectX and OpenGL.

(TL;DR: There's a lot of perfectly fine hardware running Steam where outdated drivers or old versions of Windows cripple DirectX while still leaving the newer features accessible via OpenGL... in the former case (drivers), because OpenGL extensions beat DirectX's monolithic update strategy to the punch and, in the latter case (windows version), mostly because WinXP doesn't go above DX9 and people often don't upgrade whatever they have.)

This thread has degenerated, and I'm unfollowing it.

If gog.com are still looking for packaging suggestions, I hope that the technical thread didn't go unnoticed.

It is unfortunate that the password discussion took place under this topic anyway. A new thread should have been created when it was discovered what it was that was holding us back.

It's easier than on Windows.

1. Open up Synaptic Package Manager and select everything you want to install or update (as you normally would).
2. Instead of clicking Apply, stick in a thumbdrive and choose "Generate Package Download Script".
3. Go to another machine with Internet access and run the script. (The script is simple enough that you can use it on Windows too if you rename it to .bat, and put a copy of wget.exe next to the script or in your %PATH%)
4. Bring the thumbdrive back to your offline machine, make sure the same packages are still selected (they will be if you didn't quit Synaptic), and choose "Add downloaded packages".

All your updates plus any programs you want to install in one simple, automated process.

Off the top of my head, I don't remember the process for offline-updating the list of available packages, but it's equally simple.

I could say pretty much the same thing about MacOS X despite it having more support from companies like Adobe. For non-games, just because the exact same applications aren't available doesn't mean there aren't perfectly good equivalents in 99% of cases.

Also, while Wine does work with MacOS X these days, it was originally created with Linux as its explicit target. (Partly because, for the first 12 years of Wine's existence, Apple had no interest in x86 processors and x86 emulators for Macs already existed. (I remember running DOS on an emulated 286 on an ancient Powerbook laptop.)

...so, without piggybacking on Linux compatibility efforts, OSX wouldn't enjoy anywhere near the game compatibility it does today. (And Linux still has more compatibility because, as I cited in a previous post, the OSX kernel is incompatible with 64-bit Windows applications.)

As already mentioned, that's flat-out wrong.

For partitioning, the GNU parted engine is powerful, featureful, and mature and has several high-quality UIs available based on it. (, [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Partition_Manager]KDE Partition Manager, and various types of terminal-based UIs for emergencies, such as nparted, which implements the old DOS-style "GUI drawn using terminal characters" style)

I don't know what other "essential applications" you're missing, but I have been happily running exclusively Linux for at least a decade now (I can't remember whether I switched in 2003 or 2004), my mother for almost as long, and my brother for roughly a year now.

On a modern distro, pretty much anything can be done from the GUI... but instructions for the terminal are still easier to give so that's why you find them online so much. (It's easier to say "copy-paste these commands" than to talk someone through a GUI without taking screenshots and GUIs are still more prone to change on Windows OR Linux than the command-line interface is.)

What their intentions were is totally meaningless, the question is : does the GPLv2 in it's current form explicitly forbid DRMs and the answer is no.

Also GPLv3 doesn't forbid DRMs it just state in this case the anti-circumvention laws won't apply in case somebody crack said DRM.

So even IF Dosbox was using v3 and IF GoG was still using their passworded RAR (and of course using the supposition that it was actually to be considered as a DRM) then it would still be authorized by the GPLv3, it would just mean that cracking said password would be perfectly legal, even under DMCA.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DRMProhibited

Well, I'm pro-open source myself...but this part of the linux ecosystem is severely broken (and the design mistakes infact have nothing to do with being open source but with legacy unix baggage/thinking, which needs to go away).

You described the (non-obvious) process of getting something from an central repository to run it later locally. The distro centered approach with centralized repositories (while being fragmented among the distros) has several downsides: only what is in the repos is available & recommended to users, meaning limited amount of apps. As in the distro concept with the approach every lib is a system lib and therefore tight intercoupling of apps with system, only the complete system with apps is updated, meaning either out-of-dateness of applications or instability. As it is assume everything is updated and synchronized with the distro, stable API/ABIs, forming a stable platform identified as crucial long ago, across multiple distros never were developed or enforced for the linux ecosystem, so we can't provide stable interfaces to external app developers and therefore suffering on a severe lack of ISV apps (Photoshop, Adobe stuff, games) (see also the compatibility problems of external binary apps for steam for linux).

Which is equivalent to making DRM toothless, i.e. it's forbidding DRM which is restricting users' rights.

Not DRM, only DMCA anti-circumvention clauses.

You can still make the most restrictive DRM you want with GPLv3; you just cannot sue peoples who try/succeed in circumventing it.

I doubt this clause applies to the whole installer. It's basically a software bundle that also contains DosBox. But this doesn't mean that the whole bundle must have the same license as DosBox. So I think that nobody is legally allowed to break the password. GOG would be allowed, if they so wanted to, to immediately terminate its relationship with any customer cracking passwords of installers.

That's exactly the point. Removing anticircumvention clauses makes breaking DRM a normal activity therefore restoring users fair use rights (or whatever they are called in countries without explicit fair use laws).

Plainly, use(r) rights.

That's what I get for writing in the middle of the night. Yes there was no need for it to be that long.

However, yes Vavle are trying to move towards Linux but I have no confidence whatsoever. AS time as gone on Steam has gotten worse and I suspect that Valves Success with Steam was down to luck and good timing. Valve seems to start these amazing projects, but they seem to get board and move on before anything has really happened. So I don't see a future in the Steam OS I'll just use Mint.
TL;DR: Well I skimmed it. The suggestions you made with Synaptic I did try that but it was simply too temperamental. Sometimes it worked sometimes it didn't and sometimes it half worked example installing Wine but not my Nvidia graphics driver. I certainly would never say that this was easier then Windows though. Not by a country mile. However I despite my consistent criticism I obviously like Linux just not the attitude of most of it's fans. I mostly use Terminal to make Linux do what I want. So far it's proven to be the best method for me. As for Wine I've actually had better luck getting games to work with Virtualbox and more luck with VM workstation. I'm thinking of buying it but I need to know if it uses online activation DRM first.

As for essential apps I'm not sure what else I can say. Windows just seems to have more the things that I want especly regarding system tools.