I love SteamOS for gaming and I think going forward that may get more and more adoption, but a lot of day to day apps or dev tools I use either don’t have Linux releases (and can’t be run via wine/Proton). I would love to jump over on host rather than dabbling with it via vms/steamdeck but it’s just not productive enough.
One especially painful thing is when certain libs I’m developing with need different versions of glibc or gtk to the ones installed by default on OS, and then I die inside.
I just wish we could have less ways to do things in Linux.
I get that’s one of the main benefits of the eco system, but it adds too much of a burden on developers and users. A developer can release something for Windows easily, same for Mac, but for Linux is it a flatpak, a deb, snap etc?
Also given how many shells and pluggable infrastructure there is it’s not like troubleshooting on windows or mac, where you can Google something and others will have exact same problem. On Linux some may have same problem but most of the time it’s a slight variation and there are less users in the pool to begin with.
So a lot of stuff is stacked against you, I would love for it to become more mainstream but to do so I feel it needs to be a bit more like android where we just have a singular way to build/install packages, try and get more people onto a common shell/infrastructure so there are more people in same setup to help each other. Even if it’s not technically the best possible setup, if its consistent and easy to build for its going to speed up adoption.
I don’t think it’s realistically possible but it would greatly help adoption from consumers and developers imo.
We did something similar, it’s how we saved all people in Dead Rising. We used to do this for so many single player games, it was such always such a laugh, and we got to finish games I probably wouldn’t play by myself.
I was/am kinda hoping that with the slow adoption of VR/AR that we can kinda bring hanging out on the couch taking turns on games together.
There are apps like Big Screen that already let you share a screen together and hang out, but not easily play games and you can’t share controls. EmuVR let’s you share controls and hang out in a room with people but only retro games via retroarch.
If we could get a mix of the two where I could just put on my headset/glasses (in the future) join my friends room and we both kinda exist in each other’s real life room via AR sharing screens it would be pretty good.
This is probably like a decade away, but for those of us with IRL friends who have moved really far away so hanging out in person frequently isn’t an option, it could be a ray of hope.
Would still rather just meet up and crash over at one of our places with takeaway pizza taking turns on Resident Evil 1 until 3am.
Oddjob, knives only in aztec
This is a pretty complex topic, as a quick knee jerk I agree AI art isn’t art in the common sense, but one thing I disagree with is that all art has intent or even needs it.
I don’t think AI art is going to or even tries to replace art as a creative pursuit. If anything it’s more likely to replace certain photography related jobs.
Currently the main use cases are
None of these things really care about intent, you could argue concept art does, but a lot of the time it’s just there to set a vibe/direction/theme. All of the above will still replace jobs but not the typical everyday artists jobs, maybe stock or texture photographers though.
I’m not against early access as a whole, if devs want to get player feedback earlier on in the life cycle and players are happy to be pseudo testers then it’s fine.
I get some people would rather wait and buy when it’s finished, and some studiosd/devs would rather bypass EA and just release the game outright, but I feel both paradigms can exist as long as both parties (devs/consumers) continue to benefit.
I think part of the problem is down to how a lot of games come out as “Early Access” which implies it’s more bare bones and will get fleshed out over time.
If a game releases as EA then the expectation is you will get more content until release, if a game just comes out without EA then it’s assumed it has all content and anything new is dlc/mtx/expansions.
I’m not gonna bother addressing Live Service games, wish they would go in the bin with most other MTX.
This tool is great for people who play fullscreen games, but if you play windowed it currently won’t work properly for you (even in windowed mode).
I got it to try and bump my 1440p@60fps to 1440p@120fps without making the GPU want to take off via the frame generation, and unfortunately while it does have a windowed mode that either draws over your window (it’s wonky and slow) or a mode where it just does fullscreen but with black space to pad to your window size, which looks silly.
I like what it does but I have other stuff I want to see on my screen while playing so want to keep my games windowed.
I would also say if you are playing a game that supports dlss/FSR with frame generation, just use that instead as it will use frame buffer data to drive the upscaling/frame generation, which is pretty efficient and the data is already on the gpu. Lossless scaling is basically taking REALLY FAST screenshots of your game and upscaling/frame gen then drawing it over your screen quickly.
I have a steamdeck and it’s a brilliant bit of kit and if the whole Linux eco system had this same sort of cohesion and “out the box” working experience then it would probably be far more adopted.
Your point on stability is great, but for most people I would say they rarely see BSODs, windows is pretty stable too, I think a lot of the reasons that corporate servers use Linux over windows is more to do with licensing and permissions, I have seen plenty of windows server setups which works fine 24/7 so I don’t think windows is any less stable, it’s just more faff to setup things which are based on Linux conventions/features (i.e docker).
If Windows went back to how it was in window ls 7 where it didn’t ram garbage down your throat every update I wouldn’t have any problems with it.
Stuff just works on windows, I have a proxmox box with some Linux vms to run containers and I’ve tried several times over the last 20 years to move to Linux on my main pc but there are just too many faffy bits.
I really dislike what windows has become, it’s bloat ware that’s getting worse and worse, but I begrudgingly use it as I can be productive, the moment I can be as productive in Linux I’m off of windows, but even simple things like drivers are often not as good, lots of commercial software has barebones or no Linux support, there are many different package managers (on one hand great) but some have permission problems due to sandboxing when you need something like your IDE to have access to the dotnet package, also as a developer building apps/libs for Linux is a nightmare.
For example if I make an app for Windows I build a single binary, same for mac os, for Linux it’s the Wild west, varying versions of glibc various versions of gtk and that’s the simpler stuff.
Anyway I REALLY WANT to like Linux and move away from windows to it, but every time I try its hours/days of hoop jumping before I just end up going back to windows and waiting for windows to annoy me so much I try again.
(just to be clear the annoyances I have with windows are it’s constant ad/bloat ware, it’s segregation of settings and duplication of things, it constantly updating and forcing you to turn off all their nonsense AGAIN)
I think a lot of us are just sick of Windows being eroded into garbage spyware, unless we want to run mac hardware there is no other alternative really.
Linux is really the only alternative, and I would love it to do everything better than the other OS’ rather than being content with it just being good for specific use cases.
Every 5 years or so Windows annoys me so much with its nonsense that I salt the earth and install a Linux distro.
The last time I did this was Ubuntu (tried manjaro or whatever its called before too) and every time I find a problem that requires hours of trawling the Internet just to find I need to basically rebuild/test/maintain my own version of the library/component.
It gets to the point where I can’t really be productive and I begrudgingly go back to windows as it’s less faff and more productive for me. Then the timer starts again for I get too annoyed with windows.
I want to love Linux, but its not as simple as “just using it.” (unless you are using a steam deck, that is brilliant for its use case).
Part of the problem for me I feel is that the Linux eco system is so wide and vast that we don’t have a singular collective agreement on where to share effort to get something as stable and easy to use as Windows etc. From this thread alone people seem to hate Ubuntu, and sur maybe it’s bad, but most non Linux people only know of that Linux distro.
The sheer vastness of the eco system is it’s downfall, if there was 1 main shell everyone got behind and was used by companies and end users then we would have a huge knowledge base of problems and fixes as well as a concerted effort in a shared direction. As it stands at the moment most companies using Linux don’t have a shell layer, then end users are probably all using various different shells and related components etc, so effort and support is not consolidated as everyone is pulling in their own directions.
I get this is one of the things that draws in the current Linux userbase, but for those of us who just want to do same stuff we do on windows/mac we don’t really care about being able to mix and match stuff, we just want to get behind something that gets out of our way and let’s us use the computer, not faff in the infrastructure of the OS.
Really enjoying it so far.
I was initially saddened to hear it was going to follow in the steps of 15 and be an action based rpg, and I thought 15 was brain dead “warp strike simulator” with horrible story pacing and poor characters (until last 5% of the game).
This game though has simple but effective action combat with enough variety to be fun and the characters and pacing are a joy.
I still wish we could get some FF games like 7 or 9 where there is depth to equipment, magic and turn based combat, but jrpgs have been iterating away from complex battle systems and sell well so can’t see them going back.
I still think FF7 was the pinnacle as material mixing and matching with equipment was really simple and super fun.
Anyway rnat over, FF16 is good, recommend it.