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I'm partially involved with jmonkeyengine, so it is hardly an ubiased opinion, but how do we quantify 'most advanced' and 'visual tools comparable with commercial offerings?'
In particular, where Godot has noticeable difference compared to what JMonkeyEngine offers?
http://jmonkeyengine.org/featu...
Two games given as showcase example - they look ok for indie-level games (regardless of companies behind them, they are indie-quality games at best), but so does for example JME based http://www.desura.com/games/pi.... And any of these is _light years_ away from AAA titles done on commercial engines - because problem is not only with engine, problem is with having millions of dollars to spend on asset creation.

I'm all for healthy competition in open source engines. But touting statements like 'most advanced' and 'only' is not really fair.

There is a pretty awesome isometric interface for nethack, http://www.desura.com/games/vu... or http://www.darkarts.co.za/vult... and it's free :)

Many of the games that are ported to Linux can be found DRM free onb other sites, like Desura, GOG and the Humble Bundle store. Most games are on Steam since that's the best way to get sales on PC.

Nintendo's design work is generally so much better that it's not an issue. Does Intuit worry about Microsoft Money destroying Quickbooks? Not so much.

It might impair Nintendo's ability to crank out mediocre crap (I'm looking at you Super Mario 3D Land) but overall I don't think that's Nintendo's intention. Nintendo, like Sega, are craftsman that make games. They might screw up sometimes, but it's not for lack of trying, and they mostly get it right. Much as I love Indie platformers, very few come close to Nintendo levels of quality. Frogotto and Friends is the only one in recent memory and even it's not prefect.

To that end, a fair number of these cross-platform, linux-friendly, DRM-free indie titles are also available on Desura.
It exists. It works. It's actually quite nice.
It does what Steam does (game store, install manager, launcher, community thing) without being Steam. Most of the indie bundles give you both Steam and/or Desura keys, so if you've bought any you can use those to give it a try.

If you want more games on Linux, please buy Northland ! Northland

what it means for the fsf and the somewhat wacky ideas of Richard stalman.
But i do know that for steam to work on linux without the use of wine and it's window's api emulations Kernel modules will be required to allow the input and graphics snooping that it's anti-cheat system uses.
It might also need a kernel module to have it's own monitored network interface for the same reason.

unless they want to make a desura clone.
http://www.desura.com/

Nobody else is doing this at the moment with Linux, except for Canonical

Not exactly true. Desura would be a good example of that.

i have also a steam account... but the lack of linux support made me migrate to desura

in desura i already paid for many linux games and the fact they choose to build a client first to linux instead of Mac shows that they believe there is market and that it open to grow faster than the Mac one

not all games manage to get the "mainstream" sells, even in windows... not even many mainstream games

ignoring 20,000 potential linux gamers, that are more hungry for good games, that can even pay more looks like "shooting the foot"
and those 20,000 might be 100,000 instead by looking the previous humble bundle numbers in wikipedia

I'm not too familiar with this platform, but a quick browse of the site shows that the client supports some kind of DRM (if nothing else, their developer page lists "Check player authentication (are they allowed to play the game / banned)" under API Integration). Wouldn't open-sourcing the client allow anybody to produce a version that ignored any DRM checks in the client?

When you open source a game, I suppose it's your choice as the developer. But when you open source a content delivery platform, doesn't that affect all the other publishers? (I'm no fan of DRM, but I'm just wondering how this open source changes the nature of the platform.)

when I looked, I looked for EA games and a few others - they were the top of the list. It said "we can add a shortcut" but not "install".

examples: http://www.desura.com/company/electronic-arts/games

they all say "shortcut"...so, can't install straight through desura on linux, right?

Are other titles available?

Yes there are. Oil Rush, for example. You can browse the Linux only games by going to the game browsing page and clicking the Tux in the upper right hand corner. The Humble Indie Bundle was popular and came with Desura keys, so a lot of people can test using Desura without having to buy a game straight out from them.

Are other titles available? Does this mean EA is going to start doing Linux ports through this?

I *highly* doubt EA will ever start doing Linux ports and if they did, they'd find a way to bring Origin to Linux to do it. But Desura acts as a game distribute service that goes across Windows, Linux and soon to be OSX that developers can utilize when creating cross platform games. I welcome Desura and will be using it for future game transactions since Steam never decided to make a Linux port.

Desura is now in public beta for Linux...

Fear not, We are getting closer! http://www.desura.com/

It's been done, it's called Desura. It's focused on indie games and mods, though there's a few older AAA games on it as well.