You maintain that there's an endless supply of quality games out there and at the same time accuse 'other' people of zelotry? I know tastes differ, but I find the vast majority of games for any platform, windows, console or otherwise to be crap.
It seems to be Free Software's dirty little secret.
What! You mean to tell me that there's not a lot of games for Linux? With a sharp, insightful bit of wisdom like that no wonder you got modded Informative! I don't think anyone's ever noticed that before. Another dirty little secret we keep is that water is wet, and that fire burns!
Is if this actually was true, and there was a rich, confused, Nigerian out there wondering why 100,000,000 English speakers so far have refused his request to make them rich. It's just begging to be made into a wacky sitcom.
And I woudln't even say it's always deterioration which causes an inability to see through this kind of thing. In my experience at least, a lot of older people get stuck in the worldview of whatever decade they were in at around their twenties or thirties. Even if they wind up with a computer in their homes, it dosn't become the same thing in their minds as it does to us. It's just a strange magic box which might as well be powered by dragon horns for all they understand of it. If their magic box says a nigerian wants to give them millions of dollors, it's no more stange than the fact that they're able to get letters through their phone line in the first place.
I might be alone in this, but I'm far more excited about the Dragon Quest V remake. Final Fantasy has been moving more in the direction of the middle ground, but good old Dragon Quest should be a bundle of old school RPG charm combined with just the right amount of graphical upgrades. Final Fantasy might be good, but also might be bad - Dragon Quest V sounds like an already great game is getting just souped up enough to increase its already large appeal.
I remember one person mentioned giving this a try, and having to fight an uphill battle to get the library to understand that CD-R does not allways equal warez. It's a good idea though, and I'm tempted to give it a shot. Barring anything newer, I've got at least a couple old boxed sets of SUSE and Mandrake I couuld donate.
Funcom released a little gem called "The longest journey".
It's is a little off topic I know, but this post reminded me of something I've been wondering for a while. Has anyone played The Longest Journey in Linux with Wine or WineX? The demo seemed to work OK with a recent cvs build of WineX, but I'm a bit nervous about buying such a long game with no word as to whether I'll be able to finish it or not.
the point is, the absolute refusal of any genre, to accept a blend of good elements from other genres is the mark of death. If you refuse to accept new ideas - you will stagnate and die. It's that simple.
While I do agree to some extent, I don't know if that applies to something which is in many ways defined by a lack of a certain element. Adding action elements to adventure games to make them better seems like trying to make someone a better vegitarian by adding meat to their salad.
When it comes down to believing something because it's true, and believing something because it sounds good or amusing, the vast majority will choose the latter.
I'll admit that most of my gaming in Linux comes down to using emulators, but I do get a lot of milage out of them. With native games, real emulators, wine and winex I've got a couple shelves of games I play on a fairly regular basis in linux. Sure, I don't consider myself much of a gamer, but I'd hardly say there's nothing out there for gaming in Linux.
I've got a few. Firstly, my advice is to always compile wine yourself. There's a lot of options, and packagers often choose the lowest common demoninator rather than the options which would yield the best performance for your particular computer. The wine source code comes with a nice script which almost compleatly automates the process. Secondly, to have both wine and winex installed and to try both to see which gives the best results. There's a scipt called getcvswinex which will download the latest winex cvs source, compile it, and keep it from messing with your normal wine build. Transgaming's game search is also good for getting an idea of what games should and should not run with winex. There's also a site called Frank's Corner which I've found to be a really helpful resource in finding what people have been able to get running, and how.
GTA3 - well even if you did get that to run under emulation it would be so slow as to be unplayable.
Surprisingly, GTA3 actually should run rather well under WineX. OK, should and will are two often different things. But some people at least have reported similar speeds and experiences with GTA3 in Linux with WineX as when playing it nativly in windows.
Ya, and those are all old versions from like a year ago, LOL, nice updates....
I'm using Debian Unstable. Which I moved to mostly because I got tired of how slowly updates came to other distros. Updates for most programs are available almost imediatly after the developer posts them as a new release - often even before. Heck, there's cvs builds of firebird every few weeks - it's the most up to date non source based distro that I've ever come accross.
Opera does a great job if you dont care about opensource like 99% of the users, and the rest simply use the IE that come with their OSes.
I'm somehow doubting how well a project to port a closed source browser would go.
Mozilla as many people have admitted is over-featured, but Firebird is not seeing much action in development either.
In the GUI perhaps, but remember that any improvements in Mozilla's html rendering are automatically a part of firebird.
but quite honestly, even most opensource users dont really use mozilla.
Unless you have some solid statistics to back that up, I think you're just reading your own prefrence into everyone else. Ask if anyone even knows what konqueror is on a non computer related message board, and then ask if anyone knows what mozilla is.
So can someone who has been using Mozilla for along time explain the reason for all this work on Mozilla?
I think it's not so much Mozilla that's the attraction, but gecko. And if you're going to the trouble of getting that, why not just port the whole thing? And really, what else is there to work on porting. The only other reasonablly advanced open source rendering engine is khtml, and that's fairly bound up in unix. It's been ported to other platforms in the past, and apple of course proved it's viable, but I don't think it has the same focus on maintaining cross platform compatibility that mozilla has.
The most important thing about debian isn't necessarily that apt is cool... it's that the package managers put a lot of work into producing and making sure only good packages get accepted.
Thank you! I was just about to post the same thing. It's not just the format, or apt, it's the work that goes into the packaging as well. I used apt on suse and mandrake, as well as urpmi in mandrake. And while both were great and quite comparible in technology, I couldn't depend on them like I did apt in Debian because there just wasn't as many people putting together and updating packages. I did a dist-upgrade earlier today, and at 9pm there's already 36 packages with updates available.
I can't speak for anyone else, but that's not my goal. My goal, or at least hope since my contributions are pretty much nil at this point, is an environment that's usable for me and people like me. I'm not a moral crusader who thinks he needs to save the world from itself.
Borland gave it a shot with Kylix, but we all saw what happened with that. Nobody wanted it because it wasn't free.
I don't think it was so much that it wasn't free, but that it wasn't better than what was available at the time for free. I bought the personal edition of delphi when I was using Windows, and was quite prepared to buy Kylix if I felt it was worth it. I just didn't think it was though. Firstly, the look and feel. This was about the time that unified kde/gtk themes were making an appearence, things were finally starting to get some uniformity in look! But everything I made in Kylix would not only take yet another look, but one that I felt was ugly. Though that was my biggest annnoyence, I had enough that there was little chance I'd spend any money on it, let alone what they were asking.
admit it, if you've used KDE or QT apps you've seen the crashes, I have
And you've never seen a gtk or gnome program crash? You're either lying, filtering your memories to go along with your bias, or have been very lucky. Neither QT or GTK are magic bullets that are going to suddenly make up for a programmer's errors. I've written with both QT and GTK, and I'm living proof that neither are going to do a thing for hastily written code that hasn't had enough testing.
Good. I don't understand this attitude many people seem to have that all window managers should behave in a manner perfect to their own prefrence. I like most things in KDE, I have a mild dislike for a lot of aspects of Gnome. I'm thrilled that Gnome exists, because obviously it scratchs the itch of a lot of people, and prevents that same behavior being implemented in an environment where it would only annoy most users - not help them. I love the fact that there's so much choice in Linux, and I think it'd be a shame if some people got their wish of everything, everywhere, looking and acting the same.
I can hear the Debian fans screaming already... "But Debian has APT". Yes, it does, and APT is great. RedHat has APT now too, but Mandrake has had URPMI for years, which essentially does exactly what APT does, only its easier to use, both from the command line and graphically!
Well, OK, I am a Debian user - but I also have a Mandrake install to keep tabs on how it's progressing. While I do agree that Mandrake's urpmi is very nice, I think your statement is missing one of the most important aspects of apt. Yes, red hat has apt, and mandrake has urpmi, but what they don't have is the extensive repository which Debian has. I think that urpmi is the equal of apt on a technical base, but that's only half the beauty of apt. It's real power is in the large number of people making debs, how quickly revisions are (usually) made, and standards for getting them up in the first place.
I do have to chime in the usability as well. At one point I would have agreed that rpmdrake was easier to use than synaptic for graphical installation and removal of programs. But since then, in my opinion at least, synaptic has improved while rpmdrake has devolved. One can actually add 'and' remove packages from a single program in Debian, while in Mandrake you're stuck with it being split into two.
It seems like they were really sick of people complaining how Gnome is prettier.
In my experience there's two big prefrences in style, those who like brighter keramik styles and those who like more subdued shades. As much as I place myself in the first catagory, I'm not about to say that everyone in the second is wrong. It's art, people have different prefrences. For every person who thinks it's an absolute fact that Gnome is prettier, there's going to be another that prefers Keramik. I find it really hard to believe there's enough of a majority on either side to have much of an influence on the developers.
The Iraqis are grateful. If you can't see this then you are truly blind.
And if you can't see how badly broad statements like that apply to the human condition, I'd apply the same to you as well. You could plant money tress all over the USA and there would still be people bitching about it. There's no country, anywhere, that can have 'the so-and-so feel' applied to the people in it. One could say that the majority of a nation lean politically in one direction. But saying, or implying that ever single person in a country has the same political leanings as the writer does just makes him look like he's glossing over facts to make a better case for his own beliefs.
Those are some real imaginative names they thought up. By golly.
steve forbes: Well, that's one way to interpret it. I mean, the description of the character fits my profile as a verile, charismatic leader of men. But, then again, my name isn't "teve torbes" - it's steve forbes.. which is different! Maybe it represents somebody named "leve norbes".
Slashdot Mirror
Time to fess up, zealots.
You maintain that there's an endless supply of quality games out there and at the same time accuse 'other' people of zelotry? I know tastes differ, but I find the vast majority of games for any platform, windows, console or otherwise to be crap.
It seems to be Free Software's dirty little secret.
What! You mean to tell me that there's not a lot of games for Linux? With a sharp, insightful bit of wisdom like that no wonder you got modded Informative! I don't think anyone's ever noticed that before. Another dirty little secret we keep is that water is wet, and that fire burns!
Is if this actually was true, and there was a rich, confused, Nigerian out there wondering why 100,000,000 English speakers so far have refused his request to make them rich. It's just begging to be made into a wacky sitcom.
And I woudln't even say it's always deterioration which causes an inability to see through this kind of thing. In my experience at least, a lot of older people get stuck in the worldview of whatever decade they were in at around their twenties or thirties. Even if they wind up with a computer in their homes, it dosn't become the same thing in their minds as it does to us. It's just a strange magic box which might as well be powered by dragon horns for all they understand of it. If their magic box says a nigerian wants to give them millions of dollors, it's no more stange than the fact that they're able to get letters through their phone line in the first place.
I might be alone in this, but I'm far more excited about the Dragon Quest V remake. Final Fantasy has been moving more in the direction of the middle ground, but good old Dragon Quest should be a bundle of old school RPG charm combined with just the right amount of graphical upgrades. Final Fantasy might be good, but also might be bad - Dragon Quest V sounds like an already great game is getting just souped up enough to increase its already large appeal.
I remember one person mentioned giving this a try, and having to fight an uphill battle to get the library to understand that CD-R does not allways equal warez. It's a good idea though, and I'm tempted to give it a shot. Barring anything newer, I've got at least a couple old boxed sets of SUSE and Mandrake I couuld donate.
Funcom released a little gem called "The longest journey".
It's is a little off topic I know, but this post reminded me of something I've been wondering for a while. Has anyone played The Longest Journey in Linux with Wine or WineX? The demo seemed to work OK with a recent cvs build of WineX, but I'm a bit nervous about buying such a long game with no word as to whether I'll be able to finish it or not.
the point is, the absolute refusal of any genre, to accept a blend of good elements from other genres is the mark of death. If you refuse to accept new ideas - you will stagnate and die. It's that simple.
While I do agree to some extent, I don't know if that applies to something which is in many ways defined by a lack of a certain element. Adding action elements to adventure games to make them better seems like trying to make someone a better vegitarian by adding meat to their salad.
When it comes down to believing something because it's true, and believing something because it sounds good or amusing, the vast majority will choose the latter.
A Soviet Russia joke would be on topic, and I can't think of a thing.
I'll admit that most of my gaming in Linux comes down to using emulators, but I do get a lot of milage out of them. With native games, real emulators, wine and winex I've got a couple shelves of games I play on a fairly regular basis in linux. Sure, I don't consider myself much of a gamer, but I'd hardly say there's nothing out there for gaming in Linux.
Anyway, what I'm saying is, what's your secret?
I've got a few. Firstly, my advice is to always compile wine yourself. There's a lot of options, and packagers often choose the lowest common demoninator rather than the options which would yield the best performance for your particular computer. The wine source code comes with a nice script which almost compleatly automates the process. Secondly, to have both wine and winex installed and to try both to see which gives the best results. There's a scipt called getcvswinex which will download the latest winex cvs source, compile it, and keep it from messing with your normal wine build. Transgaming's game search is also good for getting an idea of what games should and should not run with winex. There's also a site called Frank's Corner which I've found to be a really helpful resource in finding what people have been able to get running, and how.
GTA3 - well even if you did get that to run under emulation it would be so slow as to be unplayable.
Surprisingly, GTA3 actually should run rather well under WineX. OK, should and will are two often different things. But some people at least have reported similar speeds and experiences with GTA3 in Linux with WineX as when playing it nativly in windows.
Ya, and those are all old versions from like a year ago, LOL, nice updates....
I'm using Debian Unstable. Which I moved to mostly because I got tired of how slowly updates came to other distros. Updates for most programs are available almost imediatly after the developer posts them as a new release - often even before. Heck, there's cvs builds of firebird every few weeks - it's the most up to date non source based distro that I've ever come accross.
Opera does a great job if you dont care about opensource like 99% of the users, and the rest simply use the IE that come with their OSes.
I'm somehow doubting how well a project to port a closed source browser would go.
Mozilla as many people have admitted is over-featured, but Firebird is not seeing much action in development either.
In the GUI perhaps, but remember that any improvements in Mozilla's html rendering are automatically a part of firebird.
but quite honestly, even most opensource users dont really use mozilla.
Unless you have some solid statistics to back that up, I think you're just reading your own prefrence into everyone else. Ask if anyone even knows what konqueror is on a non computer related message board, and then ask if anyone knows what mozilla is.
So can someone who has been using Mozilla for along time explain the reason for all this work on Mozilla?
I think it's not so much Mozilla that's the attraction, but gecko. And if you're going to the trouble of getting that, why not just port the whole thing? And really, what else is there to work on porting. The only other reasonablly advanced open source rendering engine is khtml, and that's fairly bound up in unix. It's been ported to other platforms in the past, and apple of course proved it's viable, but I don't think it has the same focus on maintaining cross platform compatibility that mozilla has.
The most important thing about debian isn't necessarily that apt is cool... it's that the package managers put a lot of work into producing and making sure only good packages get accepted.
Thank you! I was just about to post the same thing. It's not just the format, or apt, it's the work that goes into the packaging as well. I used apt on suse and mandrake, as well as urpmi in mandrake. And while both were great and quite comparible in technology, I couldn't depend on them like I did apt in Debian because there just wasn't as many people putting together and updating packages. I did a dist-upgrade earlier today, and at 9pm there's already 36 packages with updates available.
I can't speak for anyone else, but that's not my goal. My goal, or at least hope since my contributions are pretty much nil at this point, is an environment that's usable for me and people like me. I'm not a moral crusader who thinks he needs to save the world from itself.
Borland gave it a shot with Kylix, but we all saw what happened with that. Nobody wanted it because it wasn't free.
I don't think it was so much that it wasn't free, but that it wasn't better than what was available at the time for free. I bought the personal edition of delphi when I was using Windows, and was quite prepared to buy Kylix if I felt it was worth it. I just didn't think it was though. Firstly, the look and feel. This was about the time that unified kde/gtk themes were making an appearence, things were finally starting to get some uniformity in look! But everything I made in Kylix would not only take yet another look, but one that I felt was ugly. Though that was my biggest annnoyence, I had enough that there was little chance I'd spend any money on it, let alone what they were asking.
admit it, if you've used KDE or QT apps you've seen the crashes, I have
And you've never seen a gtk or gnome program crash? You're either lying, filtering your memories to go along with your bias, or have been very lucky. Neither QT or GTK are magic bullets that are going to suddenly make up for a programmer's errors. I've written with both QT and GTK, and I'm living proof that neither are going to do a thing for hastily written code that hasn't had enough testing.
Good. I don't understand this attitude many people seem to have that all window managers should behave in a manner perfect to their own prefrence. I like most things in KDE, I have a mild dislike for a lot of aspects of Gnome. I'm thrilled that Gnome exists, because obviously it scratchs the itch of a lot of people, and prevents that same behavior being implemented in an environment where it would only annoy most users - not help them. I love the fact that there's so much choice in Linux, and I think it'd be a shame if some people got their wish of everything, everywhere, looking and acting the same.
I think Nyquil does as well, which I always thought was a little odd for a night-time drug.
Grandma, nooooo!
I can hear the Debian fans screaming already... "But Debian has APT". Yes, it does, and APT is great. RedHat has APT now too, but Mandrake has had URPMI for years, which essentially does exactly what APT does, only its easier to use, both from the command line and graphically!
Well, OK, I am a Debian user - but I also have a Mandrake install to keep tabs on how it's progressing. While I do agree that Mandrake's urpmi is very nice, I think your statement is missing one of the most important aspects of apt. Yes, red hat has apt, and mandrake has urpmi, but what they don't have is the extensive repository which Debian has. I think that urpmi is the equal of apt on a technical base, but that's only half the beauty of apt. It's real power is in the large number of people making debs, how quickly revisions are (usually) made, and standards for getting them up in the first place.
I do have to chime in the usability as well. At one point I would have agreed that rpmdrake was easier to use than synaptic for graphical installation and removal of programs. But since then, in my opinion at least, synaptic has improved while rpmdrake has devolved. One can actually add 'and' remove packages from a single program in Debian, while in Mandrake you're stuck with it being split into two.
It seems like they were really sick of people complaining how Gnome is prettier.
In my experience there's two big prefrences in style, those who like brighter keramik styles and those who like more subdued shades. As much as I place myself in the first catagory, I'm not about to say that everyone in the second is wrong. It's art, people have different prefrences. For every person who thinks it's an absolute fact that Gnome is prettier, there's going to be another that prefers Keramik. I find it really hard to believe there's enough of a majority on either side to have much of an influence on the developers.
The Iraqis are grateful. If you can't see this then you are truly blind.
And if you can't see how badly broad statements like that apply to the human condition, I'd apply the same to you as well. You could plant money tress all over the USA and there would still be people bitching about it. There's no country, anywhere, that can have 'the so-and-so feel' applied to the people in it. One could say that the majority of a nation lean politically in one direction. But saying, or implying that ever single person in a country has the same political leanings as the writer does just makes him look like he's glossing over facts to make a better case for his own beliefs.
Those are some real imaginative names they thought up. By golly.
steve forbes: Well, that's one way to interpret it. I mean, the description of the character fits my profile as a verile, charismatic leader of men. But, then again, my name isn't "teve torbes" - it's steve forbes.. which is different! Maybe it represents somebody named "leve norbes".