### Select in the menu bar Applications > System Tools > Synaptic Package Manager. It prompts you for the system admin password. Then you get point-and-click simplicity for installs.
The point is not that its hard to become root, but that its impossible to install software in the user space. GUI or CLI isn't a problem.
### The Debian package manager has provisions for that, but people usually don't bother.
Ok, please enlight me how I can install something in my home directory via apt-get? Sure I can try dpkg-deb and use a hex editor to get rid of the often hard-compiled path in the binary to make it work in my home directory, but thats not really what I call easy to use.
### For example, Adobe could provide a Debian feed for Photoshop.
They should provide a package for Linux, not specifically for Debian. Sadly Linux still hasn't a standard form to disto independendly package something, so the companies use self extracting scripts, tarballs, rpms and other unpleasant stuff. Maybe autopackage or lsb-rpm will help one day, but not anytime soon.
### Shouldn't you be using Synaptic for a fair comparison?
That wouldn't change anything, since the limitations I mentioned are in the underlying way how packages are handled, not in the UI.
### At least that way, you don't have the problem of not finding the package, because it's in the list you are picking from.
The example should show that even Debian doesn't have all software in their repository, not that it is hard to find.
### Along those same lines, when you complain about packages being out of date, again, they are, in the Apple or Windows world, with commercial software, how often do new updates come out?
You missed the point, the issue is that a perfectly stable software is released by its creator, but there is simply no easy way to install it for the normal user, since the distro will take month or years till it has it packaged into a stable distribution. If somebody releases a game for windows they don't have to wait for Microsoft to release a new version of Windows to ship it to the common users, on the Linux side however that the normal way, at least if you don't want to bypass the package system.
### Most of your complaints seem aimed specifically at debian itself.
Nope, all distros have pretty much the same problem. They all expect software to be centrally packaged and distributed.
### However whether OS X, BSD or Linux, you could always enable sudo for the users you trust not to screw up the system
The point is that I don't want to become root AT ALL to install a piece of software, its my home dir, so why can't I dump the software there? It would also be much more secure to being able to test a package first in a isolated account then being forced to install it system wide.
### Do you really want to install a.deb package made by me?
No, I don't want a.deb from you. I want a autopackage or a lsb-rpm or something else that will work on any distro. And thats not to much to expect, such a thing should be as normal for a programmer than a tar.gz, however sadly the whole Linux environment makes it rather hard to get a distro independed package done in the first place, so I can understand why people don't bother to provide them.
That said there would of course be still the problem with multiple different architectures, but that could be solved by having a standard source+metadata format, that can be easily automatically build.
### You DO realize you just said computer security is stupid, don't you? What do you do for a living, write viruses?
Its a usability problem, not a security one. If I want security, I mount the home dirs with noexec or have a policy that forbits them and run nightly cron checks or whatever. apt-get not support user install doesn't prevent a user at all to run untrusted binaries, actually worse it forces the users to search for binaries or source in potential insecure places instead of using the high quality debian packages.
Come on, how should Apple threaten Linux? If MacOSX would run on all x86 hardware and would be 100% Windows compatible there might be some reason behind this, but for all we now, MacOSX will still require its special hardware and don't offer any build in Windows compatibilty, so things havn't really changed at all from the PPC. Its all just a implementation detail that nobody really cares about.
Biggest thread for Linux always was and always will be itself. To many incompabile distros, no consistency, lack of user friendlyness when it comes to hardware install, configuration, software installation, lack of third party support, etc.
### And it is absolutely easy: an apt-get install xyz installs/updates package xyz
$ apt-get install xyz E: Could not open lock file/var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13 Permission denied) E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?
Both of the aboves gives you a pretty good summary of why Debians way of handling packages isn't really any good in the long run.
First of you can't install a application as a user, now how stupid is that? If *I* want to install a bleeding edge version of Gimp, I neither want to bother the admin with it nor do I want to force it an all the others users, yet Debian requires me todo exactly that.
Secondly Debian packages work great, but only for stuff that is in Debian, which might be a lot, but is *far* from everything and its also often *way* outdated, remember those three year release cycles... Software packaging should be done by those that provide the software in the first place, the distro might run a quality check on it, but thats it. What good is it to release a software today and having to wait three or more years till it finds it way into Debian?
There are of courses dozens of other problems, but those above are probally the main ones. You can of course work around them by compiling yourself, but didn't we invented packaging system to avoid exactly that.
### Given that OS X has shown us the power of this method, why haven't any distros latched onto it?
Rox and the Zero Install System provide that. I was quite stunned the first time when I drag&dropped a Rox Applet on my panel and saw a XTerm poping up that automagically run the compile for the Applet.
The real question is when will the bandwidth of a mobilephone be large and cheap enough so that I can just stream the video for recording to my server at home in realtime? Who needs local storage if there is floating enough free storage around on the net? All it needs is a fast enough way to access the net. If mobile phones fail to provide that, maybe free WiFi access points will cover it at least for the more public places. Who knows, will certainly be interesting when you see the first 'my whole life 24/7 on video'-movies coming up.
### Neural networks or whatever might be more 'realistic', but they won't necessarily be better to play against...
ACK, I see the biggest use of neural networks and advanced AI not so much in enemy behaviour, but in interactive story telling. Today most games run on some basic AI combined with a bunch of prescripted events, so basically everything the player is going to see is already set right from the start. What I think will play a important role in the future aren't more clever enemies, but an a form of semi-automatic story-telling, which doesn't mean that the enemies get clever, but that the fight has a whole will get more interesting and more cinematic. Simple example, if you shoot at an airplane in a game it will explode and crash somewhere, its ok, but not that interesting. In contrast to that what happens in a movie? The hero shoots at some airplane and instead of just crashing somewhere its coming towards the hero and crashing right infront of him, causing him to try to escape or it crashes in some building nearby and causing a bunch of nice explosions, probally making the building falling towards the hero. Games so far don't offer such special events or if they do, they are most likly completly prescripted or pure luck. In future games I imagine some short of 'game master'-AI, much the same of what a game master does when playing a pen&paper RPG, will take care of the overall happenings on the battlefield and make sure that the player gets something interesting to fight, instead of just something more clever and realistic. After all we play games to have fun and real battle isn't fun, so improving the enemy AI alone won't help to create better games.
Its for most part simply a technical improvment, more polys, better textures, etc., from the gameplay point of view they are basically the same, still can't crash my car, still can't drive in multiplayer vs CPU oponents and such. And heck, if I don't use my glasses they even look pretty much the same. There still might be a WOW effect, but that doesn't hold for long, at least for me, since the underlying game is still basically all the same.
There is basically only one point I still care about 'better' graphics and that is framerate. Some of those SNES SFX-Chip, N64 or Playstation games simply have lousy FPS in the 10-20 range, which just sucks quite a bit for action games. So yes, I would love to have a Stunt Racer FX with 60FPS, but thats it, more polys and textures might be nice to, but they wouldn't add any to the gameplay, more fps however do.
When I compare ResidentEvil1 vs ResidentEvil1-Remake for example the Gamecube part looks a whole lot better then the PS1 part, but once you play for a while, they feel pretty much the same. I would even go so far to say that the PS1 part plays better, since the Gamecube part is quite a bit less thrilling and atmospheric. Not sure exactly why, might be the different background sound, the lack of B-movie feeling, the different voice acting or the sometimes badly places cameras. But more polys didn't really make a better game.
The last game that really got me 'WOW' was OperationFlashpoint and not because it was graphically so more shiny then the rest, but because it allowed me to do stuff that no other game had allowed before.
### Did any PS2 game ever look as good as sonys techdemos?
The current generation of PS2 games looks at least as good if not in many cases better then the techdemos they have shown back then. That said, yes, it took them a while to get all the power out of the PS2. This thread has some videos and pictures to compare.
And last not least one should never forget that a techdemo isn't actually gameplay. A techdemo allows the developer to prescript everything they want, insert cool effects all over the place and do cool camera moves, gameplay allows none of that. PC games also look quite worse then those 3DMark benchmarsk or the NVidia techdemos, yet they are all rendered on the same hardware. Same with a RE4 cutscene vs RE4 gameplay, the first one looks far more interesting and has little todo with the actual gameplay, yet its all the same hardware again.
So do I expect first generation PS3 games to look as good as those techdemos? Hell no, but its not unlikly that the PS3 will be able to render such stuff in the not to far future as a cutscene. Real gameplay will be of course a completly different thing, unless we get AI that is clever enough to act as 'game master' and insert interesting events in realtime instead of prescripted stuff, gameplay will look nowhere near as good as a random cutscene.
The only thing that you can 'destroy', ie. delete, on a Revolution is the Flash Memory with all the Savegames on it and if Nintendo takes a little care it might be possible to simply lock that away from the running game and only allow to write to its own savegames and not play around with other games savegames. After all I can't destroy a Linux system either if I am only running a user process.
On the other side there might of course always be bufferoverflows and other hacks that lets you escape the sandbox, so there is still some risk left.
Is there enough community left to do that? After all there is already Debian (and its forks) and Gentoo and while neither of them is perfect, they work rather well. I fail to see how Fedora provides anything different enough that isn't already provided by one of the other community driven distros.
Try Peter Molyneux's Magic Carpet, it had a SIRDS mode already back then in 1994. However the lack of texture and color made it rather hard to play with.
There also seems to be a Quake2 Mod that implements a SIRDS mode.
### While I still don't see why this 3rd party stuff can't get into debian non-free
Because the point of third-party releases is to be independed of Debians release cycles, releasing a piece of software and having to wait three years till it makes it into stable is rather useless.
### dpkg --install foo.deb
That brings you back to square one, welcome back in dependency hell. As said, apt-get and third party don't mix to well, manually tweaking around with dpkg doesn't make it any better.
The problem is that most games today are both, to long to be really 'pickup and have fun' and at the same time they are also to simple to offer any kind of depth in the length. They are suck somewhere in the middle, which gives you neither.
I don't mind if a game is only 10 hours long (Ico, Beyond Good&Evil), as long as it fun and provides something exciting, neither do I mind games that I can play for 100s of hours (EF2000, OperationFlashpoint). Games however where I have seen everything after 10 hours, but which force me to play 30 hours to finish them are quite annoying (FF:Tactics).
### You can set apt to look anywhere you want for packages so you don't have to stick with "official debian".
Sure, you can edit your sources.list for each and every piece of software your install, but that is both annoying and not really problem free, a random third party repo often disapears randomly, changes urls and such and that is a pain to track, so sources.list quite often needs cleanup if you use lots of third party stuff. What I miss is something like 'apt-get install http://foo.com/foo.deb', something that makes the whole sources.list stuff automatic. As nice as apt-get is for official Debian stuff, for third-party stuff its for most part more pain than worth it.
The problem with Linux way of managing software is really that its all central to the distros, autopackage and/or LSB might help, but I have yet to install a first piece of software with those, for the moment compiling from source is often the only way.
140h of "You have to play that long to see the end"-gameplay really sound awefull, they simply would mean for many players that they never ever finish the game and that always leaves a fishy feeling, I for one wouldn't buy such a game. On the other side its of course not wrong to offer a game thats deep enough to be played for hundreds of hours without getting repetitive, that however works best with free-form games, where you arn't locked to tightly by a story.
### But does not the savegame feature take care of this?
The length you have to play between savepoints certainly is an important issue, if the time you can spend in a game is 20min, but the next savepoint is 30min away, you are lost, you will make zero progress no matter how often you try and sooner or later dumb the game (almost happen with MetroidPrime for me). But things like 'Quest logs' are at least equally important, ie. if I don't play a game for a while, a week or a month, I might have totally forgotten what my current goals are, if the game doesn't keep a proper log which allows me to find out what I am suposed todo I will have a very hard time finding back into that game. There are quite a few games (Banjo, multiple Zeldas, EthernalDarkness, FF, etc.) that I havn't finished for exactly that reason, not because they where to hard or anything, but simply because I couldn't find the entrance to the next level or dungeon. Its simply absolutly no fun if you want to go back to a game you havn't played for a while and all you manage to do is wandering around aimlessly for half an hour without accomplishing anything.
### You could play for a half hour and go back later and not be confused and wondering where you were, or lose your progress because you were still an hour away from a save point.
Aehm, the Zelda games have IMHO *exactly* that problem. If you are half way through a dungeon and have to stop playing for some reason, you have to restart the dungeon again since your position is not saved, but only the number of keys you gathered. Its also very easy to get lost if you havn't played for a way, since the map doesn't make it very clear where you have to go and where you already where (ie. some rooms block your way from one entrance, so you have to aproach them from a different one, if you forget that you can run around in circles for hours).
It might still be less then in a FF game, but I basically stopped playing Zelda games for exactly that reason, it simply takes to much time to get into and once your out of the loop, you are basically completly lost, unless you invest even more time to find the track again.
1) That might be right in theory, but from a users point of view everything in windows installs with a double click, worst case scenario is that the user has to unzip a zip file, but even that works with a double click. Linux is far far away from such easy installation and no, apt-get doesn't count, since that doesn't work with third party software, but only with official Debian.
DLL Hell is for most part a developers problem, seldomly a user has to deal with it, Dependency Hell on the other side bites you with almost every piece of software under Linux.
2) Even so the distros are huge, they still often lack quite a few more or less important packages, especially when it comes to new stuff.
3) If you are lucky Alt-Tab works, if you are unlucky it doesn't, while it doesn't work in 100% of the cases in windows either, the chance of success is *far* greater.
4) Good if ATI card works for you, it however doesn't for lots of other people, 3D acceleration is still not something that 'just works' in Linux and probally wont be for a while.
7) There are graphical tools for many things, but most of them simply suck, instead of parsing the config file they just overwrite it with their own version and similar fun. While the Windows registry has a ton of problem, it at least provides a consistent way to store config values and avoids such a mess.
I still choose Linux over Windows any day, but there are quite a few things in Linux that don't really make it all that newbie friendly and Dependency Hell, unescapable fullscreen and such are really something every Linux user will bump into sooner or later and no, switching the distro won't help, since for each problem you solve with a distro change you get dozens of new ones. Linux biggest problem is that there is no perfect distro around, plenty of distros solve plenty of problems very well, but none solves all together.
### I'd like to see a dialogue heavy Zelda with a much more epic story line.
Try 'Links Awakening', not really more dialog heavy then the rest, but by far the best story of any Zelda game. Anyway, what I would much prefer over yet another Zelda or Mario or Metroid would be something completly *new* from Nintendo. Running around with always the same weapons, solving always the same puzzle starts to get extremly boring after a while. After now almost 20 years its really time that they do a bit more fresh stuff, and not just a little bit new gameplay, but complete different world and characters. Pikmin was a good start in that direction, I would prefer more of such fresh ideas from Nintendo. The new Zelda really can get me interested anymore, it simply looks like 'Ocarina of Time' with new graphics, been there done that...
### Humans can't see more than 2^24 colors, so I think we're safe with that.
Humans can easily see more then 24bit can provide, its only that for almost all practical cases 24bit is 'good enough'. If you don't believe it, pick a paint programm, fill a rectangle with some color, add another overlapping rectangle with a color one bit away from the old one and look at the picture, especially when you scroll around its easy to spot the border between those two rectangle.
### 24 bit color is not enough for serious graphics or photographic work, which is why many professionals work in 16 bit per channel. Most digital cameras today capture at 12 bit or higher.
That is however done mainly to avoid artefacts when postprocessing the images, for the final display 24bit colors are perfectly fine for almost all uses.
Slashdot Mirror
### But if you want to install the bleeding edge version of gimp, why don't you just do it the windows way? By downloading it from the web site?
The webpage doesn't provide anything that the user can install easily, just source and links to the official Debian packages.
### Select in the menu bar Applications > System Tools > Synaptic Package Manager. It prompts you for the system admin password. Then you get point-and-click simplicity for installs.
The point is not that its hard to become root, but that its impossible to install software in the user space. GUI or CLI isn't a problem.
### The Debian package manager has provisions for that, but people usually don't bother.
Ok, please enlight me how I can install something in my home directory via apt-get? Sure I can try dpkg-deb and use a hex editor to get rid of the often hard-compiled path in the binary to make it work in my home directory, but thats not really what I call easy to use.
### For example, Adobe could provide a Debian feed for Photoshop.
They should provide a package for Linux, not specifically for Debian. Sadly Linux still hasn't a standard form to disto independendly package something, so the companies use self extracting scripts, tarballs, rpms and other unpleasant stuff. Maybe autopackage or lsb-rpm will help one day, but not anytime soon.
### Shouldn't you be using Synaptic for a fair comparison?
That wouldn't change anything, since the limitations I mentioned are in the underlying way how packages are handled, not in the UI.
### At least that way, you don't have the problem of not finding the package, because it's in the list you are picking from.
The example should show that even Debian doesn't have all software in their repository, not that it is hard to find.
### Along those same lines, when you complain about packages being out of date, again, they are, in the Apple or Windows world, with commercial software, how often do new updates come out?
You missed the point, the issue is that a perfectly stable software is released by its creator, but there is simply no easy way to install it for the normal user, since the distro will take month or years till it has it packaged into a stable distribution. If somebody releases a game for windows they don't have to wait for Microsoft to release a new version of Windows to ship it to the common users, on the Linux side however that the normal way, at least if you don't want to bypass the package system.
### Most of your complaints seem aimed specifically at debian itself.
Nope, all distros have pretty much the same problem. They all expect software to be centrally packaged and distributed.
### However whether OS X, BSD or Linux, you could always enable sudo for the users you trust not to screw up the system
The point is that I don't want to become root AT ALL to install a piece of software, its my home dir, so why can't I dump the software there? It would also be much more secure to being able to test a package first in a isolated account then being forced to install it system wide.
### Do you really want to install a .deb package made by me?
.deb from you. I want a autopackage or a lsb-rpm or something else that will work on any distro. And thats not to much to expect, such a thing should be as normal for a programmer than a tar.gz, however sadly the whole Linux environment makes it rather hard to get a distro independed package done in the first place, so I can understand why people don't bother to provide them.
No, I don't want a
That said there would of course be still the problem with multiple different architectures, but that could be solved by having a standard source+metadata format, that can be easily automatically build.
### You DO realize you just said computer security is stupid, don't you? What do you do for a living, write viruses?
Its a usability problem, not a security one. If I want security, I mount the home dirs with noexec or have a policy that forbits them and run nightly cron checks or whatever. apt-get not support user install doesn't prevent a user at all to run untrusted binaries, actually worse it forces the users to search for binaries or source in potential insecure places instead of using the high quality debian packages.
Come on, how should Apple threaten Linux? If MacOSX would run on all x86 hardware and would be 100% Windows compatible there might be some reason behind this, but for all we now, MacOSX will still require its special hardware and don't offer any build in Windows compatibilty, so things havn't really changed at all from the PPC. Its all just a implementation detail that nobody really cares about.
Biggest thread for Linux always was and always will be itself. To many incompabile distros, no consistency, lack of user friendlyness when it comes to hardware install, configuration, software installation, lack of third party support, etc.
### And it is absolutely easy: an apt-get install xyz installs/updates package xyz
/var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13 Permission denied)
$ apt-get install xyz
E: Could not open lock file
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?
Ok, next try:
$ sudo apt-get install xyz
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package xyz
Both of the aboves gives you a pretty good summary of why Debians way of handling packages isn't really any good in the long run.
First of you can't install a application as a user, now how stupid is that? If *I* want to install a bleeding edge version of Gimp, I neither want to bother the admin with it nor do I want to force it an all the others users, yet Debian requires me todo exactly that.
Secondly Debian packages work great, but only for stuff that is in Debian, which might be a lot, but is *far* from everything and its also often *way* outdated, remember those three year release cycles... Software packaging should be done by those that provide the software in the first place, the distro might run a quality check on it, but thats it. What good is it to release a software today and having to wait three or more years till it finds it way into Debian?
There are of courses dozens of other problems, but those above are probally the main ones. You can of course work around them by compiling yourself, but didn't we invented packaging system to avoid exactly that.
Rox and the Zero Install System provide that. I was quite stunned the first time when I drag&dropped a Rox Applet on my panel and saw a XTerm poping up that automagically run the compile for the Applet.
The real question is when will the bandwidth of a mobilephone be large and cheap enough so that I can just stream the video for recording to my server at home in realtime? Who needs local storage if there is floating enough free storage around on the net? All it needs is a fast enough way to access the net. If mobile phones fail to provide that, maybe free WiFi access points will cover it at least for the more public places. Who knows, will certainly be interesting when you see the first 'my whole life 24/7 on video'-movies coming up.
### Neural networks or whatever might be more 'realistic', but they won't necessarily be better to play against...
ACK, I see the biggest use of neural networks and advanced AI not so much in enemy behaviour, but in interactive story telling. Today most games run on some basic AI combined with a bunch of prescripted events, so basically everything the player is going to see is already set right from the start. What I think will play a important role in the future aren't more clever enemies, but an a form of semi-automatic story-telling, which doesn't mean that the enemies get clever, but that the fight has a whole will get more interesting and more cinematic. Simple example, if you shoot at an airplane in a game it will explode and crash somewhere, its ok, but not that interesting. In contrast to that what happens in a movie? The hero shoots at some airplane and instead of just crashing somewhere its coming towards the hero and crashing right infront of him, causing him to try to escape or it crashes in some building nearby and causing a bunch of nice explosions, probally making the building falling towards the hero. Games so far don't offer such special events or if they do, they are most likly completly prescripted or pure luck. In future games I imagine some short of 'game master'-AI, much the same of what a game master does when playing a pen&paper RPG, will take care of the overall happenings on the battlefield and make sure that the player gets something interesting to fight, instead of just something more clever and realistic. After all we play games to have fun and real battle isn't fun, so improving the enemy AI alone won't help to create better games.
### But the GT1 - GT4 hop is unbelievable.
Its for most part simply a technical improvment, more polys, better textures, etc., from the gameplay point of view they are basically the same, still can't crash my car, still can't drive in multiplayer vs CPU oponents and such. And heck, if I don't use my glasses they even look pretty much the same. There still might be a WOW effect, but that doesn't hold for long, at least for me, since the underlying game is still basically all the same.
There is basically only one point I still care about 'better' graphics and that is framerate. Some of those SNES SFX-Chip, N64 or Playstation games simply have lousy FPS in the 10-20 range, which just sucks quite a bit for action games. So yes, I would love to have a Stunt Racer FX with 60FPS, but thats it, more polys and textures might be nice to, but they wouldn't add any to the gameplay, more fps however do.
When I compare ResidentEvil1 vs ResidentEvil1-Remake for example the Gamecube part looks a whole lot better then the PS1 part, but once you play for a while, they feel pretty much the same. I would even go so far to say that the PS1 part plays better, since the Gamecube part is quite a bit less thrilling and atmospheric. Not sure exactly why, might be the different background sound, the lack of B-movie feeling, the different voice acting or the sometimes badly places cameras. But more polys didn't really make a better game.
The last game that really got me 'WOW' was OperationFlashpoint and not because it was graphically so more shiny then the rest, but because it allowed me to do stuff that no other game had allowed before.
The current generation of PS2 games looks at least as good if not in many cases better then the techdemos they have shown back then. That said, yes, it took them a while to get all the power out of the PS2. This thread has some videos and pictures to compare.
And last not least one should never forget that a techdemo isn't actually gameplay. A techdemo allows the developer to prescript everything they want, insert cool effects all over the place and do cool camera moves, gameplay allows none of that. PC games also look quite worse then those 3DMark benchmarsk or the NVidia techdemos, yet they are all rendered on the same hardware. Same with a RE4 cutscene vs RE4 gameplay, the first one looks far more interesting and has little todo with the actual gameplay, yet its all the same hardware again.
So do I expect first generation PS3 games to look as good as those techdemos? Hell no, but its not unlikly that the PS3 will be able to render such stuff in the not to far future as a cutscene. Real gameplay will be of course a completly different thing, unless we get AI that is clever enough to act as 'game master' and insert interesting events in realtime instead of prescripted stuff, gameplay will look nowhere near as good as a random cutscene.
The only thing that you can 'destroy', ie. delete, on a Revolution is the Flash Memory with all the Savegames on it and if Nintendo takes a little care it might be possible to simply lock that away from the running game and only allow to write to its own savegames and not play around with other games savegames. After all I can't destroy a Linux system either if I am only running a user process.
On the other side there might of course always be bufferoverflows and other hacks that lets you escape the sandbox, so there is still some risk left.
Is there enough community left to do that? After all there is already Debian (and its forks) and Gentoo and while neither of them is perfect, they work rather well. I fail to see how Fedora provides anything different enough that isn't already provided by one of the other community driven distros.
Try Peter Molyneux's Magic Carpet, it had a SIRDS mode already back then in 1994. However the lack of texture and color made it rather hard to play with. There also seems to be a Quake2 Mod that implements a SIRDS mode.
### While I still don't see why this 3rd party stuff can't get into debian non-free
Because the point of third-party releases is to be independed of Debians release cycles, releasing a piece of software and having to wait three years till it makes it into stable is rather useless.
### dpkg --install foo.deb
That brings you back to square one, welcome back in dependency hell. As said, apt-get and third party don't mix to well, manually tweaking around with dpkg doesn't make it any better.
The problem is that most games today are both, to long to be really 'pickup and have fun' and at the same time they are also to simple to offer any kind of depth in the length. They are suck somewhere in the middle, which gives you neither.
I don't mind if a game is only 10 hours long (Ico, Beyond Good&Evil), as long as it fun and provides something exciting, neither do I mind games that I can play for 100s of hours (EF2000, OperationFlashpoint). Games however where I have seen everything after 10 hours, but which force me to play 30 hours to finish them are quite annoying (FF:Tactics).
### You can set apt to look anywhere you want for packages so you don't have to stick with "official debian".
Sure, you can edit your sources.list for each and every piece of software your install, but that is both annoying and not really problem free, a random third party repo often disapears randomly, changes urls and such and that is a pain to track, so sources.list quite often needs cleanup if you use lots of third party stuff. What I miss is something like 'apt-get install http://foo.com/foo.deb', something that makes the whole sources.list stuff automatic. As nice as apt-get is for official Debian stuff, for third-party stuff its for most part more pain than worth it.
The problem with Linux way of managing software is really that its all central to the distros, autopackage and/or LSB might help, but I have yet to install a first piece of software with those, for the moment compiling from source is often the only way.
140h of "You have to play that long to see the end"-gameplay really sound awefull, they simply would mean for many players that they never ever finish the game and that always leaves a fishy feeling, I for one wouldn't buy such a game. On the other side its of course not wrong to offer a game thats deep enough to be played for hundreds of hours without getting repetitive, that however works best with free-form games, where you arn't locked to tightly by a story.
### But does not the savegame feature take care of this?
The length you have to play between savepoints certainly is an important issue, if the time you can spend in a game is 20min, but the next savepoint is 30min away, you are lost, you will make zero progress no matter how often you try and sooner or later dumb the game (almost happen with MetroidPrime for me). But things like 'Quest logs' are at least equally important, ie. if I don't play a game for a while, a week or a month, I might have totally forgotten what my current goals are, if the game doesn't keep a proper log which allows me to find out what I am suposed todo I will have a very hard time finding back into that game. There are quite a few games (Banjo, multiple Zeldas, EthernalDarkness, FF, etc.) that I havn't finished for exactly that reason, not because they where to hard or anything, but simply because I couldn't find the entrance to the next level or dungeon. Its simply absolutly no fun if you want to go back to a game you havn't played for a while and all you manage to do is wandering around aimlessly for half an hour without accomplishing anything.
### You could play for a half hour and go back later and not be confused and wondering where you were, or lose your progress because you were still an hour away from a save point.
Aehm, the Zelda games have IMHO *exactly* that problem. If you are half way through a dungeon and have to stop playing for some reason, you have to restart the dungeon again since your position is not saved, but only the number of keys you gathered. Its also very easy to get lost if you havn't played for a way, since the map doesn't make it very clear where you have to go and where you already where (ie. some rooms block your way from one entrance, so you have to aproach them from a different one, if you forget that you can run around in circles for hours).
It might still be less then in a FF game, but I basically stopped playing Zelda games for exactly that reason, it simply takes to much time to get into and once your out of the loop, you are basically completly lost, unless you invest even more time to find the track again.
1) That might be right in theory, but from a users point of view everything in windows installs with a double click, worst case scenario is that the user has to unzip a zip file, but even that works with a double click. Linux is far far away from such easy installation and no, apt-get doesn't count, since that doesn't work with third party software, but only with official Debian.
DLL Hell is for most part a developers problem, seldomly a user has to deal with it, Dependency Hell on the other side bites you with almost every piece of software under Linux.
2) Even so the distros are huge, they still often lack quite a few more or less important packages, especially when it comes to new stuff.
3) If you are lucky Alt-Tab works, if you are unlucky it doesn't, while it doesn't work in 100% of the cases in windows either, the chance of success is *far* greater.
4) Good if ATI card works for you, it however doesn't for lots of other people, 3D acceleration is still not something that 'just works' in Linux and probally wont be for a while.
7) There are graphical tools for many things, but most of them simply suck, instead of parsing the config file they just overwrite it with their own version and similar fun. While the Windows registry has a ton of problem, it at least provides a consistent way to store config values and avoids such a mess.
I still choose Linux over Windows any day, but there are quite a few things in Linux that don't really make it all that newbie friendly and Dependency Hell, unescapable fullscreen and such are really something every Linux user will bump into sooner or later and no, switching the distro won't help, since for each problem you solve with a distro change you get dozens of new ones. Linux biggest problem is that there is no perfect distro around, plenty of distros solve plenty of problems very well, but none solves all together.
### I'd like to see a dialogue heavy Zelda with a much more epic story line.
Try 'Links Awakening', not really more dialog heavy then the rest, but by far the best story of any Zelda game. Anyway, what I would much prefer over yet another Zelda or Mario or Metroid would be something completly *new* from Nintendo. Running around with always the same weapons, solving always the same puzzle starts to get extremly boring after a while. After now almost 20 years its really time that they do a bit more fresh stuff, and not just a little bit new gameplay, but complete different world and characters. Pikmin was a good start in that direction, I would prefer more of such fresh ideas from Nintendo. The new Zelda really can get me interested anymore, it simply looks like 'Ocarina of Time' with new graphics, been there done that...
### Humans can't see more than 2^24 colors, so I think we're safe with that.
Humans can easily see more then 24bit can provide, its only that for almost all practical cases 24bit is 'good enough'. If you don't believe it, pick a paint programm, fill a rectangle with some color, add another overlapping rectangle with a color one bit away from the old one and look at the picture, especially when you scroll around its easy to spot the border between those two rectangle.
### 24 bit color is not enough for serious graphics or photographic work, which is why many professionals work in 16 bit per channel. Most digital cameras today capture at 12 bit or higher.
That is however done mainly to avoid artefacts when postprocessing the images, for the final display 24bit colors are perfectly fine for almost all uses.