Nobody is “throwing money” at them, though.
That’s exactly the state of the industry I’m referring to. Indies are effectively brute forcing creativity with a firehose of smaller games, either self-funded or supported by a few indie publishers, but nobody is funding larger efforts along those lines with higher budgets. Unless your name is Kojima, I suppose.
Aren’t most of those examples from like… the mid 2000s? We’re like two CEOs and a remarkable amount of arthritis away from like 90% of that.
I like the loot boxes piece because everybody throws it at EA, but when you point out that Valve re-released CounterStrike two years ago and they very explicitly kept the loot boxes in all you get is crickets. Not that I think loot boxes are a deal breaker, myself, but hey, you’d expect some consistency.
I do not believe they’ve been in trouble for violating labour laws, either, but I’m not their lawyer. I know they got a pretty bad reputation like in the 90s or early 00s about a specific studio, but my understanding is they’re actually pretty good about that these days. If you’ve heard otherwise I’m happy to be given new evidence.
In any case, I don’t need them to be spotless. Big corpos are gonna big corpo, they’re all the same. But much as I do agree that they’ve done shitty stuff (I disagree particularly strongly with their stances on piracy and IP and how they enact those as part of larger orgs) I also have no issues acknowledging when they do cool stuff, like their recent release of C&C code as open source, whatever it is they’re doing with Faris or that time they got banned from selling in Russia and other places for adding explicit trans support to The Sims. Again, corpos gonna corpo. Best you can do is pat them in the back to incentivize the less crappy stuff.
No, I think 90% of the ones that do have a dedicated GPU have a Nvidia one. That’s not an opinion, it’s data that’s widely available.
It’s also, incidentally, just an example of one of the more egregious issues with the current state of Linux. It doesn’t mean it’s the only one.
In any case, that’s not typically the space being discussed here. The advice generally is “get an AMD GPU”, not “we are assuming you’re on integrated graphics”.
You’ve been rocking it for what? Does it support the DLSS feature set now along with HDR and VRR? I mean, it sure did show me a desktop for the few days I spent trying to get a clean, working install of the proprietary driver, but I wasn’t under the impression that I’d have feature parity without doing that.
“Unless you have a computer in the 90% of users” is a hell of a dismissal.
In fairness, thin-and-light media and web use laptops are a different story, but for desktop use? That’s a big stretch.
Oh, man, I had entirely blocked the concept of “soft-modems” from my memory. I’m having flashbacks.
I think we all need to start differentiating the usability quirks and general jank that all OS have in different areas from the blockers.
Yes, the way Windows handles sources and prioritization sucks, while different Linux DEs have dumb problems with UI scaling or their own audio quirks or MacOS has weird multimonitor support or whathaveyou. If that was it I’d be all for prioritizing the free alternative, no questions asked.
The issue is the blocking issues. Entire features not working, or working at noticeably sub-par performance. Hardware with straight-up nonexistent support you need to replace to make the jump, or that is so finicky to set up that it may as well not work for all the average user is concerned. Those are showstoppers.
The problem is you could have a LOT fewer of the quirks, but a single dealbreaker is enough to block somebody making the jump, or reporting that they tried and failed. I’m as annoyed with how inconsistently videoconferencing picks up the right audio output as anybody. I complain about it every time I have a work call. But I still wouldn’t suggest to any of my friends to try to set up their high end Nvidia GPU on Linux as a main gaming daily driver. Those two things are on completely different tiers.
It’s not being used as an indicator of user friendliness (that’d be the atrocious time I had setting up my Nvidia GPU and HDR monitors). It’s specifically an anecdote replying to the previous guy’s (accurate) comment regarding how finicky old implementations of audio on Linux used to be.
But also, in case you’re wondering, that setup worked first time on Windows with no additional work beyond the drivers installed by Asus itself. Do I like, or even tolerate, ASUS’s weird driver manager? Nope, frickin’ hate it, would switch to Linux to avoid it all things being equal. But one thing worked first time, the other needed five different distros before one randomly got it right for no discernible reason.
Having recently spent the equivalent to five work days trying to get an Nvidia setup working on Linux I’m going to say the experience isn’t necessarily much better, depending on what you are trying to do and how.
Yep. And even recognizing that 4080 owners aren’t “mainstream”, either, the experience is pretty much the same on any affordable gaming laptop with a dual GPU setup or most mid-range desktop PCs.
I’d say that the rise of AMD APUs is interesting in terms of brute forcing Linux’s limitations by making Linux-friendly hardware more popular, but it’s a long way to go to GPU parity and it’s not like Linux is trivial to get running on those, either. Bazzite and SteamOS help for some applications, but I think people downplay how weird they can be to use as desktop daily drivers just by virtue of being immutable distros with some very specific gaming-focused quirks.
Yeah, I don’t disagree with any of that. But as you say, it’s not why there is a whole rah-rah fanboy community for an operating system, of all things.
If you DO want to promote a less corporate-driven computing landscape, then there’s reason for some frustration, I think. I am not the naysayer in all these threads because I “support Windows” or whatever. I would love to have a Linux offshoot that neatly replaces Windows with a similar set of design sensibilities instead of hanging out with a group of delusional nerds pretending that the current way of developing Linux is bringing it to the masses anytime soon.
For desktop computing? Absolutely not. For phones, tablets and maaaaybe thin and light laptops. Maybe.
Yes, I am aware. Not what we’re discussing here, though.
But there was this brief moment, though. Maybe that’s my problem, that I remember it as this momentous piece of Linux history to start getting these cool distros in nice, shiny professional-looking CDs with proper installers that would set up your DE first time every time and get everything mostly there… and it turns out that it was like three years and a couple of Ubuntu iterations.
FWIW, networking mostly works, but I had a heck of a time finding a distro that would properly do 5.1 out of my integrated ASUS audio device last time I went distro hopping. I think audio got better, worse and then better again since the good old days.
But wait, I thought the meme was about normies that tried Linux once a long time ago and never bothered with it again. Which is it?
“Specific use cases” here seems to be “has a Nvidia GPU”, which seems to be specifically 90% of the PC market. Should a normie gamer with no tech skills who is not a power user try to migrate their mid-range PC with a 3060 to Linux? 3D modellers? Video editors? Twitch streamers?
This conversation always goes like this. Turns out that when you start scratching off all the exceptions then yes, Linux is ready to work first time out of the box. If you’re trying to salvage a specifically supported ten year old laptop with no dedicated GPU to do mostly web stuff and coding.
Right. People forget that The Orange Box was an EA game, too. I believe EA people even coded parts of the console ports directly or something, I’d have to look it up.
And yeah, that tracks. EA may exist only to provide a charisma black hole to cosmically balance out Steam’s ability to get players to go along with complete garbage sometimes.
Man, people really overstate the barrier to entry to the terminal. Windows troubleshooting is full of command line stuff as well.
It’s not the terminal, it’s the underlying issues. Having more GUI options to set certain things is nice, but the reality of it is that if an option isn’t customizable to the point of needing quick GUI access it should just never break, not be configurable or at least not need any manual configuration at any point. The reason nobody goes “oh, but Windows command line is so annoying” is that if you are digging in there something has gone very wrong or you’re trying to do something Windows doesn’t want you to do.
The big difference is that the OS not wanting you to do things you can do is a bug for people in this type of online community while for normies it’s a feature.
This is my old man nerd point every time (and by the way, we all keep having the exact same conversation here, which is infuriating).
It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
Not Linux’s fault, necessarily, but hardware got… weird since the days of the mid 00s when Linux WAS pretty much a drop-in replacement. What it couldn’t do then is run Windows software very well at all, and that was the blocker. If we had Proton and as many web-based apps as we do now in 2004 I’d have been on Linux full time.
These days it’s a much harder thing to achieve despite a lot more work having gone into it (to your point on moving goalposts).
His studio isn’t owned by EA. Hazelight is an indie studio working with EA as a publisher through their EA Originals label.
Turns out EA has been publishing indie games for ages, which is one of those kinda neat things they do that nobody ever gives them credit for.
I guess we’re doing this again.
BG3 is the triplest of triple-A. It’s a four studio game with a budget in the hundreds of millions, a major IP license and half a decade of development. If we’re going to use the term we’re going to have to agree on what it means.
Also, everybody is bleeding money right now. It’s not a creative issue. The financial situation has changed. If anything, the AAA guys are still raking it in. Fortnite and Call of Duty are making tons of money. It’s the middle of the pack that is suffering most.