Discussion on:

Open source community up in arms over proprietary software for Ubuntu

"if you want Linux to continue to stagnate on the desktop and business levels, go ahead and fight for your distributions right to ONLY use proprietary software."

Did you mean OpenSource instead of proprietary there? Nobody's fighting for ONLY proprietary software. They're fighting for only open source software right?

Game devs are finally looking at Linux.
These open source zealots need to go hide in a cave and never be seen, they could ruin a good thing.

When I tried out Ubuntu back in 2008 it had some proprietary software and stuff you could buy as well as all the free stuff. For many years it's been possible to buy some proprietary software to run on Linux, like Cedega and Crossover, it's just Ubuntu made it available through their main repository control centre. Which made it easier to find and install, and also gives you a better feeling that it'll work properly or they wouldn't have it there.

There have been proprietry packages available in Linux distros for ages.
As long as they are optional and you don't lose expected functionality if you choose not to take up that option, no problem.

I've as much time for these burgers telling me what I can and can''t do with my machine as I have with Mr Shuttleworth doing so.

No having can't from them or must from anyone else. Linux is about options, if there's only one, it's not linux.

Shocking! People would like to be paid for their work. Shocking again! There are enough Linux users that commercial software is looking at us as a revenue stream not a bunch of geeky flakes. This ladies and gentlemen is acceptance at being a main stream player in computers.

Do you know what is next???? PhotoShop for Linux, Quiken for Linux, and... dare I say it... Word for Linux.

Microsoft would take several years of living off it's savings before it would be pushed kicking and screaming to port Word to The Cancer OS (tm). Maybe IE so *nix users can get full functionality from there hosted services like Office 365 but then only if the IE/Windows bundling didn't maintain IE's market share.

Quick is more likely a candidate if enough accounts start asking Intuit for it though Intuit has it's own customer hostile issues. (weee what fun the last version update was) Intuit is more likely to push people to use the hosted service rather than local install version too though so half dozen of one, six the other..

Adobe could make a good go of Photoshop provided they do not repeat there last attempt where they price themselves out of the market then claimed no one would pay for software (no, people just wouldn't pay several hundred dollars when the product did not justify the price when compared to other options.)

Steam is very interesting given the number of "but it won't run my latest game title" complaints and gamers being a driving force in the market. I hope it drives nVidia to at least deliver an equivalent driver (what they give now is good but it's still missing functionality provided by the Windows driver version). The real issue is replacing DirectX though. I truly hope Steam can motivate developers to consolidate on a full-service OpenX stack (OpenGL + audio + inputs). Either way, Steam will be going on to my Debian desktop unless they limit it to a specific child distribution.

nVidia has already pulled their **** together
steamforlinux . com/?q=en/node/127

And many popular engines are being ported or already are, such as Source and Unity

That would be fantastic news if it's happened. Last I read the *nix driver build still lacked functionality present in the win driver build. What I got with the last update is very good but I've not seen another update since (I'm relying on the repository version though).

Personally, I'm fine with it being a closed binary blob provided nVidia can find bugs and deliver updates as fast as would be possible if opened to a community hoard. I just want functionally equality and well documented interfaces so third party devs can actually use the gpu functions to there fullest.

I still dream of the day when I don't have to kill all my running tasks just to reboot for a few hours of gaming in the evening.

So nVidia will probably release them eventually.

I'm waiting for it on the Windows side also. I'd be tickled to find out some of my CTDs and lockups are due to video driver issues. I'm pushing a freaking 560 GPU so I can't say the hardware isn't up to the task (my CPU.. that's another matter given how heavy Skyrim is on it).

For me, crashes that are hardware related are rare, usually the crash is from a bug in the game, usually during a save.

But other issues like, if anything modifies breezehome, then hearthfire causes your game to crash when you try to enter breezehome. Or if you try to save during the mission in that tower where you sent back in time after drinking that potion, the one to fix everyones dream problems. If you save after drinking the potion, your game will crash, but even the end of mission auto save will cause it, so you have to disable all auto saving as well.

My steam page if your interested.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/sinisterslay/screenshots/
I'm currently working through Super Skyrim Bros.

ha.. that's even better than the hundred foot tall My Little Pony you can ride around on

My own game is pretty much built around Better Vampires by Brehanin.. but Wars in Skyrim, Deadly Dragons, Immersive Patrols also fill it out. For me, the game is unplayable without at least those mods inplace (sadly, WIS died dramatically a while back so don't delete your copy if you have it)

is steam for linux out of beta now? I thought the article even mentioned that the beta program was still on with the maximum 1000 "testers" leaving the rest of us to wait for the official release. Hm.. seems I have some reading to do this evening.

The current testing shows few errors in steam, mostly game errors.

hm.. search field shows Skyrim as compatible with Linux though Bronze ranked.

"However, Bronze applications generally have enough bugs that we recommend that our customers use them with caution."

I love the game.. Christmas I'll be coming up on a year and still going strong. But wow is that a bit of an understatement. Two lockups last night in two hours of gaming.. but no CTDs so I guess that's something. Bless Bethesda for doing such a detailed open world.. just wish they'd designed the engine and mod interface to both fail gracefully.

It seems all their games have frequent lockup issues and poorly optimized code. Probably because they mostly just do console ports.

I know in Oblivion eventually people had modded the core of the engine to fix problems, I imagine eventually the same will happen to Skyrim.

Yup, unofficial patches out for Skyrim, Dawngard DLC and Hearthfire DLC but I'm not sure they address anything more than the ESP/EMP database files. Here is hoping TES6 ships with better crash management.

I have been applying them as I find bugs, instead of the whole sale unofficial patch mods. Things like the gourmet fix.

I'd laugh if disabling an unofficial patch fixed the windmill outside whiterun; blades, mast and grinding stone are in the right place across from the meadery, roof and walls are shifted over closer to the city wall and floating about twenty feet up. That's probably related to the landscape patch if it's not a core engine issue though.

I've also learned to be very stingy with mods, avoid things I don't really need and update them one at a time so you can see which one causes issues.

Finally did my first hello-world mod with CK though so that's been a lot of fun the last while. Modified the Predator Vision mod, modified Vampire Lord form a little. Now if I could just figure out how to double or triple the experience per point for werewolf/vampirelord perk trees because you can max both those out in a single day easy at default.

I really should set up a page for my skyrim notes, mod list and personal tweaks. The thing I love about the game and it's plugin system; everybody's game can be a totally different experience.

I got 3 items on my workshop if your interested.

M$ seems to be pushing ahead with Office 365 and you already have Google Doc. While the current iterations isn't that exciting as long as they stick with open standards it will run fine with Firefox or the browser of you choice and the platform of your choice.

Without getting into semantics of what % of the desktop market Linux owns the bottom line is M$ makes the most profit from its Office product and would not turn away a fractional percent of new revenue if they could win on a new platform.

I was thinking local installs versus the hosted application but yeah, Office 365 behaving well with non-IE standards would open it up to other platforms.

Office is indeed on of the biggest cash cows they have but I think Balmer and the old boys club would have to be ousted before they'd get enough young blood to recognize the potential customer base on general purpose Linux based distributions. Right now they have a "cancer os" hostile management and strong motivation to keep Office primarily tied to the rest of the solutions they modern business has become addicted to. (and it is very much an addiction given the "withdrawl" of legacy documents, exchange data and user recognition; speaking as someone who keeps a "can my users switch to this" test rig updated.)

Microsoft is clearly moving toward having more native apps be served by HTML5 in Windows 8, and they're moving to have it be fairly transparent to the end user that this is what is happening. You're in a web-app, just like Chrome - but you're seeing it the same way a native app would appear.

Microsoft realizes that SaaS built on HTML 5 micropurchases is an exponentially bigger revenue source than the "buy once, use until you upgrade" legacy model of their traditional desktop OS - and Windows 8 is an interim hybrid solution designed to deliver *both* experiences in one platform as the transition takes place. It seems like no one else gets that, and you would think that every tech blogger worth his or her salt would have realized this after just spending a short time with Windows 8. Instead, they're all too distracted comparing it to Android and iOS and picking apart how it isn't as good as a tablet OS as those platforms. That isn't the play Microsoft is running here. Windows 8 is competing with ChromeOS (and has a better plan for early adoption - Google would do well to integrate ChromeOS and Android into a single OS that supports mobile apps and native desktop apps to compete with Win 8).

Ubuntu is well placed strategically to be a player in this platform too, if they can get over their traditional ideological reluctance to make proprietary, closed-source pure distros their *default* install on end-user machines.