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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 10th, 2024

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  • I’m doing all of my PC gaming on Linux for years now. Except for VR. It’s unfortunately not running well at all for me. I’m running an Nvidia GPU with a Valve Index and whenever I was able to even get a picture on the HMD in the first place, the latency from movement to screen was about a second or so. Which is an incredibly efficient way to feel incredibly sick.

    I’m not sure about your setup, maybe it’s better supported in some way, but, from my experience, I’d unfortunately recommend keeping a Windows partition for VR and saving yourself the (quite literal) headache.



  • I think we‘re in a very different situation right now. Proton has become so good that it‘s just not necessary for most developers to do anything to get their game running on Linux. When Macs peaked in the hardware survey, the compatibility tools were far less powerful and developers had to actually invest time and resources, if they wanted their game running on Mac.

    I also think that the Steam Deck is absolutely being recognized by many developers. Even big publishers proudly announce their games being playable on it. And having games optimized for Deck often improves them on Linux in general.

    So I really wouldn’t worry about developers not specifically targeting Linux. Even without that, gaming on Linux is in the best spot it has ever been and is steadily improving.


  • Although I’d love to see that happen more frequently, this is simply not realistically doable for most commercial games.

    Almost all of them use licensed third-party libraries which are integrated deeply into the game’s code base, but which can’t legally be distributed as part of an open source project. So in order to be able to open source a modern commercial game, you’d have to put in quite a lot of work finding all of your code integrating with commercial libraries and either replacing or removing it. And if that’s not enough, you’d probably have to have your (expensive) legal team check the entire code base for any infringements just to be on the safe side.

    All that work for no monetary gain just isn’t a very good business case. So, unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect a lot of modern games to be open sourced any time soon.


  • While that‘s true right now, a big patch called „Economy 2.0“ is expected to drop this week (more on that here and here).

    I really hope this will be a successful first step of making the game actually better than its predecessor. Unfortunately the economy simulation is only one of many issues which make me want to play something else after a few minutes of gameplay. I think it‘ll be at least another year until they‘re able to fix all these minor annoyances, which sum up to one very big annoyance. Like not being able to place stuff sometimes without any obvious reason. Or those ugly, steep pathways on lots, when the connecting street isn‘t completely flat. Or missing animations for firemen, which currently only have to drive up to a burning building in order to stop a fire.

    Cities Skylines was a better Sim City (2013) and was justifiably loved for that. For now, Cities Skylines 2 is unfortunately just a worse Cities Skylines.





  • I think it’s important to remember that LiMux, the Linux project in Munich, didn’t really fail because the software didn’t work. The city had commissioned a study that blamed bad implementation, bad internal cooperation, and bad administration. It explicitly did not recommend that the project be shut down. Unfortunately, this recommendation was ignored by the mayor, who was previously responsible for convincing Microsoft to move its German headquarters to Munich and who calls himself a “Microsoft fan”.

    So it’s probably worth noting that the success of such large projects doesn’t only depend on the viability of the software. It’s also very much dependent on the lobbyists the project is up against, especially in the public sector.