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cmdr_flashheart: I am sorry, but how are you making this claim? For example, here's a post about users varying experiences making HB games work on Arch Linux. Also note that players are troubleshooting themselves, i.e. HB is NOT giving them support, whereas GOG ensures support for every product they sell.

Link: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=169648
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Porkepix: For the game I used, I never noticed any issues. Btw, Humble Bundle is supposed to provide some support. But I never had to ask them for any, so I don't know what's happening if you ask for it.
However, you've to know that Archlinux community is from guys that like to go deeply into things and have a distro which is always very up to date. That can cause some issues because it's a lot more up to date than other distros.
But they choose it for this reason among others :)
That's understandable, but I think that thread does highlight, in a tangible sense, the problems with gaming on Linux even with games supposedly released for Linux versions. There are many similar threads, like the one I posted, on different forums, concerning a variety of Linux flavours; some examples:

1: http://forums.runicgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=35597
2: http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/9254/
3: http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/forum/index.php?topic=1873.0

All threads concern HB games and some linux version.

But all said and done, I hope Linux players get support for their games, but they shouldn't expect GOG to do something even HB won't do.
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Porkepix: Have you seriously tried them?
I did, and while I had the feeling it was functional OK, I was neither impressed nor did I had the feeling it was so similar to MS office that it could be called a "drop-in" alternative. I was especially annoyed how slow & crashy Impress was.

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Porkepix: Never heard about dependency AND conflict checking with repositories? I did. And it does it very well by giving you warning if something is going to break if you force the update of this or this component.
You have heard of: Arch linux is notorious for broken systems because of dependencies. Also debian unstable - (which you will need if you want actual app versions)

Also, what should a casual user do with such a strange warning? "I know you want this software, but potentially it will break your system. Install: YES or NO?" This is a stupid situation a user should never be confronted with. Windows prevents that by a clear separation of system and apps. (And even if a lib is missing it will not break the system)

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Porkepix: You want multi-desk? Install a (paid) 3rd party software.
You want a real terminal? Install cygwin, but it still an ugly patch/fix.
A better FS? Ops, you can not, It's only NTFS or FAT32 (even worse) on older Windows., only HFS+ for MacOS. extX, ZFS, ReiserFS, BTRFS and so on? Meh, useless.
Unicode and UTF-8? Meh, useless, deal with your old ISO-8859-1
Normal users don't care for these developer gadgets the linux distros have included in abundance. They want Photoshop and Battlefield 4, not support for 1024 cores, the selection from a bazillion arcane editors, file systems or window managers.

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Porkepix: But…everything is fine…
The stagnating "[url=http://de.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1u5vgf/steam_survey_linux_at_111_172_008_variance_with/]% " user adoption rate and the rejection of GOG to support this ecosystem suggests differently.

I can throw in here additionally LegendOfGrimrock where Linux also faces limited to no support, while it is obviously required.

Most impressive for me: the eternal struggle of Valve with the multitude of DEs, Window managers, driver variants, 32bit vs 64bit libs, changing X, sound libs, etc ... impressive that they have not given up! :)
Post edited January 06, 2014 by shaddim
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Porkepix: Have you seriously tried them?
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shaddim: I did, and while I had the feeling it was functional OK, I was neither impressed nor did I had the feeling it was so similar to MS office that it could be called a "drop-in" alternative. I was especially annoyed how slow & crashy Impress was.
Didn't crashed for me since years. Either on Windows, Mac OS nor Linux. My sister use it : at secondary school that's what they teach them, and she never had issues too. From every peoples I know using it, no one complain. But as usual, you have the universal knowledge, don't you?

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Porkepix: Never heard about dependency AND conflict checking with repositories? I did. And it does it very well by giving you warning if something is going to break if you force the update of this or this component.
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shaddim: You have heard of: Arch linux is notorious for broken systems because of dependencies. Also debian unstable - (which you will need if you want actual app versions)
Sure I have. But are you aware that asking to any lambda user to use Archlinux or UNSTABLE Debian is just crazy? If there is "unstable" in the name, that's not for nothing. Do you put Windows lambda users on alpha version when a new Windows is coming? That's the same (unstable pretty much same as alpha and testing as beta version…)
Archlinux is a particular distro where user build the system itself. It's done for it. I did not mentioned this one for lambda users because I will never advice to a beginner to use it.

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shaddim: Also, what should a casual user do with such a strange warning? "I know you want this software, but potentially it will break your system. Install: YES or NO?" This is a stupid situation a user should never be confronted with. Windows prevents that by a clear separation of system and apps. (And even if a lib is missing it will not break the system)
In spite of what you're thinking, you can easily cause troubles to Windows. For sure there are less BSODs than before…but it have not disappear (and yes, you can do some kernel panics on Linux, even if it's not that easy ;) ), and I don't talk about all the craps you can install on the system (yeah, every malware/virus/trojans/ and os on you can find on each basic users computer). These craps exists on Linux too, you're right (because I know you'll tell it ;) ), but…how many?

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Porkepix: You want multi-desk? Install a (paid) 3rd party software.
You want a real terminal? Install cygwin, but it still an ugly patch/fix.
A better FS? Ops, you can not, It's only NTFS or FAT32 (even worse) on older Windows., only HFS+ for MacOS. extX, ZFS, ReiserFS, BTRFS and so on? Meh, useless.
Unicode and UTF-8? Meh, useless, deal with your old ISO-8859-1
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shaddim: Normal users don't care for these developer gadgets the linux distros have included in abundance. They want Photoshop and Battlefield 4, not support for 1024 cores, the selection from a bazillion arcane editors, file systems or window managers.
You get my point for FS and terminal : a basic user don't care about this. However, multi-desk is just very powerful for a lots of peoples. Even my sister in High School use them. And Unicode should not be something about peoples should have to care. Why? Because it just should be here. And I don't even understand you can't agree with this : if you were from USA, Great Britain or any other country speaking natively english I would understand it's not a problem : 7-bits ASCII is enough for them. But you are from germany. You use letters like ü, ß (I know it's now replaces by ss most of the time, but you had to use it before) and every umlaut letters. So you can get the same problem we have with our accent on letters which cause sometimes problems.
And think to peoples from Asian countries, Arabic countries, Russia and so on…
Unicode should not be something to worry about…it must be everywhere.

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Porkepix: But…everything is fine…
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shaddim: The stagnating "[url=http://de.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1u5vgf/steam_survey_linux_at_111_172_008_variance_with/]% " user adoption rate and the rejection of GOG to support this ecosystem suggests differently.
And again and again…would make me laugh if it was not so much sad to be that much blind.
But that's enough…I already gave you lots of reasons for this low market share, you reject all of them with always the same things…

And you know what? Even if you was right (which obviously is not the case), I don't care at all that to be only 2% of market share. And even if we were less than 0.1% I would still happy to have a functional, secure, light, performant, free(as much as in freedom or free beer ;) ) system. And most important : which don't try to give me the obligation to use it, because you're always free to choose to use it or not.
And 2% of the very huge quantity of computers in the world still a lot of users which are potential clients. and these potential clients pay often more, as you can see on every Humble Bundle sale.
But you will again tell that it's false, it's biased of I do not know what else?
Let's drop this nonsense about 2%. This was discussed at length above. It has nothing to do with either real adoption rate, or amount of potential GOG Linux users. If anyone didn't follow the discussion - please read it above.
Post edited January 06, 2014 by shmerl
Maybe there should be a GOG survey about GOG Linux players; I don't think it's wise to include "projected gamers" in such a survey, but only current, active customers. Just a thought.

edit: projected, not potential.
Post edited January 06, 2014 by cmdr_flashheart
They've done a survey every year, pretty much. In fact, a new survey is overdue, I think, unless I missed the last one. They can always just add the questions to their annual survey if they're so inclined.
Post edited January 06, 2014 by JohnnyDollar
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Future_Suture: The subject of not enough resources and wanting to provide a quality service at all times actually came up starting from here. Needless to say, apparently it's not as much effort as GOG likes to make it seem.
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TheEnigmaticT: Making packages and distributing them? Yes, that's trivial. But what your poster in that thread doesn't account for is that we do a lot more than that with classic games. I'm not the guy in charge of testing, mastering, and building games, but let's just look at what *I* can think of that makes Linux release a very difficult proposition:

1: Testing. What distros do we support? There are 10 "fairly common" ones (Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSuse, Fedora, CentOS, ArchLinux, Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD and, um, I've forgotten a couple). Hardware? What level of updates? Only FOSS drivers, or can we take some closed source stuff? Once we've decided on a test bed, we still have to check the games. Do they boot? What about oddball games like, say, Theme Hopsital? There's a version-specific DOSBox-related fix there. Does it in work in any distro? In all of 'em? Managing testing across the 3 OSes we support is tough and requires a lot of time, effort, and money. How much more complex will 10 more OSes make it?
You know which Linux distribution that I think GOG should primarily support?
SteamOS!
Yep! - have you seen the amount of companies ready to launch Steamboxes?

http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/steam-machine-which-steam-box-should-you-buy--1213121

I defiantly think GOG should at least be keeping an eye on this and thinking about whether it wants to try to re-position itself as less of a competitor and more of a ally to Valve in its upcoming war with MS and Sony - PC gaming to conquer the console space in 2014!
\m/
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Fever_Discordia: I defiantly think GOG should at least be keeping an eye on this and thinking about whether it wants to try to re-position itself as less of a competitor and more of a ally to Valve in its upcoming war with MS and Sony - PC gaming to conquer the console space in 2014!
\m/
We're certainly keeping our eye on it, yes. :)
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Fever_Discordia: I defiantly think GOG should at least be keeping an eye on this and thinking about whether it wants to try to re-position itself as less of a competitor and more of a ally to Valve in its upcoming war with MS and Sony - PC gaming to conquer the console space in 2014!
\m/
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TheEnigmaticT: We're certainly keeping our eye on it, yes. :)
An enigmatic eye, that is >.>
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Fever_Discordia: I defiantly think GOG should at least be keeping an eye on this and thinking about whether it wants to try to re-position itself as less of a competitor and more of a ally to Valve in its upcoming war with MS and Sony - PC gaming to conquer the console space in 2014!
\m/
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TheEnigmaticT: We're certainly keeping our eye on it, yes. :)
Good to hear!
Thinking about it, SteamOS would also make most sense to target because its the one aimed at the average consumer, presumably, for the other distributions, if a game QAed for SteamOS doesn't work out-of-the-box on them, in 99% of cases it would only take a bit of tinkering and if you're running a Linux distribution other than SteamOS then you're going to be a tinkerer!
Post edited January 08, 2014 by Fever_Discordia
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Fever_Discordia: I defiantly think GOG should at least be keeping an eye on this and thinking about whether it wants to try to re-position itself as less of a competitor and more of a ally to Valve in its upcoming war with MS and Sony - PC gaming to conquer the console space in 2014!
\m/
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TheEnigmaticT: We're certainly keeping our eye on it, yes. :)
Nice to see you posting :)
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TheEnigmaticT: We're certainly keeping our eye on it, yes. :)
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Kristian: Nice to see you posting :)
Back from a week's vacation. I'm here to blue up all your threads.
Interesting: Linux Sales Are Higher Than Mac For Maia Developer
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Kristian: Nice to see you posting :)
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TheEnigmaticT: Back from a week's vacation. I'm here to blue up all your threads.
well as long as you don't blue yourself in the process
(in case no one gets the joke) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8QrZPZQArk
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Kristian: Nice to see you posting :)
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TheEnigmaticT: Back from a week's vacation. I'm here to blue up all your threads.
Thanks for appearing here. What do you think about using Docker for providing long term support? Then you won't be limited by distro choice and won't support "SteamOS only, or "distro ZZZ only"? I hope you'll develop something that won't require everyone to use Steam runtime.
Post edited January 08, 2014 by shmerl