The game requires windows, just because you’re able to make Linux run it doesn’t mean the game supports it.

Windows doesn’t usually need them as most games are native, and Mac doesn’t do Vulkan (in their immense wisdom Apple decided to invent Metal instead) so it can’t use dxvx. Valve could still have wine there which would work most of the time, but it might be a lot of support for a janky experience at beat.

It is a red flag for them. Just like how before proton lots of us said “No tux, no bucks”, just because it’s not a red flag to you does not negate their opinion of it.

Because Steam only uses proton on Linux AFAIK, and the guy said he’s running Mac, so it it’s not native it’s not available to him.

Sharks are so old that I’ve seen other comparisons, had never seen the milky way one before, that’s very interesting, the other ones I knew is that sharks are older than:

• The rings of Saturn
• Trees

So when sharks first evolved Saturn had no rings and trees didn’t exist yet.

I tried that, unfortunately my last name is also a brand of water. So I had to use @lastname.co which was available, but people kept adding the m and I missed on emails so I had to not do that hahahah

Nope, this one is in the bible (old testament), roughly in the same place where these are also listed as sins:

Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.

Do not practice divination or seek omens.

Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.

And my favorite to point out to them:

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. 34The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.

Also the same book prohibits eating shrimps, and many other things that they will quickly jump to say it doesn’t apply anymore, because most christians do a pick and choose of things in the bible they follow and things they don’t. There’s a game where you and a group of friends follow everything on the bible, the last one jailed wins.

It’s not literal like it would be for Dwarf Fortress, the game just has A LOT of content. Even FO3 or Oblivion have a ridiculous amount of content, where you need hundreds of hours to do all side quests.

I don’t think there’s anything on a personal level that you can give them. I personally have accepted that I won’t convince people to switch so I use WhatsApp. That being said, up until very recently you could use the “hidden in the crowd” excuse, e.g. there’s no way for them to monitor every single thing that goes through them effectively, this has changed with the advance of LLMs.

This might not concern them, but the truth is that nothing you do in WhatsApp is private, the fact that you can read the same messages on two different devices at the same time without having had to input any sort of password is a dead giveaway that the information is stored unencrypted in the servers. This means that every message someone has ever sent on WhatsApp is likely stored on a huge database that can be scrapped by LLMs to find out information on an unprecedented level. Finding every user who has broken the law by for example mentioned using weed or illegally downloading content or finding all of the password for all of the accounts people have sent over Whatsapp is as easy as asking it in English. And the question you gotta ask yourself is “Do you trust Meta not to abuse that power? Do you trust every single employee at Meta with access to this database not to scrape it for personal gains?”.

But realistically that would fall on deaf ears. If you truly are serious about this you should flip the script, e.g. “Signal can do everything that WhatsApp can, AND it’s secure, which is important to me even if not to you. If you decide to use WhatsApp you’re saying that my opinion doesn’t matter, because you have no argument other than inertia. It’s like if a friend of yours developed an allergy to shrimps and you decide to still keep meeting in a Bubba Shrimp restaurant weekly because that’s what you’ve been doing.”

The thing you got to understand is that the energy of the crash has to go somewhere. The same energy will apply to both cars, the modern car will absorb a lot of it by deforming, the old car won’t absorb any in that way because it’s a hard piece of metal. And you have to wonder, what is more important to you, the car chassis or the people inside? You might as well ask “why do we put packing peanuts if nails are a lot tougher” or “why do we ship eggs in weird cardboard boxes if a metal square would be more resilient”

One of my favorites are the chains between Spanish and Portuguese:

• Garbage in Spanish is Basura
• But Vassoura in Portuguese means broom
• But in Spanish broom is said Escova
• Which in Portuguese means brush

Or

• Tea cup in Spanish is Taza
• A Taça in Portuguese is a wine cup
• But in Spanish wine cup is a Copa
• And in Portuguese a Copo is a regular glass
• But in Spanish regular glasses are called Vaso
• Which in Portuguese means vase.

Or

• Cutlery in Portuguese is Talher
• But Taller in Spanish is a workshop
• Which in Portuguese is Oficina
• Which in Spanish means office
• But in Portuguese you say Escritorio
• Which in Spanish means desk

Or a short one:

• Your last name in Portuguese is your Sobrenome
• But in Spanish Sobrenombre is your nickname
• While in Portuguese nickname is Apelido
• But in Spanish Apellido means last name

Another one I like is Vamos a chatear 1 rato which in Spanish means “let’s chat for a little while” but in Portuguese means “let’s bother a mouse”.

Sure, but “camera” doesn’t really mean room, it means chamber, which is a small enclosed space, and if you grab a box it is a camera by definition (just a very small one). And if you close every place where light can get into a small chamber you get a “camera obscura” which just means a dark chamber. And if you poke a hole on a camera obscura you will see an image of the outside being projected on the opposite wall. This was a very common trick in pre-industrialization, and became known as Camera Obscura, from then someone had the idea to put photosensitive material, also known as photographic, on the opposite wall and created the first photographic chamber, or “photographic camera”, which eventually was abbreviated to camera.

So yeah, they mean different things, but not really.

I get your point, but here’s the thing, GoG has never given a cent to Lutris, Wine or Heroic, I know about those and the many others that came before such as PlayOnLinux. But those are not useful thanks to GoG, they’re useful despite it. If I have to use an open source tool to “emulate” a game, and another one to organize and manage my library, I’ll give those guys money and pirate the games and get the same experience a lot cheaper. Because, like Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem.

you can always play without updating if you want to

Can you? I never saw a straightforward way to do this.

I seem to remember a pop-up asking you whether you want to play without updating. Also I remember being able to stop a specific game from being updated by selecting the version to use in the settings, of course not all games use this, but the ones that accept mods usually do. I remember I had my CK2 pinned for a while because of mods.

I don’t think they do anything unethical but I don’t like having this private company’s always online closed source software running in the background on my computer.

I get that, but I only open Steam when I’m going to play something, so it’s not always online running in the background, and the vast majority of games I play are closed source so that’s a moot point

Second contact is the 2017 remake of the game I mentioned, GoG was not involved in that.

I know this might go against the flow here, but realistically if they’re using the tools in the way they say they are (which you should 100% check with your doctor to let him know about possible hallucinations) it’s not that bad. Speech-to-text is not prone to hallucinate, it can fail and detect wrong things but shouldn’t outright hallucinate. After that, LLMs are good at summarizing things, yes they are prone to hallucinations which is why having the doctor review the notes immediately after the session is important (and they said they do), so I don’t see this as such a big issue from the usability point of view.

You might still have issues from a privacy point of view and that’s a much more complex discussion with them about what kind of contract they have with the LLM company to ensure no HIPAA violations (as from the LLM point of view it’s just making a summary of a text it might store it, and then the whole stack is suable). They need to understand that just because they haven’t kept a copy around doesn’t mean the other party hasn’t, and because they shared it out without your agreement (you’re only agreeing to AI note taking which can be done locally so them sharing information with third parties is entirely up to them) they would be liable. I’m not a lawyer, so you might want to double check that, but I would be very surprised if that’s not the way it works, otherwise Drs could get away with a bunch of HIPAA violations by having you sign something that says they use a computer to store data and then storing things in shared Google drive.

What? How is a game from 2024 old? Also how is GoG involved in that at all?

Edit: I’ve been reading on the story of that game, and I think I know what you meant.

While Outcast: a new beginning is a new game, you probably meant the OG outcast game, which is from 1999. There was a 4 year window where the original game was only available on GoG because they patched a community mod into it. But in 2014 1.1 version was released for Steam with some more improvements, and in 2017 the game was remade. GoG doesn’t seem to have been involved in either of those, only on the original 2010 re-release including the community mod as a built-in.

Edit: It’s amazing, GoG PR is so good that they get credit for removing DRMs from games they didn’t (and are DRM free elsewhere), being anti-DRM (while allowing DRM content and even producing some by some standards), and now they take credit for remakes and rebuilds they were not even involved in. I like GoG, but people give them way too much credit and it gets annoying.

The interests of Linux users and Valve merely coincide.

I’m not naive, I don’t think that Valve is doing anything out of the goodness of their heart. But they’re investing on something I care about, so me giving them money is an indirect way to invest in that.

As for me, with a 99% single player games library, the most important thing is no mandatory launcher and no updates. Click, boom, I’m in the game.
So using GOG when possible.

Mostly agree (except I don’t mind updates, you can always play without updating if you want to), and the fact that that’s my experience with Steam is a big part of why I buy from them. I can go from not owning a game to play it with just a few controller buttons, whereas with GoG I would have to:

• Plug a mouse and keyboard to my gaming rig
• Install a browser on that machine
• Navigate to the website and download the installer
• Figure out a good wine version to use and create a new profile for the game
• Install any needed wine tricks to that profile
• Manually create a shortcut for that game using that wine profile
• Add the shortcut to some third party UI to be able to navigate to it with a controller

So yeah, the whole “click, I’m in the game” only works on Windows, which is why I said I can understand Windows users preferring GoG.

It’s not just that, but I thought that replying to every single point would be too verbose. But you might be interested:

On the spesific spects computers they use.

On a big studio Dev’s hardware can be as varied as on the real world, and while yes they’re usually beefy PCs, they’re not at all uniform.

They need things like support for different resolution.

Which for the most part is just natively done by changing the render size of the canvas. Only some games, and almost never ports, take resolution into consideration for other things like menu layout and even then it’s usually just 2 or 3 different configurations.

Work arounds for the controller only features.

Usually the answer to this is “fuck it”, the only things a controller can do that KB+m can’t is rumble, and pressure sensitivity. Pressure sensitivity you get away by mapping two different keys, and rumble you get away with adding audiovisual queues (which you should already have because the rumble might be broken in the person’s controller). Also, controllers work on PC.

If you want to make things like mouse control feel good, it needs lot of fiddling.

Yes, but actually no. This is a solved problem for the most part, there might be some small tweaking needed but a mouse is very intuitive and usually just adding a couple of sensitivity sliders makes it so every person can control their experience at will.

Optimizing for million different hardware possibilities,

If only we had developed standards for hardware like OpenGL/Vulkan, and the OS abstracted most of the other things away for you.

error handling,

Do you think errors don’t happen on console? Error handling is error handling.

launching

Does the game not launch on consoles? Do you think every game needs a separate launcher on PC?

settings

Most of those are already there, the extra ones added are just about graphic control for performance reasons, so it’s usually just using downscaled versions of things or disabling features. And I guarantee you that most of that was in the game already because otherwise it wouldn’t run on Bob’s machine, they just needed to make a pretty UI for it.

key bindings

This is accurate, there might be a considerate amount of effort needed here depending on how lazy devs were. Most people know not to use input directly and abstract it through a layer of actions, but sometimes things slip through.

and propably million other things i cant think right now.

There are other things to consider, things like network stack and input handling are very specific for console development, and if you’re not abstracting them through your own APIs you’re going to have a bad time porting the game. But there are reasons to do this even if you will only ever use one API, so most games should already do that. Also, this is an engine level fix, once you do this for one game, every game using that engine gets that fix.

But hey, what do I know? I only work in the low level network stack for games.

Yes, but making a port of a game to a console involves using the console’s APIs for things. Things like input, network, graphics and others can’t use generic libraries in consoles like you can on PC. If you’re making a game on a modern game engine a lot of that is abstracted away for you, but if you’re working on a game engine or a game written from scratch you need to take these things into consideration.

I’m not saying it’s just flipping a switch, but it’s also not the monster that people make it out to be. Porting a game to a console is usually a lot harder, but the vast majority of things should work on a PC already as they were probably developed and tested on a PC.