Windows

Linux Continues To Make Big Headlines

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I know I’ve been talking about Linux lately, with the latest install, Steam’s Proton,, Vulkan among other things, but I’m not alone. Even someone at Forbes has been getting on the bandwagon. This is the second article I’ve seen there, and this time he interviewed the owner of Gaming On Linux, another website that I read quite frequently. They discuss the myths, pros and cons of using Linux vs Windows and its a really interesting read.

So how many games are actually available to play on Linux today? “That’s a little tricky, considering the amount of different stores that actually sell Linux games like Steam, GOG, itch.io, Humble Store and so on,” Dawe says. “Take Steam as an example, specifically looking at just games for Linux it shows me right now there’s 4,800 whereas Windows has 23,882. So on Steam specifically, we have about 20% of the library, which is incredible when a few years ago that was a big fat zero.”

In the last five years I too have seen a multitude of changes. I still remember when I made it into the Steam Linux Beta (I still wear my official TF2 Linux shirts with pride), I remember when there were only a few GoldSource games in my library and not much else, there was no way to really record your gameplay… but it was a starting point. As things progressed we soon found more and more games being ported, game recording programs such as SimpleScreenRecorder came onto the scene and eventually OBS started developing for more than just Windows; known back then as OBS Multi-platform before being known as OBS Studio as it is today, and now we have programs like PlayOnLinux and Lutris for us to play and use our non steam games. Wine has made great improvements over the years, we have DXVK now for running DirectX 11 and 12 via Vulkan, proper audio and video software to showcase our games just as we can under Windows. It isn’t perfect, and they even say that in the article, but Windows wasn’t always the godly OS for gaming. There was once a time when Direct X sucked, and eventually when it did improve they ignored PC users for several years in favor of their precious XBox.

The unofficial Steam Play Compatibility website has been tracking the testing of every Windows game now playable on Steam for Linux. To date, more than 3200 titles have been tested. Of those, nearly 1300 have received “Platinum” status, meaning they not only launch with the simple click of the “Install” button on Steam, but they also have Windows-level performance and framerates.

If you go with a distro like Mint, Ubuntu or a few others they make it really painless for you to get set up compared to how it used to be. This isn’t the case for everything under Linux, after all I did have to research what PPA to download my graphics drivers from, fortunately that information has become easier to find.

I’m seriously considering doing some video tutorials for people who might be interested in playing games on Linux, and Linux videos in general on top of the other videos I crank out. More people need to know that an alternative to Windows might be waiting for them, or at the very least to try dualbooting between Windows and your Linux distro of choice to see how you’ll fare under it. As I’ve stated quite a few times I’ve been staying more in Linux lately, in fact I only went into Windows once this week to do some Photoshop and play a couple games that don’t quite run well under Linux. Am I ready to ditch Windows 10? Not even close, but with the way things are going we may get there someday, or at least scare Microsoft enough to pull their heads out of their asses and make another Operating System that’s on par with WinXP or 7. :trollface:

How many licks does it take to get to the center of UWP?

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Five, apparently there are five layers that protect a UWP (Universal Windows Platform) application from being tampered with, or that would be the case if it wasn’t finally hacked by a group calling themselves CODEX. In this case they cracked Zoo Tycoon Ultimate Animal Collection, with some interesting instructions and insight.

CODEX says it’s important that the game isn’t allowed to communicate with the Internet so the group advises users to block the game’s executable in their firewall.

While that’s not a particularly unusual instruction, CODEX did reveal that various layers of protection had to be bypassed to make the game work. They’re listed by the group as MSStore, UWP, EAppX, XBLive, and Arxan, the latter being an anti-tamper system

I remember when UWP was first launched… There were hardcore fanboys proclaiming that the days of the exe were numbered. Then the drawbacks were noted, like not being able to mod, run a framerate counter, etc Even if you don’t own all of your games on Steam you could still purchase them from other places and run them via Steam if you wanted to take screenshots or use your Steam Controller. UWP was only designed for the diehard Microsoft user, and it pretty much stayed that way.

Seeing how there are five layers running its no wonder you couldn’t inject overlays or anything into their programs. Their DRM is a fucking onion. I can understand companies wanting to protect their products from theft or tampering, but things like UWP consoltize gaming even moreso. If someone wants to use a frame counter, or their favorite video capture program, or run their favorite controller with a particular program they purchased they should have the right to do so (this excludes cheating of course :trollface: ). This overboard DRM does more harm than good for consumers IMO, and while I won’t pirate the game they mentioned I do hope to hear more about the UWP platform crumbling like bleu cheese. :zorak:

What I’ve been busy with

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Over the last couple of days I’ve been trying to setup OBS Studio on my laptop. What’s really strange is that even if I maintain my gameplay above 60 FPS my output is below 30 even when specified at 60. I thought something was up with the NVidia codec, so I upgraded to the latest driver.

That was my first mistake…

After that I ran OBS Studio and the graphics card wanted to eject itself, then if I did anything else that would utilize my GPU the system would lock up solid. So I tried going back to the version before it, no dice. Then a couple restarts later Windows decided to put in it’s own driver and prompted me to do another restart. I restarted and got stuck in an infinite load cycle. After running System Restore everything was back to normal (even though Windows said it failed, gotta love Microsoft’s consistency in being totally accurate!). Then tried to install/uninstall my drivers only to find I couldn’t. After some dicking around I got it to install, but I had to use the device manager instead of NVidia’s installer, fabu…

After more testing I confirmed that OBS Studio for whatever reason sucks on my laptop. Meanwhile Classic OBS runs just peachy. So I guess if I record anything I’ll have to use Classic instead of Studio, which isn’t that big of a deal to me TBH. I just wanted to have OBS Studio on both systems for the sake of consistency. But NVENC works fine on Classic.

I’ve been playing with the idea of recording my gameplay during lunch (when I can) and turning it into vlogs. Maybe about why I played that particular game, what I like/hate about it, what I had for lunch, what form of insanity unfolded to make me play such a thing, food, etc.

Speaking of YouTubing, I did another Classic Tomb Raider Stream earlier this evening.

I have a local copy to go through in my spare time, as I’m sure there are a few highlights I can pinpoint within that long run of film, or I would at least HOPE there would be something in over an hour and a half’s worth of footage. 😛

Windows 10 upgrade prevents guy from checking out of hotel

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1zf8xx6jDR-14
Here we go again.

I don’t know what’s more stupid, the IT’s at the hotel disabling Windows Update so this doesn’t happen, or Microsoft for not thinking of all the doom and gloom people have to put up with when having to deal with their pushy OS.

“My hotel can’t check me out because their computer decided to just go for it & is currently in the middle of updating itself to Windows 10,” he said.

It’s pretty bad when Hotel California has fewer restrictions. I mean you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. Maybe Microsoft got the idea from The Eagles, but like every other idea they’ve stolen they got it bassackwards.

Farewell to Project Spark

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The Grim Clipper
The Grim Clipper eagerly waiting to touch Microsoft’s next product.

I remember when a former co-worker of mine tried to get me to check out Project Spark. It was a Windows 8/XBone exclusive, and it didn’t strike me as a good reason to ditch Windows 7 (like most OS exclusives being released today). Looks like I’m not really missing out on it either since Microsoft and the studio responsible for this game will be pulling the plug on it.

“This was an extremely difficult decision for our team that we do not take lightly,” Team Dakota community manager Thomas Gratz said in a statement. “When Project Spark transitioned away from active development last fall, many of our team members moved to other projects within Microsoft Studios. While this means there have been no layoffs at Microsoft, it also means it’s simply no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping Project Spark up and running with meaningful updates and bug fixes, so we have come to this hard decision.”

I’m not sure about the logic behind this. There are games on other platforms that haven’t been touched in years by developers… so why does Project Spark have to be taken off the market? Seems rather short sided to me, and good reasoning not to back anything heavily backed by Microsoft especially going by their track record. Giving up on their smartphone, giving up on Win 8 and going straight to 10, giving up on shipping a Kinect with the XBone because of the creepy requirements, closing the studio responsible for Fable after basically telling them to completely rewrite the new fable, oh… and of course:

ss-grim-reaper

Of course this doesn’t bother me at all. I learned a long time ago not to invest too heavily into Microsoft’s products, it’s much more painless that way.

I’m not sure this is how Microsoft wanted to advertise their latest OS

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One of the many reasons I’ve held off from upgrading to Windows 10 is the fact that I don’t have control over when updates occur. Some say that it isn’t so bad, but clearly they haven’t been in the middle of something when it decides that it wants to restart. Some strange occurrences have been taking place recently, from upgrade prompts showing up on local weather reports to PC Gaming streamers getting hit with updates, Microsoft is getting more of the wrong publicity.

Windows-10-Flom-compressor

This guy (who already runs Windows 10) had his game session interrupted by an update even after changing the settings. I would be seriously pissed if that happened to me, especially if I was working on a project or Streaming for my friends. Of course, we all know Microsoft’s love for PC at this point, otherwise this would have been fixed before or not long after release.

Today’s weather forecast: UPGRADE BITCH!!!!

As I’ve said before, I’m not upgrading until they get rid of that problem, and a bunch of other problems… Until then Windows 7 and CentOS work swimmingly.

Tomb Raider: Linux vs Windows

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Gaming On Linux did a benchmark comparison between Linux and Windows 10 showing off framerate differences.

It’s kind of depressing. Great that people on Linux have access to these titles, but sad that the OpenGL optimization can be flat out sucky. I have noticed this with most games on Linux. And it’s one of the reasons why I still keep Win 7 on my system, especially since I like to record my gameplays for video projects, and the better the framerate the better the video output… those numbers aren’t good. We need games to move over to Vulkan… badly. We don’t want Microsoft to control our PC gaming realm, and Linux needs to fight the good fight.

Running Ubuntu on Windows 10 will be a thing

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Winbuntu

I thought it was already a thing if you bothered with VM’s and were curious to see what Ubuntu was like, but apparently Canonical and Microsoft are partnering together to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10, no VM required.

With this new addition, Ubuntu users will be able to run Ubuntu simultaneously with Windows. This will not be in a virtual machine, but as an integrated part of Windows 10.

Ok, so why exactly are they doing this?

Canonical and Microsoft are doing this because Ubuntu on Windows’ target audience is developers, not desktop users. In particular, as Microsoft and Canonical continue to work more closely together on cloud projects, I expect to find tools that will make it easy for programmers to use Ubuntu to write programs for Ubuntu on the Azure cloud.

So is this MS-Linux? No. Is it a major step forward in the integration of Windows and Linux on the developer desktop? Yes, yes it is.

BS. People have been saying for years that Ubuntu is the Windows of Linux, this just confirms it. 😛

It also seems unlikely that Ubuntu will be bringing its Unity interface with it. Instead the focus will be on Bash and other CLI tools, such as make, gawk and grep.

lol yes. Unity and Microsoft’s new definition of the desktop would go hand in hand actually In the sense that I hated Unity with a passion, and despise Microsoft’s hardon for tiles. ffs they still exist in Windows 10’s start menu. I think I know why they’re saying this will be the last Windows, they’re going to call their next OS Microsoft Tiles, and Ubuntu will be there to help make it shittier with Unity.

Windows 10 will become a recommended update in 2016

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Windows 10 Wallpaper HD

In an attempt for Microsoft to become the new Borg, next year Microsoft will be adding Windows 10 to the recommended list of updates for Windows 10. They have done this recently as a “fluke” but have since moved the goalpost until 2016.

Adding this upgrade to the recommended list will automatically download it to your system if it is capable of running Win 10. It’s a waste of space and bandwidth to do it this way, but Microsoft really wants people to flock into their Garden Of Eden Cortana.

What’s the best thing Microsoft can do for PC Gaming?

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NOTHING!!!!!!

“For us, E3 is a console show and an Xbox show, and for us as Microsoft, Xbox is our gaming brand, and it’s the thing we can fill an arena like this, we get millions of people to watch us on TV and we show our games and it’s a brand that people care about,” he said.

C’mon Microsoft we get the picture. You have a console to sell and PC gaming gets in the way of your little walled garden. They’re making Linux sound better and better everytime they pull this crap.