rbos

rbos, 1 year ago

There was a decent selection of games on Linux ten years ago. Just because your favourite games didn’t run didn’t make it a nonviable games platform. Xbox doesn’t run all games either, but it’s still viable.

rbos, 1 year ago

I played a lot of WoW back then, it ran fine. Speaking personally. I guess if you want to gatekeep gamer hard enough you could call Linux nonviable back then but I always thought it was dumb. A ball and a deck of cards are viable gaming platforms. :p

rbos, 1 year ago

I guess ‘viable’ means different things? Is this an American usage where something isn’t viable unless it can do literally all the things?

Xbox isn’t a viable platform because you can’t play world of Warcraft!

rbos, 1 year ago

There was a good selection back then too is what I’m saying. Minecraft. Literally every web based game. It was a fine gaming platform, there was more than enough to keep you busy, if you weren’t picky.

rbos, 1 year ago

Agreed! Way better. I just hate how ‘viable’ is such a moving target. You can always find SOMETHING to dismiss it with. Linux is ‘unviable’ because of some random game that doesn’t work or because of some new feature in the latest whizbang. If that is viable we’ll never be there.

Viable is when it meets one’s needs sufficiently, not when it can do some impossible list of tasks perfectly. Viable isn’t perfect, and I hate it when people pretend it is.

rbos, 1 year ago

oh man. I played SO much KSP. I think my lifelong love of indie games partly stems from being a Linux user: I tried things I wouldn’t otherwise have tried. Factorio, as well, was a Linux game right out of the box. SNES and NES emulators.

Sure, a lot of the latest and greatest corporate shiny didn’t work (or not without caveats) but there were tons of perfectly good games.

What is ‘viability’? Like, if viability is this Holy Grail state where everything works perfectly, we’re setting ourselves up for failure.