Thanks! I had no idea I could do that. I probably won't ever do that but I may use the "Hide" feature sometime as the mountain of games from giveaways increases.

I had some games that weren't working with 3.7 so I decided why not try 3.16-3 Beta since it was newer. I tend to go with the latest version when it comes to Wine. I had no reason other than it was newer. Space Beast looks nice

This is certainly at this point a tangent since it isn't even available for PC yet but have you guys seen the gameplay of Red Dead Redemption 2?? OMFG!!! If it does, as is rumored, come to PC I will be working hard to make it run in Linux, that's for certain. The detail, the physics, the AI, the openness... whew! so real it's like making a movie on the fly.

That's probably one we'd get for PS4. Seems like we tend to use it for big studio games and do smaller or MMOs on PC. (Heh, Linux for me, Windows for him.)

Well it seriously looks like it will come to PC and obviously that will mean Windows first. However I have read some posts regarding Rock Star Games flirtation with Vulkan so if that, becomes a path for them it may not take booting to Windows for just one game.

On a larger scale it has long been predicted that in the evolution of Computing, operating systems will become a non-issue. Mac and Linux show no signs of quietly evaporating and with m,any millions of loyal users there seems to be way too much financial incentive to make cross-platform software. I actually think the new CEO of Microsoft sees this turning a corner right now with his more cooperative "play with the team" intentions. MS no longer needs to destroy every possible competitor since no matter how many will inevitably complain about new "features" they hate, the vast majority will still ultimately comply and learn to continue one way or another. Windows too, obviously, isn't going away anytime soon and is so entrenched that new users will pile on board for many years to come. They have a proven formula for a fairly wide-ranged Desktop niche (if one can call 90+% Market Share, a niche LOL).

In business, while some proclaim The Bottom Line as God, the smarter money is on the line above, Costs of Sales, and seek to reduce losses, and it seems MS has a very tightly defined niche as evidenced by the large number of complete failures as well as underperformers every time they try to step out of that comfort zone. In Gaming not only do we have Linux and Mac but also at least 3 viable consoles that also are not likely to go away anytime soon. The sum of money that would become available if cross-platform becomes easier and less costly is a very powerful force. It will continue to grind away as a major opportunity to capitalize on not a lot of software engineering as Vulkan, to mention only one case, shows just how profitable that can be. Hardware implies greater costs of sales than software so we can see where the emphasis will likely be. Valve/Steam also isn't going away soon and many look to them as how to keep costs down and keep sales "in house".

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It's definitely a good time to be a Linux gamer, yep!

And...I don't know what Microsoft's game is. On the one hand, I could see them closing things off more and locking things down to their store and a subscription model for the OS. And it seems like Valve and the like are preparing for that contingency. Whether or not they actually go through with it is another matter, entirely. I think they might for the home version, and leave the "enterprise" one more open.

I'm not too concerned about Linux. Whatever roadblock they throw up, we'll be able to deal. We always do...

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^ This Totally agree!

Yes, and the recent "all the market will bear" valuation of Redhat by IBM of ~$36,000,000,000.00 USD should tell everyone involved what the value of just one niche of all the great, creative minds working on mostly Open Source software. Factor in the proven fact that Apple was largely saved by appropriating and modifying several billion dollars worth of BSD code and it's easy to see why Microsoft, or anyone else, can't afford to ignore that wellspring. Gabe Newell, among many others, are freaking heroes not to mention savvy entrepreneurs.

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I notice that Steam has an Autumn sale on. Before I take the plunge, has anyone managed to get Cuphead to work? My experiences so far with Proton have been hit and miss.

I appreciate what Valve has done for Linux. They made the graphics stack high performance and they also proved to the bean counters that there is at least a baseline cash flow from Linux gamers. Outside of gaming though...

Either there is an internal migration or they are just slow. Why is an 2012 Ubuntu base still being shipped? They still have not fixed the simple problem of preferring native libs over their crappy and archaic Ubuntu libs. SteamOS is also based on Debian and still behind Debian, so that means: very ancient. Another systemd trap. Even the hipsters at Apple have avoided that trap; go figure.

I gave up. When on the desktop and server, it is Slackware or a BSD. For gaming I will now only buy DRM free games from now on and relegated my old laptop to Windows 10 and Steam only with no personal data on it. I want to play a game, I want to play and not mess around. I bought Total War: Attila years ago. Never ran and I spent hours and hours over the years trying to get it to run, I have been playing Total War since Shogun, a dedicated fan. Well, installed Win10, uninstalled bloatware, installed Steam, and downloaded it, it ran. Years after buying it, it finally ran. That is the point of gaming. To just play and not dick around.

Windows will slowly decline in the business world and sooner or later the Microsoft Tax will be gone. Yet, it will rule gaming for a very long time to come.

With all due respect, jakedp, I think you have drunk the koolaid of "New == Improved". How much really is there that one can do today in 2018 that one could not do in 2012 other than support newer hardware which is kernel related not mere Distro or library related? and just how does the base eliminate the possibility of newer libraries? My reaction is "So what? It works... and gets better all the time". Proton is a major milestone and it is just in it's bare infancy.

As for MS dominating gaming I wonder if you realize that Sony has 57% of the console market while XBox has dropped to around 10%. Yes, they still dominate PC games but that too is evaporating and they obviously know it given the new CEO's Business Plan. It's hard to over estimate the influence MS has had on computing but it reminds me of the trajectory of AOL, a catalyst whose old paradigm has been outgrown and MS realizes it must adapt or disappear. I doubt MS will follow AOL into the ashes but it's days of Shot Caller are numbered.

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What are you talking about ""New == Improved"" and what I said?

The same thing Linux desktop evangelists were saying 18 years ago and there is now more Windows desktops than every before. The market has grown is one of the primary reasons for the success of Linux on the desktop: it just grew as the industry grew: a synergy.

Where is the Sony PC running a Sony OS and people playing games on it? Nowhere. When you count Windows Phones, XBOX, PC, the numbers surely out number PS4.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It has only made Microsoft stronger and stronger and if you think they changed their tune I have fully certified pure breed unicorns for sale. On computer nothing beats Windows for gaming, it is sad but true. Who drove the hardware so that gaming has became a commodity? Those ignored, geeky, Windows users who spent the majority of their money on hardware and software.

I' am not tooting the evil empire' s horn but I also would not underestimate them.

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Well for starters you seem to look down on using Ubuntu 12 as a base platform when it has no bearing on it's performance within Steam. Every part can be updated as needed, which is actually very little considering the most important updates are kernels and that's not server side. Also I don't see at all how Valve "made the graphics stack high performance" when that too is client side specifically with nVidia driver modules and w/ AMD/ATi, newer kernels

Frankly I don't want to see Linux market share on the Desktop keep growing as it tends to reduce freedom as more hard dependencies are created and proliferate like systemd and pulseaudio. However your statement is correct that there are "more Windows desktops than every (sic) before" but the same can be said about Linux and Mac. FWIW the number of Linux Desktops nearly doubled in just two years from 2015-2017. I'm sure that trend won't diminish.

Where is the Sony PC running a Sony OS and people playing games on it? Nowhere. When you count Windows Phones, XBOX, PC, the numbers surely out number PS4.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It has only made Microsoft stronger and stronger and if you think they changed their tune I have fully certified pure breed unicorns for sale. On computer nothing beats Windows for gaming, it is sad but true. Who drove the hardware so that gaming has became a commodity? Those ignored, geeky, Windows users who spent the majority of their money on hardware and software.

I' am not tooting the evil empire' s horn but I also would not underestimate them.[/QUOTE]

Actually the PS4 IS a PC as proven way back 10 years ago or more when PS2's were combined in a Beowulf Cluster to create a cheap supercomputer for modelling gravity waves around Black Holes and then leaped on by several armed forces and others seeking highly configurable massive computing power on the cheap. That doesn't change that you are likely correct that the number of windows devices all together outnumber PS4s. So what?

I don't imagine that we are seeing a kinder, gentler machine gun hand in Microsoft but at one time they were the sole Shot Caller and that is simply no longer true. I'm not underestimating MS but neither am I underestimating market forces especially those in IT where it is Adapt or Perish, and Sooner Rather than Later. Five years is an eternity in that world, and it was an "eternity ago" that MS owned gaming. Why do you think "Monkey Boy" Ballmer screamed "Developers! Developers! Developers!" ? Where is the new Halo? or similar "killer app"? Have you seen Red Dead: Redemption 2 yet? Sony obviously has friendly developers and so do Nintendo and Linux and they are all gaining on MS.

Granted that historically RockStar Gaming has not exactly been friendly to Linux but LOOK HERE ===>> http://www.linuxrockstar.com/news/ .

I don't care who initially drove gaming. I care about now and the future and it gets brighter for Linux by the month. I disagree that "nothing beats Windows for gaming". While it does play more titles... so far, I have played some games installed on an NTFS partition where the exact game can be played in either Linux or Windows and even 5 years ago some games were substantially better on Linux - smoother and more responsive probably due to my custom low latency kernel and Linux's superior TCP/IP stack and memory management. If you don't realize Linux is "gaining ground" you may be hanging on to past lockout accomplishments that have been seriously eroded.

So Proton 3.16-5 includes the new FAudio support, which allegedly removes the need to install the xact package. Thing is, if you want WMA decoding, you have to compile it against ffmpeg that supports it yourself. It requires cmake 3.7. Slackware 14.2 ships with 3.5.2. Not sure if upgrading cmake would break anything else, however. Anyone got it to build on Slackware? At this point, though, it might just be easier to play any game needing xact in a regular WINE prefix with xact installed.

Interesting question garpu. I have a testing install of 14.2 and noting that Current ships with 3.13.2 cmake and SDL 2.2.15, both higher than the required versions I'll give that a try since it doesn't require a wine rebuild, just a copy of libFAudio.so in a steamapps.common/Proton subdirectory. I probably can't do it until this coming weekend but I'm interested. Thanks.