Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 21:44 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868)
In reply to: Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica) by nix
Parent article: Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

> I've done enough wrestling with insurmountable closed-source obstacles for tonight. I just wanted to waste a few hours playing some silly game, not waste a few hours cursing software :(

<Troll>Guess you should've just run the game under windows then</Troll> :)

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 16, 2010 14:55 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Say what you like, on Windows the infrastructure for installing inscrutable binary lumps is more robust (mostly because there's a monoculture so everyone can be depended upon to have a limited number of things and they *all* must be shipped everything else).

That's not the reason

Posted Dec 17, 2010 10:30 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The real reason it works on Windows so well and on Linux so bad is for simple fact that Linux developers are hostile to binary-only releases.

The surprising exceptions are GNU-related projects (GLibC, GTK), but even they are not perfect. Most other projects fell the answer "just recompile with latest headers" is acceptable. It may be acceptable for FOSS (even even there it's painful), but it's totally unacceptable for proprietary software like games.

Backward-compatibility is awful on Linux. The fact that it took literally years to provide decent support for OSS after ALSA introduction speak volumes. In Windows world it's just unthinkable to drop support for old API without providing some kind of emulation!