Andy McDandy Vent Page

For some years now, the Linux desktop has been a great alternative for those tired of operating systems developed by Microsoft because of Linux stability and security.  Unfortunately Linux is a FREE operating system and because of this, there is, nor has been any reliable way to accurately calculate market share, a value that game companies like Blizzard tend to rely on.

Gaming companies claim that because the false information they receive shows a low single digit market share percentage, it must mean no one is using Linux and therefore no reason to release their product to Linux.

Other companies like Farsight Studios base their decision on the sales of other games but again this could be the wrong move to make.

When we look at games currently selling on the Linux platform, there are two things that the big companies like Blizzard need to keep in mind.

1. The developers are smaller and thus most likely do not have the same fan following.
2. The games are usually of lessor quality.

Looking at a company like Blizzard, you can see that they have a world wide following of devoted fans, even I myself love the games they make.  Their games are beautifully made and enjoyable to play so for Blizzard to put themselves down on the same level as the current companies releasing games on to Linux would be an insult to the developers at Blizzard who have devoted so much time in creating what we love.

Companies like Blizzard should not fear coming to Linux because no matter what operating system to support, their fans will follow.  If more AAA game developers supported Linux, it would cause the market share to grow dramatically to where Mac would be listed as the least used operating system.

This of course leaves us with the question, how do we convince the big boys like Blizzard to support Linux?

A Blizzard fan who goes by the name Shahbaz suggested something in the battle.net forum, a suggestion which I have been saying to my friends for a few years now.  All gamers who want their favourite gaming developer to support Linux must come together and resist playing those games for a period of time.  This will show just how many Linux gamers there are but of course this is not easy when your favourite games are addictive like those created by Blizzard.  I know for I have tried to resist the last five years but every so often I find myself back playing using WINE.  That is when a Blizzard update doesn’t cause problems.

Without Linux becoming a purchasable operating system, big companies will continue to believe in the false market share percentage that is being fed to them.  Even Mr. Ballmer from Microsoft back in 2009 thought the market share for Linux was more than that of Mac.  The numbers companies are looking at are also most likely North American numbers instead of Worldwide which would dramatically increase the Linux market share value given that Linux is extremely popular in the rest of the globe.  A fact that Blizzard and other companies seem to forget or flat out ignore.

So what can we do?  Will AAA companies ever be convinced that the number they are being fed is completely false?  Or must we give in and use a operating system being forced upon us by the big companies?

Hello my fellow Linux users, to my surprised Netflix now runs perfect in the Google Chrome browser without having to do anything at all.

I just installed Google Chrome and remembered about a Chrome hack that someone posted the other month on how to get Netflix to run so I decided after downloading the browser from Google and installing it, I logged in to my Netflix account.  I wanted to see if I would see need to do the little hack that was required previously with the beta Chrome.  To surprise the videos played instantly.

I am so happy to finally be able to watch Netflix without needing to do any hacks for it to work.  Thank you Google!

So it appears a new Battle.net update was released and like a lot of Blizzard updates, Linux gamers are now having trouble launching the desktop client so they can play their favourite Blizzard Entertainment games.  It is times like this that should be enough proof that a official Linux client is required, not too mention the numerous times their anti-cheat system has falsely banned Linux gamers like when Diablo III launched.  Six months later a Blizzard representative admits their flawless anti-cheat system did mis-identified some players as cheating.  The cause, well according to one Linux expert, it had to do with how Wine was handling the game.

Why Blizzard continues to ignore the very large Linux gaming community is absolutely mind boggling.  We keep bugging them and bugging them and bugging them but unfortunately the people who should be listening probably do not even pay any attention to the forums and I’m sure none of the forum moderators or anyone at Blizzard support forwards our requests on to the proper person(s).

For those still unaware of my petition to Blizzard for Linux clients, goto: https://www.change.org/p/blizzard-entertainment-support-please-release-native-linux-clients

About a week or two ago my e-mail account, one that I have had for at least the past 14 years became inaccessible.  Searching the Internet I came across the story of Yahoo underwater data cable having been cut which was causing problems for some Yahoo! Mail clients.  Having read that I simply continued on with my life without making any complaints during the whole time the cable was being repaired.

This past Monday, December 1st it was announced that the cable has been fully repaired and everything is back up and running normally again.  Unfortunately there still appears to be a lot of Yahoo! Mail users whom still can not log into their account, including myself.

We have all tried the automated password reset but most of use appear to be receiving an error right after inputting our Yahoo! ID.  The error message states that the password reset can not be completed and we must contact Customer Care.

I myself contacted Customer Care through the Twitter account while others have tried through the Facebook page but unfortunately we are all receiving the same response.  That response is to use the automated password reset and if that do not work, check out the self help section.  Due to this response it is obvious that Yahoo! Customer Care is an absolute joke and is only setup to appear as if Yahoo! cares about those you use their services.  In reality they don’t care and just want you to go away.

You can tell Yahoo! Customer Care a hundred times that their automated system is not working and that you need their help but all you will ever receive is instructions to visit the self help.  O and don’t even try to find a contact phone number of email address on the Yahoo! website because it doesn’t not exist, at least not on the USA site.

In my opinion based on what I and many others have gone through with Yahoo! Customer Care, I am hereby going to tell everyone to stop using Yahoo! immediately and any products/services that support Yahoo!.  Maybe a decline in people using their services will result in better Customer Care.

With it being Thanksgiving in the United States, I felt it was only appropriate to write this blog post thanking VALVE for showing love to the Linux Gaming community.

From the moment we saw images of Left 4 Dead working in Linux taken from a computer at VALVE, every Linux Gamer most likely filled with joy because finally there was a big player in the Gaming industry bringing their product to Linux.

In the fall of 2012 when the first Steam Beta was released, I don’t think any Linux Gamer was able to hold back their excitement.

Then when Steam was officially launched in early 2013, Linux Gamers were probably like little girls at a boy band concert.

So on this Thanksgiving holiday, we thank you for being the only big player to support us.  We hope all of you at VALVE have a great Thanksgiving long weekend.

Whenever a Linux gamer creates a discussion on a game forum, they are usually bombarded by Windows fan boys who believe their operating system is far more superior and will respond with the usual “they are not going to spend money to support Linux”.  For games that may have poor sales, I will agree that there probably isn’t much point.

However, if developers were to use a little more common sense, they would create their game(s) to be cross platform from the beginning.  When you create a game to use cross platform code, like OpenGL, it will allow the game to be released on multiple platforms without the need to recode the game.  This in turn equals less time and money required to port for each operating system and by releasing to multiple platforms at launch, you also maximize your customer base and profits.

The little guys, Indie Game Developers, get this way of thinking so come on big game developers, start doing the same.

Hello my fellow Linux gamers.  Before you start sending me hate mail please hear me out.

For years now we have been requesting Linux ports of our favourite games but the big companies never seem to listen and why should they when we keep using WINE or dual boot to run our games.

We all know the problems with WINE, low fps and game breaking at any time just by one patch being fixed for another game,  etc.

With dual booting you are giving the game developers the idea that there is not enough Linux users to care about making a port of their games.

We must all become strong and refuse to play our non Linux games for an entire month.  When big companies like Blizzard and EA see a massive drop in numbers, they will finally understand just how many of us there are and hopefully convince them to bring their games to our beloved operating system.

On January 2 of this year, Polygon.com reported the plans that the Pinball Arcade devs had for 2014.  One of those plans was to bring Pinball Arcade to Linux, most likely through the Steam Linux client.

The first Pinball Arcade newsletter of 2014 also mentioned that a Linux port is going to be made but then everything went silent.  They do now have a post on their FAQ page stating that Linux is on their to do list but it is not very high on the list.  They claim they rather devote more attention to the gaming consoles including the shitty Ouya.

What frustrates me and probably other Linux gamers the most is the fact that the current supported systems OS X, PS Vita, PS3, PS4, Android and Ouya are all *nix derived operating systems so in theory, creating a Linux port should be fairly simple.  Why they don’t want to make money off the million of Linux gamers is absolutely mind boggling.  Don’t they want the millions of dollars in extra sales from us Linux gamers?

We are now just over 30 days left of 2014 with no updates at all from the Pinball Arcade team on how or even if they are still going to support Linux before the end of 2014.  I love pinball and so I hope that they do release the game on Linux very soon.  With the huge uproar over what Microsoft did with Windows 8, I am surprised gaming companies did not start supporting Linux much sooner like Valve did.

I am confident that if Farsight gave the OS X source code to the Linux community, a fully working Linux port would be released within 24 hours, that’s how awesome the Linux community is.

Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft…With every new version of Windows, you have made your updates take longer and longer to install.

Using my current machine as an example which is a AMD A8-5600K w/8GB RAM, here are my results for average install times for 100 updates:

Windows XP – Less than 30min.

Windows 7 – 30 – 40 Minutes

Windows 8 – 3 Hours (no that is not a typo)

My current Linux Mint 17 that I just reinstalled yesterday after doing the above Windows 8 test only took around 30 minutes to download and install 500 updates.  What are the Microsoft programmers doing to make updates take so damn long to install?

I have been repairing computers for 10 years now so I have seen the install times for updates take longer and longer with each new Windows release.  Now I know Windows and Linux are not the same but come on Microsoft, surely you people can clean up your code enough to allow for a much quicker update installation.

Hopefully the next version of Windows will not only come with the START button back in place but also be programmed properly so people don’t have to wait hours for updates to install before being able to use their system.

For years, Windows was the ideal platform to make games for but over time things have changed, Mac and Linux both became better desktop operating systems.  As they progressed, more people and governments have moved away from Windows.  Some of the big gaming developers like Blizzard Entertainment and Valve followed suite by adding Mac as another supported operating system.  However, with more people moving to Linux over the past couple of years, only Valve have paid any attention and expanded to Linux.

Unfortunately the other big boys have been ignoring the Linux operating system and what is even more frustrating is their lack of caring about their current and potential customers in providing a statement on why they are ignoring the other operating system.

Anyone who knows Linux will agree it is a more stable and secured operating system, not to mention faster as well.  I just got my system back up and running after doing a test.  What I did was reformat my system with my copy of Windows 8 that I purchased a year ago to use in VirtualBox and after about 3 hours, Windows was still finalizing the first 100 updates just installed.  It was painful, so painful I didn’t even allow the finalizing to finish but instead rebooted with my Linux Mint 17 KDE DVD and started the install.  In just over 30 minutes, not only was the operating system installed but also the 500 required updates.

With benefits like speed, stability and security, should Linux gamers move back to Windows…I say HELL NO!  Linux gamers must remain strong and resist the temptation of going back to Windows and we must also refrain from using WINE to play our favourite Windows only games.  By refusing to play those games, the developers like Blizzard will see a huge drop in player numbers and hopefully will finally accept that they need to support our great operating system.

I stopped playing World of Warcraft at least 2 years ago.  I will admit that I do sometimes accept the 7 day free play that Blizzards sends me but it has pretty much been 2 years since I played full time.  I would also love to purchase Starcraft 2 but with no Linux support I will continue to give my money to Valve.