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I got that huge bundle of games the other day, many of which have native Linux binaries. Binaries that probably worked fine in lots of distributions when they w

by morsch 6y ago

I got that huge bundle of games the other day, many of which have native Linux binaries. Binaries that probably worked fine in lots of distributions when they were released. Tried three games so far -- Cook, Serve, Delicious 2 (2017), Nuclear Throne (2013) and uh, another one (201x): all of them refused to start, lacking one shared library or another. I got CSD2 to start by copying .so files around and using LD_LIBRARY_PATH but it still did not work properly. Whatever. Bizarrely, it may be easier to get the respective Windows binaries to start in Wine. But I'm really past "getting things to work", there's enough stuff out there that doesn't require those kind of summoning rituals.

foobar_ 6y ago
Is it a disadvantage of the bazaar model ? In a cathedral so to speak old things are valued. In a bazaar things are sold based on trends. I see this a lot with open source software, where things are not made with the mindset of making things last a long time.
- morsch 6y ago
  It's a fun application of the metaphor. But I can still apt install nethack, a thing that was made in 1987. Or apt install lynx, a text mode browser first released in 1992. Or apt install midnight-commander, a Norton Commander[1] clone first released in 1994. All of these still receive updates, so I guess they don't qualify as old things per se, but that's the point: as long as there is still a use for them, they keep getting updated. If CSD2 or Nuclear Throne had been released as open source software, chances are somebody would have updated their dependencies and they'd run fine. Heck, I'm a developer, I could probably have fixed it myself. But they're proprietary, and have gotten stale, and are a pain to get working. So I guess it's more of an incompatibility between the two models than an attribute of the bazaar. [1] an old thing that's valued in the Cathedral, if at all, then only as a curiosity
  - foobar_ 6y ago
    That's true. Well to stretch the metaphor ;) some shops in the bazaars become boutiques to differentiate from other competitors. Boutiques price their uniqueness and that's certainly true of things like vim which is certainly an old software.
jamesgeck0 6y ago
A lot of Linux ports are by Windows developers who don't seem to understand that they need to statically link basically everything for semi-reliable compatibility. Steam kinda got around this by providing a standard base of libraries Linux games could link against that would be the same on every distro, but even there some developers STILL assume that everyone has the same libraries as their Ubuntu system.

by morsch 6y ago

foobar_ 6y ago

Is it a disadvantage of the bazaar model ? In a cathedral so to speak old things are valued. In a bazaar things are sold based on trends. I see this a lot with open source software, where things are not made with the mindset of making things last a long time.

morsch 6y ago
It's a fun application of the metaphor. But I can still apt install nethack, a thing that was made in 1987. Or apt install lynx, a text mode browser first released in 1992. Or apt install midnight-commander, a Norton Commander[1] clone first released in 1994. All of these still receive updates, so I guess they don't qualify as old things per se, but that's the point: as long as there is still a use for them, they keep getting updated. If CSD2 or Nuclear Throne had been released as open source software, chances are somebody would have updated their dependencies and they'd run fine. Heck, I'm a developer, I could probably have fixed it myself. But they're proprietary, and have gotten stale, and are a pain to get working. So I guess it's more of an incompatibility between the two models than an attribute of the bazaar. [1] an old thing that's valued in the Cathedral, if at all, then only as a curiosity
- foobar_ 6y ago
  That's true. Well to stretch the metaphor ;) some shops in the bazaars become boutiques to differentiate from other competitors. Boutiques price their uniqueness and that's certainly true of things like vim which is certainly an old software.

jamesgeck0 6y ago

A lot of Linux ports are by Windows developers who don't seem to understand that they need to statically link basically everything for semi-reliable compatibility. Steam kinda got around this by providing a standard base of libraries Linux games could link against that would be the same on every distro, but even there some developers STILL assume that everyone has the same libraries as their Ubuntu system.