Linux had a pretty strong amateur game scene back in the day before Steam came along. I spent so much time trying out different games from The Linux Game Tome.
SuperTuxKart is one of those games that has been in development for years and years. It was originally forked from TuxKart by passionate people with overly optimistic plans. Looks like it's come a long way now though.
Icculus.org's Ryan C. Gordon was instrumental for the Icculus community, many (proprietary) ports of software and Loki Software. For some history on Linux gaming, see his Wikipedia entry [1].
There have been fantastic games and emulators (and Wine) for Linux, its only getting better and better. Back in the days I played the original Counter Strike in Wine and it ran more stable than Windows 9x. I remember playing Dune 2 in Dosbox. I played Tetrinet in Gtetrinet. And something simple as Mahjong was part of Gnome and KDE.
The problem has always been that particular games didn't work on Linux, and that's now less and less, mainly thanks to Steam and Proton, and the long breath of Wine/Codeweavers itself. The only reason I currently use Windows to game is that in World of Warcraft I use a repeater (so that when I press '1' it spams '1'). I'm unable to get that to work on Linux, it works with AutoHotKey.
Props for mentioning Icculus. I always wanted to play with Black Shades at the time, but the display adapter just wouldn't cooperate: http://icculus.org/blackshades/
(I also vaguely remember a single-file Quake 3 installer from the era which started as a shell script, but snipped itself off from the beginning when run and continued on as a binary archive. It was interesting to peek into it with a text viewer, only to see the readable part randomly devolve into garbage.)
> Tux Racer is another notable Tux game, but it's commercial fork meant it felt less collaborative than the others.
Don't forget the arcade version! It was the first (I assume proof-of-concept) arcade machine by RoXoR Games, running on Debian Linux. They got rather famously tied up in legal drama with Konami for their second arcade machine, In The Groove, based on a 2004-era codebase of the FOSS “Dance Dance Revolution” simulator StepMania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Corp._v._Roxor_Games_In....
> Linux had a pretty strong amateur game scene back in the day before Steam came along.
It's wonderful that Linux has a huge collection of games these days, and it's even more impressive how far Linux has come with respect to native games and the ability to run Windows games.
That being said, I often find myself missing the amateur game scene. There used to be a lot of unique games and games with a different take on more popular titles.
It would be cool to see - like it’s console-karting counterparts - characters from the universe of the hardware. I realize Linus Torvalds isn’t licensable IP, but would love to see him throw bananas out back for Stallman to avoid. I wonder what other “characters” would fit in
Back then he was known for his libertarian views e.g. pro gun views, as well. You don't have to agree with someone on everything. Its likely I don't agree with Chinese developers on communism. Doesn't mean their FOSS contributions e.g. their PRs are invalid.
SystemD has issues. I don't particularly like it, and I only have a couple machines that use it. I much prefer OpenRC, which is what I use while provisioning new systems.
That being said, Poettering created software that
A) Is much better than I could make.
B) Is used by many, many, many, people in production, without showstopper issues.
I will not deny that he deserves at least some amount of respect for what he has accomplished, including from an engineering perspective.
I don't know what kind of software you make, but SystemD's issues are not merely bugs and misfeatures (there are those) - the fundamental design is technically and community/society-wise wrong. It is not the right path to draw more and more system functionality into a single codebase (and partially into a single process).
That's not exactly the same as the Vasa, but there too - fundamental principles were ignored while other aspects of the design were impressive.
Mostly hacky stuff that does what I need, and not much more. Definitely nothing professional,at least that's relevant to this.
I agree with what you are saying. I am by no means an expert, but I have read/studied enough to know that I disagree with almost all of the philosophy behind SystemD, and have used it enough that I know it does not work properly all the time.
Everything above also applies to Windows. That doesn't change the fact that both are impressive, though flawed (more flawed than most software I use, imho) pieces of software.
Despite all of it's flaws, SystemD has been proven through use. I don't like it, but I have to acknowledge it's capabilities.
At my current company we play the "soccer" mode after the sprint planing and we have so much fun.
Whats really nice that it is cross platform and has very low requirements, so it runs on every computer without a hitch and there is no excuse to ditch the little round.
The problem I have with this game (other than it being a shameless rip-off of Super Mario Kart) is that all in-game character models look so utterly lifeless.
This brings me good memory from early 2000 where this game was one of the first who had good 3D support back then and it was kinda of a benchmark to test if 3D acceleration was working under Linux. Good old times.
Congrats to the developer and thank you for those great moments of fun.
This game is pretty charming and fun. My young kids love it, and it's great to play with them. It works with my xbox 360 usb controller with no setup required.
I wonder if "Story Mode" is like Diddy Kong Racing with an overworld hub, or more like F-Zero GX's "Just races but with the occasional dialogue/cutscene inbetween."
What baffles me is that there aren't any (widely known) mods to turn STK gameplay into something else, like NFS or Wipeout. I've seen one vid on YouTube about increasing karts' speed, which proves that it's at least possible (rather obviously with an open-source game). Maybe the physics engine doesn't lend itself to that, dunno.
Yeah, but there are plenty of additional cars and tracks for STK, and I think it's got some workflow for converting models from Blender (you can certainly convert tracks, which some people used to create maps of real places).
Honestly though, a lot of games are now native for linux. There are very few games that I need wine for nowadays (and there is no game that I want but can't play)
> Honestly though, a lot of games are now native for linux. There are very few games that I need wine for nowadays (and there is no game that I want but can't play)
I have to agree here. Almost every game I play can run natively.
I don't remember for sure. It is it's own open source project however. I do use lutris as well, but mostly for emulators.
> Personally I had better luck fiddling with Wine than with Proton. (and by fiddling I mean "checking a few dlls in winetricks")
To each their own. Almost all of my Window's only games I have in my steam library and I've just been able to click install and play, so I haven't looked in depth at any of the other options yet.
SuperTuxKart is one of those games that has been in development for years and years. It was originally forked from TuxKart by passionate people with overly optimistic plans. Looks like it's come a long way now though.
Another similar project is https://www.supertux.org/.
Tux Racer is another notable Tux game, but it's commercial fork meant it felt less collaborative than the others.