Your PC's Specifications / Hardware

[Administrator]

Oh man, for sure. That would be pretty sweet.

Tremendous! I've sent you guys the Windows build for now, but as soon as I'm ready to cut a Linux version, you will be my test subject.

I actually believe really strongly in supporting Linux builds for games. I'm not a fan at all of the intrusive EULAs Microsoft has been moving toward of late, and I've got serious privacy concerns about Windows 10. I'd already be using Ubuntu for everything, if only games / other software would work natively there.

The only thing I can really do about the issue is to try to make sure the software I produce runs natively on Linux. Of course, that's easier said than done, especially for an organization as small as Voyager Games. The architecture choices I made when first designing Outer Colony were made to facilitate potential Linux and Mac support, so the additional testing requirement imposed by multi-OS support should be the only real impediment we face. I'm hoping we can overcome it.

[kashire]

I actually believe really strongly in supporting Linux builds for games. I'm not a fan at all of the intrusive EULAs Microsoft has been moving toward of late, and I've got serious privacy concerns about Windows 10. I'd already be using Ubuntu for everything, if only games / other software would work natively there.

I'd highly recommend using something other than Ubuntu, if privacy is your concern. A lot of friends of mine have told me horror stories about what goes on with canonical, and I've seen how they've purposely put in spyware in a lot of their proprietary software. I was recently using Windows 10 for a few months and it was not a fun deal.. It crashed a lot, because I had disabled all of the tracking stuff on there.

Anyways, I believe you guys can do it and I'll gladly test it out as much as you need. I just made a Windows 7 partition on one of my drives, so I'll be able to play in the meantime.

[Administrator]

I'd highly recommend using something other than Ubuntu, if privacy is your concern. A lot of friends of mine have told me horror stories about what goes on with canonical, and I've seen how they've purposely put in spyware in a lot of their proprietary software.

Fascinating!! I'll be the first to admit that I've never been much of a Linux expert, but I've always gravitated toward Ubuntu in my home use, just because it's been billed as easy to use. I've found it very forgiving and easy to pick up, so it's been my distro of choice to this point.

Has Fedora worked well for you? Is there a distro you'd recommend that provides a good balance of privacy and ease of use, right out of the box? Aside from the limited capacity to game on Linux, the biggest thing that's prevented me from embracing it more thoroughly has been my limited knowledge of how to use the OS. The more simple / graphical / intuitive the distro, the more likely I'll be to fully embrace it.

[kashire]

I find fedora to be really simple, but there are a couple of nuances that require a little google-fu. Although, there are plenty of guides out there.

The easiest one I've used is the one I put on Julie's laptop, Crunchbang. It's a debian-based distro. It's extremely straight forward, reliable, and since it's not exactly "bleeding-edge", you don't have to run updates daily. (Although, you can and probably should)

In fact, debian based distros are typically straight forward with encryption as well, now that I think about it. My laptop was running Arch, but I decided to opt into using Crunchbang++ because you can encrypt with LVM pretty easily. If you ever get bored one day and want to mess with distros, I'd highly recommend looking into crunchbang++, Fedora, and even debian itself. They're all pretty simple to put together. I'd recommend staying away from Arch Linux, just because you have to install things yourself.. It's very reliable, but setting it up is always a problem for me, because I always forget to do something. Although, I can say this, if you can get Arch installed and up to what you want, you'll never have problems again lol

On the topic of ubuntu, it's definitely easy-mode to install / maintain, but I've never been much of a fan of the philosophy behind it.. Although, It's one of the best for running servers with though, it's how I used to run my bots/scripts on a VPS lol

[Tchey]

Hi !

*** My system (from 2015, no hardware upgrad since) ***

I sometimes use PlayOnLinux/WINE to play a few Windows games, but the vaste majority of them are Linux-friendly.

Linux Mint 18.2 64bits Xfce
Intel Core i5 4590 (4 x 3,3 GHz)
MSI GeForce GTX 960 @ 2 Go
Drivers NVIDIA 375
8 Go DIMM DDR3 PC12800
Screen 16/9 24" LED 1920x1080
Keyboard bépo (dvorak fr) / Mouse Logitech MX518
Joystick Logitech T16000 / Gamepad XboxOne USB

[Administrator]

Hi !

*** My system (from 2015, no hardware upgrad since) ***

I sometimes use PlayOnLinux/WINE to play a few Windows games, but the vaste majority of them are Linux-friendly.

Linux Mint 18.2 64bits Xfce
Intel Core i5 4590 (4 x 3,3 GHz)
MSI GeForce GTX 960 @ 2 Go
Drivers NVIDIA 375
8 Go DIMM DDR3 PC12800
Screen 16/9 24" LED 1920x1080
Keyboard bépo (dvorak fr) / Mouse Logitech MX518
Joystick Logitech T16000 / Gamepad XboxOne USB

Excellent, man! I'm excited to see another Linux user. I hope I can someday build a proper Linux installer / auto-updater and really support the OS, as I'm a big fan of Linux gaming. Your machine has great specs, too, and it should power through Outer Colony.

[Asgarus]

Windows 7 Ultimate
Intel Core i5 2500K (4 x 3,3 GHz)
NVidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti
16 GB RAM
BenQ 16/9 28" Full HD

Just recently bought it from a friend. I had a crappy about 7 years old notebook before.
Gonna upgrade it piece by piece. Or maybe I'm gonna save up some more money and get a completely new one (new case, mainboard,cpu, graphics card... that's all I need when I think about it. HDD and RAM are good enough. Maybe a SSD. And definitely a second monitor^^)

[Administrator]

Windows 7 Ultimate
Intel Core i5 2500K (4 x 3,3 GHz)
NVidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti
16 GB RAM
BenQ 16/9 28" Full HD

Just recently bought it from a friend. I had a crappy about 7 years old notebook before.
Gonna upgrade it piece by piece. Or maybe I'm gonna save up some more money and get a completely new one (new case, mainboard,cpu, graphics card... that's all I need when I think about it. HDD and RAM are good enough. Maybe a SSD. And definitely a second monitor^^)

That's a solid build, man. Congrats on your purchase. This is actually pretty similar to the machine I used for most of the development work I've done on Outer Colony to this point. The 16GB of RAM in particular is crisp. I like it.

And the switch to SSD is amazing. Builds in Eclipse were getting torturously slow for Outer Colony. The code base with protocol buffers included is about half a million lines, and hard-drive intensive features like auto-complete were timing out. I got a Samsung 950 Pro SSD, and all those operations became instantaneous again, as they should be. If you ever look into getting an SSD, I recommend this guy here, or its larger brother:
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-950-PRO- ... ng+950+pro

Probably the best $180 I've ever spent.

I like that you're still on Windows 7, too. A part of me is afraid that this was the zenith of the Microsoft OS, and that everything will suck progressively harder from here on. When Microsoft released problematic OSs before (Windows ME, Vista, etc.), they followed them with something good (Windows XP, Windows 7). But they don't seem to understand that virtually no one likes Windows 8 or 10. It's like they're insanely hell-bent on turning my desktop experience into a mobile one, which I don't freakin' want. And now, it's not just the bogus, irritating layout of the OS, but the EULA, the data gathering nonsense - I'm not a big fan of all that. Ride that Windows 7 train as long as you can, I'd say. My next desktop may legitimately be a Linux box.

[Asgarus]

Yeah, my best friend (who I got the PC from) got a new almost high-end one and an M2 with it. It takes 8,5 seconds, even less with fastboot, from pushing the button until Windows 10 is started, which is insane

And yes, Eclipse was barely usable on the laptop. It ran better when both, Eclipse and the laptop, were younger^^

I will keep using Windows 7 until it stops supporting the hardware I want to use. And probably even after that I will keep it in a VM.

The problem with Windows 10 (and I keep reading that all over the Internet AND from friends) are the massive problems with older games.
I love to play old games, and if that isn't possible without massive problems, there is no reason for me at all to switch to Windows 10.

I mean, it doesn't seem to be that bad of an OS, compared to 8.1, and I hear some good things about it from friends, but it's just not enough to make the effort and switch.

Maybe I will get Linux, too, at some point, with the aforementioned Windows 7 VM, but that again depends on hardware drivers and stuff.

We'll see what the future brings.