The Games SIG is dead. Should it be revived?

In my adventures in exploring and documenting gaming on Fedora in 2021, I’ve noticed the SIG is pretty much dead. I don’t have very much experience in the project, but am curious on what would need to be done, and how it could be revived? Would anybody more experienced be willing to do that, or at least guide me or others through. Is there even a demand for such a thing?

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I have started looking into matter. We should hopefully find a few more persons interested in this as well. Currently most up to date info can be found in SIGs/Games - Fedora Project Wiki
Those interested can write a note here and join the mailing list as well.

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Alright, sounds good. IMO this would be the perfect time to move away from mailing lists to Discourse, but we can play that by year.

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Sure we can do that if so desired, need to update instructions for it to the documentations.

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:+1:

I’ve got work to finish but will try to begin helping out as soon as I can!

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Personally I’d very much prefer the mailing list over Discourse.

Either way, reviving the SIG would be good. I guess the starting questions are: what are the most serious issues currently? (What prevents the SIG from functioning?) And what would be the goals for the immediate future?

I can understand that, and it is definitely not out of the picture, but I believe as the project moves to more modern platforms it may be in our best interest. Who knows, maybe a little more time would change your mind.

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On that note, here is what I think is holding the SIG back currently:

  • Utter lack of documentation, and the little that there is rarely links back to the SIG (Magazine Articles etc.)
  • Lack of motivation (both written and spoken) for gamers to choose Fedora as a platform; Publicity
  • The strange place gaming can exist in Fedora’s packaging and general policies surrounding free software.
  • Lack of a centralized place for the community to work together and talk about gaming on Fedora and Linux (where I’m hoping Discourse and, to certain extents, the existing Discord) can come in.
  • Always need more contributors. Always need more packagers.
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  1. I would love to see the actively maintained list of games which work on Fedora.

One such source is a Wine DB: https://appdb.winehq.org/ But there are not many games. And with many publishers supporting Linux now, it is important to maintain such list for native Linux games as well.

For example I play many games from GOG.com on my Fedora 33 laptop, but there is currently no place to share this information.

If we make such a list we can turn it into a source for articles. Something like a regular update “new games which were added to the list in last three months”.

We should probably consider building Fedora 33 GOG Remix cou

  1. Bring gaming to Fedora events

Last time there was a Minecraft social event at Fedora Nest conference. And though I would prefer it to be replaced with open-source Minetest game-server, generally bringing some interactive gaming fun to events like Flock or Devconf works well.

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I would love to see the actively maintained list of games which work on Fedora.

https://www.protondb.com/ May be what you are looking for.

We should probably consider building Fedora 33 GOG Remix

While this isn’t a bad idea, a “gaming” environment would feel somewhat stale without the inclusion of the monolithic steam environment. I think better documentation (self plug see: Learning Fedora Linux Through Gaming - #5 by nickavem) and a better end user experience regarding gaming would be much more impactful. Perhaps we could expand the existing Games spin with tools like Wine and Lutris, to make it feel less like a demo of sorts.

Bring gaming to Fedora events

While I am relatively new to the Fedora Project, if I have learned anything from my experiences in open source, community involvement is key, and this is as a good a way as any to bring light onto the expanding world of Linux Gaming, Fedora Gaming, and FOSS alternatives.

In my opinion the Gaming SIG would need to ask itself a fundamental question regarding its identity. Fedora, as a distro, holds quite strong opinions on FLOSS and quite a lot of software that’s freely available in other distros is not present in the official Fedora repos, but rather provided by RPM Fusion. As such, it seems natural that a “gaming spin”, if we wanted to make one, would focus on FLOSS games. On the other hand, though, it would be foolish to assume that, for most people, the games in the repos are anything but toys, with the “real deal” being Steam.

Of course, Steam isn’t the only video game shop out there, what with Epic, GOG and itch.io. The last one has an official FLOSS app, and the second-last a couple of unofficial ones, so I guess these could satisfy a “FLOSS only” requirement.

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That all depends, doesn’t it? My thought is, two or three years down the road, which one is going to provide more useful archival information, in a format readily searched, parsed, and understood? I’ve seen how regular maillist archives are kept, in format where you can readily retrieve information, follow a thread, etc. If a replacement doesn’t provide an archive equivalently functional or better, it’s not a replacement. I don’t know if Discourse can do this or not.

I have created a framework for games sig (revived) documentation at:

https://pagure.io/gaming/documentation/

(When ready it will be added to Fedora Documentation :: Fedora Docs)

Contributions and ideas are welcome.

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I wrote it all wrong. By GoG Remix i actually meant the “GOG Mix”, i.e. list of games compatible with Fedora which you would maintain directly on their site. But it seems they have removed that functionality:

So basically the generic idea is - try to bring the “works on Fedora” label as close as possible to the sources (stores, game databases and so on), where people look for games.

proton.db is a good example as well, even though I personally avoid Steam platform, and I would prefer data to be stored on the independent resource, I think that Games SIG needs to be open about various possibilities and maintain as much links as it can.

The ethics of Steam as a platform is a conversation of its own lol.

Similar to what @suve was saying, we need to push as much free gaming software as we can, while also knowing our limits. On that note, I see no issue documenting non-free platforms, as long as we focus on free alternatives above all else.

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I agree. There is no need to fight against non-free options or DRM-covered games. Rather we should be communicating very clearly what are the differences and provide options to let users make their own knowledge-based decisions.

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I’m not sure what you want in a list of games that works in Fedora. Take the protondb for example, Lego Ninjago is listed as Gold and .Hack// G.U. Last Recode is listed at Platinum. Neither works on my laptop probably due to the Intel graphics not Fedora. What would “works in Fedora” mean? Would we be restricted to the least graphically intensive games that we can ensure work on all graphics cards? Most Linux games I’ve tried just work. With the number of games out there is there value in a massive list of games.

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While I agree, maybe they mean getting in contact with upstream publishers? Pretty much all games are designed for Ubuntu right now.

They may be designed with Ubuntu in mind but how many don’t work under Fedora. I’ve found one, Disc Room. I still got it running thanks to gamingonlinux. I don’t see value in a list of games if it is simply a list of all linux games minus a handful.

Actually Nuclear Throne didn’t work either now that I think about it but the windows version did run fine in wine.

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:+1: +1 on this.