cai

…and, if you actually owned The Crew (20 million people did), even outside of France, the French regulator accepts complaints from international customers. Which is super unusual, and very valuable to the campaign…

The campaign plans to get France’s consumer rights agency to rule against Ubisoft’s killing of The Crew, making game publishers have to leave games at least partially functional when online service ends (or else risk legal action & costs).

France has strong consumer protections, Europe doesn’t treat EULAs as very legally serious, and Ubisoft was selling the game mere months before they “discontinued online service”, which also stopped the single player mode from working.

And France’s consumer protection agency accepts complaints from international customers, too, in English.

So, no, don’t just keep your head down & “play old games”. This is a perfect chance to actually fix shit.

Are you sure? It seems like WDDM has a user-mode “User-mode display driver” - which looks to me like the HW-specific part of Mesa: it’s invoked by the D3D runtime - and a “Display miniport driver”, which is in the kernel.

See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/windows-vista-and-later-display-driver-model-operation-flow

That said, no doubt Linux’s ability to reset drivers is way, way behind… We’re coming up on 20 years since Windows could recover from a graphics driver reset reliably without losing the desktop, and only partial hacks exist on Linux today.

I really need to get around to building a sample HTML page to show how unsafe having WebGL enabled on Linux browsers is. One long shader, and your desktop is a goner.

If you use any accelerated graphics (GTK4 anyone?), you cannot and must not bundle all your dependencies.

Conceptually, graphics drivers have two parts: The part in the kernel (e.g. amdgpu), and the part loaded as a library from the system into the application (e.g. Mesa).

Mesa - or any other GL/Vulkan implementation - is loaded from the system into the application as a library. Mesa relies on system libc, system LLVM (!!!), a particular libc++, etc.

If you ship libGL (and LLVM etc), you must re-release your software with upgraded deps whenever new graphics cards are released (and should whenever bugs are fixed). Your software is literally incompatible with (some) newer computers.

For the proprietary Nvidia libGL - which, again relies on system glibc - you can’t legally include it.

Flatpak solves this by separating out ‘graphics driver libraries’ as a unique type of runtime, and having a shitload of special rules & custom hacks to check the system libGL, open source or proprietary, maybe substitute a Flatpak provided libGL, with all the deps that libGL needs, and make it compatible with whatever app & whatever app runtime.

Actually correctly solving the libGL debacle is half the value of Flatpak to me.