Hi!
The package includes 18 games with diverse gameplays instead of one, and it is 7.8 times lighter than 2048-qt, making it 144 times better!
it includes 2-player games, 1-player games, puzzly games, arcade games, colorful games, games in between, mouse support, adjustable AI etc. I play them all the time and it never gets boring as I just move to another game.
As one of Lubuntu’s goals is to provide a graphical user interface, I am not for this change, but I am also curious to see what the community thinks.
So if you had to choose just one game package as the default in Lubuntu (and keeping in mind you can always install whatever you want regardless of the default), which do you think would be the best choice?
Bonus points if you leave a comment as to why.
Note the binary choice. At this point nothing else is up for discussion. However, if you also want to make a suggestion that aligns with Lubuntu’s goals (including being relatively lightweight and preferably being in Qt), feel free to leave a comment.
I am not sure that we need any games installed by default.
If the user wants games, they’ve got a search engine. A lot springs to mind when someone says Lubuntu and exactly none of those things are games.
They just mean more testing - for game(s) that are likely to be ignored by most users.
(I don’t mind testing them, but I am very unlikely to test 16 different games every day.)
Hi, and thanks for reading the essay. These are answers to commonly posed questions when discussing the default games in OSes. It probably would convince you as it convinced people in IRC.
People could install MS-DOS or LFS and install everything themselves, but they install your distro.
The whole point of such distros is that you don’t have to look for software or config basic stuff the moment you need a word processor, bluetooth, webcam or a picture viewer.
A good OS makes for a pareto efficiency between image size and utility for the potential user.
There are three aspects:
I cited bluetooth as an example of why pre-installed programs are neccessary. But as far as I have seen around myself, there has been a circumstance that has come up even more often, throughout the millenia: Boredom, and lack of Internet connection.
Google has noticed that and addressed it with the dinosaur game they added to Chrome, which was pretty well recieved.
Boredom is a mainstay of human existence, and play is one of our ancient strategies to keep our brains stimulated. A loading bar with a game being around is much a better memory than a loading bar without one. Getting bored could entirely affect the mood or course of action one person takes through a day.
The default games got use and people do want them. In the days where default games were more common, and even right now, I saw people playing them all the time, be it that guy in his store playing Windows7 chess, or that other guy playing the nokia snake in subway.
Imagine you are a parent wanting to get your kid into computers (as many of us got into computers because of the games), for freeing your phone, getting them away from social media or preventing them from asking you to buy that game console, but you don’t know the role the games could play or don’t know that particular game which could captivate your kid. This is a very common occurence that wastes a lot of lost potential, money and greenhouse gases into buying useless read-only touchscreens and evil profit-sucking adware, the default games could come in and save the day, just as much as they did for feature phones and old Windows. It is worth the 300KB.
But it often rarely gets used as there is not anything interesting in there that would keep them in. Keeping-people-in quite affects the total attention being paid by the user, and them trying other stuff in there. Social media did make use of that with adding infinite scroll.
And it does really work. They keep people in, when they don’t have any other interesting things to do, and makes them look more around. I often went back to the KolibriOS and TempleOS VMs I had installed just to play their games. Even friends and onlookers asked me for their names because of that. It is worth the 300KB.
Whenever people encounter anything, ranging from food to people or tech products, the most part of their conception of the subject is the impresssion they get in the first few moments and minutes of their encounter.
Once the person installs the OS, they very often don’t have anything interesting to do immediately after the installation. The most interesting thing is the novelty of the OS.
They browse the menus, and one of the first things they would click there, are the games. Good games therefore play a important part in the first impression the user gets.
Some would say that people don’t know our distro for its games, but they would know if it had interesting games, just as much as WindowsXP is still remembered for them. I have seen people mention the games when talking of a distro. It is worth the 300KB.
It is worth the 300KB.
Also you probably have default games already, these are just better ones.
As for testing, I don’t know your testing requirements but I could easily add a automatic testing option that moves you through everywhere in the games with one click if you want.
Hi,
It may not be included in the purpose of Lubuntu, but considering the effects of introductory education for Unix, I think nsbdgame is a good choice.
If we’re aiming for a GUI, ease of use, or something user-friendly like Ubuntu or Mint, I think a GUI game must be better than a terminal game.
I like lightweight linux ditros as a kind of pure *nix, so select nbsdgame.
It could pretty much be a GUI application the moment I compile it for Xorg (there is the lib already and that could be done in the moment) but it would hardly make any practical difference other than just making it less versatile to run, record, etc.
Also if it is text-based, so is 2048, and if it is not themed, so is 2048, and that is pretty normal and expected of games. Look at WinXP pinball and solitaire for example.
GUI vs. TUI is just a distinction we programmers make, from a user perspective those are visual games that don’t involve “command-line” etc.
These are just your normal games using mouse and arrow keys.
This request was brought to the Lubuntu Council. The Lubuntu Council voted unanimously to NOT include nbsdgames in Lubuntu as a default.