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What Linux Distribution is the Best for Games?
CodeGeekGuy asks: "I've been thinking of doing the big switcheroo from Windows to Linux. I have, in the past, had various levels of success using Linux, but I generally have to give up as soon as I feel like playing a game. I've done dual booting before, but find it a pain if you're waiting for something to finish and just want a quick game of Half Life 2 or WoW.
I'm willing to give this another shot (as I hear that Cedega plays HL2 and WoW quite nicely). I've used Mandrake and Fedora Core and even Redhat, is there another distribution out there that is the best distro to use to get Cedega (and ultimately games) to work well? "
Your still going to be bound by Cedega's working game list only. That aside, Ive had fairly good success with Suse, Fedora, and Gentoo.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
If you have the patience to set it up intially, I think Gentoo might be your best bet, as the flexibility of Gentoo and it's packaging system is second to none. Compiling the initial system shouldn't be a serious problem on any machine beefy enough to run modern games - my last stage-one complete rebuild from scratch took less than a day, including KDE.
I game, therefore I am...
I've had great luck with Ubuntu, Suse, or Mandrake. I've had bad luck with Fedora Core. Other than that I really couldn't speak for any other distros as these are the ones I've tried to game with.
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
No problem.
God...while your at it, can you go on ahead and actually give me a list of games that have native ports? Who I can pay money to, to get them, other than Loki, whos not freelance, last I heard?
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
Gentoo is by far the best distro for gaming. I've used just about every major distro there is. Gentoo is the only one where I could reliably make games work. I've got nvidia drivers, alsa, the doom3 demo, emulators. Heck, I've got Mechwarrior 2 running in DOSbox on this thing. It didn't work when I tried it on fedora.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
As much as I hate to say it, if you want to play games that are designed for Windows, the best thing to do is boot into Windows. No matter how good Cedega gets, it will still be an attempt to imitate the environment that the game was designed for, and will always have some performane lag. Not only that, but if it is a graphically intensive video game, as most are, you will want the best possible video drivers for direct rendering and such, and in that respect, Linux is nowhere nere as adept as Windows yet. But, on the bright side, since the game is full screen, you won't have any of the annoying widgets like the 'start' menu around to remind you what OS you're in. If, however, you still want to play your game on Linux, I don't think that the distribution really matters. What does matter is that you are using the vendor supplied proprietary driver, either from nVidia or from ATI, rather than the open source equivalent, which is not nearly as good at demanding rendering tasks. Most distributions, including Fedora and Redhat, only include the open source version, so be sure to go to your video card maker's website and download their linux drivers.
Lets see, every unreal tournamant has had a native client. Doom 3 was much more smoother in linux than windows. Neverwinter Nights also has a native client. Of course your against Loki for some reason... so I guess I shouldn't mention Simcity 3000, or any of the other games they have ported.
Thats why i experience a 2 FPS drop? You just pulled that number out of your ass.
It doesn't emulate. It's a wrapper - it translates the calls to the appropriate API, rather than drawing it in software with occasional help from your hardware(as would be emulation).
But, you do have a point in that using them doesn't push devs to develope cross-platform. But, neither does the small market share making noise.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I very much disagree. The games Linux gamers want to play by and large are not available on Linux. With wine and cedega, at least some of those games are available. Why keep around a Windows partition if you're happy with 70% performance? What added incentive do game developers have to develop native Linux games if you're just going to keep your native Windows partition around anyways?
I say we support the emulation efforts. Through the support of a strong community, the emulation quality and performance will improve. The more the quality of emulation improves, the less likely gamers are to keep that Windows parition around. If enough gamers drop their Windows partition, then game developers will begin to be penalized financially for not writing code that is compatible with the emulators. When that happens, game developers will look at Linux as a viable platform to support, initially in emulation and perhaps eventually as a native platform.
Neverwinter Nights, UT and its variants, Doom and its variants, Quake and its variants, Wolfenstein and its variants, Kohan and its variants, (all of which I own and support, if someone makes a linux port sold with a product I preorder it IMMEDIATELY). I can only hope and pray for Dragonshard to have a linux installer to go with it, what else have I left out? IF and only IF atari continues its current motif, then great. But RTSs like Age series, Total War, Empire Earth ( that Titan 2.0 engine is the shiz ), So I guess I should give up on playing RTSs because none of the decent ones come with a decent native installer. Freeciv forever.....woohoo.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
Thank you Hal, I felt like I was the only one to jump up and defend Transgaming and its efforts. I dont feel like the only lone ranger here.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
If you knew what games that were available why the hell did you ask? You seem to be in the same boat I am, except for the small issue of thinking there is nothing wrong with supporting these "emulation/wrapper" projects. I on the other hand see a big problem with them. Mostly in the "why should we if they will be happy running our product at a performance loss and without support " area of game publishing.
Perhaps if you want the publishers to realize they ARE infact loosing sales by not supporting an entire OS then yes you should give up on them. Unless you want the publishers to contiune thinking, "Why should we make a native port, they can just run it in a wrapper, then we wont have to provide support to them either." that is. I hate civilization all together, and am majorly bummed by there not being any good real times available as well, but I'm not about to pay a company to flat out ignore my operating system of choice either.
Let me put it this way:
You are buying a vehicle. You want something fun, fast and sporty. You go and buy a 3/4 ton pickup. Mistake!
Select your OS based on what you want to run. If what you are running is "Windows Games", examine the first word -- Windows -- and run them on that platform. If you want to run Linux, go and buy VMWARE, and run Linux on the same box. No big sweat, and no particular problem.
Or, use the money you would spend on VMWARE, and buy another box for Linux.
I am sure that you will get a lot of "Red Hat sucks", "Gentoo rules", "SuSe rules", "Mandrake is the schiznit" answers.
Ignore them. Again, pick a REASON as to why you want to use Linux -- is it a hobby? if so, Gentoo or "Linux from Scratch" may be suitable. Do you want to do real work? Red Hat/Fedora Core or SuSe. Whatever, its your choice.
If you *do* explore VMWARE, you may want to pick a VMWARE supported system.
Anyway, the OS is a commodity (at least in the Linux world, with Microsoft, it tends to be forced on you based on applications -- it's the platform). So don't sweat it.
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Cygwin has its uses, but it's just not a substitute for Linux. You don't switch to Linux because you want to run a particular Linux-only program -- those are actually pretty rare. You switch to Linux because you're tired of the flakiness, lack of security, and nonconfigurability of Windows.
Ok Windex, untie your panties, and try to drink some Herbal tea, mebbe itll help the PMS your experiencing. Then, calm down, go out and give Transgaming techs a few measley dollars of your money, instead of waiting for the industry to catch up, because while largely decentralized as it is, almost segemented in places, if a wrapper/emulator allows me to play with a few , VERY FEW, displaced frames, then im happy, and you should be too. Break out the Yanni or Enya or something, and try to chill. Anger Management buddy, it works...trust me.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
...you kill a puppy. It's true.
See: 10 Points to Consider Before Buying Cedega.
Heh.
i run Gentoo and had no trouble getting Cedega working.
that said, i also use Con Kolivas' kernel patchset. initially i had problems, but we came up with a nice list of audio tips to help get things working right.
i'm waiting right now for some work Ingo Molnar has indicated he's going to do that could help Wine out dramatically. be prepared to recompile your kernel several times in the near future.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Hmm... looking at things from that way makes a lot of sense. I would then simply ask anyone playing with an emulator (wrapper) to at least write one email a week to the publishers asking that games be written in such a way, and eventually givin native ports as not everything reports home and says "Hey this guy is running the game in linux using an emulator" to provide statistical evidence of not using windows.
Maybe one of you can answer this slightly off-topic question I've had for quite some time.
Games like R6:3 Raven Shield use the unreal engine, and should basicly just be some mods and graphic packages. Why are game like this with an engine that is fully supported not being "ported". I used "ported" because it wouldn't seem a real port is needed since the major component of the game is already available. Graphics wouldn't cause cross-platform issues, and the engine should be taking care of loading the mods. So why aren't these types of games automaticly native to both windows and linux? It seems like the publishers of such games would have to go out of their way to make it non-functional outside of windows.
KVM
Just get a KVM switch and hook it up to a linux box and a windows box. Problem solved.
try zen linux, then apt-get install wine.
I recommend SuSE here, simply because of its driver support. It installs the nvidia drivers at install time if you have a net connection, and provides a good GUI to control all of that.
:p
:)
One click enabling of direct rendering (3d acceleration) is something that I think would be a godsend to most new users.
Also SuSE's exellent documentation cannot be ignored.
On the cedega front I suggest you do try this! It plays Counter Strike via Steam perfectly here, though I can't comment on WOW or anything like that.
I've heard Half Life 2 support is pretty good, and there are a lot of revies on the net that show it's working pretty well. In fact its cedega that's tempting me to go and buy HL2 - an interesting fact since I don't own a windows pc
The best thing to do is to just *try* all these things. SuSE isn't free, but there is an FTP install that should cover everything you need for gaming (the commercial extensions wont help you here and the drivers for nvidia are downloaded at install time or during a later online update).
The only problem with SuSE is a lack of a good package manager, but the installation of Apt For SuSE (http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/) solves any problems here.
As for stability I'd recommend SuSE over Mandrake, in usablilty i'd recommend it over just about everything, and I'd recommend it for gamers over the other distros.
I'm happy to answer any questions.
(I recommend other distros for other things (eg slackware or debian for servers) but thats not the point. For home users its SuSE all the way)
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com
I'm not too familiar with the unreal engine, but is there a way for the end-user to integrate the mods and graphics packages into the Linux unreal engine? Is there some code in the mod that is not cross-platform? How much liberty was taken with the engine? Will the developers for the R6 game (RedStorm?) answer your question?
Other than those considerations, the only other reason I can think of is lack of interest on the game developer's part. They see $"cost to do QA testing on Linux version" > $"loss from Linux-only gamers". That may be true or it may not be true. The only way for them to be sure is for the gamers to take your advice and send an e-mail or phone call or letter to the game developer and encourage them to create games for your OS (and maybe even point out how easy this could be in the R6 example).
Not suse 9.1 personal. It seems to detect many cards, but not my ATI Radeon 9800 pro. They have a page on their ftp site with instructions on downloading a newer driver and installing a kernel patch, but what a pain. Even now I can't use SAX2 without having to hand edit the XFree86 file afterwards to re-enable hardware 3D acceleration. Also, text isn't rendering correctly in a couple of the 3D games either (ie, not visible).
I'm not too familiar with the unreal engine, but is there a way for the end-user to integrate the mods and graphics packages into the Linux unreal engine? Is there some code in the mod that is not cross-platform? How much liberty was taken with the engine? Will the developers for the R6 game (RedStorm?) answer your question?
I have no idea. But it just seems to me that working with an engine thats already cross platform would require very very little effort to make your game also cross platform. Was just wondering if anyone had any logical ideas, other then because of cost, because there shouldn't be any extra cost when your lisencing an engine that already supports the two platforms.
Install Linux, get a console, and simplify. The Xbox has or is getting 75% of what's decent on the PC. Joypads take five minutes to learn unless you're mentally deficient.
What Linux Distribution is the Best for Games?
And which Lotus is best for off-roading?
When I get home I game and have grown tired of trying to get linux to run the games i want to play, AND don't have the budget to buy a second virtual OS.
SOOOOOO
I recommend a KVM switch. Run lin on one box and win on the other.
AND ATI suck as it is THERE fault they have crappy support (if you can find any) for linux.
I feel like a jilted lover. 5 years ago I swore by ATI but now I only allow myself to have one ATI card at a time so I can use linux on the other pcs.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
As a longtime Cedega (wineX) user I've had best luck under Mandrake in general. Suse was my preferred distro prior but as of the last year I've had nothing but trouble gaming under it... Fedora seemed to do ok, but the most solid so far (currently playing the two games you mentioned) has been Mandrake for gaming purposes.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
It doesn't emulate.
Windex82 never said it did. Note her scare quotes around "emulation".
rather than drawing it in software with occasional help from your hardware(as would be emulation).
That sentence demonstrates that you don't know the definition of "emulation". If you'd like to learn it, you could either check a dictionary, or read about other emulation projects such as UltraHLE (Ask yourself if that one does all its drawing in software)
Heh, I know it's not to everybody's liking, but I think the manual install process of Gentoo is actually one of it's strengths. I learned more about Linux in the two days it took me to get Gentoo set up the first time than I did after months of playing around with RedHat and Mandrake and the like.
I game, therefore I am...
I was just going to mention that, but I'm astounded that this guy is yet another certifiable case of Mandrake Expatriate Syndrome.
The guy who wrote that is a freakin genius.
Here ya go
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Everyone using cedega or wine are just giving the devs reasons NOT to make native ports of their games.
Because God knows we developers are leaping at the chance to develop for an OS with a small marketshare and may of whose users have a disdain for commercial software.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Okay, well, maybe not native. I use slackware and SuSE 9.2. I haven't been able to get ATI's drivers to work for Slack for almost a year now, but SuSE's downloads work well if you follow their instructions EXACTLY! I'd say go native for gaming though. There's flight simulators, Seach and Rescue, and a good number of others available. Also, playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on Windows yields about 80fps at 1024x786 on my RV350AP, in linux, it's over 100fps, occasionally spiking to about 120 even with all of the effects maxed out. I tried playing the windows port of ET under cedega, and I was getting about 60fps with much less effects turned on. That's just over half of the usual performance I get from the ported linux version. If you can help it, get a ported linux game, or even a native linux game. First, showing support for native linux games shows developers that there's a market out there for linux gamers.. Second, they just work better than trying to emulate another OS on top of an OS that's already running.
Evil Walrus >83=
Contributed back their full patchset, no. But a quick search reveals 1736 CVS commits to the WINE tree by Transgaming employees. Also note that ReWind is maintained by a Transgaming employee. Finally, remember that WINE's license at the time expressly permitted this behavior (and ReWind's still does).
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Things are improving, however. For graphics/sound/control, use SDL.
For desktop integration, go with the Freedesktop.org menu spec.
And for package management, there's RPM, standardized by all LSB-compliant distributions.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Uh, an automated install would just set up your system for you. The compiling part ("shit scroll by for hours") is all automated already.
Gentoo's "manual" install is basically paritioning and mounting the partitions you want to use and then extracting a giant tarball onto that structure. You then need to configure your fstab, network settings, compile a kernel, and install a bootloader.
Once you're done with that, then you move on to the automated part. The entire point to portage is to automate the compilation process.
You could, conceivably, manually install Debian or RedHat in the same way if you wanted to.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I run Ubuntu and play WoW all the time. While games don't run as fast as they do nativly in Windows, the convenience is undeniable. I'd recommend any debian or rpm based distrobution because Transgaming distributes Cedega packaged with both of those.
Life is offtopic.
As I see it, unless you have your *very first ever* gaming computer, there is no reason to not run Windows in addition to Linux. Eventually you will get a new one, and when you do, your old one can serve as your everyday linux box, with no dual booting, and only the additional cost of the KVM switch.
if you're wanting an OS to play games, I'd say try Gentoo, and maybe check out Ubuntu as well.
I'm a Gentoo guy, but I totally understand why people wouldn't want to go through the long install process. This is why VidaLinux exists. VidaLinux is essentially a precompiled Gentoo (with Gnome 2.8, etc), installed with Redhat's Anaconda Installer. works amazingly well Full working Gentoo distribution up and running in under an hour.
don't want to compile future packages? that's allright. just check out Project Chinstrap, which has precompiled packages for Gentoo. Easy as pie.
Ubuntu has its share of issues, but overall, it's a top-notch choice as well. both should work amazingly well for games.
Actually, XP is very stable and is just as secure as anything connected to the network if you understand basic security (i.e. virus protection, firewalls, not downloading stupid stuff). If you are playing games, XP is the way to go. Linux is great because it gives you access to stuff you can never go near in Windows, so I will grant you configurability. But they are different tools for different jobs. The guy wants to live in some magic world where you can join the two together. Someday maybe...right now, the guy who suggested the KVM got it right.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
If you're really thinking about dumping Windows, have you considered OS X? While there aren't anywhere near as many games on OS X as there are for Windows, the ones we do get are quality titles with native support, like World of WarCraft, Halo, The Sims, etc. You can find a pretty good list of games at Apple's web site. You can easily dip your toes into the water by ordering a Mac mini.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
maybe he understands the more people using wine on linux means a better chance of game companies realizing people use linux for games and start making a native linux version
I disagree with you. I feel that if developers see a large enough number of people playing their game using a less than optimal solution, they'll come to the logical conclusion that there are even more who aren't playing because of lack of support. Once the number of people using cedega is large enough, a developer will start to consider linux a profitable enough segment to spend the time/money/effort to improve the experience, and thus keep them buying that developer's games. Their smartest route is most likely to make a linux port rather than rely on another company to make their games function.
I'm certain that what you suggest is a smart route to go. If every linux user refuses to play games unless they're supported natively, then developers don't see a market waiting for their games to be ported, they see a total lack of interest. They have no way to gauge whether spending the resources to make a linux port will be profitable. I wonder if any of the games out for linux now (Unreal Tournament is the big one that comes to mind) would have been ported if no one had shown interest in getting it and other games working through "emulation." I think when you say "Everyone using cedega or wine are just giving the devs reasons NOT to make native ports of their games," that the opposite is the case. Cedega and wine give developers lots of reasons to make native ports, and those reasons are each and every customer. Once they have you as a customer, they'll be more likely to want to make you happy, and spend the money to do so.
Why stop at the commercial only ones (besides that's what he did ask for) when there are many very good free games available
Full Icculus Game List
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
That's pretty untrue. Linux is as good a platform, if not better to write games for. The difference is market share, and that is all.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Jesus loves you, I think you suck
There more then a few people that support Transgaming's work, but the anti-wine groups tend to be louder.
I've been a subscriber for over 21 months and support their work, as it does NOT make companies not want to port to Linux. That is a decision usually made long before the product hits the shelves, ideally in the planning stage before any code is written.
Those that say company A won't port game B to Linux because it runs fine with Cedega are delusional and use that as an excuse. Transgaming is looked down on because they have "stolen the code" and "don't return their changes".
The GPL at the time of the WineX fork was completely within the rights and they do give back. They are also legally bound to not redistribute the copy protection code, other then that all the code of freely available in their CVS.
If you don't like it, don't use it as we don't need to hear the same hallow excuses over and over again.
All the 'proof' I've seen has been bogus and nothing but more ranting (someone with your same argument doesn't count as proof).
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
The reason I heard that Unreal II wasn't ported was because it used an earlier version of the Unreal Warfare engine which would need to be re-written with later builds to make the ports.
The porters have no idea what the others do to the code and it could take years for a simple rewrite
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Also, Transgaming's own CVS. Although they are a little weird about it. See the Gentoo ebuild for winex-cvs for the following:
Thank you for validating my argument Choggi. But of course I see why he makes the argument. Most Die Hard Linux users that I know, and I know a few, dont have a problem supporting developments like Transgaming. I dont feel that they are anti-wine, but more wine with the nessecary tweaks to get a game running on the system. Do I wish that all games had a native linux installer, you better believe I do. It would make my life , and everyone else's life alot easier. There certainly wouldnt be these large fights over which game goes one way and which game(s) go another. Of course I substantially assume that some very good games (Rise of nations, Age of Empires and all of its derivatives, and so forth) wont ever have native linux installers with them, the companies that produce them are expressedly owned by M$, this of course also dooms them from ever running under any emulator/wrapper application, like Cedega or Wine. What does that mean for guys / gals like us. We miss out because M$ wont support us. Why? Because M$ hates us and wishes we would go away and stop taking their market share away.
Im not too young a gamer to remember that there were games that were released that had OS/2 installers on them for that very reason. Support of the community. But then its never seen that way by Gates , Ballmer and the rest of his Zombies. Ce La Vie.
Still The notion that I should not support applications who try to help us in the gaming community, is asinine.
And to honestly validate the digression argument used with cedega and wine. I run a fairly high end card on my system, when I play FPS I "realistically" get a few less frames on say Doom 3 ( not much more than 10 at worst ) , and on other games such as WarHammer 40k, I get a better frame rate than I did on my windows partition. If this is all I have to deal with is minot frame rate differences, then Ill get over it. The object isnt for me to have the most uber frame rate, but a game thats playable and enjoyable. Isnt that what the rest of us what? Or is FPS gaming still about how many Frames per second you can get?
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
Well this is not reasonable for most people but the way I did it is just by having two systems with one running Windows and the other Linux. Then I just use Windwos for games. I'm hoping someday that game studios will stop this kind of situation but until then I have a monitor switch and two systems.
It seems there is a double standard with games -- many who preach the superiority, or at least usability of apps like Gimp, Firefox and Open Office, apparently go home and play Windows-only games.
I, for one, would be quite interested in supporting games developed specifically for Linux.
I have 2 swappable HDs and a HD bay on my computer here. When I want to work under Linux, in goes drive A and I can do some serious computing. When I want to fuck around playing Windows games, I put in drive B and I can play City of Heroes.
:P
Its superior to dual booting to my mind, each OS is completely separate and cannot possibly affect the other one, and its relatively painless to switch them around. At the same time while I am in Linux, I am not tempted to fire up a game as a distraction
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Um, no, no it doesn't. :)
/etc/fstab, creating user accounts, and the other similar stuff that is needed to set up Gentoo -is- a good way to learn your way around some of the basic stuff that you might not know about otherwise. Plus, it also gives some insight into all the things that are running in the background on the system, because each of them was set up manually by hand, rather than being done invisibly by some automated setup program.
But partitioning and formatting your HDs manually, building your own
I'm not saying that an automated install is a bad thing, just that by doing it manually, one learns a lot more about what goes into the process than they would otherwise.
I game, therefore I am...
I've cut off my ties with Windows permanently now that it'll run every game I could ever want to play (with the exception of Gunbound >.). Every Blizzard game works perfectly (including WoW, for me). Most FPS games work (Valve's games, and Id's games for sure). I don't know what the status of Sims 2 is, but otherwise I think that "I don't like linux because it doesn't run my games" is a very poor excuse at this point.
- shazow
You might as well be asking which sexual position is best. There are so many different opposing and agreeing views you have to really decide for yourself. Honestly, a debian based system would be what I recommend, but SuSe has a nice interface and just seems really professional - except not a very friendly package manager. Fedora doesn't cut it in my estimation.
I use Xandros myself, but I don't play games much -- I don't have a good graphics card -- and the libs get old real quick -- hard to update. =\
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
........ why bother? it's going to be hardcore noncompetitive with the obvious gaming solution.
just learn to dual boot people, jesus =P
Don't blame Linux; blame the game devs.
The best Unix for games is still Mac OS X, which can run a lot more games natively than Linux/X86 can, and Virtual PC, while far from perfect, can as I recall run 2D DOS and Windows games reasonably well. And then there's the fact that most of the vintage Mac OS {n|6>=n=9} games.
Don't forget the UNIX games either.
Windows 98 is fairly good for older games too, but for new games that aren't OS X or Linux friendly you often just have to bite the bullet and boot into XP -- firewall it heavily and run Windows Update every time you turn it on and you should be okay. And don't use MSIE, that reduces the risks vastly.
personaly, I like all the debian based distros.. because of apt.. I tried the others but apt seems to be so great solving dependency problems.
The situation now with the Debian distros is they seem to be xfree right now for the most part.
I have run some older games, like unreal goty & quake, and it was not too terrible to figure out, but I havent tried cedega or anything cutting edge.
If it was me, I would just pick a distro I liked, set it up for dual boot, and what works.. works, and what doesn't you reboot for... VectorLinux has a nice lilo menu ... (had to tie this in somehow...)
regards
dbcad7
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
"Under Windows XP, things Just Work. Under Linux, things just won't work, and I can never figure out why. I'll go to Google, and find answers that basically say "do what you've already done.""
That is not entirely true, although yes, I've had this installation of Ubuntu for two weeks, and I'm still trying to configure my Logitech MX500.
My point is, though, is that I've had hardware act really wonkily in XP, but work right off the bat with Linux. A great example is my 20GB Archos Jukebox. Even though it's pretty old, and should work under XP with *no* problem (it just shows up as a Fujitsu (IIRC) HDD when installed), I had to scour through Archos's website to find *really old* drivers. We're talking Windows 98 drivers.
However, when I plugged it in under Ubuntu, it just showed up and worked right away--as quickly as my Fujifilm 128MB thumbdrive.
Just sayin'.
Why should they when your happy with 70% preformance and major instabilities?
If I'm happy with it, why should I *CARE* if it's native or not?
I think it's more that the manual install forces you to read the gentoo install docs than just the manual install by itself...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
That's pretty untrue. Linux is as good a platform, if not better to write games for. The difference is market share, and that is all.
Who said market share isn't part of what makes a platform 'good'?
Second, no it isn't. There is a lack of drivers, there is a lack of good APIs. If OpenGL was good enough, everyone would already be using it on Windows. It's not. The main reason is DirectX has quite a lot of other stuff which is simply not available on Linux and the alternatives like SDL are nowhere near it in functionality.
This is probably the most informative post on this discussion.
HA! Yeah how about I like running my games at full speed not just emulated speed. And I like it when I can play a game the day I bought it rather than "hacking" it into playability. I'm not looking for an excuse to leave Windows, I'm looking for a better experience than Windows. Now I understand that some of you pro hacks out there can get game "X" to work on Cedega or what ever it is with "just a few tweaks" what I believe you guys don't understand is I have a life, a girl, friends, a 9-5, and a family. If I do get the time to play a game, I want to pop in the CD install it and run it without spending a few hours learning how to hack wine to get a game to work on the OS my PC didn't ship with. Mod me troll I could care less, but please let this sink into your heads. I want my games to work the way they were intended. 60 FPS is not high enough for me, and spending an exorbitant amount of money on a PC to then install Linux on it to play a Windows game at 25-75% of it's typical performance is not a sound investment. I would buy a PC that was 3 years old if I wanted to play games at that level, and the money I saved on the premium for high performance hardware would pay for itself at the very least 3 fold on my $60 student copy of XP Pro. When Linux is an easy to use OS I'll sing its praises, the OS itself works fantastic if you have nothing but free time. I'd rather stick with Windows it works the way I want it to 99.9999% of the time regardless of what you guys like to think. It's like 100 times easier to use than Linux, and even with the Mac mini it's still 1/2 the price for a comparably performing system from apple... though that thing looks damn sexy. Don't get me wrong I love open source software, I use OO.o exclusively, Thunderbird, Firefox, TighVNC, and openVPN all for win32. But Linux itself is just not ready for prime time. Cut the effort it takes for me to install programs, make it so I don't need to worry about dependencies, and all that garbage to install a program. Realize that because your OS doesn't require ".---" at the end of a file isn't a big deal. Make a distro that can be released without a shell prompt. I understand that you like the shell, I'm glad to hear it cause it ships with every distro, but I don't want to have to use it, ever, that includes when it comes time to install a new program on my PC. Sigh... I understand for you needs Linux works great, but please appreciate the fact that for mine it just doesn't come close, so please don't tell me that one of my major, and well founded caviates with the Linux/Windows situation isn't a "good excuse". Trolling done, -manno out
all you need is a lift-kit and you're set.
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- Binary Packaged Games
- Source Packaged Games
For the first type, any pretty reasonably recent distro will work. The two main package formats are RPM and DEB. RPM used to be it for the most part, but these days you can usually find a DEB if there is an RPM to be had.RPM's do somewhat of a "dirty" install in that they often put files in non-standard locations and they have dependency issues. DEB packages don't really have any major flaws except perhaps that they are considerably more difficult to create properly than RPM's. Debian based distros also have the "alien" tool which can install an RPM, but their native package is the DEB. So my thought is that Debian based distros give you the best of both worlds here.
Source based packages are another matter. You need a system with a very strong compiler toolchain if you want to build beta versions of games with reasonable ease. Obviously source based distros like Gentoo and Slackware hold the high cards here, but Debian runs a close second because its toolchain is also very high quality. Gentoo is pretty nice for a lot of source based games, because chances are there is a Gentoo ebuild prepared and all you have to do is emerge the package. For Debian systems, its a bit more complicated because you have to install whatever development packages are required, but often the ones provided by Debian are not recent enough to compile the software. This is where things get ugly for Debian based systems. For Gentoo, often you can "unmask" a package and install a beta version of a developer library without much hassle.
Overall, I still would probably say that Debian unstable and its derivatives are the best choice for most gamers. You can quickly and easily install a humongous number of precompiled games, and getting the odd source based game to build isn't really a big deal unless its bleeding edge new. Debian's new installer is much improved over older variants making it not too hard for a novice to get a Debian system up and running.
Gentoo, however, is probably preferable for game developers and advanced users. It too has a considerable number of game ebuilds making installation of the more common Linux games quite painless. If you are the type who likes to play around a lot with Sourceforge CVS versions of games, then Gentoo (and similar) is probably more what you want.
In summary,
Personally, I run Gentoo on my own system, but for the wife's or kid's computers, Debian is a faster install with more games and more bells and whistles. I'd recommend starting with Debian (and derivatives) if you are pretty new to Linux. Gentoo is pretty cool but you should probably cut your Linux teeth on something with a flatter learning curve. The idea is to have fun and play some games.
Clickety Click
The only thing Cedega does is to dissuade publishers from making real Linux games and actually porting to something other than Windows.
Transgaming is almost as bad for open source as Microsoft is by itself.
Nathan's blog
Very well said dude, My 2cents is, and I have tried pretty much all the most popular distros and a few that were not popular. Mandrake seems to have the best balence of ease of use and still sticking with the linux ideal. Isn't ease of use most important when it comes to gaming ? I want to play not get hung up in an endless mess of compiling and tweaking. Cedega and wine/winex seem to work best on the more mainstream distros. However as mentioned MS Windows XP is currently the best OS for gaming hands down. Unless you install linux on an Xbox :-)
You sir are 100% correct. Until linux distros get together and agree on a universal desktop sound etc etc, it is why MS windows will always remain THE gaming OS, I guess it's good for MS because Windows is no good for anything else, windows would die out without gaming.
You mean my "ultra-super-duper-optimized" Gentoo install isn't that good after all?
Funny, because with Slackware I ended up doing most all of that by hand anyways when setting up. Oh well,