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Ask Slashdot: What Video Games Keep You From Using Linux?
skade88 writes "Everyone knows content is king. Many of us use Windows or OS X at home instead of Linux because the games we love just are not available on Linux. With Steam moving forward for a Linux launch, I would like to hear from the Slashdot community on this topic. What are the game(s) you cannot live without? If they were available in Linux would you be happy to run Linux instead of Windows or OS X?"
I would love to be able to play GW2 on Linux, since it constitutes 99+% of the gaming that I do these days. Mass Effect 3 would be cool too, but I don't really play it much anymore. I'm looking forward to playing native versions of Portal and Left 4 Dead on Linux soon.
The real question should be... what games do you want now, and in the future. Just getting all games to work that I want now doesn't really help me when Awesome cool game 15 comes out and I really want it. This is coming from a person who has been using Linux for years.
Aside from a couple of great indie games, the majority of the games I've enjoyed in the past few months are not available for Linux.
The opposite question would have a much shorter answer.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Drivers, installed base, drivers, familiar windows interface, drivers, most users can barely power their machine on much less install linux, drivers, forget installing linux software...see comment before the last comment, drivers, lack of vendor support, and drivers.
Oh did I mention drivers?
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
To be honest - Microsoft Office. Most of the people I communicate with use MsOffice products, and yes, I have heard of OpenOffice and LibreOffice, however, their cross-compatibility is not perfect. This is a no-go - when I send a customer an important document - I have to be sure everything is looking good / professional and that the other side has no issues with what I sent them. When I receive a document from a client - I have to be sure I get exactly what the customer sent. Sometime PDF is not a valid solution. LibreOffice does not promise it to me, yet (in my current opinion).
What sound system fragmentation? There's ALSA and there's ... ALSA.
Even if you're stuck using pulseaudio, nowadays you just use ALSA and it magically routes through PA. And then most games are going to be using SDL (Valve did kind of hire one of the libsdl guys), it hides all of that anyway.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
I play a little (read: a lot of) Minecraft, which is available on Linux. The reason I started playing it in fact is because it was for Linux and that's all I had. I've also started accruing a library of games from Steam that I tend to not play, including a few games that I play online with friends. I suppose those games would keep me from switching back to Linux, all other things being equal.
But in all honesty, I haven't switched back to Linux since Windows 7 came out because I don't mind using Windows 7. If it sucked, I'd be on Linux and no game could pull me back. But, much to the chagrin of many, Windows 7 is a pretty good OS and I have no problem using it even though I almost never play really serious games on my computer.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
No attention span. I pick up a box in the store, feel the hours sucked vampirically from my body into the box. I put the box down.
Disclaimer: it's really all the fault of Sid Meier's Civilization series.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I'm really done with computer gaming. Now if you want to talk about how Netflix keeps me from using Linux, I'll be glad to talk.
"Technology.....the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Max Firsch
Hell, I like to make things run on WINE, that's a game in itself!, but untill Joe Sixpack can drop in DVD / Download-and-play-with-one-click, LINUX gaming will struggle. (Remember even WINDOWS gaming is too hard for a lot of people, with DX updates, various runtimes, licensing, etc,etc .. thus, IMHO, console sales)
My last 2 computers had the obligatory Linux partition on the HDD, yet I never loaded Linux on either. Why? Cygwin. I can work in a *nix environment and game in a Windows environment.
So even though I first used Unix in '84, Linux in '94, and have written a handful of Linux device drivers, I don't see the need to run Linux at home.
The only reason Windows still lurks in my computer is Photoshop. True, GIMP is good, but it just doesn't measure up in terms of features or speed of workflow.
How come people dying for games don't just run Linux and their Windows OS of choice on dual boot? I use Ubuntu for most things and Windows 7 for Dungeons and Dragons Online.
This is still a problem on OSX even. It's depressing seeing all the cool new games on steam and not being able to play them.
Team Fortress 2. I need to play my digital hat game.
Ka-Bewm!!
By a curious coincidence, none at all is exactly how much suspicion the ape-descendant Arthur Dent had that one of his closest friends was not descended from an ape, but was in fact from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he usually claimed.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Though with all the nasty DRM, lately (and unfortunately) I've been gaming on consoles.
iRacing is practically all I have time for, as it eats a LOT of time. But even if that didn't exist, practically every other game that exists is for Windows anyways. I'm fine sticking with Windows until every single game is available for Linux.
It already runs on Linux (Android), and in HTML 5 on G+ Games :-P
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Any of those will do.
I like having the option to play new games or whatever games I stumble upon.
I do not know "what games I cannot live without" but in the last few months I have been playing:
Borderlands2
Diablo3
League of Legends
Cockatrice (free online magic the gathering program)
Terraria
And I have FTL and XCOM Enemy Unkonwn installed and ready to check out when I have free time.
Yeah this doesn't exist anymore. As others have said, the ALSA PCM plugin layer is flexible enough to allow pure ALSA programs to work while PulseAudio is running. Even for older games which only support OSS (which often isn't available out of the box in Linux) can be supported with alsa-oss which provides a simple wrapper around the program to redirect OSS sound to ALSA.
So what do you use when you want to play a game that is from a small developer or otherwise unavailable on a console? Or has it been your experience that worthwhile PC-exclusive games are either ported to Linux or working in Wine?
The Halo series?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Instead of complaining about this and that, ill do as the summary asks and actually list the games I currently cant do without:
- EVE Online
- Most of the DCS series ( A-10 Warthog, Black Shark )
- MS Flight Sim X
- Civilization V
- ARMA II
- PKR
Torchlight had a Linux version in the last Humble Indie Bundle. Not sure if you can get the Linux installer for it elsewhere, though.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Try and beat my high score of $1,100 in a day.
Same here. It's not any specific game, it's pretty much *any* game. If I want to run Deus Covert Ops VI: Metal Edition on release day, chances are I'd have to boot to windows. I have linux partitions on all of my systems and run linux everywhere I can (media server, xbmc, etc) but when it comes down to which partition to boot into - Windows usually wins simply on the off-chance that I might want to play a game and don't feel like rebooting every time that happens.
der dee der.
I like games. New and old. Small and big. I am a consistent Linux user, but I almost never use Linux for gaming. My home desktop is Windows, that got most computing power of all my machines and is used mainly for gaming. If I need to work on something I fire up Linux (or whatever I need) in VM (thankfully VMWare supports multiple monitors quite well, and graphic support just keeps getting better and better) and do all my work from there.
In the office I've got the opposite situation. My main workstation is Linux and I run Windows in VM when I am programming something Windows specific.
All of my laptops run Linux, since I've always considered gaming on a laptop to be a torture. Small time-killing games are Ok, but any serious gaming is terrible.
Most of the games that I am waiting for are Windows only (new Hitman, new Bioshock, new GTA) and I do not expect them to support Linux any time soon. However I try to support developers who develop games for Linux by buying them, but this is mostly small indie games.
Bottom line is as long as there are Windows-only games I want to play, there will be Windows on my system, and it is not going anywhere. If there is a game I must have on some other platform, it is likely that I will get that platform. I have couple xBoxes 360 and PS3. I have bought PS3 because only of one game (it actually collects dust since then). I do not have Wii though, and have no plans on getting one since the games just never seemed appealing to me, and I am not of Nintendo grown population. All my friends had consoles, my family had computer in my childhood.
How come people dying for games don't just run Linux and their Windows OS of choice on dual boot?
Having to disconnect from instant messaging. Losing all your open web browser windows. Music stops playing.
Or has it been your experience that worthwhile PC-exclusive games are either ported to Linux
Hmm... aside from the obvious disagreement, just listing some great indie or indie-ish games: "Lunar Flight" "xplane" "pretty much everything from spiderweb software" "pretty much everything from matrixgames" none ported to linux.
The last truly multiplatform games I can think of are the infocom text adventures, which at one point in the 80s ran on pretty much anything with a screen and keyboard...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Netflix
Nonsense. What do you even mean? Who programs directly to the sound subsystem?
Using OpenAL goes a long way when it comes to support on Linux. We've managed to port our game to Linux with zero problems with sound. OpenAL is a requirement that Win, Mac, iOS, Android etc also support so this part of the porting process is bare minimum.
Video on the other hand, is a real bitch on Linux. Frameworks like Qt rely on platform specific backends (phonon) and there is no de facto standard of a video player on Linux, let alone that the phonon plugin is installed.
Setting aside technical issues, the real reason why Linux is not a target for game publishers, is that there is no market. People can rage all they want, but no...at the moment there is no market, at all. Kudos for Valve's efforts, but Linux adoption is non-existent, especially among gamers. Indie games might have a shot at Linux, but sadly it seems more of a donation driven effort to bring games to linux than a market demand.
yohan
You know this actually brings up a really good curiosity; what the hell ever happened to Loki Games? They just disappeared from the face of the earth near from what I can tell... I'm really curious where they went to..
I'm already running Linux instead of Windows or OS X, so I guess my answer is "none of them." Games aren't very high on my software priority list. That said, I'd probably buy some titles, if they were available on Linux.
I'd switch to linux with Valve's steam engine porting over, but... The closed source AMD graphics driver is fast-ish, but crazy glitchy. The opensource radeon driver runs really well, but isn't nearly fast enough. I'll be pleasantly surprised if Valve games work at all under AMD cards.
I can't switch until AMD figures their drivers out, the radeon driver gets MUCH better, or I switch to an Nvidia.
This engine is now sporting the best real-time lighting tech available, as well as one of the most usable programming, mapping, and scripting systems to date. A single person can build a AAA quality game. And I doubt Epic is currently targeting OpenGL and Linux. :(
I realize this isn't a game, but it will be the basis for a multitude of future games.
The only part that a came programmer would have to deal with is ALSA. Alternatively, they could use the sound API of their choice. The fact that they chose differently than someone else wouldn't impact a thing.
Game developers are already taking care of business in this area. Your trolling is irrelevant as are your "anececdotes".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Xcom 2012, Civ 5, Elemental Fallen Enchantress, Fallout New Vegas, Battlefield 3, and Medieval 2 Total War. Those are the games I've installed and play as the mood strikes me. However they aren't the only ones, I have a list of other games I own but haven't the time to play yet. More or less I want all of the games. I love games, and I own a ton.
Games aren't the only things though, I'd also need Cakewalk Sonar (and affiliated plugins), or something very much like it, Native Instruments Kontakt and EastWest Play.
I'd also need support for my hardware, some of which is a bit esoteric (like a MCU Pro).
If I had a good DAW, good VIs, and all the games, I suppose I could consider switching. Of course I'd still need to be sold on a reason as to why, since personally I find Linux more frustrating to use.
However it isn't as simple as one or two games. I want all of the games I have, and all the new ones that spark my fancy.
The political games that some FOSS advocates keep playing is what keeps me from running Linux. I'll stick to FreeBSD for now.
Out of business from lack of sales if I recall. I think the last I bought from them was quake 3 in the tin box.
We all vote for Civilization. Most people are holding back just because they realize lifetimes are finite.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
I mostly play indie games nowadays, and the ones I like tend to release Linux clients. Other games I really like (read Warsow) are already for Linux. On the RTS front, I really only play Supreme Commander, and with the success of the Planetary Annihilation Kickstarter, it won't be long until my RTS itch is taken care of. On the RPG front, there are rumors that The Witcher 2 is being considered for a Linux release, and if that's true, we can expect CDP's future games to be on Linux too. I do really like the Evochron series, but as much as I bug Starwraith about it, they just don't have the resources to port it over, so I guess that would be a major reason.
So right now is essentially a transition period to using Linux on my main, gaming desktop for good. All my other computers already run Linux.
Just because Valve is creating a Linux-compatible client doesn't mean that developers and publishers are going to fall over themselves porting their wares to Linux, any more than they did to OSX. Some people may get rid of their Windows partitions because of it, through enticement or relief, but for the vast majority it will be irrelevant.
but not b4 "your iPhone is a variant of BSD *nix"
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Can't speak for OP, but as someone in exactly the same situation, the answer is the same as "what do you do if a game isn't available for the particular console you own?" I don't play it. I can't even keep up with all the good games that are available for my console. I'm certainly not concerned about the ones that aren't.
Many years ago, I dual-booted Windows so I could play games there, but once I got my first console (a PS1), that became more effort than it was worth. I haven't used Windows since.
Of course, I do hear that its possible to play some PC games under Wine, but I really haven't bothered to try.
I spend a lot of time playing solitaire instead of doing something useful. Yeah, it's the Linux version but I don't consider playing Solitaire to be "using Linux."
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
To be honest, I'm relatively happy with the combination of FOSS games, indie games like in the Humble Bundles, and older commercial games like Doom 3 and Wolf-ET such that gaming solely in Linux wouldn't be an issue for me. The problem, however, is a question of effort. Let me list one example:
- Doom 3 -
Windows:
* Install game
* Patch
* Play
Linux: .pak files from the game's CDs to where the binary is installed, because the official installer won't do it automatically (though it's possible someone's written a script to do this by now).
* Install using the latest Linux installer using the text interface (which was only supposed to be a backup in case the GUI works, which it doesn't anymore because it was built to use the GTK1.2 libraries which don't work properly/aren't available with modern distributions).
* Copy the required
* Run, then find out there's no sound because OSS was deprecated in modern Linux distributions. Spend an hour googling and trying different options until you find out the correct method to launch D3 with sound:
doom3 +set s_alsa_pcm plughw:0 +set s_driver alsa
* Create a .desktop file/link because the installer fails to do so properly, otherwise you don't get a shortcut in your DE of choice.
* Play, then discover you have massively jerky framerates because the Linux kernel changed to use a different method of timing (too complicated for me to understand) which affected how Doom 3 determines timing. Fixed using this additional variable during launch
set com_fixedtic 1
* Play and enjoy the same game that worked with far less effort in Windows.
Sure, half the problem was in iD not giving a crap at producing a good installer that would do most of the work for you (like copying required files) and not using static GTK libraries that would survive changes to distros. But things like the removal of OSS within the default builds of distros as well as the change to kernel timings, kinda do make a few problems for older games.
Newer stuff tends to works better, but often there are quirks even in newer Linux ports (I won't keep listing stuff but there are a number of complaints about bad Linux ports of a number of Humble Bundle games - look them up). For gaming, I get tired of messing about when things just fucking WORK in Windows. It's suppose to be entertainment and escapism after all.
Dude...
Oh, come on, Gabe, we know it's you. ;)
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Steam on Linux will be nice.
Mostly it's Battlefield 3 and the likes (new games with shiny graphics and DRM), they won't work well or at all.
i use linux but i sure would like to play the GTA franchise on linux native instead of playing it on ps3
We substituted the coffee Slashdot normally drinks with "Sandoz Crystals", Lets see if they notice the difference
Anybody got any ideas where they went? Talk about talent hitting the market, some companies must have been chasing those guys down before they even got the doors closed.
I find The Secret World the only new and interesting game so far. I still dable in Dungeons and Dragons Online, have had varying success with it under wine.
Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. Joshua Slocum
there aren't any games that makes me stick with windows, pretty much all the games I play either for Linux, console games that run I in an emulator, or Windows programs that I run in Wine. though I probably won't be using the Linux version of steam, they only target Ubuntu based systems and won't let anyone package it for any systems, so getting it to run on anything but Ubuntu is a pain in the ass, plus all the DRM they put in it makes me not want it
while
I don't know the demographics, but it's really not games that's keeping me personally on Winders. I want Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Creative Suite (not freeware "alternatives", not fiddling around with Wine but those specific applications running natively on, hell, any Linux distro) and something reasonably like the full version of Nero. Give me those working well on Linux, and I will gladly leave Windows and never look back.
If it's about content, let's port the prime content creators.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Linux keeps me from playing a good few games. Though, a lot of excellent ones run under WINE.
I have bought every blizzard game since warcraft 2 , so that would go a long way. battlefield 3 is pretty much the best FPS at the moment so you need that too.
These are my top three franchises...
- Fallout 3 & New Vegas
- Borderlands 1 & 2
- BioShock 1 & 2 (and Inifinite, coming soon!)
Well, plus the entire Valve catalog, but I guess that goes without saying.
I became a heavy user of windows, not because I like windows or wanted to use it. It was because it had the most focus from the developers. Games come out for it first, the software is written for the platform first (usually) and typically ran better than the games ported to the Mac (at the time I decided on buying my last few PCs). Ported games generally suck for a number of reasons, and that's why I don't run OS X or Linux for games. Even though games run on a particular alternative OS, they are usually a sub-par experience mainly due to lack of developer focus on those platforms. Ports typically run worse than their windows counter part. I know this isn't intrinsic, but its an accurate rule of thumb up until this point. Often times mod support is poor on OS ports. I know for a long time, ports could not even play with clients on windows for whatever reason. This is less of the case these days, but think back to 2004-2005. I would REALLY love to get away from windows and start running linux for gaming too, and am willing to help out on that effort simply by doing it, which is why this Valve/Linux direction pleases me so much. Windows is a terribly crippled OS in so many ways, I would love to get away from it as much as possible, and hopefully mostly avoid apple where I can since they will never support building your own systems which is pretty core to PC gaming.
Also, the Dawn of War series (RPG)
However, most of the programs I want including DoW will run on Wine. Sins ... not so much.
...Steve
Most of the older APIs do proper relay to newer ones, and abstractions like SDL take care of a lot of that. For me, the biggest detraction, is I just yesterday installed the latest LMDE on my desktop... then, when it came around to installing the nvidia drivers, I added the additional repositories (checkboxes in synaptic) after install, no gui... Sorry, it it's a pretty big deal.. also, audio didn't work, but that's another issue... My system is about 2 years old now, using a 1st gen Core i7 with a more recent nVidia GTX 660 Ti... Honestly, it's a pain... will probably give it a try with debian proper, and then ubuntu... if I can't have my hardware working accelerated in Linux, gaming is out anyway, not that I game much. Just the same, I had less trouble running a hackintosh install than Linux sometimes. I like Linux.. use it for servers, non-gui, but as a primary desktop it's problematic.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
The correct answer is all of them and also my mouse's custom software/driver, my GPU's drivers, my sound drivers, and the fact that I'm usually watching Netflix on monitor 2 at the same time.
There's nothing solid about it. The emulation is garbage compared to the native clients.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
Replace EVE with WoW and I'd completely agree with you (I'm not saying EVE sucks or anything of the sort, but I play WoW and not EVE).
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
The C&C series is probably the biggest thing keeping me from Linux-as-a-main-OS (gaming wise that is). That and Elder Scrolls.
Why should I switch to Linux if it's only going to do the same things as Windows? If there isn't something seriously broken in Windows (there isn't that I care about), and the only reason to switch to Linux is to play the same games as I can on Windows or do the same stuff there, then why should I bother switching?
It's the eternal problem with WoW clones. Why would anyone switch to a clone of the game they're already playing if doesn't improve on WoW?
At the moment that is what I'm playing the most. I also play Battlefield 3, Civilization 5, and its been a while but Team Fortress 2.
I welcome you to point out anything that is wrong or incorrect in my post. Anything that so many people who've failed to completely switch to Linux have encountered themselves.
Dude...
On top of that, it needs to be as easy as it is on Windows to get multiple monitors working, install new drivers, and apply patches. Granted, it's been 4 years since I've tried, but I couldn't get multiple monitors working in Kubuntu. The phrase "recompile the kernel" should never be seen by the user. I want to just check "I agree" and click "next".
It really isn't the games which I can not live without, it's the fact that when I get drawn into a game, then I don't want to have to wait until I can get it to work with WINE. Normally, I'm one of the people that are in pre-release and enjoying the game. Granted, I would love to be able to run it on Linux, but my game time is limited (work, family, sleep, etc.) So when I get a game, I want to be able to just play it. The last game I played was GW2 and I'm just so in the mentality of "play video game" = boot to Windows...
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
No, not games, but I've never known anyone that stayed away from Linux as a primary platform because of games. I have known many, though, that needed a handful of specific apps that simply didn't exist on Linux and that didn't run well in emulation.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
All my linuxes are terminals, and I use putty to access them. That works wonder for me, and I still find that the windows interface works better for this. Now, about games, I`d need linux to be as fast as the windows one, and at this time it would be borderlands 2 and the war z. What it means is that this will always be a moving target.. Then, there are all the tools for work that I woudl need.
At this point, I really like linux for my servers, windows as my main workstation, and those small apple mini for my build machines for ios..
the answer is the same as "what do you do if a game isn't available for the particular console you own?" I don't play it.
So why'd you buy the console in the first place if PCs have a far bigger selection? And what would you have recommended for someone like Robert Pelloni trying to get a game onto a console?
...except Solitaire and Mahjong, so I have almost no need for Windows. Now if someone would just put out a decent video editing application, I wouldn't need to turn on my Windows Netbook except when traveling.
I guess since I already accepted years ago that many of the newest and hottest games are not available to me (since I wont install STEAM or other DRM) I may not be the demographic this was aimed at. However I am a longtime gamer who has put unbelievable amounts of time and money into my games over the years. I love games, and if most of my games are old it's simply because most of the new ones require DRM that I am never going to install on my machine, period.
I am running windows because it is required for work, not because it is required for my games. I am not sure how many would run under WINE today but I bet a pretty good percentage - last time I had a dedicated linux machine I remember WINE handling a good percentage of my games. Unfortunately work is not so liberal. A large and critical portion of my required software load wont run without windows. Because of poor programming, absolutely, but I still need my paycheck.
And frankly, I wouldnt want Linux to take the sort of steps that would be necessary to change that situation from that end. I have to use windows because my job is support - supporting crappy software. Even if there werent specific required tools that would fail, I still need to eat the dogfood I am supporting to really do a good job supporting it. Changing it enough to make it usable for my work, or for my games, would just be making it into the same crap I want to get away from. Better to wait a few more paychecks till I can afford a second machine for my own use, then I will have the dogfood I need to eat in front of me, and a real useful system off to the side - and the ability to use the best parts of each to accomplish my tasks.
If you want a free windows clone support ReactOS, please dont make Linux into a windows clone instead. That would be the definition of tragedy.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Tux Racer
Games: Sword of the Stars 2 (for me) and lego Star Wars (my son). Other: Adobe.
quite a few went to Treyarch to work on Spider-Man and then from there to other places within the game industry. You can keep track with the most public Loki developer on icculus.org, Ryan Gordon.
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
All of them, or close enough. I play far too many games that having a single one running on Linux isn't enough for me to warrant ditching Windows. 10% running on Linux wouldn't be enough, it would have to be closer to 95%. And for that to happen, there would have to be some sort of miraculous movement of concious thought within the game industry to start developing games for Linux instead of Windows. Lone developers can't shift the industry. Games are the sole reason I use Windows.
On the contrary, Starcraft 2 runs almost perfectly in Wine. It has a Platinum/Gold rating in AppDB
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
With the help of Cygwin there's more or less nothing I would ever do on a Unix/Linux system that I can't do on a Windows system, and do it easier, and typically faster and more reliably. And that includes software development targeted at Unix.
The inverse however, just isn't so and most likely never, ever will be.
So the choice is really:
The best of Windows + The best of Linux
vs
The best of Linux
Despite the fact that I'm an old school Unix guy and still strongly prefer it for my work systems (servers), the fact is Unix lost the "workstation" market a decade ago and there's just no sane reason to believe they'd ever capture the "gamer" market, for all the same reasons and more.
My
I would say the COD and HALO series; and of course my favorite Battlefield 3. Multiplayer, of course.
http://twitter.com/bash_history
I used to zone out for hours on games. I would enter that world and not come out until some sort of physical discomfort would result... needing to pee, eat or something. But lately? I just don't get those quality hours to myself any longer. Life is filled with "things to do" and crap like that. Worse, sometimes I look back at myself thinking "look at all the time I wasted." I don't want to think that way really. There is some value in it... somewhere... somehow. I guess my problem was that I can't really do it in moderation. So the games I play are games I can put down at a moment's notice. The pain of having to stop when I'm in the middle of an involving situation is just too much sometimes.
But I'm only one type of gamer. There are lots of others... others I can't understand. Like the cheaters. I seriously don't get that. Many of us are addicted to the accomplishments and achievements; The goal setting; The execution of a strategy; the prefection of trial and error. Then there are the troll cheaters whose only purpose is to make other people angry with their faux-god-like cheats making themselve believe that knowledge is the weapon. (Yes, in the real world, knowledge IS the weapon, but in games, it's about actually being better or at least the best you can be.) All the cheaters do is take away from others.
And then there are the kiddies who do a thing which annoys other players... camping and hoarding. Reminds me of a certain set of children... they had to have been between 10 and 14 years old. I was playing Halo2 online. It was one of those one-on-one levels where if you got the rocket launcher, you could pretty much run the game. And that's when the kiddies started arriving. It became a race to get the rocket launcher. Took the fun out of it. Finally, I just let him have it. I got the shotgun and somehow managed to hit him in the chest and point blank range 5, 6, 7 times in a row. He just quit the game. Another player... same damned thing. I countered with shotgun... another quitter. And a third. It's not quite "cheating" but it is playing in a way that sucks the fun out of it. Why do people have to do that?
But I just had to be the vigilante, fighting the injustices with counters and proving that their flawless strategies weren't quite so flawless. Reminds me of the Street Fighter 2 game days... where one person would play a favorite character and thought he could be anyone with it. What'd I do? I asked them "pick the character I will use to beat you..." And I did. Because in the end, it was their singular technique that made them weak. I simply worked out a counter to whatever strategy they wanted to apply.
Gaming is not about winning for me. It's about overcoming limitations and things that hold me back or making the most of any given scenario. Cheating is changing the scenario and a false win. It doesn't matter to me if I win each time just as long as I do better than my last try in one way or another. And I can make games last a lot longer that way.
I'm sure a ton of people will disagree with my approach(es). They are different gamers. Even a few will probably even try to justify cheats somehow calling it a service to others or some such thing. It's crap. It's trolling and seeks to get one's jollies by causing someone to rage. I pity those people. They have no idea of the harm they are causing to their character... their personal character... that is who they are as people. There are simply too many of those people... the people who bought up the Nexus 4 phones only for the purpose of dumping them on eBay for twice the price. They don't enjoy the gaming... they are just gaming the system... taking without giving anything back. "Flippers." I have no use for those dirt bags. A net loss on society as their gains don't even come close to the harm they cause like artificially raising values and creating scarcity where it shouldn't exist.
I guess I'm just about done rambling... it's time for bed. I'm tired.
I miss gaming.
A good quality flight simulation software game using XSquawkBox that can be easily installed using Debian package management that compares to the Microsoft FSX or FS2004. Yes, X-Plane 9.X and 10.X are out there, but it is extremely difficult to get X-Plane to run on a Linux box - believe me, I've tried. A lot of add-ons (both aircraft and scenery) can be created by the flight sim community and be taken advantage of by the community and also create a better product for the community of users! Personally, if I could get a flight simulation game that accomplished this, I would get rid of my only Windows box and be a full-time Linux user.
My wife got addicted to this game and I mostly reboot under linux to play it. It could probably work under wine/ubuntu but I confess that I didn't have the courage to redo the whole day of configuration to activate the accelerated graphics of my ATI card.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Does Unity count? The thing is a steaming pile of dog shit. Gets worse every time I peak in on it too. Christ, it sucks.
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Hi, AC here who spends 10-20 hours a week on PC games.
... they have an opportunity to succeed in the video game market where several niches exist unfulfilled and the big players have (so far) failed to execute successfully.
My requirements:
1) All current Steam games that run on DirectX9 must be fully playable on Linux.
- This will cover most items from 2001-present. Only a handful of games are DX10/11 exclusive.
2) All current third-party trainers, tools, etc. must be ported to Linux.
- Torchlight on Linux is nice to see. Now get the Mod Manager to work on it.
3) Other exclusive platforms must be ported
- I'm looking at you EA/Origin. Origin needs to come to Linux or you have to negotiate a new deal with EA to make Origin exclusive titles available on a Linux-based platform (Steam itself not a requirement, though ideal).
4) Performance must be the same on Linux
- Crysis should be one of your benchmarks. If I can't run Crysis on Linux as well as I can Windows, forget it.
5) Non-game software
- Turbotax, Quicken, iTunes, Chief Architect Home Design, Logitech Harmony software all must be native and 100% functional. No WINE or other hacks.
For the $100 tax, I'll stick with Windows7 at home and not be forced to spend the time to find workarounds to all of the above. Good luck.
P.S. Steam's target market isn't current Windows gamers and getting them to switch to Linux. They will keep their current PC gamers as just that, PC gamers, regardless of which OS they use. Think much broader
Except, of course, none of it happened.
The configuration you are talking about, ALWAYS works in Ubuntu.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I play some games casually... Eve Online, Empires at War. The former runs in Cider and the latter one may or may not be native OS X. I don't care. They work good enough.
I've played around with Linux since some early RedHat days on Acer (I think) laptop, dating back to 1998 or so. I'm not afraid of command lines, X86conf files, etc., and such is hardly even needed these days. I install the latest Ubuntu in a VM for a few weeks every time there's a new release (Unity was particularly offsetting) but there's nothing there that compels me to switch away from Mac OS X. It’s like switching to the metric system (which I use professionally) in my daily life: why bother?
If WINE worked flawlessly with Office 2010, then at least I’d consider migrating my Win7 VM to Linux. I only need to run OneNote and Access (and, yeah, EveMon) from time to time, and that’s merely for work.
Yeah, maybe someday Mac OS X will be completely iOS-ified. The day that happens, I will consider fully switching (although, I use iOS instead of any of the Android operating systems, jailbroken of course (except for my phone – stupid “Good For Enterprise” is a tattletale).
Oh, I am talking about my main, home desktop machines. I keep Ubuntu around on some nettops that I used as Plex front ends, and for many years my main, household file server was a Debian box until I Hackintosh’d it. My offshore seedbox is Linux.
--Jim (me)
Games don't keep me from linux on the desktop. The fact that linux sucks on the desktop does. And my servers are headless--not sure why I would want to play games on them in the first place.
Check boxes in synaptic?
This sounds very much like you were customizing, since proprietary drivers are handled through Jockey (the "Additional Drivers" dialog).
Toughest game ever. We play it at work as a team building exercise. Can you make that work on Linux please?
Maybe slightly off-topic, but the biggest impediment to my full-on adoption of linux is a lack of reliable color calibration. And, while capable, Gimp is a bear. Finally, I really like the ease of use of lightroom—not too many options there.
rosenkreuzstilette freudenstachel
The only reason I have reinstalled Windows on my PC's at home is for games and NetFlix. BattleField 3, Torchlight 2.
I am able to do everything else that I need with Linux.
It's not just a question of past and current games, but future games as well.
Will the next Arkham game support Linux? The next Battlefield? The next Crysis? The next Deus Ex? The next Elder Scrolls? Odds are the answer is "no" to all of them, and I'm only five letters into the alphabet.
More than that, will it run well? It's already rough enough, playing console ports on Windows - having to put up with bad control schemes, limited graphics options, often having to do some fiddling just to make a game work, simply because the developers considered Windows to be a second-class system. And if you think they won't consider Linux a second-class citizen or worse, you must be smoking something good.
There's no single game holding gamers onto Windows. There's no group of games holding us on. There's pretty much every game, ever.
Yes, for some of you, one or two games would suffice to pull you over. But ask yourself - are you a "gamer", or are you a "person who plays games sometimes"? As for me, I'm a gamer. This week alone, I played seven different games. Twenty-two in the past month. For people like me, Linux just won't cut it.
At least, not for a while. If 90+% of the games released on Windows also come out on Linux, over the next few years, it will be a serious contender. Or if there's a good, AAA-quality title that is released as a Linux exclusive, that could push things.
But it is not going to be an overnight process. Linux is only recently beginning to appear attractive to developers. Next you'll have to convince the marketing executives, THEN you can start convincing the gamers.
Thre is no game that is "keeping me" from running Linux. I have two computers - one for gaming running Windows and one for everything else running Linux. I do believe Steam for Linux will change the paradigm, though, for PC gaming. I am excited to see what games will be released. Whether they are released for Windows or Linux, I am ready.
Not a game, but Microsoft OneNote. And it's not that it keeps me from using linux, but it does force me to keep a Windows partition that I'd rather do without.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If you can port Outlook to Linux, I'm in.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Well, in fact its more than the games (maybe 100+).
Twenty years of windows application purchases/acquisitions have given me quite a large library of things I use on/off but am not willing to part with. Old legal license of matlab, protel, photoshop, anydvd, Office 2003, MS money, corel painter, etc. Then there are the metric ton of assorted electronic tools with GPIB interfaces, flash/EPROM programmers, etc that only really work in windows.
Plus, most of the best opensource/free software runs very well on windows, inkscape, blender, firefox, freemake. KEGS, The list goes on, many of them work better on windows than Linux.
The one reason I use windows has been the consistency, and the near guarantee (until vista at least) that my existing software and training investments would be maintained going forward. This is something that MS has completely forgotten. Sure there are a lot of people willing to throw their PC's away in exchange for a iPad or whatnot (have one of those too), but catering to that customer base is risky because they lose the vendor lock that put them in the position they are in today. No one buys windows or Intel because they like them. They buy them because they provided a small sense of stability
I have been running linux on machines since the days before there were distributions. But its never been on my primary desktop machine as anything other than a dual boot or a VM. I've been employed working on linux for 10+ years now, and in all that time I still find that it runs best when relegated to a VM or external server with an X server in windows. To this day, I have yet to find a linux distribution that works with multiple heads, and can rotate only a portion of the heads (its all or nothing, or its broken).
So, the effort to get Kings Quest running on my windows machine for my daughter pays for the windows license in the hours of avoiding screwing with wine, or for that matter buying it again from GOG (those guys rock! I have a bunch of GOG games now too).
And this is sort of the barb, that Apple has too, once you have spent thousands of dollars on apps/movies/music/books/etc and your standing in the store next to the geewiz new tablet from korean vendor XYZ or the ipad+1 for twice the price and 1/2 the features which one do you choose?
its the fact that there are dozens of games out there that are far above crap. and they are being released with directx and pandering into the microsoft monopoly. we need game developers and corporations to be willing to stand up to these contractual games and just release games with an opengl or many other graphics systems available.
then we can have the game on whatever the hack system or OS we feel like consuming them on
that's it.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
You can play Infocom-style text games on Linux. What else is there? Oh, you mean that modern whiz-bang FPS stuff? Nah. If I have Zork, my world is complete.
Put Linux in VirtualBox on any machine that also runs Windows, unless you do lots of resource-intensive media and/or 3D work in Linux. Unless you're compiling huge programs very frequently or trying to run Blender, you won't notice the difference between that and native on even a semi-modern box. Bonus: you don't have to worry about updates blowing away your ndiswrapper config and wireless dropping out, or the crapshoot that is Linux sleep/hibernation, or upgrading your distro and finding that your audio is out, and now any page with Flash crashes X, and the only fix is "revert the relevant packages using the following 500 steps" because some dumbass decided to push alpha-level software to the front lines for absolutely no goddamn reason (yes, I'm still pissed at Ubuntu for that).
Switching from one OS to the other takes maybe 20 seconds, tops, or practically zero if whatever you're doing in Windows can be done while the virtual machine's still running.
It's not like Windows crashes much these days (unless you've got bad RAM or something's overheating) so you won't lose much stability; certainly not enough that dual-booting would result in less down time. Hell, X crashes more often than Windows, and since that usually means most of your unsaved work is gone anyway, that's not much better than a full system bounce.
Unfortunately I feel the same way. I know it's stupid - we want Windows to suck so we'd have a motivation to move to Linux, but Windows 7 doesn't (not really anyway). However, I still try to future-proof things by sticking to games that have (or are likely to have) Linux builds because I don't expect to be running Windows forever, and I'd like to have an "exit strategy" so that I can go back to Linux with the least amount of pain and the greatest amount of compatible software, should I decide that it's counter-productive to stick with Windows any longer. Windows 8 might be the first step, but it's gonna take a while.
Dude...
The worst thing about wine is that it stopped developers from creating games that really worked on Linux. Wine is great for Office etc. but games go deeper and need some real thought put into them. Now developers have got lazy and just bring out a wine version that has problems...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Assassins Creed series, Borderlands 1 and 2, Torchlight 1 and 2 also GOG.com
It's not that current games are keeping me from switching, it is that I want to be able to play new games when they come out, not after an enormous delay. That delay may have become shorter in recent years, but that is the reasoning that sticks with me.
Relaxing our standards about what constitutes "truly multiplatform," I think most would say that Doom would be a worthy heir to the title of "gets ported to everything." To a lesser extent this can also be said of Quake 2.
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I have enough consoles at home to keep my self occupied with 100's of games from years past. Just today I bought NBA Jam for my Saturn. Spent 3 hours playing wth the kids.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I know this will sound odd coming from the guy who helped popularize games on Linux w/ the Doom & Quake ports, but I actually want more text-based games like nethack.
I've been playing nethack constantly for about 20 years now, and I've only won a few dozen times. I just won again as a monk last night, and it was still concentrated awesome. I think a big part of its excellence is that it doesn't have pretty graphics to lean on, so it was forced to be seriously fucking fun and different every time. You just don't find games with that amount of procedurally generated, radically different gameplay every time you play them anymore. I also love that it's turn based because it actually lets me play the game faster the better I get at it, and I type 100wpm, which means I get a shit-ton more enjoyment out of it than I can out of most graphically-intensive real-time games. I also love that I can play it entirely with the keyboard without ever having to slow myself down with a mouse. I also love that I can read the source code, scour the nethack wiki, and still be challenged every time I play it. Plus, every time someone catches me playing it, they think I'm hard at work on something technical. :)
Nethack is really a masterwork of game design, and I'd love to play more masterwork text-based RPG's as well as other genres like strategy.
I think like most people, I use Linux only on servers and over ssh, so it's really the format I want the game in. The fancy graphics I want are coloured, extended-ASCII graphics. That's plenty, thanks!
Can't go without some battlefield 3 or netflix, but that's what dual boot is for.
None.
I use Linux.
99% of the time
aaaaaaa
Although I can play it with the c64 emulator.
Don't get me wrong it sucks right now but what is going to happen is that in 10 years consoles will be dead. The hardware to push a 1080p 3D scene isn't all that expensive. Look at the WiiU, they say that it is barely more powerful than an XBox 360. In a couple of years something equivalent to a Raspberry Pi will be all you need in terms of hardware and at that point the cost of the OS becomes a major factor. Anybody will be able to put out a "console". You'll have a race to the bottom in console hardware just to get buy-in to an online game store. Gabe/Valve/Steam are trying to get a jump on it but I'd bet that GoogleTV/Android get pulled in that direction too.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
you need to VM the video card or have some kind of pass though for 3D and maybe even some 2d stuff as well.
Even if VGChartz (http://www.vgchartz.com) represents the mainstream buying pattern for all platforms, they list a lot of games strict Linux users probably would have bought too had they only known about them. It has weekly stats for all games, platforms, etc. for the last eight years by USA/EU/Japan. Surely it must represent fairly well what keeps the mainstream away from Linux.
And I would completely switch to Linux if this would be available: Splintercell... All of them...
The "bigger selection" bit is mostly a fallacy. Yes, there are more PC games in total, but only a certain slice of them will run on your PC. The available selection doesn't actually increase appreciably, it pretty much only changes.
I don't like running random executables on the same OS that I do my banking.
Perhaps you have a 12 year old with whom you wish to spend time. Minecraft is as creative of an endeavour as any I have practiced.
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I have to use Windows at work, there's no way I'm using it at home as well. Have been running with various linuxes for the better part of a decade. Ignoring the wastage of a weekend trying to get Magicka to work under Wine, there is no game that would ever make me go back to Windows. Stupid AMD drivers!
Agree. It took me about a month to find a pulse audio command line mixer tool to adjust the headphone gain (as opposed to overall volume) for a Plantronics USB headset, because none of the dozen or so GUI mixer tools I tried even realized it had a gain control, let alone allowed me to adjust it.
Have you used Jockey with AMD drivers? It's fscking painful.
I use Linux almost all the time at home, I have been playing some online games recently which just play in a browser. But all in all I game a lot less than some years ago. Even my USB2 soundcard (Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6) works in Linux.
After all the dual-booting to play games (and mostly remaining in Windows after playing), last year (10th nov 2011 actually) I managed to play my first hours on a virtual machine. And I'm talking Deus Ex HR at 1920x1080.
I managed to use my i5-2500 (non-K) to virtualize (VT-d) my Radeon 5850 and a USB controller, thus having native GPU and input (audio took half a year of trial and error, and now my Hercules Fortission IV is working flawless). I've scored all my 80 hours of Skyrim, around 40 of DXHR and already 35 hours of Dishonored. Also a log of iRacing (which just released a 64-bit binary).
The downsides:
- obviously Windows is still present
- extra step to start VM (but I've got SSD....so not that bad)
- extra HW (IGP and GPU, 2 sound cards, 2 NICs)
- !!! hard to make it work
I'm looking now to upgrade to 7950 and 2 additional monitors for eyefinity.
I know I'm a little off-topic, but I just wanted to say I found a workaround.
I think Flashback, originally developed for the Amiga, is one of the most ported games in history.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The list? Call of Duty, I guess I could live with out it. There will be the source games before too long. Battlefield 3, My clan mate's play that and I would miss playing with them. ArmA 2 + Dayz, I would have a great deal of trouble missing them. So I keep Windows around just for Dayz...
PendragonUK http://flavors.me/pendragonuk
Works great on macs. VMWare has gotten good enough to play Skyrim on a 3-year old mac config in a VM.
Yeah, had to use XP here one day, and I agree Windows 7 is a far better operating system than earlier Windowses. It's really shocking how bad XP was in many ways - and it was one of the better Windows.
Still, Win 7 has nothing to remotely match the Linuxes' package management systems. Hardware support is also actually better on Linux these days, for almost everything. I don't see either changing for Windows 8, although they're apparently trying with the first.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Video driver support from the manufacturers should come first.
I'm running Ubuntu with Gnome, since I hate Unity. I've been trying to install the ATI drivers for my Radeon card, but it's a horrible mess. I can't get it to work and I'm a Unix sysadmin with kernel development experience so I'm not a newbie. I could probably spend a few weeks time working on it, getting to know the exact in and outs of video driver configuration under X, but honestly I don't want to. I've got other things that I'd rather spend my time on.
When video driver support becomes as easy and as solid as under Windows 7, then a huge hurdle would fall for Linux as a gaming platform.
I can't speak for OP but for me the reasons to buy a game console (I don't have one; I'm not a gamer) would be:
- The games pretty much just work. No messing around with settings, making sure your system is beefy enough to play it with all effects enabled, etc.
- No worries about drivers, Windows breakdowns, etc. If you get a nice new controller, just plug it in, and it will work.
- More likely that you can do multi-player. The only times I've seen multi-player in action was using consoles.
- Play in the living room and connect to the TV, which is much bigger than my computer monitor. And the living room has space for multiple players.
Game consoles are rather specialised in that they do one thing and do that one thing well: playing games.
I use Linux on my primary desktop since 1994.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
WTF did you just ask me?
Guess I'm not the target for the question but I use to be an avid gamer, sometimes 30-50+ hours a week only so many years ago. Even today, when I pickup a game, I just have to play it through like a long movie with ramen snacks during downtime.
With that said, I've been primarily working from my laptop which is running linux, and I just don't play games anymore b/c it's inconvenient. I dont want to dual boot, I've messed with wine for over 10 years, and the only game I'm actually active in right now is EVE Online. I run the client in VMWare Workstation 8 on an intel video card of my laptop.
Id like to see steam for linux b/c then I'd have a no nonsense way to see what's available for my platform and who knows, maybe I'd be playing again. If there's some crazy insane awesome sauce windows game that causes me to divorce my wife and disown my kids, I have an old desktop in the corner collecting dust I can play it on.
16 platforms is pretty impressive, granted—but Doom has been ported to at least 35 different systems, including every system Flashback appeared on except the CD-i and FM Towns. That's still more ports for Flashback than either Quake or Quake 2, though, so you have a pretty good point. (Of course, everything is dwarfed by the unbelievable number of different machines that can play Zork, or even more broadly, some clone of Tetris.)
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People can rage all they want, but no...at the moment there is no market, at all.
Sadly, true.
If a game developer could choose to throw 100K$ at porting to Linux or throw 100K$ at additiional marketing of the Windows version, the latter will probably earn them more money in return.
Despite what we'd all want, Linux on the desktop (I use it too), there simply aren't enough users to make it worthwhile for a commercial company.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Everyone knows content is king. Many of us use Windows or OSX at home instead of Linux because the games we love just are not available on Linux
You got the wrong way round, I think - lack of games isn't keeping gamers off Linux, it is keeping Linux users away from playing the popular games, which isn't quite the same thing. If your interest is playing games, by all means buy Windows/Mac/PS3 or whatever.
As you say, content is king; Linux has the kind of content that matters to Linux users: perfect facilities for a server, or for software development. It's a tool, not a toy.
Is Linux going to take over the desktop this year? Who cares - I think it will, eventually. Just think back: 5 years ago I was the only one using OpenOffice, that I knew; but now there are signs that it will be MS Office that tries to catch up in future: the newest versions of MS Office has reluctantly become able handle open document format. We are winning, slowly.
Borderlands 2
Starcraft 2
Diablo 3
steam +
Natural selection 2
Team fortress 2
Civilisation 4 and 5
Firefall
Minecraft
A comment like that makes you sound like a 14 year old girl.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Doom is kind of the Rule 34 of gaming - if it exists, and has a framebuffer and fastish integer arithmetic, there is Doom for it.
I don't play much games anymore since I have dropped out of the hardware upgrade race since I got a laptop. My 3yr old Macbook Pro runs all programs just fine even virtualization when I need to practice things. But games are of course not doable, except from my old favorite, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, that I play a couple of times each year.
I run OSX, not because I can play games. I run OSX because shit works and when it doesn't, rarely does it require me to go edit a config file or run a command line. None of these things are 'hard' for me, I'm a developer, I generally live by the command line. I don't however want to spend my time dicking with the OS to get multiple monitors to work in the way I want. I don't want to deal with half finished apps that care more about having every option than accomplishing a task. I want my music and videos to play in the background without hunting shit down to make it work right ... almost right anyway, always not actually correct.
Linux is trying too hard to be everything. My OS doesn't try to do that. It doesn't get in my way (well, most of the time). It doesn't' shove RMS's philosophy down my throat by actively going against anyone who doesn't go it 'their way' such dealing with binary only drivers. It doesn't have every one of its users screaming 'its going to be the year of the OSX desktop!' because people don't care about ruling the world, they care about getting shit done.
My OS is polished, does what I need and otherwise stays the hell out of my way. It serves a purpose that I need, to give me a common way to run all apps with common user interface conventions.
In short, I don't run Linux not because of Games, I play those in VMware or boot to Windows to get proper performance for that.
I don't run Linux because of philosophy. I have no problem with the Linux philosophy in general, but I just don't give a shit about promoting it. If you want to run Linux you almost have to convince yourself that all your pains you take dealing with an unpolished collection of 900 ways to skin a cat and 1200 new wheel designs is the right way to do it because its part of the philosophy.
I have shit to do, I don't have time for the philosophy.
10 years ago, I ran a FreeBSD desktop and was pretty much a promoter of the philosophy. 10 years ago I had more time than money. Now I have more important things to do than care about hardline GPL promotion zealots and their artificial restrictions.
GPL does not dominate my life. It does if you run a Linux desktop. I just don't care about running Linux and there is no compelling reason for me to care. I make money writing software. GPL pretty much is the opposite of what I care about.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Since I'm on Linux I play Heroes of Newerth because it has a Linux version, instead of League of Legends or Dota 2. It's good fun and it works brilliantly with the open source ATI drivers. I would also play some Minecraft, but I can't really get into it...
Like many others, I dual boot into Linux for work and Windows for gaming. Linux has automated backup and is optimized for my workflow, Windows is just as it were when I got it with 100 additional icons on the desktop and no backups. The only other reason I'd need windows besides playing games is for correcting papers in Word when a journal insists on .doc submissions and for some mysterious reasons formulas from OpenOffice never show up correctly in Microsoft's product.
I have around 100 games, mostly on Steam, but only play 2-3 titles from time to time, among them also X-Plane which already works on Linux. There is only one reason why I'd switch to Linux from Windows for playing games: speed. I'd switch to any platform for a substantial framerate gain with the same hardware. Other than that I see no reason to switch. Having to reboot also has the advantage of not allowing me to play when I should work.
My long term goal is to not play any games any longer at all, because (a) they suck more and more (or I've outgrown them?) and (b) there are so many better things to waste your time with, e.g. ad hoc programming for fun which is very similar to gaming anyway.
I guess both titles will need some decent HW vendor support first (FFB for my logitech G25 wheel and drivers for the HOTAS Cougar Stick).
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And this story demonstrates another problem: most Linux gamers dual-boot anyway, so most Linux sales a publisher could get would probably cause an equivalent drop on the Windows side.
Maybe the 30% tax on the upcoming "Windows Marketplace" - assuming it kills third-party platforms - can change this equation, but I doubt it.
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Vanilla NetHack hasn't had a release since 2003 but there have been several forks of it, one I did myself (look at my sig).
Considering the "far better roguelikes" that's something just asking for a flame war but I guess he thinks about ToME4 or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
ToME4's root go back a long time, originally an Angband variant but the 4th version separated completely from that heritage and created vast amounts of original content that makes Skyrim look like a coffee-break activity.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is sort of an Anti-NetHack, trying to avoid many of the design mistake NetHack had. Like the needs for spoilers, that different races play the same in the long run, grinding, or that the game doesn't stay challenging after a certain point.
DCSS and ToME4 are big games but in the last years there has been a trend to develop smaller roguelikes. Like DoomRL which is exactly what its title says or roguelikes for mobile devices like 100Rogues and POWDER.
UnNetHack: NetHack Improved!
This is the only game I'm playing at the moment. It rocks, but it's sadly Windows only.
No.
And, more to the point:
SuperTux. Seriously. I can't use a system that has this stupid game.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
just outta curiosity, did it work out of the box in windows or mac? just for comparison
i don't play many games on linux (except the original starcraft-broodwar under wine) but i don't play many games in windows either
a lot of games are coming out that are better on things like PS3, xbox360, wii, and the smartphones (android and ios)
i received angry birds rio as a present, except that it was a windows version... it sucks bad compared to the touch interface on my galaxy s2.
otoh... if i had 3 46" LED panels and a water cooled awesomeness eyefinity graphics card setup with the widescreen fixer program... that would make for a fucking awesome windows gaming experience! unfortunately i have a life, so...
I'm lucky in that I've been primarily into console games (traditionally a Nintendo/Sega fan), and there are very few PC games I give a damn about. As for Windows-exclusives, well... the Flight Simulator series, maybe Monster Truck Madness 2... and, uh, I seriously can't think of anything I can't get elsewhere that I absolutely must have. Luckily for the majority of PC games I do care about (and that majority is itself quite small), DOSBox has me covered. And I don't need Windows just to be able to run it.
Ofc it is. AMD drivers are pure garbage. So garbage in -> garbage out.
Video on the other hand, is a real bitch on Linux. Frameworks like Qt rely on platform specific backends (phonon) and there is no de facto standard of a video player on Linux, let alone that the phonon plugin is installed.
Ugh. I hate it when game developers rely on platform-specific video frameworks even on Windows, because if you have a slightly different set of codecs installed from the one they're expecting stuff breaks in weird ways.
Anyone know how this can be run on a modern OS? I haven't played it since Win98 but would love to give it another shot. And as I need to replace my PC soon an answer to this question would help me decide whether to finally make the jump from Win* to Lin*!
My game of choice at the moment is Battlefield 3. The availability of that game isn't the only thing preventing me from converting to Linux for gaming. What about the next game I want to play, and the one after that? Are they also going to be released for Linux at the same time they're released for Windows?
Further, there's better support for the hardware I'm using when I play:
- Thrustmaster HOTAS joystick and throttle for flying in the game (including drivers to remap the buttons, toggles, etc)
- nVidia GTX680 with 3 LCD panels attached, running nVidia's surround video
- Sound Blaster from Creative, which includes utilities for controlling which output the card sends sound through, etc.
When I'm gaming, I just want the rig to work. I don't foresee that happening with Linux any time soon.
Jason Van Patten
Hopefully without provoking the usual anti-SOE trollfest, I would be thrilled to see EQ2 run natively on a Linux box, without the necessity of VM lag/overhead.
Not because I love Sony. I just love EQ2.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Torchlight is available in the Ubuntu store for those that use this OS. I guess people that already bought the original game could contact Runic for a linux binary.
And this story demonstrates another problem: most Linux gamers dual-boot anyway,
Or have a dedicated gaming rig that runs Windows.
The main problem with Linux games as I see it are that the good ones are seldom native. If you have to run them under Wine, what's the point? You could just as well run them under Windows then.
Of the rest, which seldom are top rate games, they tend to run under SDL or similar, with no way to take advantage of the full capabilities of the machine. They're hobbled to a common denominator.
To be honest, that particular problem is somewhat related to what strangles Windows gaming too - most new games are console ports, with concessions to how console users don't have an instantaneous-moving mouse, multiple screens, or enough umph to do things like background- and pre-loading instead of instancing.
Linux would be big except for [insert random word] FUD ...
AccountKiller
The AppDB scorecards are usually wrong(ish). I can absolutely guarantee those weenies that rated it platinum do not get the same performance with the same settings when comparing gameplay on windows vs linux with wine.
For me it's not that my games 'don't run' in Linux, it's that they run poorly or inconsistently. With WINE I can get 90% of the games I want to play to run, but when they do they tend to either have sound issues or wildly fluctuating framerates (I'm looking at you D3). Couple this with the fact that getting games to run is usually much more complex than it is in Windows and I just throw up my hands and go back to Win 7 installation. Thankfully I dual boot so this isn't as big of a hassle for me as it is for others, but I'd love to just have one Linux installation on my computer and be done with it.
I used to always say that there was no way Linux would ever become a serious gaming platform, but if Win 8 is the future of Microsoft then maybe it has a chance.
ALSA? It just works. PulseAudio? Not so much. I wish the GNOME developers hadn't made the decision to require PulseAudio, but that's exactly why I'm not using GNOME Shell today.
Think PulseAudio is bad? Wait until you try systemd, which is designed to abstract every service and daemon on the system through a common and humanly unconfigurable framework. Need to turn jack off in order to use your mic? Sorry, "chkconfig jack off" won't work - you have to hand-edit multiple files and send a line longer than your arm to the systemd control program to do that.
It's as if it were written by the same [insert suitable adjective and expletive] as wrote pulseaudio.
Or Windows, or backgammon, or orienteering, or talking. The actual 'free time' humans have to develop and sharpen skills is diminishing with the deepening economic crisis, as the timespan in which one must work to survive is increasing. The endless cycle of distraction provided by on and offline gaming short-circuits the human tendency towards crushing boredom -- the kind of boredom that gets people out into the world to face problems, gather (in person) to discuss those problems, and solve them.
Anyone can install an operating system, load disc and click Next a dozen times then Finish... but to use an operating system is to understand its principles, adapt it optimally to the hardware, choose a set of packages geared to your general purpose and explore its commands and utilities, explore the landscape. While ding this one is engaged in inner-directed activity that has no set goal -- save to enrich the mind and 'prepare' for what comes next.
What comes next? A video game perhaps. But when you have explored the various toolsets like perl and php there are other alluring places your mind can easily drift into -- CONSTRUCTIVE (arrogant emphasis mine) realms where the fiddling with MySQL and Apache on the box might lead (amazingly, easily) to deployed applications in the cloud. Or a sense of 'can-do' ism that pervades every aspect of life.
I have long desired to assemble a real workshop with routers and lathes and such tools that one can look at almost anything and say, "I could build that." But it has remained just out of reach because acquisition of these things requires time, space, money and opportunity.
But in the digital realm our civilization has reached its pinnacle with Linux! Here in a well organized group of free packages is the Ultimate Workshop. Grab and grok Linux and you have at your fingertips every basic algorithmic and organizational tool yet imagined. Delve into data structures more easily than Knuth could back in the 70s, manipulate photos and videos with as much capability as million dollar dedicated workstations of the 80s, build and deploy net based applications at the eBay level of complexity. The assembly tools and building blocks are all there.
The modern open source workshop IS the dream workshop. All the tools are there. It is ready for you to acquire. All you need to do is reach out and grasp it. And add your own PRECIOUS TIME.
Which is why when I see so much of the modern Internet devoted to these social enclaves of gaming, to me it is as if a significant part of the population has developed a fixation with throwaway plastic knives. They come in different shapes and colors, they don't last very long, they don't even cut your food properly -- and unlike the little yarn about manual dexterity -- a fixation on gaming seems more to impair survival rather than assure it. The Grand Linux Workshop remains on the FTP site unyearned-for while the gamers collect and trade shiny plastic knives. And forks and spoons.
And that is why as you sample the fantastic moveable feast that is the Internet, you spend so much time spitting out the broken tines of plastic forks.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
...none of them. I keep a Windows box for playing games on and Linux box for everything else.
What's wrong with HTML?
You mean other than the fact that widely used user agents tend to undersupport CSS paged media? Or that the differences between IE and everything else at rendering HTML are at least as big as the differences between Word and everything else at rendering Word files?
The AC has a valid point, just saying it works for me is not helpful and definitely not +4 Insightful. Ubuntu 12.10 has some serious problems with some Nvidia cards.
I don't play games enough to justify using a subpar operating system as my main working tool.
I really don't understand why it matters to others.
No worries about drivers, Windows breakdowns, etc.
Instead, you have to worry about system updates that disable all your homebrew.
If you get a nice new controller, just plug it in, and it will work.
Nice new controllers just work on Windows and Linux as well. Since Windows XP Service Pack 1, Windows has come with class drivers for both standard USB HID gamepads and Xbox 360 controllers. And a few weeks ago, I tried all my USB gamepads on an Xubuntu machine; they worked.
More likely that you can do multi-player.
I've been told World of Warcraft is massively multiplayer. CronoCloud keeps telling me that single-screen multiplayer is overrated, that the advantage of multiplayer games with a separate machine per player is that you can play online at any time with a pick-up group of strangers instead of having to arrange schedules for all your real-life friends to come visit you. That and publisher greed are why PS3 and Xbox 360 games have become more likely to require a separate console per player. But there are still several PC games that support single-screen multiplayer.
Play in the living room and connect to the TV
PCs output VGA and/or HDMI video. TVs made since about 2007 can display both, and even older TVs can display PC video through a $30 VGA-to-composite scan converter. I don't see anything stopping people from putting a media PC next to an HDTV.
If you were a gamer, and you found an indie PC game that had a mode for multiple Xbox 360 controllers connected to a home theater PC, would you try it?
I used to be a pretty avid PC gamer but as a father of six I tend to fill a support role in our household, which doesn't leave a lot of time for gaming. However, I live vicariously though my six, nine and eleven year old daughters who like PC games (especially Minecraft - I set up a LAN server for them), but they also spend a significant amount of time watching YouTube, playing Flash games on websites, and watching Netflix. We have a PS3 slim that gets a significant amount of use by my three year old daughter (Little Big Planet 2, predominantly), and a Nintendo Wii that's been mostly neglected (haha Nintendo). We also have a PS2 slim, and four vintage arcade cabinets (of the four, Soul Calibur III gets the most use).
The desktop computers are also primarily needed for school, and because three of our children need them for schoolwork each day, if one of them is down it causes a problem. When the desktop running Windows 7 (for game support) was compromised by a drive-by trojan, presumably from one of the flash game sights that are rather heavy on the advertising, I spent four days trying to repair it before throwing in the towel (bear in mind I've worked over a decade in the PC repair industry, and my malware removal/repair skills are not insignificant - this was an unrepairable mess).
Each computer in our house (except my wife's Windows 7 laptop) is now running Debian stable. I wouldn't wish this solution on someone else due to the amount of time getting everything set up, but for us it works. I've also found that once I have a LINUX system established, it tends to remain stable (with the exception of when my three year old somehow enabled all of the Accessibility options on one of them simultaneously - that was fun to undo). Each desktop has Minecraft installed. The girls would like Windows games, but the amount of effort involved in getting one running via Wine (or Crossover, or even PlayOnLinux) typically far exceeds the amount of free time I currently have available. Whenever they complain I point out the PS3, the PS2, the Wii, the arcade machines, and that pretty much ends that dialogue. Yes, first world problems.
To answer the question directly, right now, for me, it's Borderlands 2.
Companies should focus Linux game development on tried-and-true esports titles, such as Counter-Strike (Source/Global Offensive), Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth, StarCraft 2, DotA 2, Call of Duty, etc. Fortunately, some of those are Valve titles already headed to Linux. Heroes of Newerth has a Linux version that works pretty well, and will certainly only get better.
What's it going to take to convince Activision Blizzard to port its big games to Linux?
Moreover, what's it going to take to get developers of Mac games to port to Linux, because they're apparently pretty easy to port to Linux once on OS X.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
You should discipline yourself to use GIMP occasionally. Stick a project to it, or at least a particular thing you want to do in a project, until you've searched and exhausted all options. You'll learn something, either that you didn't know how to use GIMP right or that GIMP thoroughly has failed to supply a useful feature. You might even accidentally stumble across things you hadn't thought to use for a particular task and come up with a few new tricks to keep in your toolkit. In any case, doing things different from time to time is good... at the moment I'm playing Chess, even though it's inferior to Go, because I want to improve my visualization and tactics in general--I'll play blindfold chess when I'm decent at Chess.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
starcraft broodwar
All of them. In particular WoW and Diablo X, but really all of them. Yes, I've run WoW under Cedega, yes I've run Diablo on VMs, yes one can run them under Wine, but I want true native code, not emulated, simulated, virtualized. I'm looking forward to maybe -- just maybe -- seeing this happen over the next 3 years. Games with actual accelerated high density graphics, compiled for and running on Linux. What a concept.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
The last time I installed Windows over an open source operating system for my own purposes was to play the first version of Quake.
If I had a time machine, I would go back and tap myself on the shoulder. Look dude, Quake rocks, but the skills you could be learning in Linux or BSD will serve you forever. I also quite liked Age of Empires at the time.
Dual booting wasn't a viable option. Around that time I think I paid $600 for a 6GB SCSI disk drive, thinking it would pay for itself in time saved in my software development work. Maybe it did, but I suspect it didn't.
The other problem is that you could install Windows on some cheap ass disk drive, but the installation process was long and tedious, and you had to ask what value you placed on your immortal soul sitting there feeding borg cookies into the 3 1/2" borg infection port.
I seemed to recall NT never told you about the mistake in your LUN assignment until digesting _all_ the borg cookies. More cookies, please!
But even then I had a deal with myself that I would multitask cleaning the bathroom with every large Microsoft application installed (or re-installed). Dev Studio kept my pipes clean. DLL hell polished my chrome.
I'm older and wiser now. I can clean the bathroom just because it needs to be done.
Ha Ha! Only serious.
I tried several of the Linux native iPod managers and none of them could be made to operate in a way I liked. Somewhat ironically, I normally only run two programs on my desktop at home. Chrome and iTunes. If Apple can get their Podcast app to work properly, I might just cut the cord completely and move my Chrome activities not to Linux, but to a tablet.
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I don't play a single game, I play them all. Bring the entire hundreds of titles who get released per year. Don't stop at 2-3 FPS and MMOs.
A number of libraries I have are in NKS format, NI's container format and are encrypted so that only Kontakt can open them. EastWest's stuff all works only with their own Play software, it is a proprietary format. Neither are Windows only, they are Windows and Mac, but they are not Linux.
This is the reality of high end samples. Many companies do not distribute them in open formats because of piracy concerns (legit or not). You find that most of the really good stuff is locked down like this.
Also, you can argue if it was a good decision or not, but the money is already spent. I have thousands of dollars of samples. I'm not interested in rebuying them, even if I could find something of similar quality in an open format (so far, no luck there, I do sniff around for samples all the time).
what does that have to do with game development?
Many years ago, I dual-booted Windows so I could play games there, but once I got my first console (a PS1), that became more effort than it was worth.
The problem with that is that many kinds of games suck on consoles. FPS, RTS, flight sims, all better on PCs.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Windows has updated its sound model several times. The current MS recommended way of doing audio for games would be XAudio 2, same as the Xbox 360.
However, it still supports old school sound APIs, all the way back to MME, which a surprising number of newer programs still use. So you can load up something quite old, and sound works no problem. Same deal with graphics. When a new DirectX comes out, it includes all the old DirectX APIs, bugs and all, inside of it. So if a program makes DX 3 calls, it can make those calls on a system with DX 11.1.
There's something to be said for that. It is nice to be able to run most programs without fuss. There are limits to how far back you can go, and at a certain point an emulator makes more sense, but MS does a pretty good job of keeping old APIs working, while still adding new ones when they want to.
Sometimes things actually run better under Wine than under Windows. I haven't really been a gamer for a while but I used to see that with WoW. Remember, it's not an emulator like emulating a game console CPU, it's just an API running on it's native hardware.
So you'll point me then to the Linux distribution that "works already" with all my hardware? I'll need one that has drivers for the GTX 680 that support OpenGL 4.2, so the binary nVidia drivers, drivers for an Auzentech HomeTheater HD card (CA20K2 chip), MCU Pro drivers, i1Display Pro drivers (and software that can allow it to talk to an NEC 2690), and soon drivers for a MOTU HDX-SDI.
What's that? You don't have one of those? Ok then.
Crowing about Linux systems "already working" is silly because that's only the case with quite standard/low intensity hardware which is the same for Windows. Install Windows on a system with integrated graphics, a UAA spec soundcard, and an Intel NIC and it works out of box. Same with Linux (usually). However when you start getting some higher end hardware, which gamers are wont to do, you need to go fetch drivers. Then things become problematic in Linux often.
The main reason I usually use Mac OS X more than Linux is because of fonts. I don't really play computer games anymore. But no matter what type of antialiasing or whatever I install on Linux I can't get the fonts to look as crisp as they do in OS X, which makes a difference when I'm making presentations.
It's gotten to the point where I can get by without Word. The imagine manipulation I have to do is basic so Gimp works fine. But two things hold me back: I still need Excel (in Windows - only thing I use Windows for) and I need beautiful fonts. If someone could point me in the right direction to amend my font troubles on Linux then I'll love you forever.
The funny thing is when I do play games I do it in Linux. There are all sorts of awesome logic/math/puzzle games available on Linux and they're free. I don't play games for eye candy, I play them for mental stimulation. I disapprove of hobbies where the goal is to zombify the individual so they can 'pass the time.' If your time is so invaluable you feel like you need time wasters then just kill yourself already. Seriously. If you spend a large portion of your waking life playing WoW or Call of Duty or watching reality TV then please just die already. You are the living dead.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
linux *IS* the game. I'd rather be creative than just a consumer of content. But that's me.
I've been playing a lot of SpaceChem recently (got it from the Humble Bundle a while ago) and was surprised to find out it runs much better on Ubuntu than Windows. The Windows version has cleaner sound (bugs in the Ubuntu sound drivers) but the Ubuntu version has a bunch of extra features. The big ones are saving movies of solutions, and the ability to see the action inside factories while zoomed out in the landscape view (Windows offers only waiting markers in the latter case).
For me, it would probably be slightly older games like Oblivion. Ideally anything from Desura's Indie Royal would be nice if they were Linux-friendly. Most of the time, it is Windows only. The Humble Bundle is great for that, but I really only like about a third of them (I prefer RPGs and 2D platformers).
I know Steam is going to eventually move to Linux (might have to get Ubuntu for that... dreading that) and Desura has a client, but I wish they were slightly further along the way also. The Windows side is so better polished than the Linux.
Battlefield 3 and Diablo 3 would be on my short list. I already play Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) on Linux. I will even sometimes run two instances of LotRO simultaneously, which I can also do on Windows, but Linux runs two LotRO clients much more smoothly on Linux than it does on Windows.
His point, however, is defeated right off the bat by being delivered with silly ad-hominem attacks.
Any game available on Steam or coming from Blizzard
My penguin ate my sig
I have a lot of PC games... hundreds on my Steam account, at least another 30 on GOG... and those two numbers continue to increase over time.
So, my problem isn't with Linux not supporting one PC game, it's with it not supporting every PC game I have or want/plan to buy.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
All of them? Linux would not be a viable option until it has complete support for Windows games. Not ports, but support for. Not Wine...but true support for (or at least...native-speed support, which WINE has never been in my experience). Never said it would happen, merely that is what it would take to be viable for me.
People have been suggesting using WINE to run games. I have heard stories that Blizzard bans players who use WINE. Any truth to this? I do not want to lose my entire Blizzard game library.
The real tipping point will not come when Linux supports all of the games people want to play today. The tipping point will be when Linux supports all the games people want to play on release day. When I know I can reliably and easily download and play the latest Blizzard or Valve game the day it's released, then Linux will be in a much better position to be a serious contender for gamers.
But the bigger question is why would I want to switch to Linux when I'm content with Windows 7. As far as I know, Windows 7 does everything I need it to do and I'm not left feeling like I'm missing out on any huge features, so...why invest the time and effort to switch to something that arguably is more difficult to use and less compatible if I'm not one of the geeks that has near religious zeal for it?
Sure, it's free, but the Windows tax is what, maybe $150 when you buy a new PC? That's $50/year assuming you'll use that computer for three years, and $50 is WELL worth paying vs investing my personal time to learn a new OS. Sorry, but there needs to be a compelling reason to switch. Just having working games is not a compelling reason, I already have that.
Outside of MMORPGs like WOW and GW gaming on the PC is out of style. Serious gamers are all about the console and their XBOX 360 these days.
I do play all kinds of games. Most are either browser games, or old enough that you could easily play them in a VM (in fact, some are old enough that you have no choice to play them in a VM or equivalent, i.e. dosbox). For those that aren't, I would be willing to dual-boot on the occasion that I wanted to play one.
No, it's not the games. It's primarily the desktop environments: there are several choices, but they all blow. You have your choice between bloated, overgrown shiny garbage (Gnome or KDE), or intentionally not-bloated, not-shiny choices, that are so intentionally not-bloated that instead they feel crippled in their lack of basic features Windows has had since 95. In either case, they're being designed by a combination of clueless-about-UIs programmers, and useability "experts" that care more about doing something crazy and new than actually giving people what they want. No thanks.
In fact, I'll even go so far as to say this: if anyone were to give me a simple (but not simple to the point of crippled) window manager that basically just acted like XP in all the important ways, complete with a file manager program that worked as well as the one in XP (i.e. not the one post-XP that keeps getting buggier and more annoying), I'd probably try it out. But I haven't seen one yet.
Since most of these are Windows only I'd have to keep a Windows partition if nothing else for these game nights.
Games: Civ III,IV
Galactic Civilizations II, Fallen Enchantress (Pretty please Brad?)
Mechwarrior Online
Skyrim
Star Citizen (forthcoming)
Other Apps:
Office. Seriously. This also keeps me tied to Windows and I hate it. Yes, I know about OpenOffice, but there are certain things that just don't work the way I need them too and I can't spend hours fixing every powerpoint presentation and revision I receive just so that I can use it under OO.
League of Legends (currently the most popular game on the planet) would be a must-have.
On a more general note, what we really need is for game developers to move away from DirectX and over to OpenGL.
Whats keeping me (and my clients) from using Linux is web development, not games. I ended up coding Classic ASP based websites as a career. Yes, I know all of you hate Classic ASP and feel it should be banished, but the reality is that companies have stuff written in it and they won't be throwing out or rewriting their stuff it anytime soon as long as it still works. And as long as I can't legally redistribute LAMP-server-like version of linux with Chili!Soft or Halcyon pre-installed and pre-configured to just work immediately after installation, I just don't see myself or my clients ever making any real progress towards getting away from it. Nevermind the games; we're just suck-in-the-mud here in Windows-world for business reasons.
Creative Suite and Lightroom. Specifically, the A/V side of Adobe CS. I love linux, have used it on the desktop and use it daily on the server as a sysadmin, but there are no competitive alternatives to Premiere/After Effects/Photoshop/Lightroom on the Linux stack. I wish there were, but there is nothing I've been able to find in years of looking that supplies the featureset with any degree of daily usability/stability. In several situations, there is nothing that supplies the features period. So for now this triplebooter will be stuck with OSX or Windows as daily driver, and Linux solely as an experimental/occasional OS on the desktop.
For me its simply choice... an OS that allows me to just install and run any game I want to play. I have to acknowledge that I lay all the blame at Microsoft's feet; they have blocked alternative OSes ruthlessly over the years, but, I still like my games.
I call computer-illiteracy job security
I'd like to see Starcraft II for Linux If there's ever another version of Never Winter Nights, I'd like to see that on Linux. Same for any of the ElderScrolls series of games from Bethesda.
Exile III was ported to Linux. Just saying. ;)
I play FTL and Minecraft, both of which run natively on Linux. I do have a Windows HDD lying around with some shooters on it, but I haven't used it in months. If I ever get a hankering for Windows-only games, I'll just pop that HDD in my SATA dock, then boot back into Linux for everything else.
My wife & I love PC games but prefer safe bank transactions & better web browsing. Dual-booting's a pain, so we just stick with Linux & Linux HumbleBundle games. We own StarCraft2, but don't play it much since I don't want the whole procedure to get there.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Some of these will undoubtably run on Linux. Until they all do, I'm going to keep booting into Windows because they all run on that OS::
Football Manager 2011
Football Manager 2012
Football Manager 2013
(future Football Manager games)
Empire: Total War
Borderlands
Gratuitous Space Battles
Company of Heroes
Dragon Age: Origins
Mount & Blade: Warband
Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planewalkers (and 2012, and 2013)
UFO: Afterlight
Star Wars: Empire at War
Test Drive Unlimited 2
Frozen Synapse
Portal 2
Total War: Shogun 2
Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War II - Retribution
Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War II - Chaos Rising
Spellforce
DC Universe Online
King Arthur - The Role-playing Wargame
Star Wolves
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II
Supreme Commander 2
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
FTL
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (four variants of)
Air Conflicts: Secret Wars
Alpha Protocol
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
The Binding of Isaac
Crusader Kings II
Dear Esther
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Disciples III: Renaissance
Divinity 2: Developer's Cut
F1 2010
Gratuitous Tank Battles
Half Life 2 (and various episodes)
Heroes of Might and Magic V
Jade Empire
LIMBO
Machinarium
Majesty 2
NWN2
Portal
Psychonaughts
Rocksmith
S.T.A.L.K.E.R (and sequels)
Spellforce
Spellforce 2
Victoria: Revolutions
Victoria II
Wargame: European Escalation
X: Beyond the Frontier
X2: The Threat
X3: Reunion
X3: Terran Conflict
There are also a few games I've installed, played a bit and removed, and at least 7 MMOs that have between them clocked up around 8 months of in-game time.
Hey, nobody said I had a life.
I can probably get 100% of things done in windows, but with 60-75% efficiency. Getting things done isn't always the same as getting them done well.
I'm an old-time PC player but have been using my PS3 console for gaming over the last couple of years.
I am currently playing Skyrim. I started playing on the PS3, but bought the Windows version when it became obvious that the DLCs either will not be coming for the PS3 or will be scaled down. I also bought a XBox controller and a USB receiver so that I could continue to use a gaming controller. I also output the sound and video to my TV/surround system. I was amazed at the better graphics, sound, etc. on the PC. I had forgotten that PC gaming was such a rich experience, in comparison to the consoles.
That being said, even if Skyrim was available for Linux, I would not switch. I also use Microsoft Outlook/Office, Video editing apps (i.e. TMPGenc), Photo Editing apps (Photoshop Elements), etc. which are not available on Linux. As the iPad/iPhone/iCrap users like to say, it's all about the Apps, man, it's all about the apps....
Really the important part for me that would make me truly consider switching my gaming rig over is if I had a strong guarantee that FUTURE games would be available on the Linux platform. The old games I already own? I aleady played those, and there are not many I reload over and over again. Maybe the CIV series and Elder Scrolls. Even with those I can understand "if you want to play old games, use an old platform [windows]" logic. But new stuff. That's the clincher. If all, or a huge majority, of new games will run on Linux/Steam just fine? I'd give it very serious consideration.
I'm not a PC Gamer, and am stuck on windows. I need to use it so that I can be familiar with every bug, every fix, and every funny thing it does in order to support the mass of end users at work. My computer usage is basically one big UAT that never ends.
The problem, for me, isn't the games that are currently out. In many cases I can make older games run on Linux. The issue is new games. I want to make sure I can play new game X the day it comes out if I so desire.
As title...
This is probably an odd one out, but: Touhou. Yes I know it works in Wine, but it's really wonky. It tends to break between Wine releases and some of them work while others don't.
To be honest, I've kind of "grown away" from video games (and before anyone gets resentful, no, I don't mean I'm "too grownup for video games", I just have other hobbies that eat all my time these days), but even if I were gaming more often, I have more than enough from TuxGames (especially ones I never finished or are endlessly fascinating to me). I tend to "suck the marrow from games" and get a lot of worth from them.
I am not really your target market. But I'll say this: maintaining Windows (or OSX) for games just isn't worth the hassle, and keeping the hardware up to spec eats too much into my budget. If I were still gaming, I would not buy a game that didn't run under Linux. Full stop.
Nathan's blog
Yes, and World of Warcraft is the main reason I don't switch, but there are other games I would want to play as well.
That is a good question too!
Google Earth has flight sim mode with a buncha different airplanes.
Netflix runs on Linux now. There was a /. article covering this topic last week. :D http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/11/16/1554254/running-netflix-on-linux?utm_source=slashdot&utm_medium=twitter
Good one!
What kinda graphics card are you running? Which distro of Linux?
Which are your fav. Linux games? You sound like someone good to talk to about what is awesome in FOSS games!
That is a short list there. :P
You win points for father of the year there! Good man with all the Debian and gaming around. :D
What sound system fragmentation? There's ALSA and there's ... ALSA
Yes, for Ubuntu users, there's only ALSA. But for those of us that require a real low latency sound system to do some work, we need to use the OSSv4 Audio Subsystem. But because this FRAGMENTATION in Linux it's poorly supported, so we have to use OS X or Windows.
And where do you get off thinking PA is some solution to this nightmare? It only makes matters worse. And, It's not just end users that have issues with PulseAudio subsystems. Read about the nightmare the WINE dev's are having with PulseAudio's massive latency:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyODM
noob
You're not alone. I'm also stuck with using the terribly slow and buggy open source ATI drivers. Linux needs a stable driver interface. I wish the kernel developers would stop trying to screw over ATI and nVidia with every new kernel update and start thinking of the end-users for a change.
Oh no, I am not a fan of pulseaudio... I'm currently experiencing its amazing features like "never comes back to life after pasuspending for jackd". But, if you're not doing anything fancy, it seems to ... work.
OSS, honestly, is kind of ... an obsolete design if you ask me. It does way too much in kernel (I think modesetting and evdev should be user space tasks too, FWIW). I've not really had trouble getting low latency audio from jackd on top of ALSA. Any issues with it appear to be caused by pulseaudio sucking. I'm really perplexed why Pulseaudio was written when jack exists; I know there are details like "never allows the processor to sleep" but with HPET timers nowadays (fast wakeup on an RT kernel), I don't see why jack couldn't get a "sleep when there are no sources attached" mode, even if in a higher-than-normal latency mode.
Personally, I just want to time travel back to 2008 and have an environment a bit rough around the edges, but reliable and actually working... instead of this "shiny, but ultimately useless" garbage we have nowadays.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Yup, seriously. I still play on the Half-Life 1 engine (Natural Selection 1 and Team Fortress Classic) and I still love Dawn of War 1.
If these ran natively on Linux, I would be using Linux constantly. Yes, I know Wine can generally run both games, but I've tried it and there are some glitches and other annoyances that were not present when playing on Windows (i.e., Alt+Tab, sound problems, and added CPU latency).
@junktext
Starcraft 2 and Natural Selection 2. I dual boot Windows and Linux and am pretty happy with that honestly. Linux for real work, Windows for fun and games.
Agreeing with this.
Although conversely my experience with the open-source radeon drivers has been pretty good.
only a noob would put code out on slashdot, and with bugs, and use "error trapping" as some kind of lame excuse for their bugs. only apk would be a noob and a total arrogant ass about it.
Why on earth would you be using pixel-perfect layout and CSS in important content-centric shared-editing documents?
Because we are collaborating on a document that will eventually be printed.
I'll actually answer the question instead of shooting off on a tangent about how pulseaudio sucks...
* Borderlands (1 & 2)
* Crysis
* Deus Ex
* Valve titles (Portal, HL, etc -- but those are coming)
* Serious Sam (well, 1.1 and 1.2; the rest were a bit of a waste; haven't played 3 yet -- when my harsh mistress Borderlands2 gives me time...)
* Painkiller (series)
* Torchlight 2 (apparently it wines, but I'm quite sick of wine and its artifacts, no reflection on the wine devs -- I think their efforts rock, just that many games take a serious penalty in the arena of performance and quirkiness)
There are plenty of games that I can play across both though, like Trine (1&2) and Torchlight and, of course, the great stuff from the Humble Bundles (of which I have them all!).
The sad truth though is that win8 actually runs smoother on the same hardware for regular use than my Linux Mint (KDE). Please don't suggest a different DE -- I've tried basically everything and they're either strange to use (though I should try Unity again -- I gave up on it because of the introduction of other artifacts which broke other GTK apps) or just plain fugly. I've even recently considered moving my daily operations to win8... It's a huge step up from the 2 decades of crap to fall out of the ass of Redmond in the past.
http://xkcd.com/619/
Fable: TLC (which is I think is the best thing MS have ever done) and The Witcher. Morrowind is no longer a problem since we have OpenMW :-) I am also a big fan of Titan Quest.
Check out my virtual machine: http://viuavm.org/
Crysis, 1 & 2, and futures.... COD, entire series Ghost Recon, and series Far Cry 1/2/3 Battlefield just for starters. If these had LINUX version with support for SLI/Crossfire configurations as well, it would be a no-brainer to buy and build such a machine.
I've been playing Runescape because it has a Java client. Since Java is nice and cross platform, it just works on Linux. I'm also working on my own MMORPG with a Java client that is technically an alpha but I call it pre-alpha cause so many of the client/features are bugged or missing. Still, the Java client is a huge improvement over trying to program a client in x11 for the game I'm working on. I used to play a lot of windows only games, but when windows xp came out I decided I would not upgrade(downgrade) or get any games that needed later versions of windows. After win 98 became obsolete, and my old dual-boot computer died(hardware) I gave up windows only games.
For me it is my game that I am developing and tried to compile under a virtual box Ubuntu. .
My Transformation Website
Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
Interactive CYOA http://www.catprog.org/st
All my gaming is done under emulators now. Snes9x, MAME and DOSBox already work perfectly under Linux.
They're there in their room. You're on your own.
sore loser
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Diablo 2. MS Train Simulator. RR Tycoon 3.
Yes, worked perfectly on the Windows Vista and 7 machines at work. Was barely audible under linux, even at full volume.
COD & NFS there are many more but I need these two so badly
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me"
doesn't "Ubuntu" mean "Sharing humanity" or something like that ?
I'm using Windows just to be able to play games fine. Otherwise, I'd not have bought Win 8. Here goes the list of games I'd like to play on Linux without any *major* issues: a) MaxPayne Series b) GTA Series c) NFS Series d) Assassin's Creed
We use whatever works better its not just a games issue. We use Linux for development, FreeBSD for ease of system administration and ZFS for our movie collections, Windows for games, and for love of god stay away from Apple and Solaris for having nerve of non-opensource unix.
Microsoft flight simulator.
It's not that there's no market - I'm seeing plenty of people buying Steam games and trying out the Linux version. It's just that the market is small to the point where it could almost be considered "niche". Initiatives like Steam's just show why it doesn't have to be.
I am not devoid of humor.
League of Legends. My other favorite game is already available on Steam for Linux beta, Killing Floor.
http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-slashdot-account Stop visiting Slashdot.