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?"

Comments

Guild Wars 2

[mynis01]

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.

Re:Guild Wars 2

[Nutria]

Nethack-x11.

Re:Guild Wars 2

[Nostromo21]

1. Nethack already runs on Linux & most other toasters
2. Nethack, after you've played it a handful of times, is more of an obsessive compulsive disorder, rather than a game
3. Nethack is to 'real' gamers what Excel is to real programmers :)

Re:Guild Wars 2

[rishistar]

Well, my personal fave text adventure game on Linux was xorg.conf. Spent hours on it. Way ahead of its time it was also the only text game I can think of with dual monitor support. Or not, as they case may be.

This is a loaded question

[dremspider]

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.

Re:This is a loaded question

[DarksideCoatiMundi]

Half Life 3. If that came out on just Linux I would switch to Linux and never look back. And if they brought a new release of Alpha Centauri to it too, the honey pot would just grow that much sweeter.

Re:This is a loaded question

[rtb61]

The silly idea that any one particular game would prevent a transition to Linux is just that silly. It is a whole library of games collected over years that keeps "DUAL BOOT" going. Windows the toy operating system for fun and games and Linux for business.

Re:This is a loaded question

[engun]

I don't think even that's the problem. I find that many things that work reasonably well in Windows and Mac OS X do not work properly on many Linux distributions. There may be understandable reasons for this, but in practical terms, it's a really big problem.

For example, I have a docking station for my Lenovo X201. When I put my laptop on the docking station, it should automatically switch to the external display - at the correct resolution. When I open my laptop lid, it should activate both. When I boot up while docked and lid closed, only external display should come on at the correct resolution. About an year ago (which is when I tested last), it didn't do any of these things perfectly, It kept forgetting the resolution of the external display, and I had to keep readjusting it. Opening and closing the lid was a slow and unbearable affair.

This is apart from the fact that the graphics are pretty sluggish, with occasional tearing etc. Scrolling and panning were also fairly slow. Intel drivers are correctly installed. The UI just doesn't have the polish and smoothness that Android, Windows and OS X do. The fonts are also pretty ugly by default, The buttons and layouts look squished or otherwise disproportionate. There are many many similar hiccups as the ones outlined above. As a point of comparison, I'll point out that I started using Mac OS X only recently, and have found it instantly more pleasant and intuitive to use, although I still find Windows to provide the most flexibility, especially when it comes to multi-monitor support.

Android is a testament to the fact that fluid and beautiful desktops on Linux are entirely possible, on a range of hardware. I think KDE (my favourite) and Gnome just need to stop worrying about new features, and just polish their existing experience. Alternatively, maybe the trick to finally having Linux on the Desktop, is to have Android on the Desktop.

Re:This is a loaded question

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a comp setup for Lord of the Rings Online for my granddaughter to play on, and the latest release broke it. Turned out there was a bug in WINE that was found and fixed the next day, based on my report and others. However, the WINE developers were extremely arrogant, and accused me of slacking because I didn't have a full development environment and couldn't get the compiles to work correctly. Turned out to be an issue with multi-architecture setup under the current Ubuntu 64-bit release, trying to compile Wine for 32-bit use, which was required for LOTRO to work correctly. This was not a 10-minute fix. It took several days of work trying to get the Ubuntu system working under multi-arch, and I finally just gave up. How many days can you go telling a small child she can't play her game? So I installed Win8 and she's happy again. My office comp still runs Linux, but I refuse to recommend it for less-than-knowledgeable users.

Re:This is a loaded question

[war4peace]

Not really, no. As Virtual Machine support becomes better and host machines become faster, it's *new* games that are a showstopper, not older games from 2+ years ago which can be run in a VM. But so far there's no VM that can properly run Borderlands 2, for example.
Dual boot allows you to run only one operating system at a time, that doesn't work for me. With Windows as host OS and Linux as guest OS, I can suspend the guest and be gaming in 20 seconds. Compared to shutdown+restart+boot_the_other_OS procedure, it takes 1/20th of the time.
Using dual-boot for gaming is like sex with an inflatable doll: by the time you finish inflating it, your boner turned into a wiener for a while already, you're tired and your mood is shitty.

Re:This is a loaded question

[tlhIngan]

Turned out there was a bug in WINE that was found and fixed the next day, based on my report and others. However, the WINE developers were extremely arrogant, and accused me of slacking because I didn't have a full development environment and couldn't get the compiles to work correctly. Turned out to be an issue with multi-architecture setup under the current Ubuntu 64-bit release, trying to compile Wine for 32-bit use, which was required for LOTRO to work correctly. This was not a 10-minute fix. It took several days of work trying to get the Ubuntu system working under multi-arch, and I finally just gave up. How many days can you go telling a small child she can't play her game? So I installed Win8 and she's happy again. My office comp still runs Linux, but I refuse to recommend it for less-than-knowledgeable users.

Ongoing breakage is a real problem with Wine. Wine needs to define a packaging system that installs an independent copy of Wine for each game. Let those that want to test the general purpose Wine continue to run their software in a system wide install. Let those that want a specific game/application to run install the version that is tweaked to run the specific application 100%.

Users should be able to launch the installer, select the specific application that they want to install, and point to the Windows install files. What they should get is an application that just works. An application that has no connection to any other windows applications that are installed.

If this is a concern, I would suggest paying the $35 or so a year to buy Crossover Linux which is exactly that.

Codeweavers repackages WINE (they actually actively support WINE development - several WINE developers are actively employed at Codeweavers) to make it really simple to have specific environments for specific apps, and because you're paying for support, they're damn friendly as well.

Had you used it, they probably would've got LOTRO working pretty damn fast with packages available easily.

Yes, you can get WINE for free (and Codeweavers puts all their WINE changes back into the tree), but Codeweavers has made it really easy and simple to use.

Not an employee, just someone who uses it and while apt-get'ing wine is easy and cheap, sometimes it helps to pay. And you're helping fund open-source development as well, never a bad thing. Even the WINE guys recommend them if you want paid support.

Re:This is a loaded question

[Vintermann]

Well, these days, hardware support is a big one. I don't use Windows myself, but I had to help some friends reinstall Windows on an infected machine. It wouldn't even find drivers for the network card without network access and manual selection! When I popped in an Ubuntu memory stick, it detected everything. Even the fricking webcam was functional during the installation process.

It's really amazing, considering that 7 years ago it was totally the other way around, you couldn't count on e.g. wireless cards working.

That's one of the factors keeping me on Linux, I suppose. I bet if I tried to build a Windows gaming rig, I would be stuck in driver hell and/or end up with a half-broken, underperforming system.

Re:This is a loaded question

[bertok]

Not only does my Linux installation boot in under 30 seconds (SSD drives are great for that)

So, you compare Linux on an SSD to Windows on a mechanical drive -- seriously?

I should have just voted you down for spouting something so stupid, but you touched on something interesting without realizing it:

Most of the programs I use in Linux have functional Windows equivalents, but using Windows feels like trying to run in a dream.

This is more meaningful, but not for the reason you think.

Your problem, like all Linux users who try Windows, is that you don't follow the rule that "When in Rome, do as the Romans do".

Almost certainly, you tried some replica of your Linux toolchain: Cygwin, Bash, Perl, Python, PHP, or whatever, and you were "not surprised" that "Windows was slow" running software... designed for Linux. Meanwhile, Windows runs just fine running software designed for its architecture, but you probably never gave any of that a serious try. Visual Studio starts in a fraction of a second for me, complies practically instantly, and I've seen IIS put out 1100 dynamic web pages per second on my laptop, so I don't think it's all that slow. I've heard people complain that MS Word is "bloated", but it takes 200ms of CPU time to start. Bloated? I think not.

There are many subtle architectural reasons for this. Things like: "new process" is cheap on Linux, and used for what most programmers would call "threading", but on Windows it is a heavyweight activity that's not intended to be fast. Instead, "new thread" is the fast operation. Software has to be written to start few processes and many threads to perform well on Windows. It's only very recently that Linux got good support for high performance threads, so practically no Linux software is written like this. Every damned thing starts a new process for everything. Linux scripts treat "new process" as if it was lightweight enough to replace "call procedure". Meanwhile, Windows PowerShell starts a single process which calls functions directly from dynamically linked DLLs. That's because it's designed for Windows, unlike Bash.

Please, just shut up, and try Windows 7 x64 on a real machine with an SSD, run software on it designed for it, and only then come back and tell me that's it is slow.

Pretty much all of them

[MrEricSir]

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.

Re:Pretty much all of them

[stretch0611]

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.

Actually, I feel the reverse... all of the games I have bought recently have been through the Humble Bundle which are all indie and all work on Linux. The few games that have not been through the Humble Bundle have been through GOG.com and work on wine.

The last big studio release I have bought was C&C 3. After that I just felt that DRM became too restrictive. (A big reason for buying humble bundle and GOG games.)

I did buy one indie game about a year ago that did not work on Linux, and that was Torchlight. (which I recently was released under Linux through the humble bundle.) I actually ran Torchlight in a virtual machine.

As suggested by the article, because I have not been beholden to windows only games, I have not used windows since XP.

Shall I list the reasons again?

[ALeader71]

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?

Re:Shall I list the reasons again?

[NoEvidenZ]

I can't deny that Linux would confuse a great number of users from Windows and Mac, but it has come a long way in recent years in terms of both usability and driver support. The only issue here is vendor support, and we can't forget that video games are driving the industry. nVidia doesn't keep making more powerful graphics cards so Microsoft Word will look better and run faster, they do it because the games and gamers want more power. If one big game developer made a game for Linux, drivers would be developed alongside the game and the industry would soon follow.

Re:Shall I list the reasons again?

[Mad Merlin]

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?

You play weird video games. Personally, I like playing the "my computer works already, I didn't have to hunt down twenty drivers from twenty different sites and make sure I kept them all up to date individually" game, that's why I already use Linux (and have for nearly a decade).

Microsoft Office

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Microsoft Office

[ninja59]

I have found the opposite to be true. For a long time my new windows boxes at work were producing .docx files my clients could not open. This problem seems to have gone away, but I have occasional formatting problems going from windows office machine 1 to windows office machine 2. It is almost always a margins problem, I don't really know why. It might be something intrinsic to résumés.
The only superiority that I personally have found in Office is in Power Point, and, again this is my personal opinion, Power Point presentations should be illegal. They might just be the pretties, most inefficient way to present real information.
With the exception of large spread sheets, PDF is always the way to go. You can open them in browsers now a days and if I want it presented in a very specific way, I usually don't want anyone to edit it along the way.

Re:Microsoft Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Then what format should one use for "important documents" that are intended to be editable?

(La)TeX

Re:Microsoft Office

[VanGarrett]

RTF. It has strong standardization, and so far as I know, it's universally readable.

Re:Microsoft Office

[lorinc]

Then what format should one use for "important documents" that are intended to be editable?

(La)TeX

This should not be moded funny but insightful. If you ever work in the scientific academic domain, every important document is formatted in Latex, and they are all still editable whatever the bazillion versions of Office came in between.

Re:Sound subsystem fragmentation

[Unknown Lamer]

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.

Games are why I have a PS3

[buddhaunderthetree]

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.

Before the WINEing starts..

[ihaveamo]

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)

None

[connor4312]

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.

Re:None.

[ArcadeMan]

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.

Xwing

[Ashenkase]

• Tie Fighter
• Xwing vs Tiefigher
• Bwing
• Xwing Alliance

Any of those will do.

Re:TF2

[IVI4573R]

Not sure if that was a joke or not, but Steam on Linux's beta already has 27 games, TF2 being one of them. Full list: http://store.steampowered.com/search/?snr=1_4_4__12&term=linux#os=linux&advanced=0&sort_order=ASC&page=1

Think we can get the developer to port this?

[ArhcAngel]

The Halo series?

Re:Sound subsystem fragmentation

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Currently?

[Sycraft-fu]

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 silent majority

[spaceman375]

We all vote for Civilization. Most people are holding back just because they realize lifetimes are finite.

Re:none

[Xtifr]

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.

Not the games - the effort

[wallbase]

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:
* 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 .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).
* 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.

We know it's you

[ndogg]

Oh, come on, Gabe, we know it's you. ;)

Re:Dual Boot!

[__aaqvdr516]

If you can accomplish 100% of your task in Windows 7 and 80% in Linux, then why not just stay in Windows? **

**These numbers are from my own use. Debian partition on my own drive.

Roguelikes

[bhaak1]

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.