Interview With Icculus on GNU/Linux Gaming

Via Phoronix comes a link to an interview with prolific GNU/Linux game porter Icculus about the state of gaming on GNU/Linux. Topics include Steam, Windows 8, his experiences trying to push FatELF vs full screen games, and the general state of the game industry. From the article (on the general state of games on GNU/Linux): "It's making progress. We're turning out to have a pretty big year, with Unity3D coming to the platform, and Valve preparing to release Steam. These are just good foundations to an awesome 2013."

Comments

Re:And the Linux naming experts strike again

[RCL]

Seconded. I feel that people who use Linux not even for gaming, but for anything graphics-related, are a tiny minority. Available API (de facto standard: OpenGL + SDL) sucks, drivers suck (except for NVidia, who gets blamed for being binary), development tools suck (see TFA about OpenGL debugger), distributing binaries is problematic.

Desktop integration isn't there ("standard" SDL will not help you detect multiple monitors), when your app crashes you are left with broken screen. Just allocating too much (overcommit by a few GB) memory can make your Linux desktop unresponsive enough so you have to SSH to it from another machine and kill the offending process.

Now compare it to Windows where TDR allows you to survive even a driver crash! There's A LOT of work needed if Linux is to become a good desktop, and the majority of it is not about fancy UI. It's about getting a solid graphics stack, good support for debugging, good tools built on top of that. Frankly speaking, I'm not sure that community can provide that. This requires unification of will on a large scale, and community tends to produce loosely-knit patchwork of locally optimal solutions.