The State of Linux Gaming In the SteamOS Era

An anonymous reader writes: It's been over a year since Valve announced its Linux-based SteamOS, the biggest push yet from a huge company to bring mainstream gaming to Linux. In this article, Ars Technica takes a look at how their efforts are panning out. Game developers say making Linux ports has gotten dramatically easier: "There are great games shipping for Linux from development teams with no Linux expertise. They hit the 'export to Linux' button in the Unity editor and shipped it and it worked out alright. We didn't get flying cars, but the future is turning out OK so far."

Hardware drivers are still a problem, getting in the way of potential performance gains due to Linux's overall smaller resource footprint than Windows. And while the platform is growing, it's doing so slowly. Major publishers are still hesitant to devote time to Linux, and Valve is taking their time building for it. Their Steam Machine hardware is still in development, and some of their key features are being adopted by other gaming giants, like Microsoft. Still, Valve is sticking with it, and that's huge. It gives developers faith that they can work on supporting Linux without fear that the industry will re-fragment before their game is done.

Comments

Easy of porting over is the key

[Ravaldy]

For this to be successful it needs to be easy. If they're port to Linux button works as well as they claim in this article, it makes sense to think the platform will take off. Otherwise very few will waste time on attempting to gain a minor %% of the market.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[tysonedwards]

With Unity, it actually is that easy. Source, less so but still pretty easy, Unreal, you need to really futz around...

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[jedidiah]

This Linux gaming renaissance is most likely a side effect of how every other gaming platform besides Windows uses "something else". That something else is Linux compatible. That reduces the distance between Linux and what has already been ported to.

Android, MacOS, even the PS4 and Wii's are intermediate steps towards Linux.

It's no great surprise that the most interesting ports for Linux are being done by a MacOS porting house.

Beyond the big titles, Linux is a significant part of the market. The indies were already porting to Linux because of this.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[tysonedwards]

Indies are porting to Linux because the idea of a Linux game means that they'll get some love that they wouldn't otherwise get. It's a market that is presently untapped as most big studios haven't yet come to care about Linux as a platform. They ship Linux, they get guaranteed press, ergo more sales.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[mark-t]

I think it would help the platform take off even more if the editor itself worked under that platform. Last I heard, the editor required either windows or a mac to run.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[kuzb]

MacOS, PS4, and Wii have one thing in common that Linux doesn't have. They're not moving targets. They don't require a user have expert knowledge. Aside from OS X, they're dedicated to a specific purpose.

OS X has a vested interest in trying to build a gaming ecosystem to bolster Apple's sales, but the stigma of Macs being piss-poor gaming machines will follow them around for a long time to come. Most people can't see a need or a benefit to move away from a Windows PC, but it's very easy to see the drawbacks.

What the world is really waiting for is a console that acts like a dedicated PC gaming machine and is capable of playing all the same software. A machine where you can turn it on, pick your favorite game and just quickly play. Hassle free. They want the ease of a console with the power and flexibility of a PC in terms of upgrade paths and peripherals. If the XBOX or PS4 (as well as game developers) would just take the mouse and keyboard seriously you could transform the entire landscape of console gaming to be much more in line with PC gaming.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[mark-t]

Most big studios don't care about linux because it's too small of a market to waste any amount of time doing any QA on it... and shipping a title for a platform when it doesn't actually work on that platform, or has issues that nobody ever even bothered to check because they don't want to spend any time on QA for the platform is worse for the company's PR than not shipping the title for that platform in the first place.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[MBGMorden]

They don't require a user have expert knowledge.

This isn't 1998 anymore. Linux doesn't require "expert knowledge" to run and use. My parents in their 50's are using Linux full-time (even though they don't know they are) as is my sister - who knows it but doesn't really regard the fact as more than an interesting piece of trivia.

Linux works just as simply as any other OS these days. You want a program? Go to Software Center and search for it. It installs. The icon appears in your menu.

Yes, you CAN get technical and in depth with the system if you want, but that's no different than Windows having the registry and Powershell available if you want to tweak things.

Right now Linux just isn't popular with gamers because there are no games for it, and there are no games for it because gamers don't use it. It's chicken and egg problem, but it's changing, albeit slowly. I personally use my Linux system for everything EXCEPT games, though I'll admit that I'd be excited to ditch Windows even for the games if I could (I do have a PS4 that I play some stuff on). It is nice though that Pillars of Eternity will be available for Linux and is coming out very soon. I've been waiting for that one for quite a while and it may be the first "real" game I'm able to play there.

Re: Easy of porting over is the key

[Ash-Fox]

Please explain why I am able to play all the old Linux ports of games like the original unreal tournament (I haven't acquired new ports for a while) with no problem when Linux is a moving target?

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Ravaldy]

You are speaking of closed devices correct (tables and phones)? Not desktop and laptop PCs as that's a whole other ball game. The article even states the complications with hardware optimization in Linux environments. Devices such as tablets and smart phones don't suffer the same versatility as desktop PCs hence the stable h/w configuration and drivers.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[ArcadeMan]

It's not that Macs have a stigma of being piss-poor gaming machines, it's that Apple is so obsessed with thin computers, even the desktop models, that they simply can't use half-decent GPUs. If you put aside things like OS X and hardware features which are irrelevant to gaming, the cost of a desktop Mac is much higher than a desktop Windows or Linux PC.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Ravaldy]

Android, MacOS, even the PS4 and Wii's are intermediate steps towards Linux.

Yes, they are but you can't call Android Linux or PS4 Linux. Linux after all is just the kernel and it doesn't dictate how good the OS is.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Ravaldy]

Some of the better tools are currently for Windows and MacOS. It only makes sense that they would only be available for those OSs since they are well defined and popular platforms. Linux for desktop has too much variability for them to offer a product that simply installs and works without question.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[nobuddy]

I bought my 14 year old daughter a new laptop that had Windows 8 on it. She wiped it out and installed Linux. She runs Steam for most games, and WINE for a couple because Steam does not quite work for them.

She is not computer illiterate, but she is not an IT guru either. She googles what she needs to know and follows guides she finds.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[mark-t]

It only makes sense that they would only be available for those OSs since they are well defined and popular platforms

The exact same rationality can be applied to the games themselves.

My point being that if it is worth the effort to even create an export to linux facility, then it should also be worth the effort for the editor itself to run under linux. How is requiring Windows or a Mac to run the editor on what is supposed to be a development platform any better than requiring Windows or Mac to run the game in the first place?

If they can't set an example themselves that shows that supplying a Linux port for a product is worthwhile, then why the hell should I ever take them seriously about porting a game to Linux anyways?

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[pr0fessor]

I built a kit for my nontechnical brother and he decided he didn't want to spring for windows and just install ubuntu. I was worried his wife would be mad at me because we didn't install windows {he said he would buy windows if she threw a fit}. I found out all the things she did on it which amounts to checking email, paying bills, youtube, facebook, and a few java game sites. I installed KDE not windows themed but layed out similar and made sure it wasn't missing anything and that she would be able to access everything she listed. She is really happy with it, I guess having an android tablet and cell phone had already shown her that windows isn't required.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Dragonslicer]

and shipping a title for a platform when it doesn't actually work on that platform, or has issues that nobody ever even bothered to check because they don't want to spend any time on QA for the platform is worse for the company's PR than not shipping the title for that platform in the first place.

Then why is EA shipping games for any platform at all?

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[hairyfeet]

Sorry but I predict that SteamOS will be dead in 3, probably less, and in the meantime it will be given a trickle of updates while it slowly winds down. The reason? Windows 8 and the MSFT store.

The entire reason for the existence of SteamOS was that Gabe feared Windows 8, specifically the Windows Store. He gave interviews railing on Win 8 and talking about how shit the MSFT store was gonna be for lock in, bla bla bla....so what happened? Windows 8 went over with all the desirability of a trainwreck, the MSFT store turned out to be a spyware ridden clusterfuck, and the CEO that pushed that crap "decided to pursue other interests" rather than get canned. The new guy? Seems to actually have a brain and isn't trying to fuck his partners by sticking a Winflag on everything under the sun.

So every. single. reason. given for making SteamOS? Gone, finished, wasted. Why spend who knows how many millions to develop your own Operating System to defeat somebody who has already waved the white flag? Not to mention as long as Torvalds has a pulse the driver situation will NEVER get any better as Torvalds refuses to let go of the same crap driver model he has been pushing since 1993, so they get the "fun" of dealing with that mess, and for what? MSFT is giving away Windows 10 so you can't compete on cost, MSFT has all but given up on the Windows store, in fact the entire time I've been running Win 10 I don't think I've ever had so much as a "FYI did you know we got a store?" pop up, so that is not a threat, and Steam already has big picture mode in Windows so they can't even use a 10 foot UI as a selling point!

The Linux fanboys can scream and curse me all they want, but time will prove me right. Gabe royally fucked up the SteamOS launch by telling the OEMs it was ready when it wasn't (probably because he didn't know what an unstable POS the Linux driver model really is) so they ended up being left with their dicks in their hands and had to rush out their "Steamboxes" with Windows 8.1, which with the amount of hatred Windows 8/8.1 has? Might as well have just flushed the Steamboxes down the john. After taking a bath like that you can bet your last nickel that Gabe will NOT be getting any more custom hardware, Linux users simply do not buy enough games, hell most will refuse to support Steam simply because its DRM, so the growth in that market is practically flatline, and finally no reason in hell for Windows users to switch to a limited subset of their Steam library when Win 8 is dead and Win 10 looks to be another Windows 7 level hit, so what advantage is there for Valve continuing to sink millions into SteamOS?

There just isn't any which is why they went from trumpeting SteamOS every chance they got to a trickle of low priority press releases, Valve knows MSFT isn't gonna push them off of Windows, hell since Gabe screamed bloody murder GFWL was shut down, the push to combine Windows and Xbox gaming has all but died, MSFT is just no longer a threat to Steam and Gabe knows it. Expect SteamOS to slowly wane until its nothing but a trickle, followed by a little press release a year or two quietly announcing SteamOS is gone, there just isn't a good reason for it to exist any longer.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing wrong with having a backup plan. Besides, I doubt Valve is having trouble keeping the lights on because they have a handful of guys banging away on a linux distro instead of whatever else they were doing before that wasn't Half-Life 3.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[mark-t]

Because at least with EA's titles, there isn't another platform where the same title will perform any better in the first place. Presumably, with a QA-tested windows version compared to a released-without-any-testing Linux version, the latter version would presumably be inferior.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

...which makes them piss poor gaming machines. The "why" doesn't matter as much as the truth at the end of the road when you're talking about an end user.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, my mother-in-law uses Ubuntu.

She farmed about 100 head of cattle most of her life. A technology expert she is not.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he's not talking of tablets or phones. He's talking PC desktop.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

You are speaking of closed devices correct (tables and phones)? Not desktop and laptop PCs as that's a whole other ball game. The article even states the complications with hardware optimization in Linux environments. Devices such as tablets and smart phones don't suffer the same versatility as desktop PCs hence the stable h/w configuration and drivers.

The article talk about hardware optimisation because hardware vendors spend more time optimising for the larger market share (Windows) and less for the smaller market share. Not that the OS is a moving target. I am typing this to you from my GnomeUbuntu machine running Steam and Windows games via WINE flawlessly and at times better than I get on Windows.

Wake up to the future mate.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

Gaming renaissance? Oh, you mean having other platform games ported over, none of which are open source? Such a renaissance.
 
I guess I can't expect much out of the people who think that ripping off Unix makes for some guy to be one of the greatest devs of all times...

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[wiggles]

I hope you're wrong, but you make a good argument.

I guess we'll see what happens when they unveil their latest progress next month.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[westlake]

My parents in their 50's are using Linux full-time even though they don't know they are

Every Linux conversion story posted to Slashdot reads like this. It has been that way since the site was launched.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[aliquis]

Linux doesn't have to be either.

Assume there's a proprietary Nvidia driver.

Anyway using someone else got themselves to blame.

It's ok to demand specific hardware and software requirements.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Fwipp]

Because getting a new windows/mac devbox costs like $500. Not porting to Linux can cost you (conceivably) tens of thousands of dollars.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[DamnOregonian]

That is fucking awesome- go forth, multiply, and be fruitful. Maybe that's not that weird for 14 year olds these days, but when I was 14, that was pretty unique

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Harlequin80]

While Windows remains the dominant platform Valve will continue to see that as a risk. As you stated the decision with 8 to include an app store sparked the rush to develop steam for linux and steam os. However there is no guarantee that win 10 won't come with an app store either pre-installed or pushed. As such it remains a risk profile to Valve.

The only solution to this is to fragment the market enough that steam becomes the only cross platform option. My steam for linux gets updates almost weekly. I think it is far from abandoned.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

You talk with the overconfidence of someone who does a martial art so he does "not need to fight," yet feels he can handle anyone who might pick a fight with him. One of those halfwits who feels he's as good as special forces because he spends half an hour in a gym every few days.

I knew this topic would bring the Windows trolls out, yet still I came here, hoping to learn something. Oh well, time to close the window after posting this.

Re: Easy of porting over is the key

[serviscope_minor]

It's not.

The only people who claim so are, frankly, ignorant.

The ignorance comes because Linux is easier to use for development than the alternatives. You just apt-get install the libraries you need and get hacking.

In order to make something portable you need to do what you have to do on Windows anyway: package all the libraries with your program.

It's just that by default Linux is much easier in that regard.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[hairyfeet]

I'm sorry but I think you are wrong, and here is why....the "risk" came from the previous CEO which there is no danger of returning. It was Ballmer that was pushing the "branding" bullshit, Ballmer that was pushing GFWL, Ballmer that was sticking Winflags on everything, every single complaint Gabe had cane be traced back to Steve Ballmer.

Nadella's slogan should be "Not the Ballmer, not the Ballmer" as he has shown that gives not a single fuck about sticking Winflags, devs said they wanted .NET to be open sourced? There ya go, enjoy. All the Metrosexual Winbranded crap Ballmer kept trying to shovel whether the market wanted it or not? GONE. Nadella is ZERO threat to Steam because Nadella sees that Steam has a loyal userbase and that brings value to the Windows platform, no way in hell is he gonna risk losing tens of millions of loyal as hell gamers by treating Steam as a second class citizen. Ballmer thought it was still 1997 and he could just bully his way into a market like the old days and cost the company billions with his alienating attitude, there is no way in hell Nadella is gonna do that.

Finally you have to remember that SteamOS is already fucked because Gabe shot his load too damned early. he got all those OEMs to hop on board only to leave them high and dry without an OS on launch day, so no way in hell is he gonna get jack shit when it comes to OEM support. No Steamboxes on shelves? Nobody but a few Linux faithful using SteamOS, hell he'll only get a small subset of Linux gamers as many have already said they will not support Steam simply on DRM principles, so there really isn't even any growth in that teeny niche market!

Will he keep it on life support for a few years, just in case? Probably, if for no other reason that to save face and to keep them from looking like a failure, but the days of big SteamOS announcements and buzz? Stick a fork, the fat lady is down the street having a sammich.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[AntiSol]

For this to be successful it needs to be easy

There's another factor - it also needs to be worthwhile.

We (Linux users) can help with this by supporting people who do port games, both morally and financially.

This means buying games that are released for linux, emailling developers of games you want and telling them that a port would be a guaranteed sale, and emailling devs who do port to say thanks. I now own over 100 nonfree games, it's been a great couple of years. Kerbal Space Program, Civilization V, and Borderlands 2 being standouts. I can't wait for Bioshock Infinite.

But this isn't all smooth sailing, there are 2 problems doing this:

1, the group of linux users who are on what amounts to a religious crusade against nonfree software and refuse to buy any software, period. There's not much you can do about this other than trying to convince them that there's a sane middle-ground between idealism and corporate evil. This is difficult because many of these people will ignore any rational argument you might make unless you're Richard Stallman (and then it doesn't matter whether you're rational or not). I can't find a source right now, but IIRC even Stallman doesn't disappove of nonfree content, he just thinks that the engines should be free. But the zealots don't seem to have picked up on this. (I can already hear the screams of "Ooh, them's fighting words!")

2, Valve's atrocious business practices make purchasing linux games difficult for those of us who know and defend our rights. For example, as an Australian I'm entitled to a refund for any game that doesn't work. Valve's business practices in this regard are dodgy to say the least. Which means that I can't buy anything via Steam, which makes it harder to support the porters. I buy everything via either the humble store, GOG, or direct from Aspyr these days. But it's harder and sometimes more expensive than simply hitting 'buy' in steam.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[AntiSol]

Ugh, self-reply, but there's another factor somewhat related to my second point: the idiotic, parasitic sales techniques which are now in vogue: I tried to buy Borderlands the pre-sequel, but there's no way to actually buy the whole game yet - I'd have to buy the game and then buy each piece of DLC one at a time, or wait a year or two until a "complete bundle" is released (which is what I'm doing), by which time my sale won't count on their ledgers. This could be easily fixed by simply having a "complete bundle" available at launch which automatically gives you every piece of DLC as they are released. But then you wouldn't be able to trick your users into paying $250 for a game.

To summarise the summary of the summary, it's easier to sell to a linux user if you're not a scumbag.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

She is not computer illiterate, but she is not an IT guru either. She googles what she needs to know and follows guides she finds.

Relatively speaking, that does make her some sort of expert. Simply having the wherewithal to find shit out for herself already puts her leaps and bounds ahead of much of the population.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[MBGMorden]

No. I'm speaking of just Ubuntu on a desktop.

Re: Easy of porting over is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

Please explain why I am able to play all the old Linux ports of games like the original unreal tournament (I haven't acquired new ports for a while) with no problem when Linux is a moving target?

You should explain how you had no problems.
And don't say you didn't have to figure out how to enable ctrl+alt+backspace, cause I won't buy it. Things were far from smooth sailing even when those old ports were new.

For a point of reference, when Loki was around, there wasn't even a standard way of locating the CD drive. This was before /dev/cdrom was just expected to be there.
Maybe things are different NOW, but there's still a lot of stuff that still hasn't been figured out yet, which is why SteamOS exists...

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[mark-t]

Having the Unity editor work under Linux was, at least as of about this time last year, by far the most popularly requested feature enhancement... outweighing the number of user votes for just that one feature by almost an order of magnitude more than the next most requested feature for Unity.... and still the developers do not care.

So clearly, it's not hurting Unity any that they aren't porting the editor to Linux.... Considering the price of their software compared to the average game, I highly doubt it would cost game companies as much as you suggest.

That's not to say that the company couldn't make that money from a linux game, but that's also not to say that the company wouldn't have made that much anyways from windows or mac version sales simply because a linux port wasn't available... since most gamers tend to have one of those systems at home anyways.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[CronoCloud]

If the XBOX or PS4 (as well as game developers) would just take the mouse and keyboard seriously

Sony takes mice and keyboard seriously with their Playstations. PS2's, PS3's and PS4's have USB ports for a reason. However Sony leaves it up to the developers to decide if they want to support keyboard/mouse and in what way. Requiring mouse/keyboard game control is probably not in their TRC requirements.

PS2: If a game has text chat or text entry, it almost always supports keyboards. That includes the settings disc for the Network adapter, and RPG Maker Keyboards/mice for game control is rarer, a few FPS's do like Half Life, FFXI, EQOA,

PS3: If a game or app uses the PS3 text entry widget, it automatically supports USB keyboard. Game chat, naming enchanted items in skyrim, signs in Minecraft, whatever. Keyboard for game control is rarer, again a few FPS like Dust514...but strangely, not the Orange Box. You can use keyboard/mouse to control the XMB.

PS4: like the PS3 there's pretty much automatic support for keyboards for text entry. There's at least one game that can use mouse/keyboard for game control in addition to chat and that's War Thunder. War Thunder also supports HOTAS, and uses the the PS4 Camera to use head tracking for view control.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[NickFortune]

The Linux fanboys can scream and curse me all they want, but time will prove me right.

Well obviously they're going to curse you. I mean you have just single-handedly ensured the demise of SteamOS by virtue of grumpily posting a pessimistic opinion on a nerdy discussion board. Because that's the way Cause And Effect works, right?

Seriously, a bit of perspective here?

Re: Easy of porting over is the key

[Ash-Fox]

You should explain how you had no problems.

I only had to install some pre-requesits, which is no different from me needing to install the C++ runtime on Windows for games of that era which weren't by the way, included in the installer, nor documented officially by EPIC nor Microsoft.

Pre-requiests were trivial to install, eiher copy paste a single line and hit enter or use the graphical package mangaer interface.

I had no other problems at all. If Linux was moving a target, installing a few libraries provided by the system wouldn't be the only issue I would have encountered.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[drinkypoo]

Well, when I was that age I was installing Slackware on a 386... It's about access. When I was a kid, living in a town with a bunch of computer companies was mandatory in order to have cheap computer deals around. In Santa Cruz county we had Borland, Seagate, SCO, Parallel Computing, Sequoia Semiconductor, Plantronics, and piles of other techie or nominally-techie corporations attracted by the college town environment... and internet access brought in through the college. And $1/MB used hard disks for years and years! Ahh, Seizegate, the memories.

Today, hardware is just lying about everywhere.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[drinkypoo]

What people are talking about when they say this stuff is that they want to use them as input devices. When I play a game on the Wii, I pretty much always say "this would be much better with mouse and keyboard." Sure, the Wiimote is cool, and it makes some sense in living rooms*, and I occasionally still have fun playing Wii Sports Resort. But show me a game that makes me point at the screen a lot, and pointlessly waggle the Wiimote periodically, and I'll show you a game which would be better with keyboard and mouse.

Pretty much all consoles with USB ports will let you enter text into more or less all input boxes, even on the Wii. But almost no console games, even an FPS, will let you control the game with keyboard and mouse. We all know why, but that's a feature much needed to win over fence-sitters. Whether it's worth it is another discussion, although my guess is no. We will never be happy with consoles. That's why we have PCs. We occasionally flirt with consoles and then realize that they are lame if you don't have a bunch of gamers in your living room regularly.

* The Wiimote is a crap remote control. That may not be its primary design purpose, but as it turns out Netflix is probably what most Wiis are being used for today...

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[drinkypoo]

Yes, they are but you can't call Android Linux or PS4 Linux. Linux after all is just the kernel and it doesn't dictate how good the OS is.

You can install a quite complete GNU userland on Android. You can also install an X or VNC client ... (searching google) ... ah yes, also a SPICE client, which is probably your best bet actually if it's at all reliable. And then you can run as much Linuxy goodness on your Android device as you like. So how is Android not Linux? It's not GNU/Linux, I guess. Ugh, it makes me feel dirty just to type that. Luckily, I'm typing it from Windows 7.

Re: Easy of porting over is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they're old and shit. The amount of graphics API calls in your ancient games are a joke compared to anything made this millenium.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

DirectX support in Wine is pretty solid if not quite up to date.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Baloo Uriza]

Then why is any multiplatform title released for Windows/XBOX at all? Seems like a good way to cripple yourself.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Baloo Uriza]

They don't require a user have expert knowledge.

This isn't 1998 anymore. Linux doesn't require "expert knowledge" to run and use.

This. Microsoft hasn't put out an easy to use OS in over a decade now, and even XP was pushing it. It's to the point where it's usually easier to run Linux than it is to run Windows, because at least Linux will work reasonably well for most people out of the box without fucking around with a diaspora of idiot vendor-written drivers spread across the internet. Good luck if Windows didn't bother to include the right ethernet driver, a problem Linux hasn't had since I was a sophomore in high school almost 20 years ago.

Right now Linux just isn't popular with gamers because there are no games for it, and there are no games for it because gamers don't use it.

If it doesn't release on Linux, it doesn't exist. Wolfenstein: The New Order is the new Duke Nukem Forever. Fucking Bethesda ruins everything.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Baloo Uriza]

Not to mention as long as Torvalds has a pulse the driver situation will NEVER get any better as Torvalds refuses to let go of the same crap driver model he has been pushing since 1993, so they get the "fun" of dealing with that mess, and for what?

Oh, I'm sorry that having plug'n'play actually work on a far wider variety of devices, and much more rapidly, right out of the box is such an inconvenience to you. Didn't know moving a keyboard from one port to another without having to wait 10 minutes to install another copy of the same keyboard driver is such a massive burden. If anything, the Linux hardware support model is proof positive that hardware guys shouldn't go near compilers, and programmers shouldn't wield soldering irons. The only folks who haven't seemed to get this through their thick fucking skulls yet are nVidia and AMD, and let's face it, their drivers are blowful on every platform.

Re: Easy of porting over is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

I've forgotten more about Linux than you've ever learned. He's not wrong. Linux is definitely a moving target when you start speaking of it in terms of distros. On deadrat and want to install? Need an RPM. On debian and want to install? Need a deb.

On debian and want to use a bleeding edge library? SOL unless you know how to add the correct repositories from another source, or are comfortable living on the bleeding edge. You simply can't assume very much with linux. With Windows, you can because many of the core necessities for these things ship with it.

Then there's other interesting things like Windows runs on pretty much any modern PC, and regardless of the hardware there's going to be a driver. On Linux, it's a crapshoot. Maybe your hardware is supported out of the box. Maybe your hardware is partially supported. Maybe it's not seen or recognized at all. It's a serious problem, particularly when dealing with laptops. Don't try to say "well it doesn't happen to me, so it must not happen to anyone" because that's flat out bullshit and you know it.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think this is true you've never used it. Attitudes like yours are common when you've walked away from something for so long you barely remember anything about it.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[mark-t]

XBox isn't capable as a standalone development platform in the first place, Linux is.

Offering a "port to Linux" button without actually having the development tools work natively on Linux treats Linux as if it were a standalone gaming console, like the XBox, but most actual Linux installs are not used for gaming as an XBox might be.

Clearly, the developers of Unity itself don't actually feel that taking the effort to even port their dev tools to Linux was worthwhile, so why should on earth should a game studio take Linux seriously, when,. as I said, most Linux installs are not generally used exclusively for gaming anyways?

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Ravaldy]

1, the group of linux users who are on what amounts to a religious crusade against nonfree software and refuse to buy any software, period.

That has always been my pet peeve with Linux. I long ago left the community because I can't feed my children with free software projects. Linux service is where it's at and in my books I wasn't good enough at it and didn't care much for it since most of the demand in front of me was paying customers running on MS.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Ravaldy]

Of what I've seen on forums it's hit and miss. Seems to be a hit with technically savvy Linux users, not so much with non tech users.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Ravaldy]

And after all those changes to the device, do the games still run as consistently as with the pre-packaged highly QCd version? I would suspect the answer is WHO KNOWS until you hit a problem.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[MBGMorden]

Not sure how much easier it could be. Yes, I'm a technically savvy user, but I haven't had to "exercise" any of those skills on my home machine in forever. If I wan to install a program it really is just as easy as going to Software Center and searching for it - not unlike an "App store" on a phone.

I even find it easier than Windows because the update process for the system takes care of application updates too.

Now I do maintain quite a few Linux servers at work that do require a lot more knowledge, but they don't even have a GUI installed.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[nobuddy]

you should go check out Steam for Linux. Its the same games you get on Steam for windows.
Unless you are saying all the games on Steam are shit, in which case that just, like, your opinion man.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Ravaldy]

I'm just suggesting that when you take an OS that has been QC'd to the extreme you can't compare it with dropping a different OS (even if it's the same kernel) and expect it to be flawless. In this case, if you use the same kernel and driver version I would suggest that it should work flawlessly BUT throw a couple of curve balls such as a different kernel and drivers and you are playing a different ball game that may require the expertise. To be honest I would think doing that in the first place requires expertise.

Re:Easy of porting over is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed - Android is a Linux variant, as is the Chrome OS and the Mac OSX. They're not all compatible - but they're similar enough that developers are very comfortable with the environment. I for one hope that SteamOS takes off and that it eats into the console market. . I think that many are underestimating the impact that SteamOS and the Steam Machines might yet have because they see them as an alternative to the PC gaming market, I don't see it that way. It's the consoles that are threatened. These hardware fixed closed ecosystems at premium prices and annual memberships are relics of a bygone era

The rise of branded Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

All game developers have been asking for is 3D acceleration and standard build targets, something Linux could not offer until enough people stuck to brand distributions.

Re:Do we really need an entire OS for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

"great"

You gotta be kidding me. It's still stuck in 1996-era gameplay and graphics.

What about a windows VM?

[garyisabusyguy]

What would be the downside of just installing a windows vm on Linux to run games?
It would seem to remove most of the barriers, and provide the benefit of isolating the host system from potential intrusion.
Many people like to boast about the security benefits of *nixes, but I think that loading a bunch of resource intensive gaming applications would tend to reduce that benefit

Re: What about a windows VM?

[lord_rob the only on]

The downside of installing Windows in a VM is that you need to install Windows ...
Unless you pirate it it is not free

Re:What about a windows VM?

[mark_lybarger]

doesn't work. sorry.

Re:What about a windows VM?

[Anonymous Coward]

3d acceleration inside of a VM is inefficient to say the least unless you're doing VGA pass-through which is rare and a pain to setup.

Re:What about a windows VM?

[ihtoit]

potential problem:

All the VMs I've tried (well, actually a grand total of one - Virtualbox) don't correctly configure for Direct3D. A yardstick app I use is (conveniently) Homeworld, the original one from 1999 not the reboot which I couldn't run if I mashed all my hardware together. If that doesn't run, then I don't have the DirectX driver in right.

Re:What about a windows VM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtualization slows things down and uses more memory (which is a problem for some people, even though RAM is cheap), the Windows license isnt' free, and, most importantly, that would make the Linux version of Steam completely useless as anyone willing to run a VM inside Steam could just run Steam inside the VM instead.

Re:What about a windows VM?

[ckatko]

I've personally had lots of trouble with proper 3-D acceleration pass-through in virtual machines. Vmware gives you half a driver worth, so things like multisampling aren't supported. Which is annoying if you're doing lots of primitive drawing in OpenGL like I was.

Re:What about a windows VM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Game companies don't care about marketing to pirates.

Re:What about a windows VM?

[mark-t]

the games may often refuse to run inside of a vm on account of the vm not simulating the necessary hardware.

Re:What about a windows VM?

[sexconker]

OS pirates far outnumber Steam pirates.

Re:What about a windows VM?

[jedidiah]

...in a VM perhaps.

Go beyond that and Windows is a royal pain to get up and running. It's actually far more problematic to get up and running than Linux is.

It's hard to see this if you've never actually installed a proper copy of Windows on bare metal.

Re:What about a windows VM?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the opinion of a lot of my countrymen. And it's no surprise when a lot of idiots do it and install some crapware like Windows Black or somesuch and find out, it's default state is that of a malware ridden spambot.

I've used Linux for the past 10 years, but dealt with a lot of Windows users by necessity.

Re:What about a windows VM?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Go beyond that and Windows is a royal pain to get up and running. It's actually far more problematic to get up and running than Linux is." I can guess who's never installed Windows.

Re:What about a windows VM?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use the opengl mode of homeworld if you use the patch found here:
http://homeworldfansite.weebly.com/homeworld-patches.html
It works well in virtualbox. Make sure to press control-i to disable mouse integration - otherwise zooming around in homeworld doesn't work as intended.

Re:What about a windows VM?

[Anonymous Coward]

All the VMs I've tried (well, actually a grand total of one - Virtualbox)

Well there's your problem. It works in VMware.

Steam still broken on ZFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just checked and yep, Steam is still broken on ZFS.

Oh, well. Guess I'll just continue not buying or playing any games, then...

Re:Steam still broken on ZFS?

[binarylarry]

Snap it also doesn't work on ReiserFS.

Re:Steam still broken on ZFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS is broken on Linux, so what's your problem?

Re:Steam still broken on ZFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

who cares its a gaming box not a file server

Re:Steam still broken on ZFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS OR NOTHING, MORTAL!

Re:Steam still broken on ZFS?

[drinkypoo]

root on ZFS is a thing now. ZFS has a lot of benefits that I'd like to be using, if it were easier. (It's not that big a deal overall, but I don't want to have to do a lot of extensive fiddling when something fails.)

Re:Do we really need an entire OS for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

No no no see WarThunder http://warthunder.com/en

Razer Forge TV

[Luthair]

For me local game streaming effectively kills the notion of the SteamBox. Why have multiple powerful expensive PCs when you can have one and a $99 low power ARM box attached to your TV.

Re:Razer Forge TV

[dj245]

For me local game streaming effectively kills the notion of the SteamBox. Why have multiple powerful expensive PCs when you can have one and a $99 low power ARM box attached to your TV.

Have you actually tried to use the streaming regularly? For me, the input lag is significant enough to make it a nonstarter. There are a lot of little quirks too. I'm very happy they added the feature, but it isn't usuable for some games.

Re:Razer Forge TV

[ihtoit]

1. what's doing the processing?
2. because input latency.
3. because network latency.
4. because bandwidth.

Re:Razer Forge TV

[Luthair]

Latency and bandwidth on a local network should be irrelevant. Sure if stuck using wifi in an apartment you might have issues but in that case invest in a long video cable.

Most controller based games are pretty forgiving for input latency, and I'm certainly not going to sit on a couch with a keyboard and mouse seutp.

Re:Razer Forge TV

[Luthair]

No, because it hasn't been released yet. See my other post for why input lag isn't a big deal.

Re:Razer Forge TV

[lpevey]

Hmm... Steam has actually had in-home streaming out of beta and available to the masses for quite some time. I use it all the time to stream from my desktop computer to my media computer so that I can play games in the living room.

Re:Razer Forge TV

[Anonymous Coward]

The input lag is a big deal. If you don't notice it, that's just because your mental agility is quite poor. Plus, compressed video? You must be going blind too.

Re:Razer Forge TV

[RogueyWon]

Sorry, input lag is a huge issue for me, even on a controller. I've returned two games to the store for refunds because of it: Shift 2 on the 360 and The Last of Us on the PS3 (though the PS4 version is much more playable).

If you aren't finding input lag a problem, then you are either playing games where it matters less (RPGs etc) or else you aren't playing at the kind of level where fine control matters. For me, playing a game with heavy input lag (which includes almost any PC game with vsync enabled) feels like playing while wearing oven mitts.

Re:Razer Forge TV

[Harlequin80]

I've used it fine for quite some time now. But the games I tend to play aren't too twitch intensive so perhaps that is why. I'm not using wireless either and have a managed switch that I put some tweaks into for steam.

I don;t notice the input lag even when playing fps games. But that could just be me getting old.

Re:Razer Forge TV

[Luthair]

All digital video formats we use are compressed and lossy.

Gaming on Linux will matter...

[HerculesMO]

When Linux has a worthy Office competitor.

Until then, people will always want Windows (yes, I know you CAN get away without Office but for practicality people actually do like it). And even then... Windows isn't as bad as it was when Linux was so advocated for. It is stable, boots fast, and is relatively easy to use. Yeah, Windows 8 is a trainwreck but Windows 10 looks very good, and DirectX is a very good API.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[Captain Splendid]

When Linux has a worthy Office competitor.

Libre Office not good enough for you?

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[ledow]

Sorry, but I could live tomorrow on Linux.

I only use Windows because it was "for free" because of my employer buying me a laptop.

But for five years, I managed and supported a 90% Windows network with hundreds of devices primarily using a laptop which had LibreOffice, etc. installed.

OS - sorted.

Office suite - sorted (sorry, but it is. I used to get people envy my LibreOffice setup, as I could do everything they could do, and manage their same files they managed, and also do things like open ancient foreign formats that people emailled us still).

General apps - sorted.

Games - 1/3rd of my Steam account "just works" on Linux.

For years, I didn't have Windows or Office, as an IT professional supporting users on Windows and Office. Sure, it would have been nice to have a native tool occasionally, but for the odd things I needed (e.g. AD admin tools) it was always safer to just remote-desktop into a Windows machine, or use VM's (Samba tools just aren't there yet).

For everyday use, personal and business, I used Linux as the base OS and for the vast majority of tasks. Only when I was doing something very Windows-specific did I have to load up a Windows tool and always did it from a Linux machine.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[HerculesMO]

For me, no. I do macro work in Excel that can't be replicated in LibreOffice. I assume many other people as well. I know it CAN be done, but when you need a specific tool there is no denying that Office is simply the best productivity suite.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[new_01]

Yea, Libre Office is good for everything I use at home. I actually prefer it to the ribbon crap that I last used from Microsoft. However for real business work Excell and Powerpoint are second to none still. But that's ok, because I don't do Excell and Powerpoint stuff at home that needs enough complexity to switch over the Microsoft. I'll give it to them, Microsoft writes good software, but the open source guys are no slouches.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[ihtoit]

for some metric of "great".

Doesn't work 100% on Linux.
Doesn't work 100% on OSX.
Ports for the above two platforms are not supported by Microsoft. For the simple reason that implementations (eg WineX and Cedega/whatever it's called this week) are 100% entirely guesswork ports on proprietery code.

If DirectX were open as in "we can do something useful with this on an ARM box", we'd *have* an XBox emulator for COTS x86-64.

As it is, we have to "make do" with such projects as Unity (Win64 API is still broken) which are built from the ground up to permit, nay encourage parallel development across platforms. This is why I can run Kerbal Space Program in OGL mode in a Knoppix VM.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[bmo]

>Worthy Office Competitor

Most people don't need anything more than Google Docs.

>but muh obscure Word function

If you're using something obscure in modern versions of Office, you're going to lose when you try to share the document with /other/ Office users. And don't even get me started on formatting when everyone and his brother has slightly different fonts installed (well, it certainly seems that way).

Most (sane) offices have standardized on Office 97 formats, out of desperation with Microsoft's ever changing formats. Office 97's formats are well known and well handled by Office alternatives.

>Windows 10 looks very good

It does? When the icons look like they've been done in Paint?

The Oxygen icons in KDE are better.

>DirectX

Sorry, OpenGL is still better.

--
BMO

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[mark-t]

Comments like this leave one has to ask themselves why an integrated email client in the office suite should ever be critical for gaming to succeed on Linux.... because in terms of functionality, that's about the only difference between LibreOffice and MS Office.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be silly. MS has the best office around and if you need it, you get it. Or you get it cause you must edit documents from people that use ms office. Luckily I don't, but try recommending libreoffice to heavy office user. Good luck :)

For what you and me need office, libreoffice is better. But not everyone shares our needs.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[Holi]

According to who? If OpenGL is so much better then why do 98% of the games on the windows platform use DirectX. Hell even the games that have OpenGL support (Half Life 2, Left 4 Dead, Far Cry, Dead Island, I could go on) only use it for the OS X and Linux ports. Even if they offer OpenGL on the Windows platform they usually default to DirectX. So in the face that almost EVERY game developer for Windows chooses DirectX over OpenGL, why would I believe you when you say OpenGL is better?

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[asvravi]

Not until it can allow me to cut a full row and insert it elsewhere using a reasonable number of mouse clicks as in Excel (two vs seven now!).

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[MBGMorden]

Windows still has the problem of spyware. Whether that's due to lack of security or its popularity is a matter of debate, but still, to me at this point using the internet on Windows feels like sex without a condom. Relatively safe if you truly trust what's on the other end, but definitely a risk.

On the other hand I surf the internet without so much as a care on my Linux machine. You still have to not be an idiot (ie, don't type your info into phishing sites), but I have no fear that simply visiting a particular site is going to hose up my machine.

As to the Office competitor - Office is being marginalized. Even in our corporate environment we just implemented Office 365, and when you do that you have an option: an "E1" license which has browser-based office, and "E3" which includes the full MS Office suite. We've put about 80% of our users on the browser based version and they're doing fine. That browser-based MS Office actually works just fine on Linux, and is actually far more limited than LibreOffice - it just is branded MS Office so people will accept it.

Microsoft is being marginalized. My guess is that if PC gaming survives, it'll eventually shift to Linux. I'm just not sure there will be too many people aside from geeks and gamers still using a desktop computer by that time.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, OpenGL is still better.

--
BMO

The problem is that you are a Linux zealot with only one choice: OpenGL. Pride and arrogance force you to twist reality to please your own ego. Thus, OpenGL becomes better to you , when in reality it isn't.

Re: Gaming on Linux will matter...

[Ash-Fox]

To answer your why. The number one reason for using DirectX APIs is because of the ease of use with Visual Studio, the second reason is that commonly game development courses until recently focused exclusively on Direct (that has changed because of mobile devices).

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[Iniamyen]

Unfortunately I have had a bitch of a time getting LibreOffice to reliably work with my old-ish MS Word docs, which aren't even that old (think like 5 years.) Random characters, breaks, etc. Anecdotal, but then so is your experience.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

So try Kingsoft Office for Linux. It's so MS Office compatible that it uses (only) the same file formats as MS Office. It can even switch between the "ribbon" interface and the traditional menus. At least LibreOffice tries to be a little different, Kingsoft is a clone...

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

That all may be true but you should focus less on ad hominem and more on actual supporting arguments.

While I believe that, broadly speaking, OpenGL has some issues, they are both complicated parts of an even more complicated software and hardware ecosystem. Making a blanket assertion that one is better is difficult, and arguing against either based on the character of their proponents is just asking for your opinion to be dismissed instantly without consideration. Pot, meet kettle, and the next time you feel like posting something like this, just don't.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

When Linux has a worthy Office competitor.

I know it's blasphemy around here to say anything positive about Microsoft, but Office Online works great under Linux, as long as you have a modern graphical web browser.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Replying to all the above, where do you work that actually has employees who know what a macro is? Or how to copy/paste? I want to apply for a job there too.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fine in a business where you don't do meaningless PowerPoint crap, at any rate.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[AntiSol]

I do macro work in Excel

They haven't removed macros from Excel yet? Strange, that's where the trend is headed. Don't worry, there's always next version.

there is no denying that Office is simply the best productivity suite

I deny it.

Specific tool, huh? You mean like the ability to customise toolbars programatically, allowing you to make an add-on that installs its own toolbar button? That feature that got removed with the awesome new ribbon interface?

Let me guess: I'm misjudging the poor ribbon - it's actually awesome, and I'm just too stupid to realise that - they did a bunch of usability tests with a bunch of non-technical people and came to the conclusion that it's better in 100% of cases. I'll come around after using it for a while. And that feature which was removed which I need? I didn't actually need it, I'm just misguided and too stupid to realise it.

Instead of writing a 'setup toolbar button' bit into the 'install' routine for my addon, I should distribute my add-on with a page-long set of instructions for how to set up a button in the "quick access toolbar". Because the stupid users who don't even know what they want are smart enough to do that.

Right?

I do macro work in Excel that can't be replicated in LibreOffice.

I've never come across anything I can do in excel with VBA that I can't do with OOBasic. In fact, the opposite is true.
What you actually mean is "I can't be bothered switching from VBA to OOBasic - Learning is hard."

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[ray-auch]

Nope, it's not.

Come back when it has things like Outline View, first requested oooh about 13yrs ago ( https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show... ), been highest voted or second highest bug/request ever since, but not fixed in 13yrs (apparently it required some reworking of the architecture, and apparently this was done back in 2010...). Having a equivalent of Normal View is also highly voted - I don't use that as much but I can see that if you work on certain types of document layouts it would be essential.

Track changes also lags MS Office significantly.

Excel removed ridiculously low row/column limits almost a decade ago, LO will still only do 1024 columns AFAIK - again, apparently fixing this is too hard. I might only need that for a handful of spreadsheets, but if I have to buy Office anyway for those cases, why would I also use LO and have to master two different tools when I can use Office for everything.

Trouble with OO/LO is similar to electric cars, 80/20 or 90/10 is not a success (against an incumbent tech), it's a problem - if OO/LO can do 90% of my documents or even 95%, I still need Office for the other ones. Similarly if range & charging have improved so that the electric car can do 90% of my journeys or even 95%, that's great - but I still need a fossil fuel car for the others. If I have to have two cars, or two Office suites, instead of one then the new one needs to offer something really compelling that the incumbent doesn't have - and OO/LO doesn't, for me, yet.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[ray-auch]

I've never come across anything I can do in excel with VBA that I can't do with OOBasic. In fact, the opposite is true.
What you actually mean is "I can't be bothered switching from VBA to OOBasic - Learning is hard."

Here's one thing - open your old Excel marco spreadsheets and have them work just the same as in Excel.

Can't do that ? Well then you've got to convert them, take cost of converting them vs. cost of Office licence - are you still saving anything ?

Or you parallel run, do new stuff in OO and use Excel for old ones, probably for several years (7 or more at a guess if it's financial stuff) until the old stuff is no longer needed. Now you're not switching from VBA to OOBasic, you're having to learn both and be productive in both at the same time, which is a lot harder, and you won't save anything in Office costs for years.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[drinkypoo]

If OpenGL is so much better then why do 98% of the games on the windows platform use DirectX.

Because when Windows platforms started to get 3d accelerators, the OpenGL implementation on Windows NT was incredibly primitive and performed poorly even for a software implementation, and only high-end corporate users had acceleration at all. It was as likely to use a private API for acceleration as to use OpenGL. Although Windows OpenGL accelerators did exist, they cost thousands of dollars and up. When the first consumer-level GPUs came out for PCs, they too used custom APIs rather than OpenGL. While 3dfx eventually supported a subset of OpenGL functionality under the name "MiniGL", and towards the end of their run actually produced nominally complete OpenGL drivers (for Voodoo x000 series cards) the damage was already done. Microsoft was able to appear to be a hero by implementing their own 3D API instead of OpenGL with vendor extensions, and the rest is history.

Direct3D is successful today because of inertia. If 3dfx and PowerVR had implemented OpenGL from the beginning, then we probably wouldn't have Direct3D at all today. Microsoft would have tried to control OpenGL through fancy-pants vendor-specific extensions, and probably failed because hey, others have also tried that and failed. So, aside from Microsoft of course, I blame 3dfx. MiniGL is what we needed from the beginning.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

I run tons of directx only games in Linux flawlessly.

They perform better on the same hardware as well.

Re:Gaming on Linux will matter...

[AntiSol]

Here's one thing - open your old Excel marco spreadsheets and have them work just the same as in Excel.

(smartass jab about spreadsheets named "marco" goes here)

Sorry, i don't have any left, I abandoned Excel about 10 years ago and never looked back. The only times I've worked with Excel since then are when people pay me ludicrous consulting rates. And then I end up spending ages pulling my hair out and wishing I'd asked for an even more ludicrous rate.

Can't do that ? Well then you've got to convert them, take cost of converting them vs. cost of Office licence - are you still saving anything ?

Well, I'm saving my sanity by not using that terrible interface and having features removed "just because", so yes, but I don't think that's what you mean...

How many times have you "upgraded" Excel over the last 10 years? How many times are you planning to "Upgrade" over the next 10 years? Let me guess - every year or two? So you're actually spending $299 (or whatever it is, I don't know or care) per year. Suddenly Excel licenses don't look so cheap compared to the cost of converting a couple of spreadsheets. In the long run, investing the time to switch to an open format devoid of licensing costs makes more financial sense, rendering your remaining points moot. Thanks for playing!

Or you parallel run, do new stuff in OO and use Excel for old ones, probably for several years

THE most expensive way you can possibly do it.

(7 or more at a guess if it's financial stuff)

If you're using Excel macros for financial stuff, you're doing it wrong.

To restate my original position: What you actually mean by all this is "I can't be bothered switching from VBA to OOBasic - Learning is hard."

Re:where?

[ledow]

Nearly one third of my 900+ games on Steam not enough for you?

Hell, the thing isn't even out yet and already it's prompted hundreds of developers to release their games on Linux too.

The state is easy to see.

[kuzb]

It's not great. It's only good for staunch advocates who refuse to run any other operating system. Linux still isn't good enough for joe sixpack to run it as a daily driver. Until they get joe sixpack on board, it'll forever be a niche product without enough inroads to support a gaming ecosystem.

Developers have had decades to get Linux right on the desktop, and they've failed at every turn. Even distros which did a lot more right than the others still aren't as polished and usable as the alternatives. It's time to get your head out of the sand on this, and start examining the reality. OS X has more of a chance at becoming a capable gaming OS than Linux does, and that's really saying something.

Re:The state is easy to see.

[tlhIngan]

It's not great. It's only good for staunch advocates who refuse to run any other operating system. Linux still isn't good enough for joe sixpack to run it as a daily driver. Until they get joe sixpack on board, it'll forever be a niche product without enough inroads to support a gaming ecosystem.

Developers have had decades to get Linux right on the desktop, and they've failed at every turn. Even distros which did a lot more right than the others still aren't as polished and usable as the alternatives. It's time to get your head out of the sand on this, and start examining the reality. OS X has more of a chance at becoming a capable gaming OS than Linux does, and that's really saying something.

And that's where something like SteamOS can help by being "the definitive Linux". It eliminates all the political power plays, backstabbing and other nastiness that happens over Linux.

Yes, Linux is great - its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness - the diversity.

Developers don't care about fights over systemd or PulseAudio or whatever else stuff powers the modern Linux system. They don't. But with all sorts of distributions doing all sorts of different things, well, it doesn't help in the porting.

But Valve can easily dictate the game environment and say games must work on SteamOS. And SteamOS will (or will not - up to Valve) have services like systemd or PulseAudio or NetworkManager or whatever. So by basically dictatorial dictate, Valve creates a Linux-based OS for games without all the political Linux BS that goes with it. Sure the Linux admins will whine and complain that it's not "their one true Unix" or whatever, but everyone else is happy to have something to code for and work on.

And if it happens to work outside of SteamOS, bonus.

Re:The state is easy to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

They haven't failed at every turn.

They have built a system that developers want.

That the system developers want is different from the system "desktop users want" is just... design.

Re:The state is easy to see.

[jedidiah]

What do "desktop users" even want? Do they even have any real desires or do they just mindlessly take whatever is force fed to them by a Microsoft dominated OEM channel?

These are the same "desktop users" that turned their noses up at MacOS in favor of DOS.

The idea that Linux "lost the desktop" is assinine. It was never there to take. It was owned by DOS from day one. Quality of the product accounts for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

By Lemming-centric market metrics, even MacOS is a failure.

Thankfully most other markets are not quite as broken and I am not stuck eating dirt. Only in the computing market is the notion of not wanting to eat dirt seen as extreme or subversive.

Re:The state is easy to see.

[Kjella]

It's not great. It's only good for staunch advocates who refuse to run any other operating system. Linux still isn't good enough for joe sixpack to run it as a daily driver. Until they get joe sixpack on board, it'll forever be a niche product without enough inroads to support a gaming ecosystem. (...) OS X has more of a chance at becoming a capable gaming OS than Linux does, and that's really saying something.

Except for cost. That's what powered the Android drive, it wasn't the technical superiority. There's probably more people gaming on phones and tablets than any other platform when you count Angry Birds, Candy Crush and such. Chromebooks running on Linux also seem to sell reasonably well for the same reason. If Valve can get a a range of steamboxes out there to sell to everything from a $99 box to sell freemium + $1-5 games to a $999 gaming rig to people who don't really care about having a desktop anymore with their tablet/convertible covering those needs there's probably a market for gaming boxes.

It does of course assume that you commit enough to get it off the ground. Nobody wanted to code for Android either before it got popular. And if Valve is backing off now that the Microsoft Store doesn't seem that big a threat after all, it might take many years. But Linux is well propped up by servers, supercomputers, embedded, cell phones, tables, chromebooks... it's not going away. Particularly not in the direction we're going with more cloud, less local it's certainly not going to get worse.

The driving force behind Mesa is Intel, they're certainly not going away. Pretty soon they'll hit the big OpenGL 4.0 and it seems almost all the prerequisities for 4.1 and 4.2 are done once they get over that hurdle. And they certainly want to keep their OpenGL ES current if they want to play in the x86 smartphone/tablet market. AMD also apparently like their open source driver for embedded/custom projects, less legal hurdles for customers who want full control. So maybe they don't win, but I don't see how they could lose much terrain either.

Re:The state is easy to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

"What do "desktop users" even want? Do they even have any real desires or do they just mindlessly take whatever is force fed to them by a Microsoft dominated OEM channel?"
We're talking about gamers specifically here. You know, the kind of people that pay $60 for a game, get repeatedly screwed by the publisher, then shell out more money for extensions and/or DLCs of the same game.

Re:The state is easy to see.

[quantaman]

It's not great. It's only good for staunch advocates who refuse to run any other operating system. Linux still isn't good enough for joe sixpack to run it as a daily driver. Until they get joe sixpack on board, it'll forever be a niche product without enough inroads to support a gaming ecosystem.

Developers have had decades to get Linux right on the desktop, and they've failed at every turn. Even distros which did a lot more right than the others still aren't as polished and usable as the alternatives. It's time to get your head out of the sand on this, and start examining the reality. OS X has more of a chance at becoming a capable gaming OS than Linux does, and that's really saying something.

What does the typical joe sixpack need?

Web browsing? That works aside from some newer niche Flash stuff

Word processing? That works for a big majority of cases

Email? Works.

Playing Music? No iTunes, but otherwise works.

Games? .... well this is the big one.

For every common usecase there's a fairly generic app you can use to get things done regardless of the OS. Sure there's sometimes warts on Linux, but you get warts on Windows and Mac OS as well. My mother has had trouble with her Mac that take me just as much esoteric googling to figure out as anything on Linux.

But games, well that's been the problem. If you want Joe Sixpack to use your system he needs to be able to run almost every game, since Linux has never had that capability of course it's not going to become big on the desktop.

Now that's changed. Linux can do a lot of games and the major obstacle to Joe Sixpack is gone.

It's still not great (gaming is still a problem outside of Steam), and Linux still lacks the marketing power. But I could really see a lot more casual users coming on board, or even some OEMs coming on board with well configured pre-installed Linux machines, either low-end machines made cheaper by not having the Windows tax and having some crappy OEM apps added, or higher-end machines targeted towards power-users who just want a laptop with an Ubuntu or RHEL system where all the esoteric hardware works.

Re:The state is easy to see.

[aliquis]

OS X has more of a chance at becoming a capable gaming OS than Linux does

I'm not convinced.

Snobs who always have argued they for whatever reason don't need games because supposedly that ruin their creativity / other software somehow blended together with a company which argued about the same and didn't bothered about games.

Most don't run OS X (of course they don't run Linux either but in the case of the desktop the OS X likely is kinda "meh" too.)

Re:The state is easy to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux still isn't good enough for joe sixpack to run it as a daily driver.

I'm sorry, but this is just so much opinionated bullshit.

My father's 70. He runs Linux as his *ONLY* desktop computer.

If he used Windows, I'd be up reinstalling it from an image every few weeks, and he'd be demanding to know why it's broken this time. Explaining malware hidden in ads to him would stretch the patience of even a Zen master. It's easier, quicker, and cheaper to install Linux on his computer.

When I worked at a biege box store, we had people ringing us up daily, bitching about the money they'd spent a few months back on a new computer, and now it was really slow. They'd bring it in, and it'd be reload time, because all the newly-embedded spyware would just kill the system.

Had the daughter of one little old lady ring up and scream at me because the little old lady had bought anti-virus.
"Do you use it at home?"
"No, but I don't run Windows either."
"There you go, then, she doesn't need it because you don't!"
"I see. Does she have a degree in Computer Science, then? Do you, for that matter?"
"No, but she doesn't need anti-virus because you don't."

Don't get me started on the Registry corruptions, either. Having to burrow into the Registry to get the optical drive working again just because Windows, well, when Microsoft can sort that shit out, then Windows will be ready for the desktop, and not before.

Re:The state is easy to see.

[kuzb]

Have you actually talked to an average user? Have you ever tried to get people to use Firefox over Internet Explorer? Do you remember what an uphill battle that was? Now step back and understand that you're now trying to change their operating system.

How well do you think that will go over if it was virtually impossible to get them to stop using the worst browser in the world?

The problem with arguments like yours is they're made on the basis of rationality. However the people you're talking about aren't rational most of the time.

Re:The state is easy to see.

[kuzb]

I am, it's already happening. You're seeing it on steam. When software does get ported, it often gets ported for OS X long before it gets ported for Linux.

Re:The state is easy to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody gives a shit what you've forced your grandfather to run. We're living in the real world here, not the "sample of one" playground you live in you fucking idiot.

"Registry corruption!" When was the last time you actually looked at a windows machine? 1991? Sit down and shut the fuck up. You're completely clueless.

Re:The state is easy to see.

[quantaman]

Have you actually talked to an average user? Have you ever tried to get people to use Firefox over Internet Explorer? Do you remember what an uphill battle that was? Now step back and understand that you're now trying to change their operating system.

How well do you think that will go over if it was virtually impossible to get them to stop using the worst browser in the world?

The problem with arguments like yours is they're made on the basis of rationality. However the people you're talking about aren't rational most of the time.

It's not about changing their operating system. It's about choosing a different operating system when they get a new computer.

Linux is now a viable default.

Re:The state is easy to see.

[vilanye]

Most people don't know what OS they are using much less what an OS is.

Re:Do we really need an entire OS for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

SteamOS games are mostly the same games you get in steam on windows. also you don't need steam os it works in most linux distros, SteamOS is just geared towards a fullscreen steam ui for using on a tv with a gamepad or what have you.

Can't... get.... it.... to.... work....

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't get the damn radeon drivers to work on this laptop of mine .... so no gaming for me :(

Re:Can't... get.... it.... to.... work....

[armanox]

So...stream it from your desktop if you're at home?

Re:where?

[ihtoit]

Tuxgames was a great site, it seems to have done abunk though and is now placeheld by some fucking slots portal.

Re:where?

[decipher_saint]

Linux games on Steam?
http://store.steampowered.com/...

Re:where?

[dj245]

Nearly one third of my 900+ games on Steam not enough for you?

Hell, the thing isn't even out yet and already it's prompted hundreds of developers to release their games on Linux too.

Video games are not a commodity like brown sugar. There may be slight differences between brown sugar manufacturers but 99% of people aren't going to notice. There may be "open world third person shooter with grappling hooks" games available for Linux, but I don't want to play "open world third person shooter with grappling hooks", I want to play Just Cause 2. If Just Cause 2 isn't in that 1/3 of games that Linux supports, then no, the progress on games for Linux isn't enough for me.

Re:where?

[jfbilodeau]

Civ V, X-COM, Borderland, Left 4 Dead, Half Life, DOTA 2, CS-GO, EU are just _some_ of my favourite that run on SteamOS. Did you want the full list? It's over 300 games...

GOG vs Valve

[Anonymous Coward]

GOG is also starting to support Linux native games now, and almost all of their Windows catalog works fine on Wine.

Buy games from Steam and support a model where someone else will dictate when you update, whether or not you can play games you bought...

Buy from GOG and support a model where your games are YOURs, they can't go away because some DRM server went offline, they can't force unwanted updates on you...

WINE

[DarkOx]

Rather than targeting Windows game studious should just target a wine release. If it works there it will work on Windows version X. If they simply started doing there development to winelib and worked around stuff that is stubbed or does not work on the front end, they probably would get a product that would reliably run on most Linux Distro's and Windows with little added effort.

Wine + the staging patches (RH uses this as their packaged version now) is pretty damn good.

Re:Do we really need an entire OS for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL
http://warthunder.com/upload/image/media/screenshots/t8ys.jpg

Developers have had decades to get Linux?

[lippydude]

"Developers have had decades to get Linux right on the desktop, and they've failed at every turn."

NO, the main reason is because the OEMs have been prevented from marketing a Linux Desktop. Mainly by having to pay Microsoft 'Per-system' for every machine shipped, regardless of whether it ships with Linux or without. Microsoft haven't been able to get the same deal in mobile space, which is why they are reduced to charging the phone makers for an 'Android Licence'.

Re:Developers have had decades to get Linux?

[kuzb]

This is bullshit and we both know it. Take you tinfoil hat off for 5 minutes.

The truth is you'd have a hard time even giving Linux away to the average user because it doesn't run any of the software they want to use, and it doesn't run with half the peripherals out there out of the box. Macs alone are a hard enough sell when it comes to that. You need active education to show users they can get the stuff done that they want to do with software that is either equivalent or better to sell the average user a mac over a windows machine.

The truth is that for as far as it has come, Linux is still a sub-par unfriendly experience for the average user that is easily eclipsed by either OS X or Windows. How great it is for your purposes or my purposes is irrelevant because they don't need to target us.

Re:Developers have had decades to get Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

A random modern Linux distro supports more hardware out of the box than 8, 7, Vista, XP, ME and 98 combined

Re:Do we really need an entire OS for this?

[ArcadeMan]

Alright... 1997-era graphics.

Re:where?

[Foresto]

Here's the list. Seventy-three pages worth.
http://store.steampowered.com/...

Why VMs suck at Windows 3D

[DMJC]

Quite simply, Virtual machines suck at emulating Windows Direct3D because they use wine for their emulation. If you actually look into Virtualbox/VMWare, they both use wine's DirectX to OpenGL implementation to emulate Direct3D. That implementation doesn't properly support DirectX 10/11/12 or crucially DirectX 4/5 so old games won't work properly in it, and neither will new games. This is a problem that has plagued both wine and virtual machines for years. Won't be solved until some resources are put into fixing wine's older DirectX implementations.

Re:Why VMs suck at Windows 3D

[Anonymous Coward]

There are at least 2 lies in your post.

* The first one is that VMware uses Wine's DX-to-OpenGL. They don't. They have actually implemented a proper GPU-like interface, and wrote a native D3D driver for it.
* The second one is saying Wine doesn't support DX10/11/12 or DX4/5. Wine does support DX10 and 11, and by the time I'm writing this, they probably support 12 already. DirectX4 did not exist. DirectX5 was hardly used by anyone, was 2D used, and not even Windows supports it these days.

Re:Why VMs suck at Windows 3D

[drinkypoo]

VMware works better than anything else I've seen. Most of the games I've tried to use in vmware actually still work, which is what keeps me on Linux. It's the best place to run vmware, and the only freely-available Unixlike on which it runs. Otherwise I might well have shifted to FreeBSD by now.

OTOH Linux runs on everything I own, and I mean everything. Routers, access points, desktops, pogoplugs, my Blu-Ray player. So there's not much sense in learning something that will only run on some of that stuff.

Underworld Ascendant now supports Linux

[guises]

This is a somewhat on-topic reason to throw out a link to the Underworld Ascendant Kickstarter. They started their campaign with supporting Linux only as a stretch goal, but eventually realized that they were losing money that way. This might not come as a surprise if you think about it, but Kickstarted games seem to be the ones with the most consistent cross-platform support and DRM-free availability. People are a little pickier about what they're willing to donate to than what they're willing to buy.

Flying Cars

[YetAnotherBob]

"We didn't get flying cars, but the future is turning out OK so far."

Flying cars have been produced for the last twenty years. Drivable aircraft for longer than that. The problem isn't technical, it's political. They can't license and regulate them. The Government systems are just too crude.

Re:Flying Cars

[Carewolf]

"We didn't get flying cars, but the future is turning out OK so far."

Flying cars have been produced for the last twenty years. Drivable aircraft for longer than that. The problem isn't technical, it's political. They can't license and regulate them. The Government systems are just too crude.

That is not the problem. You can fly one if you have a flying license or do it at low altitudes over your own private land. The problem is that they are a stupid idea, the power spend keeping the vehicle hovering is not spend moving it which makes the range ridiculous short, on top of a price set in hundreds if not millions of dollars.

Re:Do we really need an entire OS for this?

[Darinbob]

A lot of these games don't even need Steam. The big benefit of Valve or SteamOS here is in promoting the idea that Linux is viable for games.

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

...indy games don't mean squat really. Until there are same-day releases of the big title games to linux it won't matter.

Driver model

[coder111]

I just wanted to say- Linus is right regarding driver model.

I do NOT want binary blobs running in kernel mode on my machine. They screw up both stability and security of the system. And OEMs who cannot provide open source drivers can go fuck themselves.

If not for MS monopoly and bullying of OEMs, Linux would have had good driver support from OEMs ages ago. Don't blame Linus for problems caused by Microsoft. Any OEM who tries to sell both Microsoft and Linux systems gets visited by Microsoft and stops selling Linux systems very soon. Because of that quality drivers never get provided by OEMs.

I do agree with your doubt that SteamOS has a future. Valve should have shipped SteamBox after all the hipe. Now this looks like another piece of vaporvare.

--Coder

Re:Driver model

[hairyfeet]

Then riddle me this...why does NOBODY, and I do mean nobody, not in FOSS nor in proprietary, support Torvalds driver model? After all if it was good there is absolutely NOTHING stopping them from adopting it, right? And what about BSD, why does it not follow the great Torvalds driver model?

The reason why is obvious, its because its shit that just won't scale. Hell basic math will show you that "let the kernel devs handle it" utterly collapses when the number of drivers reaches 5 figures because there simply is not enough kernel devs to keep up with all the hardware that is already out, much less the hundreds of new devices released this and every other quarter. It really VERY simple, in 1993, when the entire OS could fit on a single floppy? Then sure letting the kernel devs handle it made sense, they had MAYBE 30 drivers all told to deal with, now how many is there? 100,000? 200,000? Even if you pumped up the devs on coke and locked them in a room with NOTHING to but but deal with drivers they would have MAYBE 5 minutes every 3 years for each driver!

There is a REASON why the Hairyfeet challenge has stood for nearly 8 years without a single consumer Linux OS passing and it all comes down to his driver model not scaling, simple as that. BSD? It passes the Hairyfeet challenge with flying colors, too bad there simply isn't enough consumer hardware support for it to be a viable desktop. Its been 24 years now, 24 years of the same excuses, 24 years of "update foo broke my drivers", 24 years of manufacturers being unable to put a fucking penguin on the box because they can't JUST support Linux, even JUST support a distro like Ubuntu, they have to support "Ubuntu version X, kernel version Y" because THAT is how fucking picky Linus has made the OS with his fucked up driver model!

Meanwhile a Windows user can buy a PC and have the drivers that come on the system run for the ENTIRE LIFE of the system, I can take a copy of XP RTM, install the drivers, and then run it through the entire life of the OS, 3 service packs and countless patches, know how many drivers will be non functional at the end? NONE, that is how many drivers will be broken at the end and THAT is what you are competing against, and failing miserably!

But if you truly believe what you are saying? Then put your money where your mouth is and take the Hairyfeet challenge which just FYI only requires Linux to run HALF, I repeat HALF as long as a Windows lifecycle. Surely your OS can do half of what Windows can, right? I look forward to seeing your video posted here and the complete vid on Dropbox. of course we'll never see it because if you actually attempt to take the challenge you'll see what I saw countless times and that is Torvalds.driver.model.doesn't.work. and it all comes down to his driver model being made of fail.

Re:Driver model

[hobarrera]

Then riddle me this...why does NOBODY, and I do mean nobody, not in FOSS nor in proprietary, support Torvalds driver model? After all if it was good there is absolutely NOTHING stopping them from adopting it, right? And what about BSD, why does it not follow the great Torvalds driver model?

"nobody" migth have been an exageration. Intel does. As do plenty of others (logitech, realtek come to mind, but there's a lot more). But I think naming Intel should prove that it's not just just one man.

Also, BSDs follows an extremely similar model: In the kernel tree. Most OpenBSD don't support binary blobs either, I've no idea about the rest.

The reason why is obvious, its because its shit that just won't scale. Hell basic math will show you that "let the kernel devs handle it" utterly collapses when the number of drivers reaches 5 figures because there simply is not enough kernel devs to keep up with all the hardware that is already out, much less the hundreds of new devices released this and every other quarter. It really VERY simple, in 1993, when the entire OS could fit on a single floppy? Then sure letting the kernel devs handle it made sense, they had MAYBE 30 drivers all told to deal with, now how many is there? 100,000? 200,000? Even if you pumped up the devs on coke and locked them in a room with NOTHING to but but deal with drivers they would have MAYBE 5 minutes every 3 years for each driver!

The devs just check that everything is the tree is ok, The drivers themselves are written by the hardware developers. When I had an issue with a Logitech mouse on PowerPC, it was a Logitech dev that submitted that patch to the linux kernel. That model does scale.

But if you truly believe what you are saying? Then put your money where your mouth is and take the Hairyfeet challenge which just FYI only requires Linux to run HALF, I repeat HALF as long as a Windows lifecycle. Surely your OS can do half of what Windows can, right? I look forward to seeing your video posted here and the complete vid on Dropbox. of course we'll never see it because if you actually attempt to take the challenge you'll see what I saw countless times and that is Torvalds.driver.model.doesn't.work. and it all comes down to his driver model being made of fail.

The hairyfeet challenge is stupid. Is someone is stupid enough to invest money on something without knowing what it is or any previous research to see if it fits their purpose, they deserve what they get. Even if you know nothing about PCs, you can ask someone that does.

The problem is not related to the driver model at all (which is actually far better than the MSFT one), but to the fact that microsoft has a huge amount of money, has held a strong monopoly over a very long time, and there's a lot of money motivating manufacturers to just write windows drivers. It's money, there's nothing technical about that.

Re:Driver model

[Rutulian]

I suppose by "nobody" you mean "everybody except nvidia"? Because the nvidia binary blobs are pretty much the only drivers that occasionally have problems with kernel updates due to the way they really mess around deep into the kernel (ie: they implement their own drm code and X api). With Nouveau finally starting to mature, this is thankfully becoming less and less of a problem. But pretty much every other driver (proprietary or otherwise) seems to work just fine with the linux driver model.

Meanwhile a Windows user can buy a PC and have the drivers that come on the system run for the ENTIRE LIFE of the system, I can take a copy of XP RTM, install the drivers, and then run it through the entire life of the OS, 3 service packs and countless patches, know how many drivers will be non functional at the end? NONE, that is how many drivers will be broken at the end and THAT is what you are competing against, and failing miserably!

So, are you saying that over the life time of your system (what is that, say 6-7 yrs?), you never update the drivers? What do you think a service pack is? Nevermind. Anyway, it doesn't matter because you are wrong. SP2 broke a lot of XP drivers (and software for that matter), including the nvidia driver. Yes, you can now download an updated nvidia driver that works, but at the time of the SP2 release the old nvidia driver did not work on SP2.

Re:Driver model

[coder111]

Ok, I hear you. I KNOW vendor support is bad. Well, it's not as bad as it was in 1998, but it's still quite bad.

However the main problem with that is NOT the driver model. The main problem with that is Microsoft.

OEMs that cannot/do not get bullied by Microsoft DO provide open-source drivers. Intel, Atheros, Realtek, AMD, lots of others.

However Microsoft made sure Linux devices cannot be sold by usual popular vendors like Dell/Asus/Lenovo etc. Anyone who tries selling Linux laptops or desktops gets their windows licensing screwed up. This is bullying and monopolistic pratices at their worst, and they still continue. Similar with Intel/AMD- Intel effectively forces vendors to limit their AMD offerings.

Plese stop blaming this on Linus and his insistence on open-source drivers.

--Coder

Re:Driver model

[drinkypoo]

BSD? It passes the Hairyfeet challenge with flying colors, too bad there simply isn't enough consumer hardware support for it to be a viable desktop.

If your challenge doesn't take into account consumer hardware support, it's not a very good challenge. Consumer hardware support is one of Linux's greatest strengths, especially as compared to BSD. The software support is pretty relevant, too. I'd probably have jumped ship by now (I have nVidia, they have an OK BSD driver I'm told) if I could have vmware. It's the only vm with good 3D support. So since I'm sticking with Linux, I just went ahead and adopted KVM as my VM strategy. Now I'm more or less married to it, although obviously I could migrate away again. I migrated my non-3D-using Windows VMs to KVM already, I could likely migrate them again given a reason. But what's OSS and better than KVM with SPICE? Virtualbox would be if 3D didn't make it asplode every time I tried it.

But if you truly believe what you are saying? Then put your money where your mouth is and take the Hairyfeet challenge which just FYI only requires Linux to run HALF, I repeat HALF as long as a Windows lifecycle.

I've been running "more or less" the same Ubuntu install since Dapper Drake. There was a complete reinstall in there somewhere around Karmic Koala, but I kept my homedir, /opt, and /usr/local. Also, in the same time, I've had to reinstall Windows about a dozen times for one reason or another. And many of my peripherals showed up cheap (scanners, printers, etc) because Windows dropped support for them. Yeah, not Windows, the vendors, but same difference to the user. New windows, new scanner. Thanks, Obama^WHP. Man I can rant about scanner drivers all day, how sad

Re:Driver model

[drinkypoo]

The problem is not related to the driver model at all (which is actually far better than the MSFT one

I both agree and disagree. I agree that for users, OSS drivers for all would be the best. But I also think that making it difficult to have binary drivers has kept a lot of hardware off of Linux.

microsoft has a huge amount of money, has held a strong monopoly over a very long time, and there's a lot of money motivating manufacturers to just write windows drivers.

But they also make it easy. They provide a really convenient development system for little to no money, just like in Linux-land, and a lot of documentation, just like in Linux-land, except actually Microsoft's documentation seems to be pretty good. Shame about all the years it was full of dirty lies, since Microsoft was using different functions internally, but long gone are the days when that sort of trickery would fly with the public. Now, if performance is unacceptable, they can go somewhere else.

I think more manufacturers would release Linux drivers if they could release binary ones. Would we be grateful? I know some of us would use them.

Re:Driver model

[hairyfeet]

So you ADMIT that Linux can't even KEEP ITS OWN DRIVERS FUNCTIONING for a lousy 5 years, just HALF the life cycle of Windows?

I don't know what is more sad and pathetic, the fact that you consider basic functionality "stupid" or that you are so drunk on the koolaid that you actually consider such piss poor support to be an acceptable situation. And you wonder why Linux has been stuck at under 2% for 24 fricking years?

Re:Driver model

[hobarrera]

So you ADMIT that Linux can't even KEEP ITS OWN DRIVERS FUNCTIONING for a lousy 5 years, just HALF the life cycle of Windows?

No, I never admited anything alike (I've no idea how you misinterpreted my response). I've also seen drivers that have been in kernel well over a decade. Generally, as long as someone is interested, there's no reason to remove drivers from the kernel.

Give it another shot

[coder111]

Not sure how long ago that was. But each LibreOffice release improves MS format support.

So you might want to give it another try.

On the other hand MS office format is so screwed up that there will always be bugs and warts...

--Coder

Re:where?

[Anonymous Coward]

983

(On Steam alone.)
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?os=linux#sort_by=_ASC&category1=998&os=linux&page=1

Re:Do we really need an entire OS for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must not have been very old in 1997.

With mods?

[tepples]

What the world is really waiting for is a console that acts like a dedicated PC gaming machine

You could always buy an iBuyPower SBX PC.

If the XBOX or PS4 (as well as game developers) would just take the mouse and keyboard seriously you could transform the entire landscape of console gaming to be much more in line with PC gaming.

Would this include ability to install and use community-developed mods, or would only the vanilla versions of games be available?

Re:With mods?

[drinkypoo]

Would this include ability to install and use community-developed mods, or would only the vanilla versions of games be available?

Steam has shown that it's possible to deliver mods to the console experience, with the workshop. I don't see why an even more curated model of modding wouldn't be palatable to the console developers. They could review the most popular mods for content and then give them a rating in order to give the slightest veneer of involvement.

Re:where?

[Harlequin80]

Well of the current top 25 sellers on Steam 15 of them are linux compatible. Not yet perfect but over half.

PS4 runs *BSD

[tepples]

PlayStation 4 doesn't run Linux. It runs Orbis OS, an operating system based on FreeBSD. The point is that if your company ports a game to OS X and PlayStation 4, those count as ports to environments with a POSIX heritage, and GNU/Linux is another OS that aims for POSIX conformance.

Re:PS4 runs *BSD

[Baloo Uriza]

Which has got to be the first time someone adopted BSD since MacOS/Darwin...

While the TV is occupied

[tepples]

Why have multiple powerful expensive PCs when you can have one and a $99 low power ARM box attached to your TV.

Can you game while another member of the household is using the family PC for homework, Facebook, YouTube, or whatever else?

Re:While the TV is occupied

[drinkypoo]

Can you game while another member of the household is using the family PC for homework, Facebook, YouTube, or whatever else?

They can use a $199 PC, which together with the $99 streaming box is going to be no more expensive than the fancy console - and provide more versatility.

I hate to come on like one of those "PC Master Race" dicks, but the consoles are either especially gutless (like Nintendo's) or spectacularly curated. For people who don't feel hampered by that, OK, great. But boy is that shit annoying. It's more annoying even than having to run Windows.

Re:While the TV is occupied

[tepples]

[Someone who needs a PC to game on while another family member is using another PC] can use a $199 PC, which together with the $99 streaming box is going to be no more expensive than the fancy console - and provide more versatility.

Just to be sure: You mean keep the gaming PC and run the non-gaming stuff on the $199 PC, right? Then the question for households that currently have a $199 PC becomes whether to buy the expensive gaming PC or to buy one of the consoles.

I hate to come on like one of those "PC Master Race" dicks

Don't worry; I agree that PC users are masters of their own respective experiences.

but the consoles are either especially gutless (like Nintendo's) or spectacularly curated.

Some other Slashdot users would argue that this curation serves a purpose, namely saving people's time from having to wade through the crappiest of the crap, which is 90% according to Theodore Sturgeon, and that the profitable majority of people have been Stockholmed into not "feel[ing] hampered by that. Have you looked into what caused the North American video game recession of 1983-1984?

Re:While the TV is occupied

[drinkypoo]

Have you looked into what caused the North American video game recession of 1983-1984?

I dunno, I haven't come up with a clear answer to that yet. But it's not going to happen now, absent a general recession to match, since video gaming is now a real thing.

Re:While the TV is occupied

[tepples]

Let's just say that curation helps keep a flood of amateurish games from cluttering the list of new releases presented to prospective game buyers.

Re:While the TV is occupied

[drinkypoo]

Let's just say that curation helps keep a flood of amateurish games from cluttering the list of new releases presented to prospective game buyers.

You'd like to think so, but it seems to me like most video games are pretty bad on every platform.

So do you buy every console?

[tepples]

There may be "open world third person shooter with grappling hooks" games available for Linux, but I don't want to play "open world third person shooter with grappling hooks", I want to play Just Cause 2.

So if you want to play one PlayStation 4-exclusive game, one Xbox One-exclusive game, and one Wii U-exclusive game, do you buy all three consoles rather than looking for a same-genre game on the PC you have?

Re:where?

[CronoCloud]

Let me guess, you're playing a lot of early access indies and "indies in general" that's the only way to have a library that large...and with that many Linux games on Steam.

Sure the small timers can do a Linux build... in fact what they're probably doing is taking their PS4 version and ./configure make make installation-package or whatever for Linux (or vice versa)

But when it comes to games that aren't indies...well Linux is less well represented on Steam.

Re:where?

[serviscope_minor]

"great games shipping for linux ..." where? i'd love to install some.

Well, I've been playing Creeper World III recently. I loved 1 and 2, and 3 is available native on Linux, where as I had to run 2 in a Windows VM. it's an indie game, so not super fancy but it runs on low-end hardware and the game mechanic is interesting. It also has a lot of built in content, a huge amount of very imaginative user generated content and a remarkably good random level generator.

No desire to port

[bjwest]

If the developers were really concerned with ease of porting, they'd use an engine that's available on all platforms. With the right engine, all that should be needed to port a game is to compile it for the desired platform. Isn't this all they do for the Win/Mac games?

The state here

[drinkypoo]

The state for me is that Steam works on Windows and doesn't work on Ubuntu. I have to use -tcp on windows, but even that won't let me connect on Linux. No firewall rules on this system under Linux, there may be some under Windows. Double-natted, of course, but it works on Windows.

Re:The state here

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't imagine how that's even possible, something is seriously wrong with your setup. Don't blame Steam for that.

Re:The state here

[drinkypoo]

I can't imagine how that's even possible, something is seriously wrong with your setup. Don't blame Steam for that.

I can't imagine how that is even possible either, since everything else works. I can post to slashdot, stream video, or do anything else from both Windows and Linux. I even installed steam_latest.deb right before posting, including deleting my .steam directory. No good.

Possibly there is something wrong with my Ubuntu install, but I really can't fathom what that might be since everything else works fine. Until something other than Steam fails, though, I'm going to continue to blame Steam.

I'm not going to post my iptables ruleset or anything, heh heh, but:
All my firewall iptables chains are default ACCEPT, and I drop (or reject) at the end of the chain
All my firewall ebtables chains are default ACCEPT, and I have no drops or rejects
All my desktop chains are default ACCEPT with no other rules.
My only forwarding rules relate to SIP, and don't relate to the IP of this system at all
The IP remains the same when I dual boot, and is fixed.
The Windows firewall obviously knows about Steam.
I have no uPnP daemon running on my firewall.

Perhaps I have missed something obvious? But other stuff works fine.

Re:Do we really need an entire OS for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I belive part of the idea was to streamline the Input to reduce delay and provide a big push in graphics driver performance on linux. Areas in which they have made good progress.

As far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing.

Unfortunately they tried to push it out before it was ready for prime time, hopefully this means they'll wait until they are certain it'll work until the next push. This'll probably mean they'll have to make their own box before the OEMs get on board again though.

Why are we doing this?

[JakeBurn]

I get that people feel MS/Apple=evil and Linux=bright wonderful world where rainbows shoot out of your ass every time you fart, but why rejoice in the gaming industry wasting time on stuff like this? I also get that it doesn't matter if your child is ugly or mentally handicapped, that its still your child and you love it with all your heart but now your child is shitting in the grocery store and needs to go home. Every second of time wasted on porting a game to Linux is a second that potentially makes the overall gaming industry that much weaker and I have a hard time believing that anyone fighting for this is a gamer.

Steam on Linux

[melting_clock]

I had no interest in Steam until they brought out a Linux client and started encouraging porting games to Linux. Now, I have bought a few Steam games on Linux and Windows, although I spend most on my time on the Linux games.

As a >40 year old gamer, I am probably not the target market for a lot of these games but I did have the disposable income to frequently upgrade my computer and buy the latest games. My tolerance to putting up with abuse from publishers is at an all time low, after putting up with bullshit from EA with BF3 and BF4 where for weeks at a time it was impossible to play a game over claimed "DDoS" attacks which were more likely poor design of backend servers. I will now never buy another EA game which just means more of my money going on Steam and Android games.

My desktop PC is my gaming and general purpose machine but it is very rare that I boot into Windows and that is only for gaming. My Android tablets and phone are my other main computing tools. My poor Windows laptop sit unloved and unwanted, other than for a few hours a month. My media centre PC is also Linux with MythTV recording TV programmes to watch at my convenience, rather than when they air, making my largish TV little more than a monitor.

After running the Steam client and some games through a couple of distribution upgrades (Kubuntu) without any problems, I am much more confident that Linux gaming is here to stay. SteamOS as a console alternative has some real potential to compete with the obsolete console concepts from MS and Sony.

Movies and tax returns

[tepples]

Playing Music? No iTunes, but otherwise works.

Unless you're buying music and you can't find a particular track on Google or Amazon.

Web browsing [...] Word processing [...] Email

You forgot watching Hollywood movies (lawful DVD player, lawful BD player, clients for each country's DRM'd streaming services) and preparing tax returns.

Linux itself isnt the biggest issue

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an indie dev and I'm proud to support Linux (I use arch and centos). The biggest problem is the linux community itself. So much elitism and fragmentation between distros. Linux users are their own worst enemy. with a market share of something like 1.75% things aren't as rosey as they may seem.