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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.
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.
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.
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.