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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.