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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.
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.