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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.
I mean, TuxKart is great and all, but c'mon does it really warrant it's own fork of Linux? Talk about bloat.
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.
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.
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
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Just checked and yep, Steam is still broken on ZFS.
Oh, well. Guess I'll just continue not buying or playing any games, then...
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.
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.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
"great games shipping for linux ..." where? i'd love to install some.
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.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Can't get the damn radeon drivers to work on this laptop of mine .... so no gaming for me :(
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...
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
"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'.
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.
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.
"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.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
...indy games don't mean squat really. Until there are same-day releases of the big title games to linux it won't matter.
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
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
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?
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.
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?
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?
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?
--- Keep the choice with the user..
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.