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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.
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.
The downside of installing Windows in a VM is that you need to install Windows ...
Unless you pirate it it is not free
doesn't work. sorry.
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.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
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.
When Linux has a worthy Office competitor.
Libre Office not good enough for you?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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.
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.
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.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
1. what's doing the processing?
2. because input latency.
3. because network latency.
4. because bandwidth.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Snap it also doesn't work on ReiserFS.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
Tuxgames was a great site, it seems to have done abunk though and is now placeheld by some fucking slots portal.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Linux games on Steam?
http://store.steampowered.com/...
crazy dynamite monkey
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.
No, because it hasn't been released yet. See my other post for why input lag isn't a big deal.
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.
ZFS is broken on Linux, so what's your problem?
the games may often refuse to run inside of a vm on account of the vm not simulating the necessary hardware.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
>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
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.
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
who cares its a gaming box not a file server
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.
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?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
So...stream it from your desktop if you're at home?
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
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!).
OS pirates far outnumber Steam pirates.
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.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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...
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
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...
...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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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
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.
"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'.
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).
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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.
Alright... 1997-era graphics.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Here's the list. Seventy-three pages worth.
http://store.steampowered.com/...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I stole this Sig
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.
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.)
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.
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?
Well of the current top 25 sellers on Steam 15 of them are linux compatible. Not yet perfect but over half.
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?
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.
"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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
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.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
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.
I stole this Sig
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..
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."
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.'"
All the VMs I've tried (well, actually a grand total of one - Virtualbox)
Well there's your problem. It works in VMware.
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.
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.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.)
"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.
All digital video formats we use are compressed and lossy.
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.
Most people don't know what OS they are using much less what an OS is.
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."