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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.
This Linux gaming renaissance is most likely a side effect of how every other gaming platform besides Windows uses "something else". That something else is Linux compatible. That reduces the distance between Linux and what has already been ported to.
Android, MacOS, even the PS4 and Wii's are intermediate steps towards Linux.
It's no great surprise that the most interesting ports for Linux are being done by a MacOS porting house.
Beyond the big titles, Linux is a significant part of the market. The indies were already porting to Linux because of this.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The downside of installing Windows in a VM is that you need to install Windows ...
Unless you pirate it it is not free
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.
Indies are porting to Linux because the idea of a Linux game means that they'll get some love that they wouldn't otherwise get. It's a market that is presently untapped as most big studios haven't yet come to care about Linux as a platform. They ship Linux, they get guaranteed press, ergo more sales.
Thirty four characters live here.
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.
MacOS, PS4, and Wii have one thing in common that Linux doesn't have. They're not moving targets. They don't require a user have expert knowledge. Aside from OS X, they're dedicated to a specific purpose.
OS X has a vested interest in trying to build a gaming ecosystem to bolster Apple's sales, but the stigma of Macs being piss-poor gaming machines will follow them around for a long time to come. Most people can't see a need or a benefit to move away from a Windows PC, but it's very easy to see the drawbacks.
What the world is really waiting for is a console that acts like a dedicated PC gaming machine and is capable of playing all the same software. A machine where you can turn it on, pick your favorite game and just quickly play. Hassle free. They want the ease of a console with the power and flexibility of a PC in terms of upgrade paths and peripherals. 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.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
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.
Linux games on Steam?
http://store.steampowered.com/...
crazy dynamite monkey
>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.
who cares its a gaming box not a file server
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.
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!).
They don't require a user have expert knowledge.
This isn't 1998 anymore. Linux doesn't require "expert knowledge" to run and use. My parents in their 50's are using Linux full-time (even though they don't know they are) as is my sister - who knows it but doesn't really regard the fact as more than an interesting piece of trivia.
Linux works just as simply as any other OS these days. You want a program? Go to Software Center and search for it. It installs. The icon appears in your menu.
Yes, you CAN get technical and in depth with the system if you want, but that's no different than Windows having the registry and Powershell available if you want to tweak things.
Right now Linux just isn't popular with gamers because there are no games for it, and there are no games for it because gamers don't use it. It's chicken and egg problem, but it's changing, albeit slowly. I personally use my Linux system for everything EXCEPT games, though I'll admit that I'd be excited to ditch Windows even for the games if I could (I do have a PS4 that I play some stuff on). It is nice though that Pillars of Eternity will be available for Linux and is coming out very soon. I've been waiting for that one for quite a while and it may be the first "real" game I'm able to play there.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
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
Please explain why I am able to play all the old Linux ports of games like the original unreal tournament (I haven't acquired new ports for a while) with no problem when Linux is a moving target?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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.
Alright... 1997-era graphics.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Android, MacOS, even the PS4 and Wii's are intermediate steps towards Linux.
Yes, they are but you can't call Android Linux or PS4 Linux. Linux after all is just the kernel and it doesn't dictate how good the OS is.
I bought my 14 year old daughter a new laptop that had Windows 8 on it. She wiped it out and installed Linux. She runs Steam for most games, and WINE for a couple because Steam does not quite work for them.
She is not computer illiterate, but she is not an IT guru either. She googles what she needs to know and follows guides she finds.
Here's the list. Seventy-three pages worth.
http://store.steampowered.com/...
and shipping a title for a platform when it doesn't actually work on that platform, or has issues that nobody ever even bothered to check because they don't want to spend any time on QA for the platform is worse for the company's PR than not shipping the title for that platform in the first place.
Then why is EA shipping games for any platform at all?
Sorry but I predict that SteamOS will be dead in 3, probably less, and in the meantime it will be given a trickle of updates while it slowly winds down. The reason? Windows 8 and the MSFT store.
The entire reason for the existence of SteamOS was that Gabe feared Windows 8, specifically the Windows Store. He gave interviews railing on Win 8 and talking about how shit the MSFT store was gonna be for lock in, bla bla bla....so what happened? Windows 8 went over with all the desirability of a trainwreck, the MSFT store turned out to be a spyware ridden clusterfuck, and the CEO that pushed that crap "decided to pursue other interests" rather than get canned. The new guy? Seems to actually have a brain and isn't trying to fuck his partners by sticking a Winflag on everything under the sun.
So every. single. reason. given for making SteamOS? Gone, finished, wasted. Why spend who knows how many millions to develop your own Operating System to defeat somebody who has already waved the white flag? Not to mention as long as Torvalds has a pulse the driver situation will NEVER get any better as Torvalds refuses to let go of the same crap driver model he has been pushing since 1993, so they get the "fun" of dealing with that mess, and for what? MSFT is giving away Windows 10 so you can't compete on cost, MSFT has all but given up on the Windows store, in fact the entire time I've been running Win 10 I don't think I've ever had so much as a "FYI did you know we got a store?" pop up, so that is not a threat, and Steam already has big picture mode in Windows so they can't even use a 10 foot UI as a selling point!
The Linux fanboys can scream and curse me all they want, but time will prove me right. Gabe royally fucked up the SteamOS launch by telling the OEMs it was ready when it wasn't (probably because he didn't know what an unstable POS the Linux driver model really is) so they ended up being left with their dicks in their hands and had to rush out their "Steamboxes" with Windows 8.1, which with the amount of hatred Windows 8/8.1 has? Might as well have just flushed the Steamboxes down the john. After taking a bath like that you can bet your last nickel that Gabe will NOT be getting any more custom hardware, Linux users simply do not buy enough games, hell most will refuse to support Steam simply because its DRM, so the growth in that market is practically flatline, and finally no reason in hell for Windows users to switch to a limited subset of their Steam library when Win 8 is dead and Win 10 looks to be another Windows 7 level hit, so what advantage is there for Valve continuing to sink millions into SteamOS?
There just isn't any which is why they went from trumpeting SteamOS every chance they got to a trickle of low priority press releases, Valve knows MSFT isn't gonna push them off of Windows, hell since Gabe screamed bloody murder GFWL was shut down, the push to combine Windows and Xbox gaming has all but died, MSFT is just no longer a threat to Steam and Gabe knows it. Expect SteamOS to slowly wane until its nothing but a trickle, followed by a little press release a year or two quietly announcing SteamOS is gone, there just isn't a good reason for it to exist any longer.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
That is fucking awesome- go forth, multiply, and be fruitful. Maybe that's not that weird for 14 year olds these days, but when I was 14, that was pretty unique
While Windows remains the dominant platform Valve will continue to see that as a risk. As you stated the decision with 8 to include an app store sparked the rush to develop steam for linux and steam os. However there is no guarantee that win 10 won't come with an app store either pre-installed or pushed. As such it remains a risk profile to Valve.
The only solution to this is to fragment the market enough that steam becomes the only cross platform option. My steam for linux gets updates almost weekly. I think it is far from abandoned.
It's not.
The only people who claim so are, frankly, ignorant.
The ignorance comes because Linux is easier to use for development than the alternatives. You just apt-get install the libraries you need and get hacking.
In order to make something portable you need to do what you have to do on Windows anyway: package all the libraries with your program.
It's just that by default Linux is much easier in that regard.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No. I'm speaking of just Ubuntu on a desktop.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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."
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.
I suppose by "nobody" you mean "everybody except nvidia"? Because the nvidia binary blobs are pretty much the only drivers that occasionally have problems with kernel updates due to the way they really mess around deep into the kernel (ie: they implement their own drm code and X api). With Nouveau finally starting to mature, this is thankfully becoming less and less of a problem. But pretty much every other driver (proprietary or otherwise) seems to work just fine with the linux driver model.
Meanwhile a Windows user can buy a PC and have the drivers that come on the system run for the ENTIRE LIFE of the system, I can take a copy of XP RTM, install the drivers, and then run it through the entire life of the OS, 3 service packs and countless patches, know how many drivers will be non functional at the end? NONE, that is how many drivers will be broken at the end and THAT is what you are competing against, and failing miserably!
So, are you saying that over the life time of your system (what is that, say 6-7 yrs?), you never update the drivers? What do you think a service pack is? Nevermind. Anyway, it doesn't matter because you are wrong. SP2 broke a lot of XP drivers (and software for that matter), including the nvidia driver. Yes, you can now download an updated nvidia driver that works, but at the time of the SP2 release the old nvidia driver did not work on SP2.
If the XBOX or PS4 (as well as game developers) would just take the mouse and keyboard seriously
Sony takes mice and keyboard seriously with their Playstations. PS2's, PS3's and PS4's have USB ports for a reason. However Sony leaves it up to the developers to decide if they want to support keyboard/mouse and in what way. Requiring mouse/keyboard game control is probably not in their TRC requirements.
PS2: If a game has text chat or text entry, it almost always supports keyboards. That includes the settings disc for the Network adapter, and RPG Maker Keyboards/mice for game control is rarer, a few FPS's do like Half Life, FFXI, EQOA,
PS3: If a game or app uses the PS3 text entry widget, it automatically supports USB keyboard. Game chat, naming enchanted items in skyrim, signs in Minecraft, whatever. Keyboard for game control is rarer, again a few FPS like Dust514...but strangely, not the Orange Box. You can use keyboard/mouse to control the XMB.
PS4: like the PS3 there's pretty much automatic support for keyboards for text entry. There's at least one game that can use mouse/keyboard for game control in addition to chat and that's War Thunder. War Thunder also supports HOTAS, and uses the the PS4 Camera to use head tracking for view control.
Well, when I was that age I was installing Slackware on a 386... It's about access. When I was a kid, living in a town with a bunch of computer companies was mandatory in order to have cheap computer deals around. In Santa Cruz county we had Borland, Seagate, SCO, Parallel Computing, Sequoia Semiconductor, Plantronics, and piles of other techie or nominally-techie corporations attracted by the college town environment... and internet access brought in through the college. And $1/MB used hard disks for years and years! Ahh, Seizegate, the memories.
Today, hardware is just lying about everywhere.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"