Street Fighter V Announced For Linux and SteamOS
An anonymous reader writes: Capcom has announced that their upcoming Street Fighter V game, one of the most anticipated games for 2016, will also be available for SteamOS and Linux. Already in place is support functionality for the Steam Controller, Valve's game controller that was recently updated with some new features. Ever since Valve launched Steam for Linux, the number of native Linux games has positively exploded. But will it be enough for gamers to choose a Linux distribution as their gaming platform?
I play games on Linux. I loved the Portal games, and I'm spending more time than is perhaps good for me in Kerbal Space Program. Got XCOM waiting for me once I take a break from KSP. On my laptop I play FTL, and I've slowly playing through Baldurs Gate; something fun to do during business trips.
If I didn't have these games on Linux, I would not be playing on Windows. Dual-booting is completely impractical, since you'd have to close your work and shut down just to play a game. I'd not use Windows; I'd probably just get a game console instead. Or be content with the games I can play on my tablet. Without Linux games, I would not be playing PC games at all.
Why does _anyone_ care that you play PC games or not?
I'm pretty sure that people making and selling the games would care..
And yet right now, on Windows, the SF5 beta is crashing for me. There's even less I can do because there are no messages at all.
Worse, Ultra Street Fighter 4 randomly crashes out on me. No errors, no messages. Just up and vanishes mid-game. Other games give me, occasionally, random crash dialogs. So I doubt the troubleshooting situation can truly be worse on Linux.
> When it comes to ease of use, performance and backwards compatibility, Windows kills Linux all day long. And it always will.
Windows requires a massive multistep procedure to not leak data like crazy to Microsoft. Fixing it requires command line garbage, scripts, etc. Linux doesn't require any of that configuration- out of the box it just works. Windows you have to dick around with the wusa package manager and that binary registry just to get a fraction of the security and privacy that Linux has for free.
But lets go further:
Performance- Linux outperforms Windows at almost every task an OS does. The exception is if you write a game just to support Windows APIs, as many games do. Microsoft didn't do anything to make their platform perform better- far from it. They have a large userbase, so many developers jump through hoops to support it. The same thing applies to drivers- Microsoft didn't write those, third party companies did, and if the Linux version is ever less than the Windows version at something, it's the fault of those companies.
Backwards compatibility- I'm really not aware of older Linux programs failing to work on modern Linux. Maybe, somewhere, that's true- I certainly don't see it though. Linux comes packed in with standard utilities dating back to the damned 70s for fucks sake. Windows struggles just to support shit from the Windows XP era. Linux is vastly more backwards compatible than Windows- hell, it even supports programs written for stuff from prior decades BEFORE IT EXISTED.
It always will- Nothing you've said is true. What Windows has is a big user base. That's the limit of its power. It can't even run fucking bash and it's 2015- every real OS has supported that for over a decade. It's a joke of an OS with holes at every level, unreadable binary bullshit for config files, random hex strings in random places a mile deep in a HKEY_CURRENT_BULLSHIT, a terrible command line package manager, a shitty shell that tries to look like DOS and fails, random idiotic access controls that protect viruses but not users, and an entire industry built to find and remove the malicious shitware that infests the platform. Linux runs MOST windows programs, and MANY windows games. Windows can't run a single fucking Linux binary without a goddamned VM!
Here's what Windows has: a big userbase. This means that some developers just make Windows versions of shit, and never even compile a Linux version- this means that there are many windows only programs, games especially. But that's not something Windows did. Microsoft doesn't write all those games. Microsoft doesn't even write all the goddamned drivers.