Nevertheless, Aaron is pretty critical of Ubuntu Phone, and frankly, he has a point. Ubuntu is not using the common codebase they try and claim
Maybe I've looked at the wrong websites but I have yet to see a claim that both desktop Unity and phone Unity are written using the same codebase. I just saw the claim that one application's Qt codebase can be used on both systems and that's completely true. Canonical wrote various bits and pieces even quite some time ago to make sure that Qt applications utilize indicators, global menus, etc. Canonical also rewrote at least their UbuntuOne desktop client in Qt a while ago. Canonical also forked MeeGo's Qt-based SSO framework and integrated that into Ubuntu for desktops and I'm 100% certain that Ubuntu phone just as regular Ubuntu will both use Maliit (another MeeGo leftover) as virtual keyboard. It just makes sense and which toolkit the actual shell is written is, is completely irrelevant.
Ubuntu Phone is based on Qt5 and QML2. The deprecated Unity2D is based on Qt4 and QML1. Granted, the effort to port from QML1 to QML2 is minimal (which is why KDE Plasma components are first being rewritten in QML1 to prepare for the port to QML2) but they are not the same.
KDE have worked a lot already splitting application core and UI in many components and thanks to Nokia's past ownership Qt turned into a first grade mobile framework with technologies like QtQuick. With QtQuick it's even possible to write adaptive UIs rather easily: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2MjFw_Pewg
Complete desktop support for QtQuick will still take a while (Qt 5.1 or 5.2, depending on progress) but with the modifications KDE already made throughout their stack one QtQuick-based UI for mobiles and one traditional QWidget-based one for desktops is already possible, as can be seen in Kontact - Kontact Touch, Calligra Suite - Calligra Active, etc.
The other DE projects seem to try to find a compromise and make one UI that works on both device types (see Nautilus and the removal of not touch-friendly features) which is IMO the completely wrong approach. KDE's approach with separate UIs and shared back-ends seems more logical.
The Wii U has neither a Cell nor SPE units, it only has it's slow CPU.
Wii U has only a CPU and no GPU? It is already a known fact that Nintendo's approach is to use the GPU as co-processor. I looked a bit of info up about the 4A Engine. Turns out that it's extremely bad designed. It only runs on a single thread (therefore even multiple CPU cores are unused) with NVidia PysX technology as only exception. Xbox 360 has a relatively strong CPU and PS3 has a NVidia GPU. If PS3 had a Radeon-based GPU, PS3 would have been in exactly the same state as Wii U. As a result, even PC gamers without a NVidia GPU one will suffer.
4A Games was either too stupid or received sponsoring money from NVidia to only support PhysX. If 4A Games had done vendor-independent GPGPU programming (via OpenCL) from the beginning, not only would the Wii U probably run etro Last Night just fine, the other platforms (esp. PC owners with Radeon GPU) would benefit as well.
DuckDuckGo can sod off, in my opinion. My one experience with DDG results from their inclusion as the default search engine in Linux Mint. 1) Their search results are crap. 2) Trying to replace them with Google as the default search provider was CRAZY DIFFICULT. I don't want to hear about how hard it is to change default search providers to DDG, because changing back was a non-trivial task for me.
And how is it DDG's responsibility how Mint is configured? DDG makes a search site and nothing more. They don't develop a web browser or an operating system. Go and bitch at Mint if configuring it is difficult but this story is not about Mint.
From DDG it's totally easy to search via Google: Either select Google from the drop-down menu or add !g in the search field.
The quality of every developed search engine obviously varies over time.
Seriously: It's discovery seems like a break-through and no one thought about catching a few alive ones to study them in a laboratory? I mean, "Oh, shiny! Let's catch a few!" is so obvious...
General lack of polish. This is my #1 complaint about KDE, and it's everywhere.
Personally, I disagree that's it's everywhere. Yes, it's here and there and usually in applications that are either very new (=incomplete in general) or remnants of KDE3. But there is an initiative that works on ironing them out: http://www.sharpley.org.uk/blog/extra-mile-1
Crashiness. Sometimes, daemons decide to crash randomly. Occasionally, the compositor goes crazy and locks up the entire desktop.
Never experienced that (openSUSE with official NVidia drivers here). Either these are those infamous (K)ubuntu-specific bugs or they are related to the GPU driver.
- Insane defaults. Preferences are nice, but they need to be set to reasonable values by default. For example, there are *way* too many global key bindings by default, the eye candy is set to an annoyingly high level by default, single-click select in file dialogs contradicts every other desktop, the default panel is huge, and a whole ton of other things.
Global key shortcuts may be a case for Extra Mile. The others are things the distributor should decide for his user base.
- No good system monitor widget. GNOME 2.x had an awesome panel widget that would display CPU, network, and memory; it even displayed I/O wait CPU time in a different color, which was awesome.
There are several 3rd party ones available. No idea how good they are because system monitors are useless bling for teenage boys IMO.
- The cashew. It makes no sense, and you can't get rid of it.
It makes sense and you can remove it. One of Plasma's goals is not to rely on right clicks which is why common users should not be able to completely break their desktop. It's not a GNOME-like "Settings confuse users" thing but imagine a user who uses a touchscreen and first turns off the cashew and then accidentally removes the task bar. Without the ability to right click the desktop would be completely broken until a mouse is attached.
As for removing it: It's possible and has always been possible. Technically the cashew is just another Plasma widget. Personally I just move it behind a panel but there are tools to regulate the cashew's opacity or even remove it completely, eg http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Py-Cashew?content=147892
Apple is just one of many companies who have shown how easily a thriving BSD software project can essentially be taken private. Just take your wad of cash and buy out the core developers. Set them to work on your proprietary, extended version with all the security bug fixes, the slick new UI and the closed-source installer.
Remind me: Which was the thriving BSD-licensed fully featured C/C++ compiler before Apple came and released Xcode?
Last I checked it was Apple who got behind an obscure university research project named LLVM, made it real world-usable, and developed Clang on top of it and gave the FreeBSD project for the first time in its history a BSD-licensed default compiler.
You may be right. However, losing all the technical users who fix bugs and gaining lots of non-technical users who drain support resources is a disaster for an open source project, even if overall usage increases.
I think we can all finally admit that GNOME 3 has become the most significant OSS project disaster to have ever occurred.
Don't include me in your "we all" family. While I'm a KDE user (Plasma Desktop and many KDE apps), IMO Gnome 3 is the second best DE in existence (after Plasma Desktop, of course). I definitively find it way ahead of Gnome 2.x which essentially followed the GUI approach of Win95.
No way Gnome 3 is anywhere as bad as PulseAudio which even after eight years of development can't even play music without occasional stuttering on my Core 2 Duo system. (Plain ALSA works just fine here.)
In an age where the smallest hard drives you can get new are hundreds of gigabytes and even the smallest SSDs you can get new are dozens of gigabytes, what's a few hundred megabytes?
I've only really attempted to remove them from the systems (openSUSE mostly), not disable them.
Nepomuk and Akonadi are optional at compile time -- have always been and there are no plans to change that. Distributors choose to compile and ship them enabled because they feel that their target audience will find them convenient to use (and most people actually do not complain). If disabling them is not enough for you and you really like to save the handful of MB disk space they consume because you use a PC from the 1990s, get on https://build.opensuse.org/ , branch the KDE repo, change the build settings yourself and after a day or so of building install the packages from your OBS home repo.
Erm 100% of Blizzard's revenue is generated by PC Gamers, so therefore I extrapolate from my dataset that 0% of gaming must be happening on other platforms.
Picking Activision or Ubisoft are bad examples as they primarily produce console games with PC as an afterthought. Fortunately they are not the only game manufacturers, nor are they representative of the gaming industry in general.
Activision Blizzard is a single company and the market leader. So yeah, it's very representative.
What I wrote are numbers released by the publishers themselves. Before you make a fool of yourself again: Better read what you post. The infographic says very clearly that the 2011 and 2012 numbers are predictions by a 3rd party source. The infographic onlycompares PC vs. consoles but ignores the entire mobile market (I just wrote that 5-7% revenue are PC games, not that the remaining ~95% are consoles). They are not actual data. The infographic also explicitly includes browser games that are already Linux-compatible. Was there a rush of FarmVille players to Linux? No. So if we include browser games in a discussion about AAA game publishers, fine: My argument was that Windows users have an irrational emotional attachment towards Windows and the installed base of PC Linux will not change via further availability of games, as the free Linux ports of id Software's and Epic's games -- and by your will also availability of browser games -- already proved.
To repeat myself: Linux is great and it's the main platform I use. I'm not bashing Linux. All I did was countering the claim that Steam on Linux will suddenly lead to a mass migration of Windows users to Linux. We had AAA games on Linux in the past. It did not change a thing and Steam will not boost PC Linux from 1% installed base to a 30, 50,or 70% installed base. It just won't.
PC has a niche in MMORPGs and strategy games but the overall majority of revenue is generated on other platforms: Consoles and mobiles (iOS, Android, NDS,...). Valve's ambitions on Linux have nothing to do with PCs. Valve wants Steam with its big picture mode to run on "livingroom hardware" (=smart TVs) with Linux as option to run on them. See http://www.gametrailers.com/full-episodes/ncis3o/gt-tv-valve (after 3min) for an interview with Valve's boss who confirms that. The Valve games announced for Linux (TF2, L4D2, and Portal) are not high-end games like Battlefield2. Smart TVs capable of Full HD playback are powerful enough to run them.
I did, and I already knew the answer. That was me questioning the reliability of data coming from Ubisoft, and you citing them.
Really, READ THE INTERVIEW! Quote: "Research showed that it can reach that rate for some specific or popular PC games, and that number often varies depending on the territory. So we are not saying that it applies to all PC games for all territories, and we’re not saying that the same situation would apply for any game."
To keep it simple: 90% piracy = isolated incident, 5%-7% PC gaming revenue = global data (and this also applies to Activision.
And even if your stupid calculation was right: All those non-PC gamers didn't switch to Linux. Your attempts to distract from the original claim (which was Valve on Linux = mass migration of PC gamers to Linux) just do not work. PC gaming on Windows is not what's keeping PC Linux at 1%. Both id Software and Epic Games in the past provided Linux binaries for their games. That didn't have a measurable impact on PC Linux' installed base and Valve won't do anything either. Valve isn't targeting PC Linux anyway. They target "livingroom hardware" (probably smart TVs) with Linux as option to run on them. See http://www.gametrailers.com/full-episodes/ncis3o/gt-tv-valve (after 3 minutes). Valve's lower end games (TF2, Portal1, L4D) could easily run on platforms powerful enough for full HD video decoding and playback.
Linux tends to project a geek's ideal of technological perfection, ideological purity and political correctness, no matter how poor a fit they may be to the needs and values of other users.
The average mainstream PC Linux distribution is easier to use than Windows, especially Win8 which I had the chance to use and see for myself.
I'm the word's laziest person. I use Linux because it's easier. If Windows was the easier route, I'd never left.
Ubisoft. That's the same company that claims a 95% piracy rate, correct?
Click on the link before asking stupid questions already answered.
So, if 95% of their installations are pirated, and they seem to imply that the piracy rate is measured for PCs only and not consoles, and they still get 7% of their revenue from PCs, wouldn't that mean that the 5% sales rate on PCs makes up 7% of their total revenue, and therefore that the total PC market for games is larger than the console market?
Actually no, because market means that the games must be bought. That said, before making stupid calculations, just read the interview.
How on earth is it completely irrational for people to stick to what they know when it does what they need?
...
Do you know how out of touch with reality it makes you look?
The one without any grasp of reality is you. That's because you didn't even care to read my comment properly. Read the part you quote and answer properly before making a fool of yourself. Let me explain it to you again: It's irrational, because they don't know Windows. They just think they know it. They won't even consider looking at alternatives. Their PCs are full of crapware and their Windows does not do "what they need". What they need is a PC that works flawlessly, without slowdowns because 10 toolbars, 10 autoupdaters, 2 antivirus tools, and whatever hog their system.
If they actually knew Windows, their PCs wouldn't be in that sorry state. Having no clue about Windows and still fiercely claiming otherwise is irrational. Period.
Ubisoft is the worst company to quote for PC games sales data. I'm almost certain their Always-On DRM they had been bundling with their games was killing their PC game sales.
Just because 90% of the gaming market is (for their output... hint hint) does not mean the remaining 10% is not a significant market.
But it means that PC users could have switched to Linux years ago. Linux is perfectly capable of performing all common PC tasks, from browsing (Firefox, Chrome, and Opera are available) to media consumption to office (OpenOffice) to even web-based gaming. (I'm a lazy user. I am using Linux and would not do if it was not doing just fine what I want.) For 90%-95% of gamers the PC is not their first choice and yet they'll stay on Windows. Sure, there is the occasional task that can only be done under Windows but these are niches.
The claim that Linux on desktops is only being held back because it lacks games is absolutely ridiculous. I believe Linux is being held back because of an irrational brand loyalty of the masses toward Windows. Maybe it's some kind of herd behavior.
Microsoft is in the tablet market since many years. If I'm not mistaken since shortly after the launch of Windows XP with these UMPC things. Nobody ever wanted tablets with Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Nevertheless, Aaron is pretty critical of Ubuntu Phone, and frankly, he has a point. Ubuntu is not using the common codebase they try and claim
Maybe I've looked at the wrong websites but I have yet to see a claim that both desktop Unity and phone Unity are written using the same codebase. I just saw the claim that one application's Qt codebase can be used on both systems and that's completely true. Canonical wrote various bits and pieces even quite some time ago to make sure that Qt applications utilize indicators, global menus, etc.
Canonical also rewrote at least their UbuntuOne desktop client in Qt a while ago. Canonical also forked MeeGo's Qt-based SSO framework and integrated that into Ubuntu for desktops and I'm 100% certain that Ubuntu phone just as regular Ubuntu will both use Maliit (another MeeGo leftover) as virtual keyboard. It just makes sense and which toolkit the actual shell is written is, is completely irrelevant.
Ubuntu Phone is based on Qt5 and QML2. The deprecated Unity2D is based on Qt4 and QML1. Granted, the effort to port from QML1 to QML2 is minimal (which is why KDE Plasma components are first being rewritten in QML1 to prepare for the port to QML2) but they are not the same.
KDE have worked a lot already splitting application core and UI in many components and thanks to Nokia's past ownership Qt turned into a first grade mobile framework with technologies like QtQuick. With QtQuick it's even possible to write adaptive UIs rather easily: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2MjFw_Pewg
Complete desktop support for QtQuick will still take a while (Qt 5.1 or 5.2, depending on progress) but with the modifications KDE already made throughout their stack one QtQuick-based UI for mobiles and one traditional QWidget-based one for desktops is already possible, as can be seen in Kontact - Kontact Touch, Calligra Suite - Calligra Active, etc.
The other DE projects seem to try to find a compromise and make one UI that works on both device types (see Nautilus and the removal of not touch-friendly features) which is IMO the completely wrong approach.
KDE's approach with separate UIs and shared back-ends seems more logical.
The Wii U has neither a Cell nor SPE units, it only has it's slow CPU.
Wii U has only a CPU and no GPU? It is already a known fact that Nintendo's approach is to use the GPU as co-processor.
I looked a bit of info up about the 4A Engine. Turns out that it's extremely bad designed. It only runs on a single thread (therefore even multiple CPU cores are unused) with NVidia PysX technology as only exception.
Xbox 360 has a relatively strong CPU and PS3 has a NVidia GPU. If PS3 had a Radeon-based GPU, PS3 would have been in exactly the same state as Wii U.
As a result, even PC gamers without a NVidia GPU one will suffer.
4A Games was either too stupid or received sponsoring money from NVidia to only support PhysX.
If 4A Games had done vendor-independent GPGPU programming (via OpenCL) from the beginning, not only would the Wii U probably run etro Last Night just fine, the other platforms (esp. PC owners with Radeon GPU) would benefit as well.
DuckDuckGo can sod off, in my opinion. My one experience with DDG results from their inclusion as the default search engine in Linux Mint. 1) Their search results are crap. 2) Trying to replace them with Google as the default search provider was CRAZY DIFFICULT. I don't want to hear about how hard it is to change default search providers to DDG, because changing back was a non-trivial task for me.
And how is it DDG's responsibility how Mint is configured? DDG makes a search site and nothing more. They don't develop a web browser or an operating system.
Go and bitch at Mint if configuring it is difficult but this story is not about Mint.
From DDG it's totally easy to search via Google: Either select Google from the drop-down menu or add !g in the search field.
The quality of every developed search engine obviously varies over time.
Seriously: It's discovery seems like a break-through and no one thought about catching a few alive ones to study them in a laboratory?
I mean, "Oh, shiny! Let's catch a few!" is so obvious...
General lack of polish. This is my #1 complaint about KDE, and it's everywhere.
Personally, I disagree that's it's everywhere. Yes, it's here and there and usually in applications that are either very new (=incomplete in general) or remnants of KDE3. But there is an initiative that works on ironing them out:
http://www.sharpley.org.uk/blog/extra-mile-1
Crashiness. Sometimes, daemons decide to crash randomly. Occasionally, the compositor goes crazy and locks up the entire desktop.
Never experienced that (openSUSE with official NVidia drivers here). Either these are those infamous (K)ubuntu-specific bugs or they are related to the GPU driver.
- Insane defaults. Preferences are nice, but they need to be set to reasonable values by default. For example, there are *way* too many global key bindings by default, the eye candy is set to an annoyingly high level by default, single-click select in file dialogs contradicts every other desktop, the default panel is huge, and a whole ton of other things.
Global key shortcuts may be a case for Extra Mile. The others are things the distributor should decide for his user base.
- No good system monitor widget. GNOME 2.x had an awesome panel widget that would display CPU, network, and memory; it even displayed I/O wait CPU time in a different color, which was awesome.
There are several 3rd party ones available. No idea how good they are because system monitors are useless bling for teenage boys IMO.
- The cashew. It makes no sense, and you can't get rid of it.
It makes sense and you can remove it. One of Plasma's goals is not to rely on right clicks which is why common users should not be able to completely break their desktop. It's not a GNOME-like "Settings confuse users" thing but imagine a user who uses a touchscreen and first turns off the cashew and then accidentally removes the task bar. Without the ability to right click the desktop would be completely broken until a mouse is attached.
As for removing it: It's possible and has always been possible. Technically the cashew is just another Plasma widget. Personally I just move it behind a panel but there are tools to regulate the cashew's opacity or even remove it completely, eg http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Py-Cashew?content=147892
Apple is just one of many companies who have shown how easily a thriving BSD software project can essentially be taken private. Just take your wad of cash and buy out the core developers. Set them to work on your proprietary, extended version with all the security bug fixes, the slick new UI and the closed-source installer.
Remind me: Which was the thriving BSD-licensed fully featured C/C++ compiler before Apple came and released Xcode?
Last I checked it was Apple who got behind an obscure university research project named LLVM, made it real world-usable, and developed Clang on top of it and gave the FreeBSD project for the first time in its history a BSD-licensed default compiler.
OK, but he said FreeBSD, which isn't quite the same thing.
Actually it is. PC-BSD is just FreeBSD with a GUI installer and changed artwork. The core is unmodified FreeBSD.
You may be right. However, losing all the technical users who fix bugs and gaining lots of non-technical users who drain support resources is a disaster for an open source project, even if overall usage increases.
Even techies may want a simple desktop.
I think we can all finally admit that GNOME 3 has become the most significant OSS project disaster to have ever occurred.
Don't include me in your "we all" family. While I'm a KDE user (Plasma Desktop and many KDE apps), IMO Gnome 3 is the second best DE in existence (after Plasma Desktop, of course). I definitively find it way ahead of Gnome 2.x which essentially followed the GUI approach of Win95.
No way Gnome 3 is anywhere as bad as PulseAudio which even after eight years of development can't even play music without occasional stuttering on my Core 2 Duo system. (Plain ALSA works just fine here.)
In an age where the smallest hard drives you can get new are hundreds of gigabytes and even the smallest SSDs you can get new are dozens of gigabytes, what's a few hundred megabytes?
The minimal installation size of LibreOffice...
I've only really attempted to remove them from the systems (openSUSE mostly), not disable them.
Nepomuk and Akonadi are optional at compile time -- have always been and there are no plans to change that. Distributors choose to compile and ship them enabled because they feel that their target audience will find them convenient to use (and most people actually do not complain).
If disabling them is not enough for you and you really like to save the handful of MB disk space they consume because you use a PC from the 1990s, get on https://build.opensuse.org/ , branch the KDE repo, change the build settings yourself and after a day or so of building install the packages from your OBS home repo.
Erm 100% of Blizzard's revenue is generated by PC Gamers, so therefore I extrapolate from my dataset that 0% of gaming must be happening on other platforms.
Picking Activision or Ubisoft are bad examples as they primarily produce console games with PC as an afterthought. Fortunately they are not the only game manufacturers, nor are they representative of the gaming industry in general.
Activision Blizzard is a single company and the market leader. So yeah, it's very representative.
You may wish to become better informed.
What I wrote are numbers released by the publishers themselves. Before you make a fool of yourself again: Better read what you post. The infographic says very clearly that the 2011 and 2012 numbers are predictions by a 3rd party source. The infographic onlycompares PC vs. consoles but ignores the entire mobile market (I just wrote that 5-7% revenue are PC games, not that the remaining ~95% are consoles). They are not actual data.
The infographic also explicitly includes browser games that are already Linux-compatible. Was there a rush of FarmVille players to Linux? No.
So if we include browser games in a discussion about AAA game publishers, fine: My argument was that Windows users have an irrational emotional attachment towards Windows and the installed base of PC Linux will not change via further availability of games, as the free Linux ports of id Software's and Epic's games -- and by your will also availability of browser games -- already proved.
To repeat myself: Linux is great and it's the main platform I use. I'm not bashing Linux. All I did was countering the claim that Steam on Linux will suddenly lead to a mass migration of Windows users to Linux.
We had AAA games on Linux in the past. It did not change a thing and Steam will not boost PC Linux from 1% installed base to a 30, 50,or 70% installed base. It just won't.
PC has a niche in MMORPGs and strategy games but the overall majority of revenue is generated on other platforms: Consoles and mobiles (iOS, Android, NDS,...).
Valve's ambitions on Linux have nothing to do with PCs. Valve wants Steam with its big picture mode to run on "livingroom hardware" (=smart TVs) with Linux as option to run on them. See http://www.gametrailers.com/full-episodes/ncis3o/gt-tv-valve (after 3min) for an interview with Valve's boss who confirms that. The Valve games announced for Linux (TF2, L4D2, and Portal) are not high-end games like Battlefield2. Smart TVs capable of Full HD playback are powerful enough to run them.
I did, and I already knew the answer. That was me questioning the reliability of data coming from Ubisoft, and you citing them.
Really, READ THE INTERVIEW! Quote: "Research showed that it can reach that rate for some specific or popular PC games, and that number often varies depending on the territory. So we are not saying that it applies to all PC games for all territories, and we’re not saying that the same situation would apply for any game."
To keep it simple: 90% piracy = isolated incident, 5%-7% PC gaming revenue = global data (and this also applies to Activision.
And even if your stupid calculation was right: All those non-PC gamers didn't switch to Linux.
Your attempts to distract from the original claim (which was Valve on Linux = mass migration of PC gamers to Linux) just do not work. PC gaming on Windows is not what's keeping PC Linux at 1%. Both id Software and Epic Games in the past provided Linux binaries for their games. That didn't have a measurable impact on PC Linux' installed base and Valve won't do anything either.
Valve isn't targeting PC Linux anyway. They target "livingroom hardware" (probably smart TVs) with Linux as option to run on them. See http://www.gametrailers.com/full-episodes/ncis3o/gt-tv-valve (after 3 minutes).
Valve's lower end games (TF2, Portal1, L4D) could easily run on platforms powerful enough for full HD video decoding and playback.
Linux tends to project a geek's ideal of technological perfection, ideological purity and political correctness, no matter how poor a fit they may be to the needs and values of other users.
The average mainstream PC Linux distribution is easier to use than Windows, especially Win8 which I had the chance to use and see for myself.
I'm the word's laziest person. I use Linux because it's easier. If Windows was the easier route, I'd never left.
Ubisoft. That's the same company that claims a 95% piracy rate, correct?
Click on the link before asking stupid questions already answered.
So, if 95% of their installations are pirated, and they seem to imply that the piracy rate is measured for PCs only and not consoles, and they still get 7% of their revenue from PCs, wouldn't that mean that the 5% sales rate on PCs makes up 7% of their total revenue, and therefore that the total PC market for games is larger than the console market?
Actually no, because market means that the games must be bought.
That said, before making stupid calculations, just read the interview.
How on earth is it completely irrational for people to stick to what they know when it does what they need?
...
Do you know how out of touch with reality it makes you look?
The one without any grasp of reality is you. That's because you didn't even care to read my comment properly. Read the part you quote and answer properly before making a fool of yourself.
Let me explain it to you again: It's irrational, because they don't know Windows. They just think they know it. They won't even consider looking at alternatives.
Their PCs are full of crapware and their Windows does not do "what they need".
What they need is a PC that works flawlessly, without slowdowns because 10 toolbars, 10 autoupdaters, 2 antivirus tools, and whatever hog their system.
If they actually knew Windows, their PCs wouldn't be in that sorry state.
Having no clue about Windows and still fiercely claiming otherwise is irrational. Period.
Ubisoft is the worst company to quote for PC games sales data. I'm almost certain their Always-On DRM they had been bundling with their games was killing their PC game sales.
So take Acivision's 5% then.
Just because 90% of the gaming market is (for their output... hint hint) does not mean the remaining 10% is not a significant market.
But it means that PC users could have switched to Linux years ago. Linux is perfectly capable of performing all common PC tasks, from browsing (Firefox, Chrome, and Opera are available) to media consumption to office (OpenOffice) to even web-based gaming. (I'm a lazy user. I am using Linux and would not do if it was not doing just fine what I want.)
For 90%-95% of gamers the PC is not their first choice and yet they'll stay on Windows. Sure, there is the occasional task that can only be done under Windows but these are niches.
The claim that Linux on desktops is only being held back because it lacks games is absolutely ridiculous.
I believe Linux is being held back because of an irrational brand loyalty of the masses toward Windows. Maybe it's some kind of herd behavior.
So if without a touchscreen its crappy then its more a Tablet OS vs PC OS.
Learn to read, dude. Win8 is also crappy to use with a touchscreen.
Microsoft is in the tablet market since many years. If I'm not mistaken since shortly after the launch of Windows XP with these UMPC things. Nobody ever wanted tablets with Windows.
all my friends who also game aren't techies.
Which is why they likely play on consoles without hassles like draconian DRM, driver upgrades, etc.
These days any random mainstream Linux distribution is more user friendly than Windows.
>> Linux has everything they need
except driver support from nvidia
http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/50195
http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/50196
How is this greed?
No clue. It's just capitalism at work.