When supporting a platform can mean debugging and submitting patches for a users graphics drivers in exchange for a shockingly low conversion rate, it's an easy no for me.
PS I built and maintain an Enterprise AWS GPU app on Ubuntu and the platform is great. But it was very non trivial to get working.
PPS if you spend less than $150/yr combined on all software purchases (including mobile/console) please don't make a case for Linux gaming. TuxRacer is your apotheosis.
I have absolutely no affinity for linux. My times spent twiddling with settings, packages, and getting drivers to work are long behind me. I have been exclusively Mac for almost a decade now, so I am in no way shape or form a "linux gaming homer" I could care less, but I am an opportunist, and I do see an opportunity now (and not 15 years ago)
> I've been in games and game middleware (including in many cases with Linux support) for fifteen years and I have never once seen this happen.
Yes, 15 years ago, Windows 10, with all it's privacy intrusions basically being a spyware OS didn't exist. A Steve Job-less Apple, doubling down on it's disdain for OpenGL and gaming in general at Apple didn't exist (see relevant John Carmack posts). And forgive me, but I would be willing to bet we didn't hear about it your game because I was specific when saying "first class citizen" meaning the game worked just as well on Linux as it did Windows. If you achieved that and still got no publicity I would be shocked. All you would need is one popular twitch streamer streaming Fornite (which also didn't exist 15 years ago, and wasn't pervasive until recently) on Linux or some similar big title and you would have a spark.
It's easy to think that a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would make a lot of stir. But I used to play Heroes of Newerth years ago when Linux support were way worse than today. I also read HN then.
I never saw any special treatment for that even tho I loved the game and it worked really, really good on linux.
Searching on algolia just proves my point: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=heroes%20of%20newerth&sort=byP...
I simply do not buy the story that just because you release it on Linux, have good linux support etc it will spread like wildfire.
S2Games, which made HoN, made a superior MOBA imo but none of my friends play it anymore. They play Dota2 tho. I think the reality of the situation is that no one cares about if a game run on linux or not except extreme nerds that would never use Windows and go through the daily struggle that is desktop Linux.
I used to be one of them, nowadays I only use Windows.
lol what year is this? 1999?
but I agree with the rest of your points
Maybe that's yet another reason people don't switch to Linux: the evangelists are annoying and untrustworthy.
Did someone call me? Jokes aside, as a person using Linux (95% of the time, for ~15 years or so), I can honestly tell that Linux has its fair share of problems. However, for some time, the problems I experience are not more frequent than Macs that I have or the Windows PCs of my family members.
Is Linux perfect? No way. Did it improve over the years? Yes, tremendously. Also, I can say that advanced desktops like KDE can do very nice things for automation and productivity. I'm currently happy about the state of Linux, but it doesn't mean its perfect or the very very best.
But there are a lot of reasons that Linux's particular brand of issues are actually still a deal breaker for people, and refusing to acknowledge that will never attract anyone to the platform.
I for one do photo post-processing and development on Linux mainly, and have no problems while doing what I want to do.
> ...Linux's particular brand of issues...
Can you please elaborate? I'm interested. Since I'm using Linux heavily and for a very long time, I might be blind to that problems.
I'm reluctant to go into detail about my own personal blockers because every time I do I end up in a multi-page argument with some evangelists who insist that everything I want to do is completely wrong and I should just change my entire workflow to match theirs.
I personally found out that professional class hardware (Dell XPS, HP EliteBook, Lenovo ThinkPad) has the best Linux support out there. I have a EliteBook 850G2 at the office, and except the fingerprint reader (which I don't use), everything is working without any problems. Battery life is also great (~7 hours). However, works for me is not a valid excuse, esp. with hardware.
If you want to discuss further, you can reach me via my profile page.
Misunderstand me right, it's still mostly on laptops I have experienced issues. On a stationary computer you just get a performance drop, at least for most graphics cards.
I think it's great that it has improved so much and I hope it will continue to improve so that sometime in the future I can return to the promised land.
If you google computer model linux. If the result is 17 pages of results about how it didn't work you may want to try a different model.
Generally how well your machine is supported is a function of how hostile your oem is towards openness, how different from existing hardware your machine is, how common it is, and how much time people have had to add support.
Current macs aren't well supported. Supporting all hardware under the sun is a Sisyphean task and ultimately an unimportant one. For Linux to be useful it doesn't have to support all possible machines just a good range of hardware.
Well there's your problem. The companies that make the custom hardware that Apple uses in their laptops refuse to release driver support for Linux for basically the same reasons as the writer of this Tweet. Whether the fault for this is on Apple or the manufacturers is up for debate, but driver compatibility with Apple's laptops and anything but macOS has always been a crapshoot and only became decent for Windows in the last few years.
Note: This is coming from an Apple fan who has been wanting to try out dual booting a Linux distro or one of the BSDs but has watched support tickets get answered with "testing MBP drivers on Linux isn't worth our time" from multiple OEMs.
When it came time to replace my old macbook air, I got a dell xps 13 and linux works great on that. All of the hardware works out of the box without having to do anything with drivers.
Sad to say, but some Macbook models work great, and others are fucking terrible. I have two models - my older model where the only thing that has ever consistently worked is bluetooth, and a slightly newer one where nothing has ever broken.
Then things should be pretty sweet for quite a while. Unless your hardware is really poplar, things will bitrot away eventually, but expect a 5-10 year sweet spot where everything should just work out of the box.
Linux needs a driver compatibility story this strong to even start.
Meanwhile, I "fondly" remember having to have a USB stick on hand for Windows 7 installs because the default install didn't include wired (let alone wireless) NIC drivers for 90% of the laptops and desktops on which I installed it. Thankfully Windows 10 is better about this (at least on the wired front; wireless drivers are still hit or miss), but still.
I worked in an IT support shop at the time windows 7 was released, and I imaged and installed hundreds of copies of windows 7 over the time I worked there. While you're right about wireless drivers being a crapshoot, I can not remember a single instance of missing wired NIC drivers on install. I'm not doubting that some were missing (there is lots of hardware, lots of manufacturers out there), but it was definitely not as huge a problem. The biggest issue was usually SD card readers and trackpads which required downloading from the manufacturer.
I've done a few linux desktop installs (same job) and the situation was definitely more painful. Issues with sleep/wake, webcams, network drivers (usually wireless), multiple displays were basically guaranteed, and the help process was usually "You're using the wrong hardware", which isn't really helpful.
Were you pre-installing NIC drivers with your images? That'd be a good reason for the high success rate.
It might also have to do with specific manufacturers/vendors. Most of my installations were on Dells; it's possible HP or Lenovo stuck with chipsets that Windows properly supported out-of-the-box. Linux worked fine in all cases.
It does not. Take a look at the Steam games supporting Linux. There's thousands of them, it's not special.
That would not buy food on the table. Most money comes from Windows and what games should be optimized for.
See r/choosingbeggars for more entertaining stories on the "value" of "publicity".
Really a big difference.
This particular game (Planetary Annihilation) was designed with Linux support in mind from the very beginning; as the person who wrote the tweets notes, he and numerous others within the company were huge proponents of supporting Linux. As events proved, it didn't work out for them.
Heck, I'm mostly on Linux but boot into Windows for gaming... I'd probably continue to do so, even if the games were released for Linux just for that extra performance and significantly less chance too run into an obscure issue with my setup.
the thing is microsoft really painted themselves into a corner. ya see windows was made for all sorts of skullduggery to occur , this was supposed to be a boon for MS but they punched so many holes in W32 that it was secure as a sieve, I know this first hand as i have spent a major amount of time decompiling and snooping through the binaries. the file structures in a windows OS has big voids of zeros for padding, leaves lots of room to insert malcode and fix the file headers, Thread Local Storage is neat, a thread can move data packets through its kernel objects to other objects or static files on swap. And the alternate data paging that win executable files may have is just mindblowing. a file {any W32/W64 file} that every one expects to do one thing can be trojaned by the system as a feature using alternate data streams in a file! IT GOES ON AND ON this and win10 is why i left windows and gave linux a serious try and never looked back. Linux runs games and keeps getting better at it with no cat and mouse game of you modding system files so things work and having MS updates demodd them and then prevent you from making thing workable without major klugeing around.
If you ported your game to the Atari ST or the Amiga you'd get more press and probably more sales.
Developer kits like Unreal and Unity have helped a lot here, but those are far from flawless. Even those struggle with Linux because there's just way too many distributions and way too few standards.
Now, statistically, I realize we don't exist. But at absolute levels, we do.
In practical terms nobody plays games on Linux unless they're using something like SteamOS or, technically, Android.
Given how ridiculously hard it is to get a simple application to run across all the various distributions of Linux that exist, expecting something as complicated as a game to run at all is asking way too much.
Windows is ridiculously hard to support, but at least it has sales volume to justify the work necessary to get a game launched. Linux doesn't.
There's no need for adventure for me. I prefer to code on Linux and not need to reboot into Windows. Playing games on Linux IS the convenient way for me.
Have you seen how tight the gaming market has become? You need a niche to get any attention. Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity. It would be on the front page here a lone, a site with an enormous audience at minimum once a quarter. It would appear in countless tech related subreddits, twitter hacker-verse would take off. The “maker culture” would adopt it as its son or daughter.
Sounds like a tremendous opportunity.
We are not representative of the culture but we are hackers and developers and eventually one spark is all you need to start a fire. I have the perception that gamers are dying to get off of Windows, but I could be wrong, I certainly was when I was a gamer.