Linux graphics support is quite good as long as your driver is open source and in-tree. I was just talking the other day with the graphics team about how we haven't really had any problems on Linux/Intel because everything just works.

Mac, on the other hand... oh boy. It's pretty much a disaster. There is no end of bugs in Apple's graphics stack, and no, Metal doesn't solve them all. The first time I ran the Metal port of my library, my MacBook Pro instantly kernel panicked. I have never had that happen on Linux.

As long as, that is the key expression.

Besides, the driver is only a tiny portion of the whole tooling for any graphics, professional game engine minded developer.

Even the NVIDIA drivers on Linux are superior to macOS' drivers. The problem with the NVIDIA drivers is that they don't play well with the rest of the ecosystem, but they do work. The only area where Linux is behind in graphics is on mobile, where the GPU vendors are perpetually unable to write working drivers.

I'm a professional graphics developer and I prefer the tooling on Linux to that of macOS.

Back to graphics drivers.

Most professional graphics developer I know rather user better tooling than only bare bones graphics drivers and RenderDoc.

I guess that is the same point of view that gave us OpenGL and Vulkan without any kind of tooling beyond drawing framebuffers with hardware support.

I does appeal to some, but not the majority, otherwise Linux adoption would have moved beyond 1% by now.

Like most software developers, graphics developers develop where the users are. That's why they predominantly use Windows. Some use macOS, primarily to develop iOS apps, which is, again, where the most valuable users are, particularly in North America.

Linux desktop market share, or lack thereof, has nothing to do with graphics tooling.

Sure it does, why bother with a market that not only lacks customers, it makes it a major hurdle to develop for?

While anyone on Apple and Windows platforms can enjoy Metal Frameworks, DirectTK, Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, PIX, Poser3D, Photoshop, Houdini, Cinema 4D, AfterEffects,...

On Linux, I guess having the freedom to use half baked copies of them, or hunting for libraries that should come out of the box with any graphics stack like 3D math, mesh handling and loading materials, is more important.

> Metal Frameworks, DirectTK, Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, PIX, Poser3D, Photoshop, Houdini, Cinema 4D, AfterEffects

I don't know them all, but FYI Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, PIX,Houdini, and Cinema 4D have native Linux versions.

I don't know about Metal Frameworks, DirectTK, Photoshop, and AfterEffects though, you might want to look into that.

I suspect there are plenty of people in this thread who’d love to see top tier games and development AND run on an open platform. In that sense, OpenBSD and Linux are both closer to supporting high-end games development than Windows and Mac are to being fully open platforms.

Your initial analogy is wrong, then, since—if modern Linux is also bad for those things—then OpenBSD being bad for those things wouldn't thereby make it an example of the OS "retaining classic Unix sensibilities" that modern Linux does not.

So other than SGI and NeXT, which although UNIX based had their focus on other kind of development stacks, which UNIX sensibilities are so great examples of graphical applications and game development tooling?

I think you misread my statement? I wasn't disagreeing with you. Rather, I was pointing out—in way of explaining why everyone was jumping to argue with you or downvote you—that the most obvious reading of your comments are an incoherent argument, and you should probably clarify what you mean.

In your first comment, when you said "Like being quite bad for graphics programming and game development", you were implicitly forming the larger sentence: "[Retaining] classic Unix sensibilities ... like being quite bad for graphics programming and game development."

And—since the topic of the thread was "OSes that are better because they avoid going down the road of RedHat-like 'modern' Unix sensibilities"—you were implicitly forming a larger assertion: "[OpenBSD, because it retains] classic Unix sensibilities [unlike RedHat] ... [is] quite bad for graphics programming and game development[, unlike RedHat, which is okay at those.]"

And so that's what people tried to argue with you about, which I hope makes people's rebuttals to your first comment make more sense to you.

But then, in your second comment, you went ahead and said that modern Linux is equally bad at doing these things. So clearly the expanded form of your assertion isn't what you meant.

So... what were you actually trying to argue?

I guess I might have.

I was arguing that only NeXT and SGI had a graphics workstation culture, where having UNIX underneath was more of a detail than anything else.

No one cared that much of writing POSIX daemon and CLI tooling, the whole point was making the best use of the GUI frameworks, IDEs and their GPUs.

Even when SGI offered IrisGL as the basis for OpenGL, they kept the best parts for them.

RenderDoc works great on Linux. I prefer it to the Metal debugger for the simple reason that it actually works without regularly crashing and popping up a "please file a radar" box.

Yeah, pity it only offers half of the features.

RenderDoc offers more useful features than the Metal debugger too. For example, RenderDoc is scriptable.

Your choice of platforms is highly questionable.

Either you're talking about high-end gaming, in which case Apple isn't in the game at all - the only players are Microsoft and Sony, though Google is making a bid now as well with Stadia.

Or you're talking about low-end gaming, in which case Google probably matters most because of Android.

Which mobile platform got Fortnight first?