Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode Fairly Quickly”

Re:Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode... by pcwalton on Friday June 28, 2019 @05:17PM (#20308852)

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.

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Re:Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode... by pjmlp on Friday June 28, 2019 @07:29PM (#20309691)

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.

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Re:Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode... by pcwalton on Friday June 28, 2019 @08:14PM (#20309929)

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.

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Re:Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode... by pjmlp on Saturday June 29, 2019 @02:27AM (#20311087)

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.

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Re:Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode... by pcwalton on Saturday June 29, 2019 @03:13AM (#20311244)

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.

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Re:Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode... by pjmlp on Saturday June 29, 2019 @04:36AM (#20311482)

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.

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Re:Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode... by fluffything on Saturday June 29, 2019 @09:56AM (#20312592)

> 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.

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