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posted by martyb on Friday April 05 2019, @04:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the drm-as-the-elephant-in-the-room dept.

Depending on how it is measured, the market share for gaming on GNU/Linux is less than 1%. Jason Evangelho writes at Forbes about what is holding back gaming on GNU/Linux. He outlines three problem areas. First, there is inconsistency across the distros in how hardware — especially the graphics card — is dealt with. Second, major titles continue to ban the accounts of those who join from GNU/Linux hosts. Lastly, he figures that the gamers need to pull behind a single distro and get support for just that one distro because vendors are using the existence of multiple distros as an excuse to support none of them.


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  • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday April 05 2019, @06:02PM (2 children)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Friday April 05 2019, @06:02PM (#825038) Journal

    I've never developed for Linux since I don't know anything about Linux. But whenever I've tested my Windows programs in wine they work fine.

    Based on what I see on GOG, publishers don't seem to be very big on doing testing or trying to determine accurate system requirements (most stated system reqs seem to be a generic "dual-core and Win 7" regardless of what the game is). So it's questionable whether they would bother testing in wine. But IF they did so, and tried to use it as a selling point "Works in WINE!" would that be attractive to people that want to run games in Linux? Or does wine have some major disadvantage compared to a real Linux program?

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Snospar on Friday April 05 2019, @06:15PM

    by Snospar (5366) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 05 2019, @06:15PM (#825051)

    I think "Works in WINE!" would be a good start and is really what Steam is trying with Proton (basically their own integration with WINE). Hopefully if enough Steam users work out the small tweaks and fixes to get games working in Proton then this can lead to a more generic "Works in WINE!" classification. GOG is much the same in that many of the Linux games they support are just the Windows version in a pre-tweaked WINE environment packaged up for easy install.

    The only downside to all these unique and tweaked copies of WINE is how much disk space is wasted on multiple copies of almost identical files but disk is cheap these days so perhaps not the problem it once was - especially when you stack the MB's of WINE against the tens of GB's of game content.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Friday April 05 2019, @06:58PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Friday April 05 2019, @06:58PM (#825068) Journal

    Yeah, a lot of games that I try will actually work *better* in Wine than they do in any recent Windows distro. Wine is great for old games (although new ones often work well too). I once tried to run Wine on Windows for that exact reason -- Windows' own compatibility mode is a freakin' joke, and I KNOW those games worked in Wine. That was at least a decade ago (the last time I actually had a Windows box) but the situation for Windows certainly hasn't gotten better since.

    Official support for Wine would be nice though, but only if they *actually* support it. I've had some trouble with Steam on that front recently -- a year or two ago, if you asked for help with Steam while using Linux they'd actually tell you which log files to provide and they'd tell you "here's the line we're seeing in your logs, here's what could be causing that, try these solutions and get back to us if you still need help". Recently I tried again, not even asking directly for help but merely asking "Which log files should I be looking at." The first response answered a totally different question (what to do about games that won't launch when my issue was games running for half an hour then Steam -- but not the game itself -- crashing) and after I replied with that they just told me to go log a defect on github. Still not even attempting to answer the question. That ain't support. So if THAT'S the kind of help they're going to offer while publicizing that it works on Wine...that doesn't really help. I can look it up in WineDB myself, and I can figure out if someone somewhere found a configuration in which it works. But if they'll actually help me figure out any issues -- not even solve them necessarily, just point me in the right direction -- then that would be excellent. I don't expect them to be able to solve every issue on Linux, they don't know my exact configuration. But I don't know how their game works, so they've gotta support that part of it. Tell me a configuration which does work, tell me which libraries or settings are known to be important, tell me where it would be logging errors, and I can take it from there. Post all of that on a single "Linux Troubleshooting Guide" and just set the support line to auto-reply with that link any time it sees the word "Linux" -- that would still be a HUGE improvement over the ways may companies "support" Linux.