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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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Linux Gaming Won't Find A Mainstream Audience Until Three Things Happen
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Everything you know is wrong!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Saturday April 06 2019, @12:49AM (2 children)
Ahem ... How should I put it politely, to you, and to TFA's author ...
Linux is the biggest gaming platform worldwide.
A distro has been picked, and hardware discrepancies have been addressed. Major publishers are involved, minor ones and indie guys too.
The only problem is that most devices running games are not as powerful as PCs from five/ten years ago, I guess. But that's not Linux's fault.
It's a solved problem, that people keep discussing for no good reason, maybe because they don't like that it's driven by Google, and it ain't the distro on their desktop.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @04:35PM
That's not the same problem--it's any linux on the desktop and gaming--and by extension, control. There is a lack of control and it's getting attacked very strongly.
Efforts are being made to prevent ownership of games--there is no effort by Google to solve gaming on linux as the IT crowd understands it. The solution has been to get regular people to accept the lack of ownership and pay a subscription, and bypass the gaming on desktop issues entirely via things like Stadia.
Your solution is just a symptom of how pervasive the efforts are to prevent the problem from being solved.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday April 07 2019, @11:06PM
The low CPU power of a smartphone is not the only problem, nor even the biggest in my opinion. That'd be the unsuitability of touch input for some game genres.
Most devices with the Linux distribution you're thinking of have neither a keyboard nor a gamepad. Instead, the only input devices that a game developer can rely on are a touch screen and an accelerometer. I've tried to emulate a gamepad with a touch screen; it wasn't fun. Because I was concentrating on the action in the middle, not the on-screen buttons at the corners, I kept missing the on-screen buttons with my thumbs. Unlike with a keyboard or gamepad, there's no tactile feedback as to whether my thumbs are aligned over the controls. It's possible to connect a keyboard or gamepad to a smartphone, but I haven't seen evidence that a commercially significant number of people actually do this regularly.