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: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday April 05 2019, @04:29PM (15 children)
"We could get much better appreciation of cats if they'd just all herd together in one direction".
Linux people go to various distros because they're already the kind of people who like flexibility and personal control above standardization. Without that sense of intellectually valuing independence, most would be okay with the corporate slop.
Besides, everyone in tech already knows Ubuntu is pretty clearly the 'generic' user friendly distro you can treat as default if you're lazy already.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @04:59PM (14 children)
Invalid form key: b5KZLIRHr1
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @05:39PM (13 children)
SN should just come right out and say they don't really want ACs posting anymore. This blocking of half our AC posts with the "Invalid key" stuff is a sly way to make us frustrated so we go away.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday April 05 2019, @06:39PM (11 children)
There is a certain kind of person who takes things that are very obviously software bugs to be malevolent plots against them. Don't be that person.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @08:15PM (10 children)
Is there a spam filter that generates that error? I was bashing Windows in a funny way, not being rude about it, and kept getting that error when trying to post. It let me post the error though.
(Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Friday April 05 2019, @08:47PM (9 children)
After examining the site html source: in order to prevent accidental double-submission(i.e. click submit twice) duplicate posts, when you load the reply page, soylent news embeds a <input type="hidden" name="formkey" value="[some randomly generated blob]"> into the form. It also caches temporarily that value server side. When you submit that formkey is passed to the server. The post has to have a unique ID that the server has cached.
For whatever reason, when you're loading your reply page, it's generating an ID that it's either not caching server-side, or is formatted incorrectly for the server to read from your post. Likely this is a timing bug.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @09:22PM (8 children)
yeah, and tor browser drags ass and causes this error many times. never seen it with vpn and normal browser.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Saturday April 06 2019, @12:51AM (7 children)
ah tor.
Okay. I've got you. The ID in question must be assigned(on the backend) to a IP address. Tor uses a different exit node for each request so your post comes from a different IP than got the ID.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @01:11AM (6 children)
I see the error often, and I don't use tor or vpn. I use...
... oh, you almost got me to admit what techniques I'm using to hide myself! Very clever, but not clever enough! It'll take more than that to outwit Paranoid Man!
(run off and hides in the forest)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @02:18AM (4 children)
I saw the error, changed my comment to the error shown, then it let me post. I'm using a normal browser with a normal Internet connection. That's why I asked if there was a spam filter, and it didn't have any profanity.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Saturday April 06 2019, @03:20AM (3 children)
That error will occur if one's IP address changes between the time the Post Comment page loads and the time you click Submit. (Even if you are logged in, BTW).
Apparently some shithole ISPs have started alternating user's IP addresses for *EVERY* HTTP(S) connection made. This behavior breaks a LOT of sites, but they don't care. There are on-line tools that will tell you your IP address. Check and see if it changes with each connection. If it does, then call up your ISP and complain to them.
As mentioned, some proxy software can also cause this problem. Make sure you don't have any of that unintentionally loaded.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @05:29PM (2 children)
It's actually quite common, at least for my IPv4 network since I don't even have IPv4 address. The only thing saving me here is IPv6 connectivity. But even that is NATed when it comes to work, hotels, whatever and so every connection is likely to have different IP address, even for IPv6, depending on what the NAT thinks. And then there is mobile networks...
The bottom line, don't *assume* IP address == fixed, even per session. It just doesn't work at all. It did't even work 15 years ago as IPv4 was already limited, never mind now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @06:09PM
My IP is displayed in Conky, it hasn't changed in months.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @02:52AM
This is one of the major overlooked features of running your own VPN - DIY "mobile IP" style connection consistency.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday April 06 2019, @03:46AM
Ah, the Black forest, huh...my favourite place too.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @02:11PM
Let's make a test, if this message gets through at the first try, then parent is full of sh_t. If it doesn't I'll close the browser and pretend nothing happened.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @04:43PM (5 children)
Ah, the old song about the number of distros. It's just that, an excuse. Bundle everything and ship it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @05:18PM (3 children)
Yep. Just pick a distro. Can't make up your mind? Target Debian LTS then.
Other binary distros like Void can package a compatibility layer (use the deep magic of LD_PRELOAD or LD_LIBRARY_PATH or chroot or something, plenty of tools available). The crazy Exherbo and Gentoo users will figure it out. (Source: crazy Exherbo user here. No problem running Steam games after a few tweaks.) systemd dependency got you down? Make a shim. We're smart. We'll figure it out. If you get Void, Gentoo, Exherbo, etc users calling for support, tell them to Debian or GTFO.
And honestly, at least you can troubleshoot crap on Debian. Good fucking luck on Windows.
In the final analysis, games are published for Windows for the same reason publishers insist on DRM despite the fact that all available evidence indicates that file sharing services increase sales. It is because, unlike early stage capitalism, in late stage capitalism the role of free markets is diminished as the market comes to be dominated by oligarchy or monopoly (depending on the sector of the economy, etc). Oligarchies and monopolies do not have customers towards which they must be responsive; they have consumers they are free to abuse according to every passing whim and fad, no matter how unpopular among the consumer population.
(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.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday April 05 2019, @05:20PM
Yes, bundle everything, There's even an app for that: AppImage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @04:54PM
Preferably one where functions aren't arbitrarily renamed by the maintainers out of spite for people using their API.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday April 05 2019, @05:24PM (4 children)
It Is Not Profitable. That's all.
Unifying under one primary distro might get you there but isn't guaranteed and a sufficiently powerful gaming title could release to one particular distro to see if it gets traction on the platform. (Nothing stops a publisher from going with The Biggest Fish only already). Maybe others would install a dual-boot if the title worked on a different Linux distro.
I'm not sure what Evangelho gets at about Linux being only 1% of Steam users - Linux only has 2% market share and people use Linux for reasons other than gaming, so what's the problem?
If hardware incompatibility was the issue one would see people flocking to gaming on Apple - it will be interesting to see if Apple Arcade finally breaks Apple into the market but historically a homogenous hardware platform hasn't been enough for them, has it?
As to banning users... Ensuring native playback on Linux will NOT stop anti-cheat software from false positives. It may reduce it down and eliminate some hardware incompatibilities. But for titles who care about cheating there will always be a subset of people swept up in that net. The question is how robust are the game companies to recognize error and/or work with recognitions. Which is what the article was saying.
In the end it comes down to simple economics: Linux hasn't had enough people willing to pay for the game companies to go out of their way to enable them to play. That's the real nut to work on to make Linux gaming happen. If it can at all with its market share.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @06:14PM
Yep. Wine means that most things don't need a native Linux version, and the market is too small to support developing for it specifically. Containers/appimage/flatpak/LD_WHATEVER/etc. make packaging and distribution simple once it works, but if it's not cheap and easy for the dev to make it work, not gonna happen.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Dr Spin on Friday April 05 2019, @07:55PM (1 child)
Linux being only 1% of Steam users - Linux only has 2% market share
I am not sure that there is much in the way of valid data anyway. Lots of homes have a PC or three sitting in a corner, used once or twice
a year. When people try to use them next, and find they have to sign up to "Windows as a shitstorm (I mean service)" they will phone
their neighbour "Ned the Nerd" ...
Pleb "The PC wont work"
Ned powers it up, and it tries to phone home. The wifi is sub standard, and MS registration servers claim it is a fake copy of Windows 6.73.
Ned "Do you want to pay, do email and write stuff, or play games?"
Pleb "Yes"
Ned "you want to pay and play games? or not pay and just do email and watch youtube?"
Pleb "Just do email and stuff!"
Pleb "yes"
Ned "I can put Linux on it. It will do internet stuff, but the only game will be Tux Racer"
Pleb "Can I watch Youtube (and pornhub)?"
Ned "Yes"
Pleb "do what you have to"
Ned brings out USB stick, and 40 mins later, all is fine.
Maybe not in America, but who in other countries is going to pay MS? Cracked versions of Windows 7 may be easy to get in 3rd world countries,
but bit rot is killing them off, and there are more Neds with every year.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @08:50PM
ODMs bundle windows with vendor boxes along with adware/shareware that actually reduces the total price of the machine. At least that's the case for both Dell and Lenovo.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by darkfeline on Friday April 05 2019, @09:11PM
And one of the reasons it is not profitable is because you have to support such a wide range of hardware/software, because Linux isn't one platform but thousands of different platforms (ignoring the negligible long tail of less common hardware/software). You can get a taste of this by finding a few games that runs okay on Wine (silver/gold) and walking through the steps required to run that game on three or four different Linux distros, installed on three or four different desktop PCs and/or laptops (with different graphics cards, CPUs, motherboards).
Linux doesn't have 1% market share, Ubuntu X on PC X has 0.01% market share, Ubuntu X on PC Y has 0.01% market share, Ubuntu Y on PC X has 0.01% market share, Debian X on PC X has 0.01% market share, etc.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Friday April 05 2019, @05:27PM
Items 1 and 3 are similar arguments from different angles. Both are blaming the variety of distributions for the problem. I don't think this is the core problem but rather a detail about the core problem.
Item 2 is bad but I don't think it is sufficiently troublesome to submit as a major problem stopping all Linux gaming that some anti cheat services have trouble with Linux hosts. This is a chicken-and-egg problem; they aren't doing the testing because it's not big enough to bother with. Anyway, I doubt a substantial number of people are saying "no Linux for me" because of this. It's just a thorn in their side.
It's ease of use. It's always ease of use and ease of access that are the problem. That's the common thread in all three problems present here, it's not easy enough for the developers to make work or the players to access.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by realDonaldTrump on Friday April 05 2019, @05:28PM
Yesterday it was the Chef, that one's dieing because Google moved in with modern digital that's much better & cheaper. And I said, what can really save the Chef is if Microsoft buys it. Today it's another one failing very badly and even the article says that Windows is much much better. This is something that, they're trying to compete with one of Microsoft's biggest products. But, Google (I think) hasn't bought them. The name of the game is, get bought by a big and successfull Company. Be it Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook or -- I hate to say it -- Amazon.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @05:52PM (2 children)
Gaming on Linux isn't mainstream because Linux on desktops isn't mainstream. Even if Linux was a single distro, there still aren't enough Linux desktops users to make going after their business worth the effort. (I'm assuming very few people want to play games on a Linux server machine.)
Besides, there's a very simple way to play games if you have a Linux machine. Buy a console. You don't expect your Linux box to be a dishwasher, why expect it to be a gaming machine?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @10:23PM (1 child)
278 native Linux games in my Steam library is why.
Linux is an excellent gaming OS, just not for those who demand to be played by all the latest $60 day-1 DLC AAA gambling skinner-boxes on release day.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @01:17AM
Like I said, define "mainstream". Steam has Apple games on it too, and that still doesn't make it mainstream.
Look, the article is from Forbes. They don't care about gaming, they care about large companies making large amounts of money from gaming. That's their definition of "mainstream". Linux isn't going to meet that criteria anytime soon, but of course that doesn't mean there aren't Linux games out there.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday April 05 2019, @06:02PM (2 children)
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?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snospar on Friday April 05 2019, @06:15PM
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.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Friday April 05 2019, @06:58PM
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @06:28PM (1 child)
I realize that first, I'm an AC, and second, one piece of anecdotal evidence is not a valid sample, but with these caveats, I'd like to point out that I've been doing all my gaming on linux for several years now. First on Ubuntu 14.04, and now on 16.04. I'm using steam, and turned proton (their build of wine) on recently for all titles. I had to jump through a couple hoops to get Skyrim and Elite Dangerous running, but it was fairly painless overall.
Because of steam and proton, I've actually bought some windows-only games that I never would have otherwise, since I don't run windows machines.
Granted, I'm more technical than most mainstream audience members, but gaming on linux works for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @02:49PM
I found Ubuntu 16 very good for gaming. When they worked. Except for the whole 32 bit vs 64 bit library snafus. Beyond that Ubuntu 18 is a lot more stable - just don't use the default UI it sucks.
(Score: 2) by anotherblackhat on Friday April 05 2019, @06:32PM (3 children)
It only takes one thing; Customers.
No one is going to make a game (or a port of a game) if the potential customer base is 50 people.
Most companies aren't even interested in numbers as "small" as 10 million.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Saturday April 06 2019, @12:53AM (2 children)
Your stawman aside, that has always been a non-argument. If your game engine doesn't suck, you can port it to nearly any platform. Platform-specific code is a miniscule part of any decent game engine. Once the engine is ported, the games themselves come along for essentially nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @04:45PM
it's not a strawman
countless people would keep using windows xp or windows 7 or older versions of whatever OS if they were not forced to move to the new model. they were not being good customers by demanding support for something the developer was not interested in supporting.
games, applications, it's all the same. if XP and 7 can't display ads the same way windows 10 can, then you better believe those people needed to be harvested again, and they won't get them as recurring customers if they keep supporting an OS that isn't on the list.
linux is no different. why set half a person in India aside to do this when there will inevitably be support involved from someone who isn't in India and didn't do the conversion? easier to just not support it at all.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday April 07 2019, @11:18PM
"Nearly any" is a big one. Desktop computers and modern smartphones in 2019, maybe. Modern consoles, fine provided you have an S corporation, an office with a static IP, and a commercial title on another platform. Retro platforms that have seen a resurgence lately, not so much.
Say you want to make a game for Commodore 64, NES, TurboGrafx-16, and Super NES. All four use processors in the 6502 family, so you can write most of the code in 6502 assembly language.
Say you want to make a game for NES and Game Boy. The NES processor is a second-source MOS 6502 missing one rarely used instruction. The Game Boy processor is a Sharp SM83, resembling an Intel 8080 and originally intended for use in microcontrollers. The 6502 and 8080 ISAs' mentalities differ too much (AXY, spilling variables to the first page of RAM, and rich indexed addressing modes vs. ABCDEHL, efficient stack machines, and strong sequential access), so you'd have to write most of your game in C. But the C compilers targeting 6502 and SM83 aren't very efficient, in part because the C standard doesn't anticipate 8-bit platforms, and in part because there haven't been a lot of dollars poured into making it efficient. Retro consoles didn't get CPUs amenable to C until the MC68000 in the Sega Genesis and Neo Geo.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @09:08PM
I wonder why that is.
There are so many games available from very small groups, and Linux support is exploding. And that is just an observation from visiting GOG frequently. I can't imagine how much more there is if I started browsing Steam, too.
But I will branch out beyond this. The development and build chain is certainly improving. Open source tools, libraries, engines, etc. It's only getting easier to make something cross-platform entirely. Explain why the small guys can publish releases for all three major operating systems but the so-called "AAA" producers, charging 300% or more for their games, bitch and cry about why they won't support Linux and throw common excuses like distribution fragmentation to avoid the subject.
I'll borrow some other Soylentil's comment: I've got tons of games to choose from, more than I could ever play. If your product is incompatible or otherwise hostile (DRM, privacy issues, etc.) then fuck it. I'll stick to those small groups working hard for just $15 per sale who actually publish cross-platform and DRM-free.
Distro fragmentation is just a bullshit excuse. Look how much OSS we've got shared among them all -- including the BSDs -- and the community gets the job done. The answer is just money. Some suit decided the increase in time/labour cost doesn't justify the potential increase in revenue.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @09:57PM
The only thing that really has any impact between distros now is ALSA vs. PulseAudio, and the solution is to just support ALSA and ignore PulseAudio because it works that way but not the other way around. The days where every tiny version difference between libc caused incompatibilities are long past. Same with graphics drivers, and as Vulkan becomes more common that won't even be any different between windows and Linux. The differences between all Linux distros are now less than the difference between windows 7 and 10. Unity runs great on Linux, Unreal, well, it's viable.
When people say "companies don't make games for Linux" they really mean "EA doesn't make games for Linux." That's fine with me because I don't want to play games from EA anyway.
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Saturday April 06 2019, @12:14AM
If your making a game anyway what you really should be doing is doing it as a progressive web app which is an application can be installed on the users computer and runs as a desktop app but runs on the web browser architecture. This covers all plartforms with a modern web browser, Mac, Linux and Windows.
Also there are snaps that allow for a single installer package for any distro.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @02:32AM
Most people reference Ubuntu as their linux desktop of choice. I really like Ubuntu Mate 18.04 LTS. A lot of games already work on this platform.
Maybe they could use the Snap system to distribute games and keys to unlock them?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @10:49AM (1 child)
There are so many versions of windoze, there is windows 95, windows for workgroups, windos vista, windous ExPee... The list goes on and on. And they are not 1:1 perfect copies of each other in every way. This makes it really hard to support winders. Let's ban people who connect from any of these wildly different operating systems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 14 2019, @06:48AM
Yeah, but they trained the general population to either patch, upgrade, install stuff or buy new hardware.
This is complete BS.
The amount of time I spent at LANs getting hardware, software, patches to work so we could game across the network? And it only got worse after CounterStrike.
We used to have a couple of people dedicate their weekend before the LAN to download the latest version of the game, make sure it works, get the right patches, merge them if possible or batch it, just so people could get on and game when they set up. It didn't always work. There was always one or two people who had to fully uninstall and reinstall or wipe their OS. Windows 98 made it a lot easier. Windows 7 was the best. Still, it was a PITA. Especially when you all had to have the same patch level. It really made people appreciate games that would just play after installing.
The amount of times we fell back to Quake 2, UT, Red Alert, Armagetron, Dungeon Siege, Starcraft 2, Warcraft 2 and the like because Counter Strike borked it at the latest patch level, half the people can't join? or something just didn't work?
I'm glad I purchased Quake2 and Unreal Tournament. I got years of play out of them. I might even still have the original disks around somewhere. It's a damn shame playing online isn't doable but I suppose that's life. Only play with friends on your own server maybe.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 06 2019, @01:47PM
All it needs for Linux to succeed is for Microsoft to pull one of their operations. Like charging monthly for Windows.
But MS will play that card carefully.
The idea of a single distro, when the Linux OS could be shipped for each game separately, is irrelevant.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Monday April 08 2019, @06:37PM
I've been listening to this argument for as long as I've used linux (since ~2006). The biggest problem I see is the Catch 22. The game producers say they won't make the games because not enough players run linux to make it worthwhile. But a lot of the players won't ditch Windows until the games they want are on linux. Someone has to throw the first bone here. What's easier, millions of people suddenly switching to linux and hoping the game producers weren't just bullshitting, or dozens of game producers just biting the damn bullet and supporting linux already? Thankfully Valve is running with Proton now and making a lot of progress. A lot of indie companies have native linux versions. Vulkan is really promising too. So hopefully this is the start of the push for the players to spearhead this and show the games producers that we want to give them our linux money, if they'd just shut up and take it already. (Although the platform fragmentation seems to be pulling us in the other way now too... Battlenet, Uplay, Epic Games, etc., none of which run in linux.) I have about a hundred games on steam and only a few won't run in linux natively or through proton. Every year I get closer to being able to completely nuke my windows partition and never look back.
I have been posting game testing reports to this database to help further the fight. If you have steam and linux, send them some test reports as well. https://www.protondb.com/ [protondb.com]