Editorial - Linux Gaming's Ticking Clock

*DXVK

Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: appetrosyanEven Feral interactive are usually taking a windows code base and add a few minor changes through SDL and only recently began making use of Vulkan. The biggest problem with all of these ports is that neither of them is open source, and you end up with a hard-coded out-dated binary. This is not the case with Proton.

That is definitely the case with Proton™. Only now on top of the closed-source Windows™ binary (unpredictably changing patch over patch) you have the imperfect WINE wrapper.

Quoting: appetrosyanI’ll give you an example of Witcher 2. It’s a native port in name only, written by Virtual Programming. To try and run this on a modern machine will have me searching forums to try and figure out which dynamic libraries it used to link against, the performance was bad when it was Wine with OpenGL, it just got worse in comparison. This is because no one went back and patched the executable to work on modern Linux machines.

Ah, I see what you've done here!

Nice try, but no. You are trying to sell the "Let's Abandon Native in Favor of Windows-as-a-Target-With-a-Wrapper" by presenting one (and only one!) extreme example ("Witcher 2") as some sort of common practice.

Not quite. I’m more of a “let’s not trust the developers not to abandon their software, when that’s everything that always happened to their games”. I believe that the games’ code should be FOSS’d like Id (the real one, before Carmack left) used to do. The sheer problem is, most games that run using DXVK enjoy much better performance than OpenGL, simply because, as Liam said, Vulkan is a generation or two ahead.

In lieu of arguing from principle, I’d say just try any native game, and the same game using Wine + DXVK. Odds are there will be a not insignificant amount of performance uplift. Not to mention that you wouldn’t need to hunt down age old libraries. A non exhaustive list of games includes Doom 3 (non BFG), Quake 4, Dungeons (1, 2, and to some extent 3), Quake 3 arena, Deus Ex: mankind divided, Overlord etc. Sometimes the difference is marginal, but it’s only temporary. For performance and the user experience to improve, either the translation layer or the game needs to be modified, and often developers abandoned their releases post launch, especially on such a small share of the market.

By doing this slap-in-the-face job of "porting" the game "Virtual Programming" has effectively trashed its reputation and now has no hope of returning to Linux business. As it should be, because instead of using "Witcher 2" as an excuse for not making Linux versions we must (and we do!) punish so-called "porters" for bad job. Granted, in case of "Witcher 2" CDPR also had its share of hate, and maybe just a little too much, but honestly, where was their Quality Control back then?

While I generally agree that the Virtual programming port is a bad one, I don’t think that we are in any position to punish. We are not faced with a choice of a good or a bad port, we are faced with a bad port and no port at all. I’d argue that if you want more native ports, you should be encouraging the last minute half-arsed ports that Virtual programming had been actually releasing.

What we need are actual "Day-1" native releases made with Linux in mind from the get-go (or by using Linux-friendly game engines), not some three-years-later "ports" (of games everyone else managed to forget already) with 30% less performance and most of effects disabled.

Couldn’t agree more. Preference for OpenSource engines and FOSS games like 0ad, Xonotic, OpenMW, Freespace 2 SCP, Godot, etc.

Quoting: appetrosyanI don’t see how it will improve with time, but I do see that using Wine + DXVK will get better and better.

And I see it gets so good that it stops working after a publisher adds "Denuvo AntiCheat" (or basically any anticheat for that matter) or uploads a patch breaking "Proton Compatibility". And all that with impunity because you on Proton™ was given no guarantees at all.

I’d be surprised if a native port would continue working if Denuvo Anti cheat was on the table. I don’t see a huge difference between this and Rocket League being pulled for completely arbitrary reasons. You don’t get guarantees either way, except with a native port, you’re expecting that the publisher in their benevolence spends time and effort to remove the anti-cheat. With proton, you can run DooM Eternal, because the codebase is continually updated.

I’m not sure if you planned to give me ammunition to support my point, but you should be really picky about your examples.

Quoting: appetrosyanThe trick here is that because you’re taking the control from the full binary and giving it to the Wine runtime, you are effectively making an openSource interpreter for a proprietary language. The developers only have to worry about making it work on Windows, and proton takes care of the rest. And I think that’s what Carmack meant in his age-old 2012 post about GOL. By making native ports with bad user experience we are only going to turn people off of running Linux.

And they will do just that!
Are you using Proton™? Not our problem! So long and thanks for your money![/quote]Funny. They could say the same thing about native ports. Fun fact, although every single ID game up to and including DooM 3 BFG, has a functional binary port (which is actually native), however, Bethesda in its wisdom has seen fit not to add the badge and officially support the binary releases. For them to murder the Proton they have to patch some sort of selective DRM that refuses to play in emulation, that was also hack-proof. I honestly think it would be cheaper to just pull all mention of all those games.

You see, you keep forgetting that you’re not actually buying anything. You’re given a temporary non-transferable license that can be revoked at any time, for any reason, despite you having paid. There’s no fundamental difference between them pulling Proton support because it’s not guaranteed and saying “well, we’re tired of supporting the Linux binary, so we’re killing it off”. You’re SOL either way, but unlike the latter case, there’s a huge chance that a game not working through proton can start working eventually.

Quoting: musojon74EDIT. I know we don’t all do this. Sorry to sound ranting but this is a big issue. We are a small market share. Plus we make ourselves smaller by only buying drm free and avoiding steam. ( not that I disagree with the principle of that ). But it does affect sales. Then we vocally shout about this. Then we shout at people for bad poets. Like Virtual Programming. It’s less they trashed their reputation, more like f it why should we bother supporting people who just shout at us.

I don’t think this is baseless. In words of RMS, we’re sacrificing convenience for freedom.

Also, If Virtual Programming are turned off of writing Linux ports, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I can imagine a whole slew of games that they could have ported just as badly. Now those games probably went to feral, or conceivably didn’t get ported at all, and now enjoy a nearly hassle-free experience through Proton. The policy off shutting down things that you don’t like has the effect of things that you don’t like not showing up.

Quoting: GuestNative ports aren't sustainable. Such releases are so volatile that you can't persuade someone to switch or stay on Linux. Even if we do get native releases, we have to wait much longer than Windows to play the games. With Proton, it's stable and we can play games from first few days they are launched. The reason Proton fails is because there are actors within the industry who's business is reliant on Proton's failure, and they will do things to stop it's momentum.

Linux gaming's opportunity to kick off depends on Proton's success and Vulkan adoption. Imagine Proton and Vulkan as two buddies stuck in a underground cave. Proton has made a straight, narrow and small line up to surface water which both Vulkan and Proton is sustained by. While Proton does that, Vulkan is digging a path up to the surface. If Proton dies, Vulkan will too. Their deaths will symbolize death of Linux gaming's growth.

I can't state it enough, native ports aren't sustainable in general. Despite many major games having Vulkan renderer (Doom, Red Dead, Cyberpunk, etc etc) publishers/developers won't release them on Linux. That is pure fact. And the only way to play these games are through Proton. And when games work on Linux, even if it's not native, people will switch and stay on Linux. Marketshare will grow and that will surely lead to developers and publishers deciding on a Linux port, especially if by that time Vulkan has become widely used in the industry.

That all is a ideal scenario though. Microsoft and other actors will surely do things that will hurt Proton or/and Vulkan.

Hopefully, we can reach critical adoption and every other proprietary application just becomes outmatched.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: appetrosyan

Quoting: musojon74EDIT. I know we don’t all do this. Sorry to sound ranting but this is a big issue. We are a small market share. Plus we make ourselves smaller by only buying drm free and avoiding steam. ( not that I disagree with the principle of that ). But it does affect sales. Then we vocally shout about this. Then we shout at people for bad poets. Like Virtual Programming. It’s less they trashed their reputation, more like f it why should we bother supporting people who just shout at us.

I don’t think this is baseless. In words of RMS, we’re sacrificing convenience for freedom.

Also, If Virtual Programming are turned off of writing Linux ports, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I can imagine a whole slew of games that they could have ported just as badly. Now those games probably went to feral, or conceivably didn’t get ported at all, and now enjoy a nearly hassle-free experience through Proton. The policy off shutting down things that you don’t like has the effect of things that you don’t like not showing up.

VP improved the quality of their ports massively after the initial Witcher 2 debacle. There are quite a few games they did that ran really well - including Witcher 2 once it was patched up. And they did help with some driver issues in Mesa. If they'd managed to get through enough and invest in a Vulkan backend, they'd be pretty much where DXVK is now, except tailored to individual games and giving support for them.

Losing fglrx drivers was a good thing. Losing VP is not.

I agree to an extent. There’s always a way to politely remind people that their work is not quite up to scratch, and death threats for a job however botched is never warranted. That does not mean that trust cannot be lost and that there are no objective markers of quality. My issue with this debacle is both the immaturity with which we have made a fool of ourselves, and the extent to which the entire community was gaslighted. VP, have learned a valuable lesson about quality of work. We have learned that telling people to kill themselves is a bad thing.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: appetrosyanI agree to an extent. There’s always a way to politely remind people that their work is not quite up to scratch, and death threats for a job however botched is never warranted. That does not mean that trust cannot be lost and that there are no objective markers of quality. My issue with this debacle is both the immaturity with which we have made a fool of ourselves, and the extent to which the entire community was gaslighted. VP, have learned a valuable lesson about quality of work. We have learned that telling people to kill themselves is a bad thing.

To add to that, I don't believe it's wrong for a developer to rely on Proton at this point in time. My reasoning for that is that for some games or genres Linux isn't that profitable, and thus it's not feasible to do extra work to provide native. The extra work could be used to make more content for windows game.

Streets of Rage (External Link: You need to be logged in to view this.) developers provided keys to Valve so they could make it work with Proton. Ideally I would like native, but I understand that's not feasible and therefor I don't have any ill will against developers who decide to forego native release for Proton one. Provided their reason for doing so is warranted.

But it's important than when developers decide to go for Proton that they do it the right way i.e working with Valve and Valve's recommendations for Proton. Furthermore developers could be kind and give back X amount of money back in form of Steam wallet if players have played their game through Proton on Linux after X hours of played or something like that.

A bit intractable, but I’m sure it’s with good intentions.

Reading through the last bunch of comments I noticed a couple of things.
Some people are talking about the way "the community" behaved at certain times as though that's tactically relevant and we could choose do do that differently in future. It isn't because we can't. It is not a controllable factor. Any uncontrolled community bigger than a certain size will have some people in it who act like jerks. Period. Planning based on the notion that we can make that not be the case is entirely pointless.

Some people in the last few posts are also talking as though if we get Proton working well enough, that will actually cause Linux adoption. It will not. A lot of the story of Linux is about removing barriers to adoption--getting rid of the things that block people from switching. Many, many barriers have been removed, many others have been made much lower. Proton is one of those barrier removers, and a fairly important one. Removing barriers is an important thing to do. IMO, Linux developers have been really very successful at barrier removal, whether it's hardware not working or UI polish or software that does needed jobs. For a lot of use cases, there are no significant ones left.

And yet here we are at about the same market share we've always been at. Removing all the barriers is not enough to drive adoption. The big question coming out of the original article and some of the key discussion posts is, what can be done to create actual pull towards Linux, so that people are not just not blocked from switching but have positive reasons to do so?

I think anti-cheat is likely to be the biggest threat of the things you mentioned. Not just to Proton, but to Steam and all Linux gaming. To see why, take a look at Android.

Right now, a lot of big-studio mobile games use a very simple mechanism to detect cheating: they check (or try to check) whether the supposed owner of the phone has root access. If you have root access to your device, they assume you are cheating. If you don't have root access, they assume you aren't cheating.

This method of anti-cheat doesn't always work. For example, in Pokemon Go and other location-based games, the most common type of cheating is location-spoofing, which is possible to do without rooting. Some users have reported location-spoofing without being banned. It's particularly embarrassing on the part of Niantic, because it should (in at least some cases) be possible to detect location-spoofing server-side: if a player travels from North America to Europe to Australia and back to North America in a matter of seconds, they are probably cheating, and you don't need to know what other programs are installed on their phone to figure that out.

Anti-cheating has also become common in single-player mobile games, thanks to the dominance of pay-to-win. In a pay-to-win game, there is already a publisher-approved way to get an in-game advantage: buy IAPs. Publishers are likely to view cheating in a pay-to-win game in a similar manner to how they view illegal downloads of a premium game.

And the vast majority of smartphone-owners don't care. The general public has come to accept that a company who "sells" them a device still has complete control over the device.

Given the increased popularity of iOS and Android among non-techies, and given the fact that the global revenue from mobile games keeps increasing, I think it is only a matter of time before an AAA publisher attempts to do the same thing on PC, and makes a game that can only be played in S Mode. The deciding factor in the future of AAA gaming will be how Windows users react to such a restriction.

In the best-case scenario, most Windows-gamers won't be willing to give up the ability to install apps from outside the Microsoft store just to play one game. Hence, whichever game is S-mode-only will be a commercial failure, and publishers will be discouraged from trying to do the same thing in the future.

In the worst-case scenario, Windows users will willingly enable S-mode just to play one AAA game. Since s-mode only allows users to install apps from the Microsoft store, that could create a death spiral for Steam and other storefronts: anyone who switches to s-mode for one game would have to buy all of their other games from the Microsoft Store, which would increase the market share of the Microsoft Store, which in turn might convince other publishers that they wouldn't lose many customers if they made their games s-mode only.

If the worst-case occurs, I think that would be the end of (legally) playing AAA games on open platforms. Publishers will get the idea that they can prevent cheating or illegal downloads by making their games playable only on console-like locked down platforms. If they ever allow their games to come to Linux after that, it would only be to a variant of Linux that was as locked-down as iOS and Android.

As a Linux user, I really, really, hope I am wrong about all of my predictions above.

Quoting: GuestYou speak of Proton as if it's complete when reality is it's not. It still lacks support for anticheat, and VK3D is still not mature. How can Proton make a significant impact when it's still lacking? I am certain a completed Proton will drive adoption.

I'm afraid you missed my whole point. Proton, whether incomplete or complete, is a thing which reduces barriers to adoption. It cannot in itself drive adoption. With Proton, you can potentially say "If I switch to Linux, I can still have my Windows games." But people who stay with Windows can already have their Windows games--that's not a reason to switch.
If barriers are high, there can be drivers of adoption and people still won't switch--they'll say "I'd like to switch, but I wouldn't be able to play my Windows games." So something like Proton is important in its own way. But it is not in itself a driver of adoption, just an enabler if such drivers exist.

For people to switch, there need to be both few and low barriers to switching, and positive drivers, actual reasons why you get something out of switching. My point was that Linux people have tended to work very hard to reduce barriers, but have not put as much effort into creating actual incentives--and Proton is in the former category, not the latter.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: GuestYou speak of Proton as if it's complete when reality is it's not. It still lacks support for anticheat, and VK3D is still not mature. How can Proton make a significant impact when it's still lacking? I am certain a completed Proton will drive adoption.

I'm afraid you missed my whole point. Proton, whether incomplete or complete, is a thing which reduces barriers to adoption. It cannot in itself drive adoption. With Proton, you can potentially say "If I switch to Linux, I can still have my Windows games." But people who stay with Windows can already have their Windows games--that's not a reason to switch.
If barriers are high, there can be drivers of adoption and people still won't switch--they'll say "I'd like to switch, but I wouldn't be able to play my Windows games." So something like Proton is important in its own way. But it is not in itself a driver of adoption, just an enabler if such drivers exist.

For people to switch, there need to be both few and low barriers to switching, and positive drivers, actual reasons why you get something out of switching. My point was that Linux people have tended to work very hard to reduce barriers, but have not put as much effort into creating actual incentives--and Proton is in the former category, not the latter.

Very good points, thanks.
I wonder what actual drivers are there to move to Linux. The one I could think of, except from non-functionals like being free/open or less intrusive, is that Linux offers a much better developer experience. Even in development areas where Windows is rather strong, e.g. Web development, I'm gradually seeing people move to Linux since things like Docker or Nodejs do work much better on Linux (I guess that is also the reason why there is so much investment into WSL from Microsoft). Are there more strong functional drivers?

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: GuestYou speak of Proton as if it's complete when reality is it's not. It still lacks support for anticheat, and VK3D is still not mature. How can Proton make a significant impact when it's still lacking? I am certain a completed Proton will drive adoption.

I'm afraid you missed my whole point. Proton, whether incomplete or complete, is a thing which reduces barriers to adoption. It cannot in itself drive adoption. With Proton, you can potentially say "If I switch to Linux, I can still have my Windows games." But people who stay with Windows can already have their Windows games--that's not a reason to switch.
If barriers are high, there can be drivers of adoption and people still won't switch--they'll say "I'd like to switch, but I wouldn't be able to play my Windows games." So something like Proton is important in its own way. But it is not in itself a driver of adoption, just an enabler if such drivers exist.

For people to switch, there need to be both few and low barriers to switching, and positive drivers, actual reasons why you get something out of switching. My point was that Linux people have tended to work very hard to reduce barriers, but have not put as much effort into creating actual incentives--and Proton is in the former category, not the latter.

Couldn't agree more.

The problem is, all the traditional means of driving adoption that spring to mind are more or less the anti-thesis of everything 'free and open source software' stands for and probably beyond the scope of what we could achieve anyway. It's not like the Linux community is going to suddenly start pumping out 2 or 3 AAA Linux exclusive games a year, or sign third party exclusivity contracts with publishers, or do weekly game giveaways.

Linux as a platform for gaming, can of course add convenient features to make life easier, but then we quickly enter a 'everything you can do, I can do better!' song and dance with the other platforms, where they adopt any new features we come up with shortly after we create them. Same has happened with Windows for years, every time Linux desktops gain a new feature, eventually it comes to Windows (eg: multiple virtual desktops).

I've spent some time thinking about if and if I had to come up with a list of 'Reasons to Game on Linux', this would be it:

• Linux is free and open source, this isn't just an ideological benefit, this is also a practical benefit. Keeping track of Windows licenses or paying for them is one less thing to worry about on Linux. If you ever need a copy of a Linux distro you can just jump on the distro website and download it. Super convenient.


• Better graphics stack. I can't explain it nor do I understand it, but in my opinion, rendering graphics on Linux is faster. For example, you can see as much as 30% faster rendering with Blender. I have no idea why this is, but it's definitely something I've observed. Of course this doesn't translate to faster graphics in every situation, such as lazy ports or running Windows games on Linux. But even then, sometimes Windows games have run faster on Linux in certain circumstances, which is a testament to just how much faster Linux generally is than Windows for graphics rendering.


• Superior update UX. Not only on Windows do you have to deal with the annoyance of the now infamous forced updates, but the UX of updates on Windows is quite bizarre. Windows communicates very poorly when it's checking for updates, what updates it's performing and what even is being updated. Not only that but usually software is updated separately to the OS. On Windows, it's very common for software to have it's own 'updater' service that runs in the background, consuming memory and CPU cycles just to constantly check for updates. Contrast that to Linux, there's usually very well made update utilities that allow you to update when you feel like, tell you what's being updated, and update both your OS and your software at the same time. Linux in my opinion has a cleaner UX here.


• Another Windows annoyance to avoid, the incoherent mess of UIs for Settings/Control Panel in Windows 10, especially for things like changing filetype associations. It's one of the few areas where I can say with confidence Linux is definitely offering a better UX, almost all the popular Linux distros have a better UX here. OS settings on Linux are usually offered via a single global settings UI, and actually easier to follow than what you usually get on Windows. I don't know how Microsoft has screwed this up so much but they definitely dropped the ball here, but their loss is our gain.


• Generally speaking there's no need to install drivers on Linux any more as long as your hardware is supported. It's still common on Windows to need to install manually drivers for things like printers and wifi cards and monitors, etc, it's common for these things to come with instructions telling you to go to a website and download & install some annoying little application that will live in your system tray forever. It's usually one of the first things you need to do with a new Windows installation, and at the very least you need to go grab the GPU driver. These days most Linux distros are actually coming with GPU drivers out of the box or install them at the same time as OS.

Those are things which come to mind when I try to think of reasons to use Linux instead of Windows.

Quoting: jens

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: GuestYou speak of Proton as if it's complete when reality is it's not. It still lacks support for anticheat, and VK3D is still not mature. How can Proton make a significant impact when it's still lacking? I am certain a completed Proton will drive adoption.

I'm afraid you missed my whole point. Proton, whether incomplete or complete, is a thing which reduces barriers to adoption. It cannot in itself drive adoption. With Proton, you can potentially say "If I switch to Linux, I can still have my Windows games." But people who stay with Windows can already have their Windows games--that's not a reason to switch.
If barriers are high, there can be drivers of adoption and people still won't switch--they'll say "I'd like to switch, but I wouldn't be able to play my Windows games." So something like Proton is important in its own way. But it is not in itself a driver of adoption, just an enabler if such drivers exist.

For people to switch, there need to be both few and low barriers to switching, and positive drivers, actual reasons why you get something out of switching. My point was that Linux people have tended to work very hard to reduce barriers, but have not put as much effort into creating actual incentives--and Proton is in the former category, not the latter.

Very good points, thanks.
I wonder what actual drivers are there to move to Linux. The one I could think of, except from non-functionals like being free/open or less intrusive, is that Linux offers a much better developer experience. Even in development areas where Windows is rather strong, e.g. Web development, I'm gradually seeing people move to Linux since things like Docker or Nodejs do work much better on Linux (I guess that is also the reason why there is so much investment into WSL from Microsoft). Are there more strong functional drivers?

I dunno about strong. There are a couple minor ones I can think of.
--The OS is not made of nagware/coercionware. That is, it will not go around interrupting what you are doing to insist that you do updates or whatever.
--In some distros, fairly unified software management. All the open source stuff in your distribution's repositories is easy to find and install from a single GUI application, and it updates along with the OS, no muss, no fuss. The software manager is like Steam for your other software, if less glitzy.
--This may be counterintuitive, but I think a case could be made for superior UI. We've always had an inferiority complex about Linux UI; traditionally the Linux desktops were considered behind Windows and especially Mac, rough and lacking polish. But no matter which desktop environment you prefer, these days most of those rough edges have been knocked off, while new features and approaches have been added. If you want power and customizability, KDE makes Windows look like it's stuck at 3.1. If you want innovative and clean, Gnome is far cooler than Windows. I hear a couple of the others, like Budgie and what, are very nice too. If you want something like Windows but better, I personally think Mate totally fills that--I go back and forth every day (well, I did until I started working from home) and I find that for instance the Windows file manager feels clunky compared to the Mate one and probably most other Linux file managers. Like, I don't see a way to make the Windows file manager have more than one pane so you can easily move things back and forth, and it's not tabbed. And as far as I know you can only have one taskbar, and you can't move it--Windows is weak.

I can imagine a situation in the future when various existing projects become effective and reliable and easy to use, where Linux became "The OS where you can use all your old stuff--old games, old software generally, old games from previous generations of consoles and things, old Office files, whatever". It can already do a fair amount of that, but the ways are kind of scattered and some of them are hard to use.

Quoting: musojon74But it does affect sales. Then we vocally shout about this. Then we shout at people for bad poets.

I know this is a typo, but we should totally shout about bad poets more. :D

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: jens

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: GuestYou speak of Proton as if it's complete when reality is it's not. It still lacks support for anticheat, and VK3D is still not mature. How can Proton make a significant impact when it's still lacking? I am certain a completed Proton will drive adoption.

I'm afraid you missed my whole point. Proton, whether incomplete or complete, is a thing which reduces barriers to adoption. It cannot in itself drive adoption. With Proton, you can potentially say "If I switch to Linux, I can still have my Windows games." But people who stay with Windows can already have their Windows games--that's not a reason to switch.
If barriers are high, there can be drivers of adoption and people still won't switch--they'll say "I'd like to switch, but I wouldn't be able to play my Windows games." So something like Proton is important in its own way. But it is not in itself a driver of adoption, just an enabler if such drivers exist.

For people to switch, there need to be both few and low barriers to switching, and positive drivers, actual reasons why you get something out of switching. My point was that Linux people have tended to work very hard to reduce barriers, but have not put as much effort into creating actual incentives--and Proton is in the former category, not the latter.

Very good points, thanks.
I wonder what actual drivers are there to move to Linux. The one I could think of, except from non-functionals like being free/open or less intrusive, is that Linux offers a much better developer experience. Even in development areas where Windows is rather strong, e.g. Web development, I'm gradually seeing people move to Linux since things like Docker or Nodejs do work much better on Linux (I guess that is also the reason why there is so much investment into WSL from Microsoft). Are there more strong functional drivers?

I dunno about strong. There are a couple minor ones I can think of.
--The OS is not made of nagware/coercionware. That is, it will not go around interrupting what you are doing to insist that you do updates or whatever.
--In some distros, fairly unified software management. All the open source stuff in your distribution's repositories is easy to find and install from a single GUI application, and it updates along with the OS, no muss, no fuss. The software manager is like Steam for your other software, if less glitzy.
--This may be counterintuitive, but I think a case could be made for superior UI. We've always had an inferiority complex about Linux UI; traditionally the Linux desktops were considered behind Windows and especially Mac, rough and lacking polish. But no matter which desktop environment you prefer, these days most of those rough edges have been knocked off, while new features and approaches have been added. If you want power and customizability, KDE makes Windows look like it's stuck at 3.1. If you want innovative and clean, Gnome is far cooler than Windows. I hear a couple of the others, like Budgie and what, are very nice too. If you want something like Windows but better, I personally think Mate totally fills that--I go back and forth every day (well, I did until I started working from home) and I find that for instance the Windows file manager feels clunky compared to the Mate one and probably most other Linux file managers. Like, I don't see a way to make the Windows file manager have more than one pane so you can easily move things back and forth, and it's not tabbed. And as far as I know you can only have one taskbar, and you can't move it--Windows is weak.

I can imagine a situation in the future when various existing projects become effective and reliable and easy to use, where Linux became "The OS where you can use all your old stuff--old games, old software generally, old games from previous generations of consoles and things, old Office files, whatever". It can already do a fair amount of that, but the ways are kind of scattered and some of them are hard to use.

I think the first two point are surely valid, though I guess users already need some understanding of the underlying operation system to get this.
About UI, yeah I agree that this could be indeed something to catch "normal" users. I love my Gnome Desktop on my Fedora box, though changing the GTK/Shell/Icon theme from the default Adwaita theme to something much more stylish (Plata-Noir) is one of the first things I do. Of course taste differs ;).
Hopefully Linux will improve more with default settings and default appearance so that UI will be a strong selling point.

Last edited by jens on 24 May 2020 at 3:36 pm UTC

Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: musojon74But it does affect sales. Then we vocally shout about this. Then we shout at people for bad poets.

I know this is a typo, but we should totally shout about bad poets more. :D

Haha! Totally missed that. I’m not editing it now, it’s too funny. Definitely up for some bad poet shouting.

The whole conundrum is because you're trying to use a free, infinitely modifiable software environment (known collectively as Linux for its kernel, because the kernel and maybe C library is the only permanent component of the mix) for distributing closed source, binary only, compiled once and never updated, games.

Of course that's not going to work well and it is not working well. FOSS system needs FOSS games that are developed according to its rules and can be patched as the system evolves. Alternatively, FOSS system needs an "emulator" for a more stable environment, which can be adapted so users can play the same "frozen" images of console or Windows games while the underlying system changes under them.

Asking for more native closed-source, binary only, "frozen" Linux games is asking for trouble. Why? They will quickly bit rot in the ever-evolving Linux environment. If you have a closed source game that was released in 2010 for Windows and can be played via Proton now in 2020, chances are, you'll be able to play it in 2030. Can we say that about native Linux games released in say 2012 with the Humble Bundle? FWIW Valve recognizes that and started working on its own containerization system ("pressure-vessel"). Which, if it works, is going to be a solution for Steam-distributed games only, not for any random native Linux game...

EDIT: this is not to say that Windows doesn't change. But Microsoft is taking great care to not disrupt the games with its changes, recognizing the value of its ecosystem. Linux, in contrast, is developed mostly not for the games, and the major distro vendors often don't care enough about them (even Ubuntu, as recent attempt to remove 32-bit support showed). Moreover, it can be said that running closed-source binaries is an explicit non-goal for many distros, something that they tolerate on pragmatic grounds, but do not wish to endorse (understandably), because it undermines the FOSS principles and also security (you may have no concerns about running someone's closed source binary you just downloaded from the web, but for majority of non-gaming Linux users this is a big security risk).

Last edited by RCL on 25 May 2020 at 6:43 am UTC

I would like to add that not all games are created equal. Some of them, like Alien: Isolation are installed, run and completed several times over. Right now Linux is a hard sell for en-mass installation because, as much-better-poets-than-me have remarked, we have no compelling reason to have people switch over and there are barriers. Proton and DXVK reduce the pressure to switch away from Linux but they don't create pressure to switch to it.

By design, there are very few programs that can be run on GNU Linux and only GNU Linux. That includes Games. A thing that would have driven mass adoption, could have been if a single-player Half Life 3 non-VR were released as a Linux exclusive. Valve are under no obligation to create a Windows build and a vote of confidence would have been to release, HL3 as a Linux exclusive. It won't happen, but mainly because the mass adoption of Linux and control over a platform that you can't lock-in, doesn't compensate for the lost sales that they would have had. It has nothing to do with Exclusives allegedly being incompatible with FOSS (they are the key part of CopyLeft, and by design the proper GPLv3 is exclusive to FOSS). In fact, we don't inspire much confidence to have them delay the launch of HL:Alyx until they have a working build for Linux.

Another reason to switch would have been privacy and security. Unfortunately, it almost never is a factor in people's minds. You can't make it one, because preaching doesn't work. You can convert a small number of people, but not more than that.

Viruses create a pressure to switch to Linux, but not as much as I hoped. People don't care about viruses. Some don't care enough to use a mitigation like Windows defender that they already have! Much less spend time and effort to get away from them. The only way this pressure gets stronger, is if Microsoft keeps on making blunders and creating security holes, that cause ransomware outbreaks. Otherwise, why bother?

The abundance of Professionally monopolistic software that doesn't and will not support GNU+Linux because of catch 22. That's a strong pressure and a dealbreaker for switching away from Linux to Windows. It's sometimes enough to make people switch away from Mac OS, which has way more things going for it than Linux.

Community fragmentation. No! I'm not referring to people writing weekend projects like an app to keep track of recipes. Nor am I referring to the overabundance of Desktop Environments. I'm referring to the fact that if you search for Linux.org, and ask to download, you'd be taken to a wall of text with no descriptions. If I'm totally honest, I'd just prune the list down to Ubuntu, Arch and parabola, clearly stating that Ubuntu's the gateway drug, Arch is the hard stuff, and Parabola is the hardcore fanatic dosage. Sadly, far too many distress are pushing their own agendas on Linux.org, to remove them from consideration. It wouldn't be fair, too. I personally like Gentoo.

Lack of standardisation. What is the de-factor standard VoIP communication protocol for Linux? Anyone? Mac OS - FaceTime, Windows - Skype. Everything that is standard came from Unix and no newer standards are better. Wayland is supposed to be one new standard, and its support is abysmal. Office Suite? Apple - Keynote, Pages and Cells, Windows - Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Linux? Well we have a zoo. Thankfully they all speak the same language. Unfortunately instead of speaking it like Americans, Australians and Brits, they speak it more like the Aztecs, the Russians and the Japanese...

The User experience and Desktop Bling are a good selling point. Just go to UnixPorn and you'll see many compelling reasons to switch to Linux. But... that's the UI, not the UX. The UX is: I created my coursework in FreeCad instead of AutoCad, and got an F, because my project Supervisor couldn't open it. It's that I'm at a command prompt and instead of using the familiar apt install, instead I have to use paceman -S. It's fine, it's easier to type, but I would install by default a wrapper script that dynamically resolved what you want to happen and told you what the command is. It has to be there by default!!! We lack these common interfaces that people need to rely on, if they want to eventually stop thinking and get doing. The flatpak is a major step in the right direction and the fact that RedHat is forcing it on everybody is actually a good thing. because then I have a reliable way of making things work cross platform. If only it were also, you know... GOOD.

The only real advantages, like technical superiority the security are sadly the things that are the toughest to sell. Until we fix this, Linux will always be at the mercy of Microsofts and the Googles. If we want to change adoption we need a Killer App. And unfortunately, every killer app spot is already taken...

Wasn't sure if I was gonna post or not as someone who has come to Linux somewhat recently (now that i think of it, it's almost a year now o.O) after randomly stumbling about how much easier Valve made gaming on this wonderful platform by integrating Proton and realising that most my games actually work.

True is that I always hated Windows for it's lack or privacy and security and I know I'm the minority in that case, as I notice whenever i bring those topics up and get the same redundant/stupid answers like "Well, i got nothing to hide anyway" etc.

One of the main problems I see with the lack of widespread linux adoption is so many companies being locked into windows and microsoft's office suite or other windows-only programs like adobe for instance as well as that the "common person" as in not really tech-savy, often don't know that there ARE alternatives. Maybe they know about MacOs, if at all.

I recently brought my mother over to Linux Mint for her work-related stuff - and thinking about if I hadn't done the switch myself and told her about it, she would still be complaining about how shitty Windows 10 is (aka forced updates during Webinars and all that fun), because she wouldn't know that there was a viable alternative and Desktop Linux in many aspects has become viable for the common user. (as in browsing and light office-like work)

Gaming for me was always what kept me using Windows and I hated that situation (as already stated) and with every blunder MS does, as they seem to not have any QA for their operating system by the looks of past updates, we can get minor adoption with tools like Proton and the likes.

Still. What we need is a big player supporting the platform.

Valve is kinda doing that, which i commend them for but the reason is fairly obvious:

They're afraid of Microsoft trying to take over the gaming market as their marketshare on windows is already that big and this is exactly what we're seeing currently:

MS pushing Game Pass and UWP trying to lock-in the market on their platform.

If Valve doesn't push Linux adoption harder, we might see this end up happening: That gaming will end up (mostly) being bound to windows with games being locked into the windows store itself or maybe steam even being forced to pay some kind of share. (as in MS trying to create a more google playstore like platform)

I really hope I'm reading this whole situation wrong.

Last edited by Sonata on 28 May 2020 at 11:20 pm UTC

Quoting: SonataWasn't sure if I was gonna post or not as someone who has come to Linux somewhat recently (now that i think of it, it's almost a year now o.O) after randomly stumbling about how much easier Valve made gaming on this wonderful platform by integrating Proton and realising that most my games actually work.

True is that I always hated Windows for it's lack or privacy and security and I know I'm the minority in that case, as I notice whenever i bring those topics up and get the same redundant/stupid answers like "Well, i got nothing to hide anyway" etc.

One of the main problems I see with the lack of widespread linux adoption is so many companies being locked into windows and microsoft's office suite or other windows-only programs like adobe for instance as well as that the "common person" as in not really tech-savy, often don't know that there ARE alternatives. Maybe they know about MacOs, if at all.

I recently brought my mother over to Linux Mint for her work-related stuff - and thinking about if I hadn't done the switch myself and told her about it, she would still be complaining about how shitty Windows 10 is (aka forced updates during Webinars and all that fun), because she wouldn't know that there was a viable alternative and Desktop Linux in many aspects has become viable for the common user. (as in browsing and light office-like work)

Gaming for me was always what kept me using Windows and I hated that situation (as already stated) and with every blunder MS does, as they seem to not have any QA for their operating system by the looks of past updates, we can get minor adoption with tools like Proton and the likes.

Still. What we need is a big player supporting the platform.

Valve is kinda doing that, which i commend them for but the reason is fairly obvious:

They're afraid of Microsoft trying to take over the gaming market as their marketshare on windows is already that big and this is exactly what we're seeing currently:

MS pushing Game Pass and UWP trying to lock-in the market on their platform.

If Valve doesn't push Linux adoption harder, we might see this end up happening: That gaming will end up (mostly) being bound to windows with games being locked into the windows store itself or maybe steam even being forced to pay some kind of share. (as in MS trying to create a more google playstore like platform)

I really hope I'm reading this whole situation wrong.

That's pretty much exactly how I read it. It's not because "Microsoft is evil, they're satan!" it's just basic common sense, all companies that control a platform want a more locked down platform, because that makes them more money. If Valve didn't exist and Microsoft had free reign over the PC gaming market, they would absolutely lock it down as tight as they can to eliminate any possibility of Windows games spreading to other OSes. They have shareholders to please, profits to make, and that's how you make money.

Valve is no angel, they want to make money too, but in this case, I think Valve's interests so closely align with ours and with 'software freedom' in general, that Valve is without a doubt our best friend right now. So I want them to succeed, because what works for Valve right now, works VERY well for us.

Historically, when it comes to computer operating systems, video gaming has very little affect on adoption.

That is, there are not a significant number of people who begin to adopt a computer operating system because of the games available on it. Instead, the more people that adopt a computer operating system overall, the more that game development for that platform increases.

If games led the way to computer operating system / computer platform adoption, it would have been the Commodore Amiga (it originally had the best games and graphics performance) rather than the IBM PC that began to dominate by the end of the 1980s. It's true that the dynamics of the market have changed some since then, but not that much. If we see more games on Linux, it will be because there are more Linux users rather than the other way around.

Last edited by CFWhitman on 10 Apr 2021 at 7:18 am UTC