Little Racers STREET is an excellent racing game, loads of fun.

Pillars of Eternity looks great. I hope it lives up to expectations...and yeah...hope Unity does too!

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Arrgh, not Rich again....I find myself compelled once again to wade in and debunk his tabloid journalism. The problem with that guy is that he is dangerously well informed enough (not to mention an ex- Valve employee) to persuade people to think that what he's saying is gospel, when in fact it's just pure speculation and very biased at that. Read the comments from Mattias Goldberg at the end of the article, that's where you're more likely to find the voice of reason.

Point #1: native ports are always going to be fast.
Mattias touches nicely upon this - planning for the software architecture you're targeting has a huge performance impact. Porting that same architecture to another SDK or platform is an act of shoehorning, forcing a problem into an existing solution, irrespective of whether that's the best solution for the task at hand. Not only does Linux suffer less performance than Windows for these games, but so does OSX, precisely because the original games were written for DirectX. The real test will be when truly cross-platform engines such as Unreal Engine 4 fail to perform under Linux (and no, Unity is not particularly high performing for any platform).

The telling response from Rich to this is:
"I wonder how many devs will spend the time (like yourself) to properly create an AZDO backend for what will probably be a single digit percentage of the marketplace?"
THIS is the core of the problem. Windows fan boys totally incredulous as to why anyone would want to leave the MS ecosystem. To his credit, Rich alludes to why we need to leave Microsoft behind and create a new gaming platform: "But no, the Microsoft Experience is inviolate, the holiest of holies, eternally immutable. No matter how much hatred it gets, it Must. Not. Be. Changed ."

Alienware's "Steam Box": Bouahahahahahahahahahahahahah!
Rich's comment: "When no-one was looking, Steam took Microsoft and snapped it like a twig." Duh, this happened a LONG time ago. The Alienware box is useless, it's just a quick money grab. It has a totally uncertain future, uncertain updates, is a closed system used by only a single hardware partner. Compared this to a slow burning increasingly well engineered OS by the company that owns the digital distribution platform. As has been said elsewhere, Valve's delay (Valve time anyone?) in releasing the Steam Box hurt Alienware's plans, so they fought back and released their own skin. Good for them, it was the right strategic thing to do.

Point #2:
X11/DRM: Mattias again touches on the real problem - the X11 Windowing system and DRM stack. I currently suffer horrible VSync issues on my GTX660, and I'm pretty sure it's X11 and Compiz that are to blame. Bring on Wayland and Mir and the new buttery smoothness.

Point #3:
Intel's Open Source driver.
Intel's driver is amazing, it has progressed in leaps and bounds. However the team working on it is indeed smaller than the Windows driver team, and yeah, Intel is married to Microsoft at the moment, as they should be as Windows has the largest PC market share. Which is why Valve has to hire 3rd party companies to fix driver bugs. All this means is that the current computing culture and status quo is Microsoft and Windows focussed. Is this news? Of course not, it's been like that for ages, which is why SteamOS is so exciting, because it could break that hegemony and usher in a brand new culture. So yeah, I might be currently losing some 2-10 fps by not using the Windows Intel driver, but I get an amazing out of the box experience with no extra driver installs, no annoying pop-ups and ugly Intel GUIs. Just wait till the Linux Intel driver is faster...because this WILL happen (it's already happening in the OpenGL space, just read Phoronix for more details)

So yeah, in retrospect Rich Geldreich must have had a BIG fall out at Valve...he's certainly still harbouring some grudges. Either that, or he's decided to change career and become a tech shock-jock....I'm sure there's money to be made there, maybe some ugly PR company will hire him.

That's not to say that SteamOS won't fail, but you can be sure that Valve will give it a seriously red hot go, or come out of this experience looking pretty stupid, which they obviously are not.

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I read this earlier today. I'm struggling to direct my love towards a) Valve for funding them OR b) LunarG for bringing such awesome driver improvements to Linux. I think I'll need to ponder this some more...

I have an Nvidia card, but Intel Mesa drivers on my laptop are fast becoming a favourite. Having an open source driver makes a huge difference in terms of quality of integration and general out-of-the-box usability.

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Yup...what a ride, and what a loss of productivity!

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Yes you're right EKRboi, multi-monitor needs more scrutiny now that Linux gaming is getting serious :)

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Thanks Liam, I was worried that no one had covered this yet.
I believe BG:EE is actually fully playable on Linux, it's just in beta.
I also think Beamdog has had a bit of a rough time on release with BG:EE which is why it hasn't been released on Linux yet, they concerned about quality control...which is GOOD. I think their future releases, including Icewind Dale are going to be stable and best of all, native!

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OpenGL 4+ has pretty much all of DirectX11 covered iirc. It's a question of upgrading their OpenGL engine (which will probably require some R&D...)

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Editor note: typo in heading.

This is rather fantastic news.
I see this as a continuation of the extensive flexibility of Linux in the face of other OS'es locking themselves down.

I love how my Linux laptop can read/write pretty much all major filesystems, most file formats, and a huge amount of older hardware that often fails to get updated on OSX/Windows.

While the kernel of Linux must always be untainted by proprietary software, I'm happy to have Linux be as compatible with as many other software formats out there, proprietary or not....like supporting .docx in LibreOffice for example.

The Linux immune system just got a little stronger, like a giant amoeba (think Akira) absorbing all in its path!

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I haven't played the paradox games for fear of exactly this :) Maybe one day...

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Great. Liam's strength is his ability to prod info out of developers...so if he can do this in a low profile way, that would be excellent!

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