Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: RCLCommercial distro designed for gaming would by definition incorporate closed source software so it would be neither, and as such it would have a much harder time attracting users.

Linux users won't appreciate a distro, that pushes for blobs (besides games themselves).

I meant games, it's enough for the point I was making (neither free as in freedom nor free as in free beer). Linux gamers are obviously Okay with this, but Linux community at large not always is, so a proposed commercial distro would be a tough sell. Still, I personally would support it.

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Quoting: gradyvuckovic

Quoting: wvstolzing

Quoting: gradyvuckovic

Quoting: keanI would even pay for it if everything works well.

I'd happily sign up to that, $10/month for a Valve developed Linux OS which provides the best possible gaming experience for Linux? Hell yes, give me that.

Kinda off-topic but I'm somewhat terrified that the idea of a 'subscription model' OS comes so naturally to people nowadays.

Why not?
[...]
I'm happy to pay for high quality software, foss or not. A high quality Linux OS with great support would be worth paying for.

This is a very healthy attitude and the only way to go forward. I have been donating to Canonical (and other OSS software I use regularly) over the years myself, however Linux community at large (i.e. not just Linux gamers) tends to despise commercial, for-profit software even when it is open source. High quality commercial Linux OS with a paid support will look too much as Windows + WSL2 to a lot of folks. Canonical itself was and is not liked much.

Lack of monetary feedback (or clarity about that feedback) for the desktop Linux is in my opinion the reason why its (desktop) market share is so tiny. But at the same time, a commercial distro from your example would be fighting an uphill battle. After all, people are attracted to Linux because a) it's free as in freedom and b) it's free as in free beer. Commercial distro designed for gaming would by definition incorporate closed source software so it would be neither, and as such it would have a much harder time attracting users.

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Quoting: BeamboomMaybe it's too soon. Maybe it should have been handled differently. But the notion that the entire backlog of the history of gaming should be forever kept able to run across all future generations of operating systems... It's just dumb.

If you want to run old software, keep an old OS on your drive. Just like if you want to play your cassettes, keep a cassette player.

Not just old OS, you need to use an old hardware as well. Forward compatibility of the drivers in your OS only goes so far.

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Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: AnxiousInfusionAnd we were beginning to wonder if Epic had forsaken EU4 on Linux. But does this mean that all the current OpenGL issues (thinking of ARK, et al) will never get fixed?

They still released Fortnite last week with only Win+Mac support. Do they have Metal support for that or is the OpenGL support actually good enough?

Fortnite on Mac runs on Metal. Unreal Engine dropped support for OpenGL on Mac since UE 4.15 (February'2017).

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Quoting: ShabbyXI wonder why they wouldn't make it the default on windows either. That will make not only their vulkan renderer more stable (more people get to test it), but also damage directx considerably, which is nice.

Defaulting to Vulkan on Windows at this stage would create unnecessary problems for Windows users.

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Quoting: BdMdesigNBut Windows ports are all Native ports.

Not all. Sometimes games are ported from consoles by third party developers. If the engine in question was cross-platform, it may be native (for some definition of native - there might be no major rework to up the resolution or add features that weren't possible on the original platform), however sometimes game in question used a highly platform-specific engine. Then things might get really difficult. If you talk to people in the industry you'll find examples where Windows version contains essentially a software implementation of certain console chips because the engine relied on its particular design and API. Porting houses run really lean and employ just a handful of developers, sometimes one per game; they cannot always afford a several man-year project like rewriting a highly platform-specific engine, it may be easier to add a compatibility layer.

Windows gamers don't care as long as the end result works great; Linux gamers wouldn't care either had that been the case.

Blaming developers for not writing cross-platform code from scratch misses the point; sometimes you don't want to be cross-platform but instead you want to make the most out of a particular platform. It's akin to saying that Stephen King is a shitty writer because he uses English that makes translation of his works to Chinese difficult; had he written in Esperanto it would be easier (if necessary at all) to translate. There are developers who enjoy writing SPU code for PS3 and miss that a lot...

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Quoting: salsadoomIf you run something different like me, then you should understand the dev never said it would work for you in the first place and you should ask the community for help rather then the devs themselves. Dev's who have the time and energy may help you anyway though, and I've seen that a lot (Guns of Icarus devs DID reply to my posts I made on the community forums btw, I think they would of sorted out the issue if it were reasonably possible).

Short version is I guess is that if I'm running the supported setup I expect an experience like I would on windows and very often don't get that.

@salsadoom - your voice is very reasonable and I wish this attitude was common.

Now, even on a sanitized setup like Ubuntu there are normally more moving parts than on Windows - for starters, imagine how many things would be broken if Windows users installed their own (or community-produced) drivers. Games break even with vendor drivers (e.g. when too old)! This is not to mention that Linux APIs (like OpenGL) allow several ways to do the same things; some outdated and some more modern ones - all this adds dimensions to the test matrix. If on Windows you have to test VideoCard * OSVersion combinations, on Linux you begin with VideoCard * VideoDriverVendor * DesktopEnvironment * OSVersion number of test cases.

The other reason for worse support is disproportion between the number of users. This is not limited to Linux - Windows users running less common setups (e.g. two GPUs from different vendors, or outdated version of the OS, or sometimes even a version of the OS in an exotic language) will also have more pain.

Developers, especially small, cannot afford extensive coverage - even if they get QA testing in form of Early Access on Steam, they often need to reproduce the problem locally in order to understand it - and this may be unfeasible, be it Windows or Linux. Not everyone can install Arabic version of Windows to understand what causes the text to render badly in right-to-left order. Same with Linux - even when the devs try, their unfamiliarity with Linux works against them (you would be surprised how many Windows coders don't ever touch command line tools these days, doing all their work via GUI).

TL;DR - two factors behind worse support: vastly different (order of magnitude more) number of test cases on Linux, plus relative obscurity of the platform - developers are unlikely to use it themselves, so don't test/know it that much.

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If 2% of sales were matched with 2% of support requests, Linux gaming would be healthier. But everyone expects their particular distribution, drivers and what not to be supported - a fair request, but untenable for game developers; on other platforms this support cost is shared with (or competely delegated to, as is the case with consoles) the platform owners.

That's the whole point of SteamOS. Limit the extent to which users can customize the system, so developers can target it as a single platform and make games run "out of the box".

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Stop thinking in terms of politics, it's mostly economy that matters. Microsoft didn't kill Skype. Microsoft introduced Linux debugging in new Visual Studio 2015, opensourced .NET, works to support docker containers. Whenever Linux makes money, it gets supported.

Didn't you see in Liam's reddit link that the game's developers are sympathetic to Linux ("we like Linux and what it stands for", "haven't given up on it personally" ) ? But without a monetary incentive you can only do so much in your free time, and 1-5% of extra revenue may not justify spending money to support an additional platform.

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Quoting: Stebs[IMHO the interesting point of the new APIs (Mantle, DX12, Vulkan) is, that they were mainly made by the industry, folks from Dice, EA, Valve etc. and not really solely by AMD, Microsoft or Khronos.

Graphics API do not get designed in isolation from its actual users (i.e. developers). This might have been true for PHIGS and (conceptually similar to it) early retained mode Direct3D, but hasn't been the case since GPU became ubiquitous.

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