Quoting: PhlebiacBack when M$ was actively trying to kill Netscape, there were versions of Internet Explorer for Solaris, HP-UX, etc. It does make you wonder what their motives are this time around. Maybe it's as simple as "we recommend using Edge to access Office 365" even on Linux. As long as they still support / don't actively sabotage it for other browsers, that isn't a terrible motive. Not that I would choose to use any of it.

Yeah, I mean as soon as they won that war, support for IE on all of the other systems was killed off. They pretty much tried to support everything Netscape did at the time in their drive for controlling the Internet. Hmm, the same thing Google is getting sued for now :P

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Quoting: Linuxwarper

Quoting: slaapliedjeRemember back in the days when the various computer platforms were around and companies still managed to release games for all of them? DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Machintosh? They not only had a wide variety of hardware, but also of operating systems. People tended for some reason to target the minimal Atari ST spec, the upper spec on the Amiga, and DOS / Machintosh usually got CGA / EGA versions until VGA had a lot more users. But DOS devs had the huge task of trying to figure out which hardware was popular to add support for that. But they still did it, even though DOS was definitely not a gaming platform, and not friendly to it. But still a huge majority of games were made for it as that's what systems people had. Then the 3D hardware wars happened, where there were so many APIs for people to target...

It wasn't until Windows and DirectX that there was an abstraction layer for everything. We basically have SDL that is similar, but it took a long time for that to be a thing.

But now that we have it, and we have better drivers, and a free OS, you'd think people would flock to it. Nope, because we are historically a community that is against closed source, DRM, etc. And GAME developers are ALL about the DRM.

And this is the main reason I think most games don't come to Linux. That and 'well they won't even pay for their OS, why would they do anything other than pirate our game' mentality.

No, I got my first PC long time after those events. When it comes down to why games don't come to Linux it's simply because of marketshare. If marketshare was significant enough games would be developed with closed source and with Denuvo implemented into them just like with Windows.

Also it doesn't help the situation that industry has become in my opinion quite corrupt. We are at a point now where microtransactions are intertwined into a game's design and developers hold presentations titled "Let's go whaling" that explains how to maximize money siphoning from gamers using predatory practices. They don't treat Windows gamers right with these predatory practices, so I'd say it would be naive for one to think that these companies, who are releasing their games on Stadia, will be nice to us with a Linux release.

As much as I believe Stadia is a double edged sword, I believe it and primarily Proton, is chance Linux has to break free of the cage Microsoft continues to put platform in with DirectX.

No one in their right mind that uses Linux would allow some of the rootkits that companies have been shipping with their software. The thing is that most Linux users are savvy enough to have things in place to prevent such things. That's why companies don't bother with porting it over. But at least it seems most publishers have been removing that crap after a few months of sales. Seems Conan Exiles finally did and so now it works great in Proton.

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Quoting: Linuxwarper

Quoting: ShmerlIt's not nonsense because you need to compare resources, not just the amount of work. Small developers have less of them than big companies. So it's a bigger risk for them because of that alone. It's harder to make profit for small developers. Yet they are the ones releasing for Linux, not the huge ones who are making way more money and have more resources for it.

Besides, the work and expenses point was addressed above. They already have invested needed effort and spent the money to make it work on Stadia,

I think it's safe to say that companies like EA and Ubisoft, two big Stadia partners, will not want to help Linux. They are big supporters of Games as a service business model and big offenders of bad practice within the industry. So them giving users more choice would possibly work against their profits, instead of one platform to get all the money they would have to accommodate for Linux too. With cross platform software they can overcome those issues, but a greedy company would not want to put in work to make change.

The reason I said it's nonsense is because I don't think releasing a game like Cyberpunk for Linux, and maintaining it over time, is as easy as a indie game. If a indie and AAA game gets equal resources to port game to Linux, I can see AAA being far more difficult. And even if both games are ported, I can imagine the AAA one breaking over time because of a dependency while the simpler indie game will have higher probability of not breaking because of less software involved. I didn't mean to sound authoritarian, I just am not convinced that referring to indies releasing on Linux is entirely valid when asking why AAA games aren't. Some software used for smaller games seems to be ubiquitous, which may explain one of reasons why indies are more prevalent on Linux.

Quoting: slaapliedjeI was wondering about Exodus the other day. In the discussion forums on Steam it sounds like they're still working on it? But I mean it's been on Stadia since forever.. so if the theory is it's just a direct thing to release a game on Stadia onto Steam with Linux support... maybe that's the one that proves it's not the case?

Sadly a lot of the 'do we port to Linux' is politically based more than financially based. Like Doom (2016) literally having a Linux port made for fun, but was never published / released.

Perhaps the holdup is 4A Games using good time because they plan to release a Redux with Vulkan raytracing. Metro Last Light port wasn't a great port. or perhaps Google has a NDA exclusivity contract with developers that prohibits them from releasing their games for Linux if they want to release for Stadia. Think about it, local play is a competitor to Stadia, whether you are on Windows, Linux or a device like Switch. A "insignificant" platform like Linux can be surely swept under the rug if a big company tries to undermine it through such tactics.

I think it's former, 4A taking good time to give us a good release. Afterall, after Epic exclusivity ended they released their game on GOG too. That must be a good sign.

Remember back in the days when the various computer platforms were around and companies still managed to release games for all of them? DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Machintosh? They not only had a wide variety of hardware, but also of operating systems. People tended for some reason to target the minimal Atari ST spec, the upper spec on the Amiga, and DOS / Machintosh usually got CGA / EGA versions until VGA had a lot more users. But DOS devs had the huge task of trying to figure out which hardware was popular to add support for that. But they still did it, even though DOS was definitely not a gaming platform, and not friendly to it. But still a huge majority of games were made for it as that's what systems people had. Then the 3D hardware wars happened, where there were so many APIs for people to target...

It wasn't until Windows and DirectX that there was an abstraction layer for everything. We basically have SDL that is similar, but it took a long time for that to be a thing.

But now that we have it, and we have better drivers, and a free OS, you'd think people would flock to it. Nope, because we are historically a community that is against closed source, DRM, etc. And GAME developers are ALL about the DRM.

And this is the main reason I think most games don't come to Linux. That and 'well they won't even pay for their OS, why would they do anything other than pirate our game' mentality.

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Quoting: LinuxwarperI think the expectations of companies porting to Linux is somewhat unreasonable in general. If a company does so, goes through major work to provide a quality release where they target Ubuntu, and then the return on investment is low - why should they? And the assertion that "Indies can manage to make games for many distros why can't big companies???!" is such cloudy argument. Indies are small games with simple design that are easy to scale to Linux. Where as when you are developing a major game like AC Valhala or Cyberpunk, even representing cars in the game becomes a huge project in itself. You have tech like DLSS and raytracing. If big games were so easily and cost effective to release for Linux as indies are, then you would surely have seen raytracing for many if not all indie games. And I am not talking about "We have raytracing", I am talking about shadows, global illumination and reflections.

Quite honestly such argument is nonsense. Looking at a indie game being available on Linux and then asking why big games can't be either. I don't know it all, but one thing I know I should expect from developers it is to provide Vulkan renderer and get involved with Proton issues for their games. If a company decides to port their games, then find out the business isn't there for them then they will give up on Linux in a sour way. I hope Proton will increase marketshare and raise awareness so that Linux gets to that point that more games will be worth it.

It may be a unpopular opinion, but tell me friends..where is that Metro Exodus port we were told would come? If major games like it are so profitable on Linux, why are they so few and far in between? I feel like by time a new major game is released for Linux (year or years later) the Windows version should be very playable through Proton and cost much less ($10 vs $50+).

I was wondering about Exodus the other day. In the discussion forums on Steam it sounds like they're still working on it? But I mean it's been on Stadia since forever.. so if the theory is it's just a direct thing to release a game on Stadia onto Steam with Linux support... maybe that's the one that proves it's not the case?

Sadly a lot of the 'do we port to Linux' is politically based more than financially based. Like Doom (2016) literally having a Linux port made for fun, but was never published / released.

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Quoting: Eike

In other Microsoft-related news, Microsoft opened up their Windows calculator application back in early 2019. Now, developers from Uno Platform have ported that over to Linux too because why the heck not. You can grab that from the Snap store if you want to try it.

That's the one that still doesn't do multiplications before additions by default. Why the heck not? :grin:

Is that what they call Common Core? :P

2020 has been a weird year, that's all I can say...

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Quoting: Linuxwarper

Quoting: FrawoTotally agree with this, but I still want Stadia to succeed anyway. Because if it does, it could convince more companies to choose Vulkan over DX12 in the first place, as they would have near to no trouble porting their stuff to Stadia. Linux users would benefit from Vulkan, even if there would be no Linux version at all. And I don't like the idea of MS dominating the graphics api market again...

I really hope CDPR already regrets being tied to DX12, especially now against the background of their crunch time.

What if Stadia's success turns to dominance, and Google makes streaming exclusive deals? Then you would be trading in one evil with another. I wouldn't worry much about Microsoft dominating, Valve seems to be committed to improving gaming on Linux. They are not only improving Proton (DX11/DX12 games) but they are also providing VR support. I hear the VR support isn't perfect, but neither was Proton either if you look back to when it all began.

I wouldn't judge CDPR so harshly. Crunch or no crunch at least their game practices are largely good. Where as other companies I bet do crunch on top of filling their games with ads, drm, micro transaction and other awful things. We will see what kind of company CDPR truly is with Cyberpunk and Witcher nextgen. But whatever they do, hateful or angry posts will never help to change the situation.

You know what is a crazy thought?

Look at where we are now and where we were 8 years ago, pre-steam on Linux... we had a couple attempts at porting houses that had disappeared, and we had open source games and engine recreations. That was about it. MS putting fear into Valve pretty much have given us so many games I couldn't keep up, and I tried for a while!

With proton and the HUGE advances Wine has made, it is almost seemless and so many of us can just ditch Windows now. But I can't help but think that Google with Stadia should be helping us out here... like they should make it part of the deal that the port is to be released on desktop Linux at 6 months or a year later. As it is though they basically are exclusives for a platform I will never own.

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Cool, now users of this can also see the warning about your private voice chat being recorded so people can rat on you if they feel like it?

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Quoting: Dunc

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Duncthe A1200 ... I've got four of them sitting around not doing much, but never had a “big box” Amiga with a wired keyboard.

I'll take one off your hands...

I keep meaning to put a couple up on eBay, but I'd rather fix them up first and get some decent money rather than selling them as untested for parts. I know, for example, that they were cannibalised in various ways (although not especially heavily) to keep one good one running back when I was still using it as a daily driver, so there's no guarantee that any of them works.

The weird thing is, I never set out to collect them or anything. I don't know where they all came from. I remember buying one, back in the day, and I think one came from a friend of my brother's. I've a vague recollection that another maybe came in a job lot with a PC about 20 years ago, but that's far from certain. And it still leaves one. :huh:

They secretly reproduced when you weren't looking. I keep my 4000s in separate rooms. Maybe I should put them together and hope for the best?

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: slaapliedjeMy guess has always been that it's just a massive virtualization platform that spins up a new VM instance whenever someone launches a game. That'd make far more sense than them porting Dx12 games over as quick as they have been.

Except it's not the case. Stadia is using Debian Linux + Vulkan. See here:

https://stadia.dev/intl/en_us/about/ [External Link]

Scroll down there and click "See Software Stack".

Huh, at this point I'm more interested as well into this...

Custom 2.7 GHz hyperthreaded x86 CPU with AVX2 SIMD and 9.5 MB L2+L3 cache

Custom AMD GPU with HBM2 memory and 56 compute units capable of 10.7 teraflops

16 GB of RAM with up to 484 GB/s of performance

How much cash did Google hand off to AMD for this? (I can only guess they're using AMD CPUs there too?)

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Quoting: rustybroomhandle

Quoting: rustybroomhandle

Quoting: Comandante Ñoñardo

Quoting: rustybroomhandleWish people would stop thinking that Stadia's tech is some huge mystery we have to speculate about. There is info on the web site and there have been very detailed talks by developers. Maybe a recap article that consolidates all of this stuff might help people get off this weird trip.

Nobody doubt that Stadia is Debian + Vulkan...

The doubts are if the big games are actually ported to Debian + Vulkan when they could be just Windows games running on Debian + Vulkan via Proton alike compatibility layer, being that the cheapest way according to the mentality of those big publishers.

Maybe Google is earning money using DXVK and the author doesn't even know it.

Also no doubt at all there. The talks from Bungie, ID etc talk about the porting process. They are native ports.

Start here:

https://youtu.be/cEQkPe-H05I [External Link]

Well that's even more of a kick in the dick.

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