Quoting: x_wing

Quoting: vipor29people are plainly sick of windows 10 and rightfully so.let it keep rising.im not saying we will pass the mac numbers but if that keeps happening we might just do that.

I think Corona may be a factor too. Lots of people bored and during last year and LTT and many other youtubers has been showing Linux distros qualities. This unexpected free time probably allowed many to give it a try.

I wish I had more free time :)

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Quoting: BTREThanks Epic and Sega for caring. I'm sure Feral is over the moon at this.

Yeah, this must be like a slap in the face for Feral :(

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: LeopardFor my case ( i'm on NV but ACO and NV are not too far when it comes to shader compiling

How did you compare that? In my experience ACO made stutter a non issue. Especially combined with general shader cache and dxvk pipeline cache.

As far as I understood that is exactly the point: to provide an already built-up shader- and/or (not sure) dxvk pipeline cache for games that have never been touched. Of course the effect differs per games, but for some the already built-up cache can make quite a difference when starting for the first time or entering certain areas for the first time (and only then afaik).

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: jens

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: LinuxwarperYou 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.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: LinuxwarperYou 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?

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I've added this to my library, my first 5 minutes impression is indeed very cool.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: GuestDo you remember two years ago when proton came out and people on this site seriously thought linux gaming numbers were going to radically grow because of it? :)

The numbers grew, didn't they? So how do you know it wasn't because of Proton and Wine progress?

But radically? I don't remember such expectations. Rather, it was expected to help sustaining the growth. And it does. You can see new users commenting all the time how they switched to Linux because of how easy Proton makes playing games for them.

And I would say Linux (gaming) got a lot more general attention and acknowledgment lately, I guess Proton and also Stadio have their share in this. I for example had a very pleasant experience with Kunos (Assetto Corsa Competizione). Linux people reported a Proton issue and it got fixed with a hotfix.
See https://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/index.php?threads/acc-under-linux-proton-issue.64391/ [External Link] (might be visible behind a forum account).

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Not that cool, but I'm (mostly) a patient person, lets wait a bit ;)

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I hope this game will also be released for Ipad's. I have both FTL and this one in my Steam library, but actually I've played FTL much more on my IPad. I guess I would do the same with Into the Breach.

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Quoting: DuncAs with others here, it's going to take a lot more than friendly words for me to trust Microsoft.

Quoting: JanneBut they are clearly a different company than they were 15-20 years ago. Companies consist of people, and as people change, so can companies.

I'm not sure they change all that much. Despite numerous changes in personnel, and even a short (second) period as a successful PC manufacturer, I don't think IBM ever reconciled itself to the fact that it wasn't going to own the PC market in the way it had with previous generations.

I see Microsoft in the same light. It's a company that was founded on the productization of software, playing its cards close to its chest, jealously guarding its source. It's trying to adapt to open source because it sees the way the wind's blowing. But corporate cultures run deep, and it's always going to be an uncomfortable fit. As others have said, I'll begin to believe it when major Microsoft projects - Office, DirectX, even Windows - go open source. I'm not holding my breath.

Well, I'm pretty certain that these older code bases will never go open source. Actually I don't know of any code base of that scale that is still being maintained to ever being open sourced. Waiting for this to happen is just waiting for your own prophecies to come true, thus to only confirm your own believe that Microsoft is the company from the 1980's.
I think that Mircosoft, like all major players, is a pretty big company with a lot of different departments that have now much more independent control than in the early days. Some of these departments (or better the people working and directing there) understood the value of Open Source and made it part of their "department culture", e.g the VS Code team or the .Net Core team. Other departments, Windows and Office, are still more traditional departments and due to history likely not even in a position to change that rapidly (or don't want to change).

To be honest, what would Microsoft (or e.g. NVidia) gain by just dumping these code bases on github? I guess nothing except bad press due to being an old code bases (even the best code tends to rot over time) and may be issues with embedded third party IP. If these companies do go open source, they usually do it with greenfield projects and of course it has to benefit them (which is fine if it's a win-win in the end ).

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