I remember how things used to be just a few years ago, when Blender was still the black sheep of the industry with its horribly unusable UI and its weird non-standard shortcuts and its not-quite-up-to-the-task rendering engine and its limited sculpting and animation capabilities, and it was only a hobbyist project made for kids that could never compete with the top-dollar industry giants that were 3ds Max, Maya et al (*)... and look where we are now. Oh, how things change :)

(*according to said industry giants' marketing departments, as well as their fanboys)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Guys, will you please stop confusing "demand" as in "whining, crying, yelling and practically begging for others to acknowledge me and hear my pleas", with "demand" as in "having enough oomph! to force others to have no option but to acknowledge me and my pleas"? Supply and demand in economics work with the latter kind of demand, not the former; by trying to force your opinions on the gaming industry when you and yours represent a rather pitiful ~1% of their user base, no matter how noble your motives, will get you nowhere - you'll still be completely ignored by the industry, and you'll also miss out on a lot of good games in the meantime via Proton.

The key that will win us the battle is achieving that oomph! (i.e. bring more gamers on the Linux platform) in order to help us push our agenda further, and Proton is the only real way to do that for the time being, not only from a technical point of view but because it is being actively supported and marketed by the foremost company in the PC gaming industry, that is Valve. Whether we like it or not, once again, it's corporate support that will help us take off the way we want/need to, not our oh so noble ideology of free and open source software. You want another example? Check out just how much more helpful is e.g. Red Hat for furthering the Linux cause compared to the FSF. The latter is certainly a welcome and necessary addition to our "arsenal" (if only for helping us to not lose our way and forget what it is we're fighting for in the first place), but it's Red Hat (and other companies of course) that are really furthering Linux when it comes to increasing its oomph! in the desktop market.

Also, re: demand and "getting what we deserve as a platform" - would you also support the BSDs should they start raising a ruckus demanding equal treatment from the gaming industry..? The key word is, of course, "demanding".

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: gradyvuckovic1. PRAISE LORD GABEN AND LORD PHILIP!

2.

Quoting: BeamboomI'm slowly gliding over to the conclusion that Steam Play probably is the solution for gaming on Linux.

Don't get me wrong, I will always be eager to support native binaries, but let's face it: The companies/individuals who work on porting to Linux are way too few and the interest at the game developers too low.

Absolutely. The way I see it, the battle strategy is thus:
Gamers can't game on Linux because there's no games?
Game devs won't port to Linux because there's no gamers?
Fix: Bring the games to Linux, so the gamers can come, then the game devs will follow.

"How do we know this won't kill native games?"

Here's my logic: Why doesn't Linux get more games?

Is it hard to port a game to Linux? No, not now, not with engines like UE4, Unity, Godot, or even the in house engines the likes Ubisoft and EA use, as their software is designed to be flexible so they can easily port to new game consoles and new platforms. We've seen that with Stadia.

Bringing a game to Linux doesn't mean porting it, it means supporting it, and there in lies the issue.

Support is more or less a fixed cost, despite how many customers you have. Support includes testing, checking compatibility, running tests on multiple hardware configurations, providing help staff, etc. That's not happening right now because "not enough Linux gamers to justify that cost".

Proton doesn't just offer porting, it also offers support, kinda. Valve takes the heat of support and supplies the commitment to porting (updating Proton), the game developer just gets sales.

The way I see it, the more people who use Linux for gaming, the more Linux gamers there are, the larger the potential marketplace gets. The more sales those game developers are going to get.

Sure, at first, for some game devs they will weigh up that market and say "Still not worth it to do a native port". But that revenue from Linux sales won't go unnoticed, and eventually it WILL make management of some game developers ask the question, "What are we doing to ensure we're compatible with Proton for those extra sales?".

Then we'll go through a period of time, where game devs are willing to 'half commit' to Linux, putting minimal effort into making their games run via Proton as long as that doesn't represent a large commitment, to enjoy some additional sales. That will result in many games working via Proton that currently don't, which will only increase the number of people who game on Linux.

So at what point does Proton cease to become relevant and suddenly get replaced with native games?

Hypothetically if Linux had 90% of the marketshare right now, would game developers continue letting gamers play their games via Proton? No.

Eventually, Proton ceases to become useful as a compatibility solution with minimal cost, and instead becomes a dependency burden. Just look at the number of times an update to Proton has caused a regression, if you become dependent on Proton, then you're subject to those regressions out of your control.

Supporting a game means testing, ensuring compatibility, performance, etc. Not because you want to, but because you want sales from your customers, and you want the game to run on their systems reliably, because you want those customers to tell their friends to buy the game.

Proton is an extra dependency, extra layer of complexity, an extra drag on performance, etc. When the costs of ensuring high quality Proton compatibility become larger than the cost of just doing a native port, then in my opinion it becomes cheaper and simpler to just do a native port and ensure a high quality result, with no Proton dependency to worry about.

Basically what I'm saying is, I think if Linux gaming gets to say, 10% of the marketshare, Proton will begin to naturally fade out and become replaced with natives anyway. And it will have a heroes funeral.

Right, that's one of the best and most succinct comments I 've read in a long time. Just wanted to get it out of my chest.

Now, my own 2 cents: Valve's Proton incentive is much like inversion of control in software development. Instead of us sitting around twiddling our thumbs and waiting for when the game developers will finally get off their high horses and start porting their games to Linux (which could happen at any point in time between tomorrow and the death of our Universe), we instead take matters into our own hands and make it so that whenever a game is released for Windows, it is "automatically" (in the sense that the developer is not involved in the process) made to also work with Linux. So even if the developers won't give a damn about us, Linux still gets to (...eventually) claim that it is a valid gaming platform able to run modern AAA games, which will bring in more gamers and eventually more proper, native games. So Proton is essentially a very good solution to bypass the "chicken and egg" problem of no gamers = no games but no games = no gamers.

P.S. - By "us" I of course mean the fine people working on Proton, Wine and DXVK (and associated projects like D9VK etc).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: EikeWell, actually "immature" and "world was ending" were part of your statement, too.

I take it that you don't frequent Phoronix and Slashdot much. If so then don't let the curiosity get the better of you, it's not pretty.

I see it as a clash between two diverging factions: From a dev ops (it's larger than that) perspective, 32 bit support is useless and doesn't need to be maintained anymore... On the other side gamers are left with a crippled gaming library. For them, it's just unacceptable.

I think that we all agree that 32bit support has to go, but not yet. The "tooling" required is non existent or not performant enough, from what I understand. The call seems premature.

Am I wrong to think so?

It's not "gamers who are left with a crippled gaming library" that complain about the 32-bit deprecation, Linux doesn't even have that many gamers among its users to begin with; it's people who simply desire a future where Linux is a major player in the desktop OS market, and who realize that the only way to make this possible future into a reality is to make Linux a viable gaming platform, because like it or not, gaming is the #1 reason that Windows is still the #1 OS nowadays.

Canonical being a desktop focused Linux company should have known this better than anyone, so if they really had Linux's best interests at heart, and also if their own interests were really aligned with those of Linux, they should have been best pals with Valve and fighting tooth and nail to realize this dream of making Linux a viable gaming platform, because that would also serve to promote their own interests and increase their market share as Linux's foremost desktop distro. The fact that not only are they not best pals with Valve, but that they also either actively or at least out of ignorance and/or indifference seek to harm Linux's interests by removing 32-bit support and thus break the future of gaming and thus the future of the whole platform in the process, reeks of terrible incompetence - and that's the best case scenario (imho the strange timing of the announcement without any serious warning, along with their weak and not really thought-out arguments against 32-bit support, are more than a bit worrying when one considers their relationship with Microsoft, which of course has every reason not to want Linux to ever become a viable gaming platform).

So, no, 32-bit support does not have to go, at least not until Microsoft itself decides to deprecate it and remove it from Windows; as long as Windows still supports it, which means that vendors still support it, then Linux should also support it, unless the Linux community manages before that time comes to develop a good way to run 32-bit binaries in a pure 64-bit environment with a negligent performance hit. If and when that happens then, by all means, be my guest and deprecate the hell out of it. But not one second sooner.

View this comment - View article - View full comments