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Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

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Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#261

Post by madez »

wtracy wrote: post #246
madez wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If their one shot release isn't good enough, they deserve all the flak they are getting. I do have empathy with them getting frustrated, but the root cause is their approach.

The original post in the thread basically said that Linux support is easy if you just make a new release every time the libraries you depend on make a breaking change. (Or a GCC update breaks binary compatibility for everything .) Even if an initial release of a Linux game is flawless, it tends to stop working with the next major distro release. (Unless it's statically linked to everything , or uses something like Fl…

I understand the business aspect that the Hollywood model is possibly incompatible with games in free software systems (i.e. "Linux"). There are other business models to make games, though.

The problems are real and I think it is natural that they are there, because the movie model is suboptimal. I see similar pains with Android device manufacturers and updates to released devices. That pain is because they are doing it wrong (i.e. not mainlining and doing things binary). That pain is a feature, not a bug. It is a constant reminder that the approach is wrong.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#262

Post by huhtenberg »

60654 wrote: post #47

This is a pretty well-known effect in gamedev. The specific numbers change, but Linux sales are only a small percentage of total, while generating much more development and support work. At least dev work can be drastically simplified with middleware like Unity, which is how small studios can even consider Linux. But support difficulties are real. Players have so many possible distros, configurations, and drivers - a…

But for a game that is built on Unity, wouldn't these support issues be Unity's responsibility? Assuming the issues are triggered by their glue layer.

What's the arrangement there, does anyone know?

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#263

Post by sephoric »

rkido wrote: post #53

Linux is the perpetual scapegoat. They selected a middleware, Coherent UI, that didn't work properly on anything but Windows. They also didn't make proper use of the Steam runtime, a mistake that continues to cause issues. Most games don't make these mistakes, so this isn't really representative of the larger state of Linux gaming. It's worth pointing out that the devs did make a legitimately good attempt at making L…

From the article:

> "We eventually laid out a guide with known good versions of Linux and graphics drivers, but it didn't matter. Part of the allure of Linux is the customizability, so few actually stuck to it, and generally wanted to run the game on older hardware we didn't support."

It seems that it's because Linux users are unwilling to upgrade their hardware. From a philosophical standpoint, I agree with them, we shouldn't need to buy a new computer every 3-5 years, it's very wasteful and I am very against planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence. That said, I can see the benefits of writing code to work on the machine you have in front of you, and not doubling your QA work by testing it on older machines that no longer even receive OS upgrades.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#264

Post by pjmlp »

kurtisc wrote: post #256
pjmlp wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if we forget about the work done by Symbian, Psion, Microsoft, Compaq, Dell in portable Touch devices.

How did the demand work out for Symbian, Psion, and Microsoft phones?

Pretty well in Europe and Asia, until a certain company in Mountain View decided to screw Sun and offer a mobile OS for free to OEMs., in exchange for user data.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#265

Post by pantalaimon »

klodolph wrote: post #170
zanny wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like more something to blame the Debian family over than the whole ecosystem. I might be running "bleeding edge" on Arch but I can still depend on and use libcurl3 with the libcurl-compat package. I maintain about two dozen software packages in the AUR, including some really old stuff like the Heretic 2 Linux release from 1999 and RBDoom 3 BFG which has a boatload of dependencies. Breakages are extremely…

I don't think it's Debian, because Debian tends to have compatibility packages for old versions too. For libcurl there's libcurl3. It depends on the package, of course.

Only for so long - try installing qt3 on a recent Debian or Ubuntu.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#266

Post by bwat49 »

taway_1212 wrote: post #219
WAthrowaway wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>daily struggle that is desktop Linux lol what year is this? 1999? but I agree with the rest of your points

Tried installing Linux on MBP last month. Ran away screaming after 30+ hours of dealing with drivers issues. I do this every couple of years, hoping that finally THIS time I can get off Windows. Next attempt will be circa about 2021 probably.

Installing linux on a Mac is your problem. Macs are notoriously a huge pain when it comes to linux compatibility. Tbh even windows isn't that great on a Mac...I'd just stick to OSX on a mac.

When it came time to replace my old macbook air, I got a dell xps 13 and linux works great on that. All of the hardware works out of the box without having to do anything with drivers.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#267

Post by shadowoflight »

taway_1212 wrote: post #219
WAthrowaway wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>daily struggle that is desktop Linux lol what year is this? 1999? but I agree with the rest of your points

Tried installing Linux on MBP last month. Ran away screaming after 30+ hours of dealing with drivers issues. I do this every couple of years, hoping that finally THIS time I can get off Windows. Next attempt will be circa about 2021 probably.

> Linux on MBP

Well there's your problem. The companies that make the custom hardware that Apple uses in their laptops refuse to release driver support for Linux for basically the same reasons as the writer of this Tweet. Whether the fault for this is on Apple or the manufacturers is up for debate, but driver compatibility with Apple's laptops and anything but macOS has always been a crapshoot and only became decent for Windows in the last few years.

Note: This is coming from an Apple fan who has been wanting to try out dual booting a Linux distro or one of the BSDs but has watched support tickets get answered with "testing MBP drivers on Linux isn't worth our time" from multiple OEMs.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#268

Post by nybble41 »

wtracy wrote: post #148
bryanlarsen wrote: post #45

Part of the problem in 2019 is that the vendor with the best drivers on Windows is the vendor with the worst drivers on Linux. (aka Nvidia).

Care to elaborate? Nvidia used to be the only discrete GPU manufacturer that had Linux support worth mentioning. I know that AMD/ATi has made a lot of progress, but is Nvidia really the worst at this point?

I believe nVidia is the only major GPU manufacturer left without full-featured open-source drivers. nVidia was once the best GPU manufacturer for Linux on PCs but they proved unable to make the leap from proprietary drivers to OEM-supported open source; Nouveau exists as a community effort but remains well behind the AMD/Intel equivalents. IMHO, assuming you get to choose your GPU, the only reason to mess around with nVidia's proprietary drivers at this point would be support for CUDA—there are still some apps which only support CUDA acceleration and not OpenCL, and AFAIK CUDA remains exclusive to nVidia hardware.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#269

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

stcredzero wrote: post #259
rkido wrote: post #53

Linux is the perpetual scapegoat. They selected a middleware, Coherent UI, that didn't work properly on anything but Windows. They also didn't make proper use of the Steam runtime, a mistake that continues to cause issues. Most games don't make these mistakes, so this isn't really representative of the larger state of Linux gaming. It's worth pointing out that the devs did make a legitimately good attempt at making L…

Most games don't make these mistakes...it seems they weren't aware of some other best practices. I see this time and time again. Game developer runs into one of the difficult subjects in computer science/programming. Dismisses the difficulty. Gets themselves into trouble. Blames the library/product/platform. The last time I was at a game jam, I found myself explaining generational garbage collection to a game dev. He…

> I see this time and time again. Game developer runs into one of the difficult subjects in computer science/programming. Dismisses the difficulty. Gets themselves into trouble. Blames the library/product/platform.

Members of this particular team worked on the highly acclaimed Total Annihilation (1997) and Supreme Commander (2007) so inexperience or lack of technical expertise seems unlikely to be the cause here.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#270

Post by michaelmrose »

taway_1212 wrote: post #219
WAthrowaway wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>daily struggle that is desktop Linux lol what year is this? 1999? but I agree with the rest of your points

Tried installing Linux on MBP last month. Ran away screaming after 30+ hours of dealing with drivers issues. I do this every couple of years, hoping that finally THIS time I can get off Windows. Next attempt will be circa about 2021 probably.

Try this is an exercise instead pick a random dell. Attempt to install OSX on it. Post about how huge a hassle this was and how the end result was a non functioning brick and OSX still isn't ready.

If you google computer model linux. If the result is 17 pages of results about how it didn't work you may want to try a different model.

Generally how well your machine is supported is a function of how hostile your oem is towards openness, how different from existing hardware your machine is, how common it is, and how much time people have had to add support.

Current macs aren't well supported. Supporting all hardware under the sun is a Sisyphean task and ultimately an unimportant one. For Linux to be useful it doesn't have to support all possible machines just a good range of hardware.

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