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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

#321

Post by wtracy »

nybble41 wrote: post #268
wtracy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The thing to understand about Nvidia is that they use the same model as Apple: Produce really nice software, and use it to drive hardware sales.

On the driver side, a lot of the features and performance advantages of Nvidia cards are rumored to be largely implemented in software. (Think of things like having a really good optimizing compiler for shaders.) Open sourcing that code would allow other brands to copy a lot of their techniques.

On the application side, Nvidia produces a lot of developer tools (like CUDA) that are either tied to or heavily optimised for Nvidia hardware.

All this means that Open Source is largely antithetical to the way they do business.

OTOH, ATI Linux drivers went through a very rough patch when ATI decided that Open Source meant, "Hey, we can get a bunch of suckers to write drivers for us!" Everyone involved seems to have actually come out the other side stronger for the experience, and I'm very optimistic about their future.

That said, my understanding is that you are committed to Linux, you still get a more robust OpenGL implementation (ATI used to be buggy as sin) and better shader performance with Nvidia hardware/software. The situation is changing rapidly, and I would love to know if the information at the start of this paragraph is out of date.

Now that I've provided an infomercial for Nvidia: I'm willing to defend Nvidia's products, but I'm not really ready to defend Nvidia the company. Even if Nvidia's hardware beats the competition on all the benchmarks relevant to your use case, it's entirely reasonable to prefer choosing a company that is more willing to play nice with the greater community.

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

#323

Post by jenscow »

ken wrote: post #275
andai wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Innumerate person here, does that mean that supporting Mac is a net loss for a business?

It's impossible to say for sure, without knowing people's behavior and motivations. In the past, I've certainly been more likely to buy software if I see it's cross-platform, even if I know I'll never use it on those other platforms. Or it might be a corporate requirement. There are many possible reasons. For example, if a restaurant serves only steak, is it a net loss for them to put a pasta option on the menu, if t…

A "loss leader"

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

#324

Post by jcelerier »

FigBug wrote: post #208
jcelerier wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am developing an open-source DAW with Qt ( https://ossia.io ), to solve the problem you mentioned I used AppImage with great success - of course you have to ship all your libs, but that's what you have to do on macOS and Windows too anyways.

Do you ship any plugins? Do you do a separate AppImage for each plugin?

> Do you ship any plugins?

I used to but I'm switching to a different model

> Do you do a separate AppImage for each plugin?

no, they are just loaded as .so / .dll / .dylib in the ~/Documents/score/addons folder. They can't have further dependencies though.

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

#325

Post by brianwawok »

dejaime wrote: post #125
brianwawok wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you run a business, say software? Or even a non-technical business like window washing or pet walking? If .1% of your pet walking clients made 20% of the complaints, what would you do?

Complaints or tickets? I would bet that in this game's case what is happening is Linux gamers are techy and will properly file tickets and try and be helpful. While windows players will simply do as I do on windows games and leave a negative review. Looking at the game's reviews, first two negative ones: > "wont fit my screen. no setting to scale it correctly... Looks like i have to go buy a new monitor to play this…

They are bugs, due to issues with linux drivers. Not helpful things to improve.

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

#326

Post by kentonv »

_wmd wrote: post #315
kentonv wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no other option, though. If you aren't integrated into the distros' builds, then you have no way of getting your binary updated when a dependency makes an ABI-incompatible change -- much less shipping a single binary that works across all distros. The only reasonable option is to determine a subset of your dependencies which offer long-term stable ABIs, dynamically link those, statically link the rest, and ho…

But there is another option, it was mentioned in the original complaint :) > So it means for every product, have a build for every distro / version combination you want to support. Of course it's a total pain in the ass, but it's still vastly preferable to unfixable bugs sometime in the distant future

I'm not sure how per-distro (or distro-version) builds fix the problem, unless you're committing to continuously produce new builds for future distro versions to account for ABI changes. If you can do that, you can also fix issues with static linking if/when the come up.

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

#327

Post by JAlexoid »

astrodust wrote: post #164
jimmy1 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should they change the way they develop games for 0.1% of their sales? Have you seen how tight the gaming market has become? You need a niche to get any attention. Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity. It would be on the front page here a lone, a site with an enormous audience at minimum once a quarter. It would appear in countle…

Literally nobody cares about Linux gaming. It's not even press-worthy because of SteamOS. Anyone who games on Linux does it for the adventure of the process, not because it's convenient. If you ported your game to the Atari ST or the Amiga you'd get more press and probably more sales.

>adventure of the process, not because it's convenient

There's no need for adventure for me. I prefer to code on Linux and not need to reboot into Windows. Playing games on Linux IS the convenient way for me.

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

#328

Post by JAlexoid »

tcd wrote: post #149
jimmy1 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should they change the way they develop games for 0.1% of their sales? Have you seen how tight the gaming market has become? You need a niche to get any attention. Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity. It would be on the front page here a lone, a site with an enormous audience at minimum once a quarter. It would appear in countle…

> would buy tremendous free publicity. That would not buy food on the table. Most money comes from Windows and what games should be optimized for. See r/choosingbeggars for more entertaining stories on the "value" of "publicity".

Choosing beggars literally think that publicity is payment enough. Linux gamers PAY.

Really a big difference.

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

#329

Post by [deleted] »

plq wrote: post #192
pjc50 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not as easy as it sounds, because funny things happen if you ship your own libc - I remember last time I tried this there were problems with PAM and name services. But that was a number of years ago. Can you ship with your own version of GNOME different from the currently running one?

> Can you ship with your own version of GNOME different from the currently running one? I'm confused. GNOME is a desktop environment. It implements a task bar, a control panel, a way to set your desktop wallpaper etc. Why would you ship GNOME? Maybe you meant shipping a proprietary application that uses a GTK version that is different than the OS-provided GNOME uses? If so, of course you can. GTK is a bunch of shared…

[deleted]

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

#330

Post by jenscow »

wtracy wrote: post #251
deathanatos wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just went through the process of getting NVIDIA drivers working on my brother's dual-boot Ubuntu. Here's the issues we hit: 1. You don't don't get drivers out of the box. The NVIDIA driver is non-free, so Ubuntu's (and other Linux distros') hands are tied here: they're not permitted to distribute it. Getting it is relatively easy (check a box, install a package), but you need to know that you need it, and then figu…

Last time I checked, both AMD and Nvidia expect you to download manufacturer drivers for Windows. I'm willing to jump through similar hoops for Linux. (Incidentally, when someone complains about how hard it is to install Linux, that person has usually never tried installing Windows without using the OEM disc from the manufacturer. Take that away, and Windows becomes a lot harder.) Linux support for Optimus and friend…

Recently I tried to install Windows on some HP Elitebook, a few weeks back.

It didn't have drivers for the graphics card, nor both network interfaces (and several other internal devices). How am I supposed to download the network drivers without a working NIC?? (same machine, like many others, have no troubles with Ubuntu, out-the-box)

It was only so my wife (honest) could play The Sims 4. Fortunately, thanks to the hard work of the WINE developers, it runs flawlessly on Linux (small amount of trickery required for Origin).

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