71–80 of 220 posts
Like Adobe Flash with Linux, Valve's effort will suffocate on the need to support hundreds different linux distributions and configurations complete with crappy drivers and audio/video subsystems. Three years is my estimate.
Looks like this is going to be reality, Phoronix just published the promised article[0] which basically claims that Valve have ported L4D/Source over to Linux already! Exciting news indeed, AAA-titles for Linux could turn the desktop OS market upside down. [0]: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve...
That is interesting news, but turn the OS market upside down? You can't be serious.
The advantage of Linux is that you can take the pieces that suit your needs, replace the others with your own modules and presto, you've got an OS.
Then you can build the hardware for it and bam, you've got a killer machine meant for consumers.
Android may be a bad example here, but think of Tivo. Think about it, suddenly every PC maker can assemble some hardware together and call that a games console.
The missing piece for Linux was always the software, like games and Adobe Photoshop and MS Office. If Linux gets the support it needs for the games that people love, then I could see its popularity going through the roof.
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OSS is dead for five years or more. These days you either have a direct ALSA, or Pulse, which ALSA can stream to transparently. If you have a SDL+ALSA game you will see exactly zero problems and that's what everybody does. OpenGL support is pretty solid too.
> OSS is dead for five years or more. OSS on Linux may be dead but OSS is still the API on other free unixes like *BSD's and the API has been developed forwards. > If you have a SDL+ALSA game you will see exactly zero problems and that's what everybody does. With SDL, you're stuck with the lowest common denominator of all audio API's. I've had more than my share of problems when doing audio with SDL. If you want 3d a…
Same could be said for Direct3D. It has its own share of pitfalls. Apart from that MS completely changes the API between versions, making porting difficult, and making it hard to gracefully fall back on old hardware without supporting multiple APIs... I wouldn't say one is inferior to the other.
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That is interesting news, but turn the OS market upside down? You can't be serious.
I think it has the potential. It always had. Android already turned the mobile market upside-down. The advantage of Linux is that you can take the pieces that suit your needs, replace the others with your own modules and presto, you've got an OS. Then you can build the hardware for it and bam, you've got a killer machine meant for consumers. Android may be a bad example here, but think of Tivo. Think about it, sudden…
In what way did Android 'turn the mobile market upside-down'?
The mobile market turned itself upside-down, and Android was just one of the players, along with (in historical order) Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iOS, and as one of the last to arrive on the scene, Android.
Not to start a mobile OS flamewar or anything, but I can honestly not think of a single way Android 'turned the mobile market upside down'. It's just a commodity mobile OS like most of the others. That it ended up on the majority of smartphones sold is IMO what you would call a serendipity.
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At the moment? Anything (pre Rage?) by ID and all the HumbleBundle games. On the other hand, all the pieces are in place: OpenGL support is pretty good and lots of games actually work well enough under wine. That probably means that if they were compiled directly against winelib (as Google did with the Picasa Linux client) they would work just fine. Anything that already runs on OSX is probably an easy port, given so…
Not all the Humble Bundle games. I can't run Super Meat Boy on my Intel GM45.
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Not the only reason: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Linux-users-contribute-twice... Linux users seem (or seemed in 2010) to have money to burn on games (and charity).
I notice this too every time with the Humble Bundle. I mean, go to humblebundle.com right now and Linux wins again. Can anyone explain this?
Fewer games means they're willing to spend more per game;
They want to create an incentive for game devs to port their games;
Linux users are older on average, therefore have more disposable income.
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"I would use Linux only, but I like game X and Y." is incredibly common attitude among people who use dual boot. I'm not making this up, the phrase pops up very often on various forums, especially in context of linux ports for newly announced games. You don't see many complaints about GIMP being inadequate (and with the recent news that will be the end of GIMP complaints), or OpenOffice/LibreOffice incompatibility. Y…
Even with Steam, important games like those Blizzard titles are not available on Linux.
Looks like this is going to be reality, Phoronix just published the promised article[0] which basically claims that Valve have ported L4D/Source over to Linux already! Exciting news indeed, AAA-titles for Linux could turn the desktop OS market upside down. [0]: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve...
That is interesting news, but turn the OS market upside down? You can't be serious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Gaming is really the last bastion of Windows. For the consumer market, yes. As much as I love GNU/Linux and support Free Software, the reality is that pretty much all business runs on Word and, even more so, Excel. Sad, but true.
Not all businesses. I've worked for and with plenty of small businesses where the norm was OpenOffice, running on top of Linux and Mac OS X, with non-technical people having no problem using it (after a period of bitching about it, because people in general are conservative). For example I helped a local kindergarten switch all their computers to Linux and OpenOffice (one in every classroom, plus 4 others used for ad…
You're forgetting active directory and group policy.
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That is interesting news, but turn the OS market upside down? You can't be serious.
"I would use Linux only, but I like game X and Y." is incredibly common attitude among people who use dual boot. I'm not making this up, the phrase pops up very often on various forums, especially in context of linux ports for newly announced games. You don't see many complaints about GIMP being inadequate (and with the recent news that will be the end of GIMP complaints), or OpenOffice/LibreOffice incompatibility. Y…
As happy as I am to see Steam come to Linux, I don't expect Linux to grow much desktop market share as a result. The future of user-facing Linux is Android.