What does this mean for Nvidia and AMD?
Nothing. The people that buy 250 watt, 300mm^2 GPUs to play games will continue to buy them.
Battlefield dabbler - my 7970 confirms anecdotally.
Valve joins the Linux Foundation
121–130 of 301 posts
Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation
#122And here it is, straight from the horse's mouth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8PMUvuHK4g
Wow that's the most childish video graphic I've ever seen.
Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious what the user base of gaming focused users in for linux world wide. Linux tends to attract developers rather than users who spend a great deal of money on their gaming hobby. Perhaps I am wrong. Don't get me wrong, I'd love this to work, but it seems like a bit of a stretch to say it will work better than a platform that is already successful at getting people to spend money on games (see Mac App Store, i…
> I'm curious what the user base of gaming focused users in for linux world wide. Linux tends to attract developers rather than users who spend a great deal of money on their gaming hobby. Perhaps I am wrong. I'd wager a good portion of Linux devs are gamers, and likely just dual-boot, have a console, an iPad, etc... Seeing as how the barrier to using Linux is lower than either Windows or OSX, it doesn't really matte…
Barrier to using Linux is not lower than Windows. Windows comes installed on almost every PC sold. Linux does not. Therefore more work is required to use Linux.
I love Linux, but "if a program works on every single other distro.." is disingenuous. I have not once had 100% success with Linux on initial install. There has always been something that needed to be tweaked (usually sound or graphics). No, Windows isn't 100% either, but it's more like 98% while Linux is like 92%. For the majority of people, that 6% difference matters.
Gaming on Linux still needs to catch up. NVidia Optimus support is still being worked on. Most platforms don't ship with the proprietary drivers, which are the ones that are actually good for gaming. And from what I hear, the OSS AMD drivers are good at power management while they suck at gaming and flipped for the proprietary ones. AMD also has a problem where they drop support for cards relatively quickly.
I love Linux so much (Crunchbang, baby) but it's so fragmented that unless things change, gaming on Windows is going to stay easier. I don't see any reason why my family would give up Windows with its large library of games and all that support for Linux with its tiny library and not up to par drivers. That might not work on that distro without some workaround.
Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gabe was the 271st employee at Microsoft[0] and "was the producer on the first three releases of Windows"[1], so I suppose that, even if he hasn't contributed to the very same code as Bill Gates did, there must be an earlier employee who has. I don't estimate his Gates code number to be more than 2. [0] http://www.giantbomb.com/gabe-newell/3040-4498/ [1] http://www.computerandvideogames.com/172835/interviews/creat...
Oh I forgot Gabe worked at MS, in that case, yeah, it must be pretty low. Gabe worked both at Valve and MS, and both companies have submitted code to the Linux Kernel.
Gabe was not just "release producer" at MS, he was the driving force behind windows gaming (port of Doom from DOS to windows)
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/167253-gabe-newell-made-wi...
Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation
#125While this is great, its a bit sad that Valve is mostly doing all of this now, because they fear losing their dominance on windows to the native Store in Win 8.x In the end its a win-win for everyone if it works out, just their motives are questionable.
Before Windows 8, Valve seemingly couldn't care less about Linux! It bothers me how Valve tries to make itself out to be Linux's best friend nowadays. They also talk about open source a lot despite them ever releasing only proprietary software.
Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation
#126It will be interesting to see whether Valve can encourage the move to Linux gaming. Their biggest asset at this time is the distribution model of Steam, but that's not sufficient to get the big publishers to develop for OSX, never mind Linux. Edit: Valve's game list: http://www.valvesoftware.com/games/
OS X is not a good platform for gaming. It has a significantly smaller user base of which only an even more significantly smaller are gamers. Playing on a MacBook (or at least on my MacBook) is impossible, and I wouldn't buy an iMac for gaming. On the other hand, you can put Linux on anything (for free!), from your mom's 2002 pc to the latest generation hot stuff. This means there is indeed a potential, and somebody…
I play The Witcher 2, Skyrim and so on with my rMBP on the Windows 7 partition, while I played Batman Arkham City on the OSX one.
Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Your problem is using Linux Mint... I think you just provided a shining example of the potential problems linux gaming faces...
I've used Steam successfully with Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro... Mint is just a buggy distro, I used it once upon a time, it's simply not stable.
Ubuntu is just a buggy distro, I used it once upon a time, it's simply not stable.
Fedora is just a buggy distro, I used it once upon a time, it's simply not stable.
Arch is just a buggy distro, I used it once upon a time, it's simply not stable.
We could play this game all day to make stinkytaco's point.
Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Gaming doesn't work on OS X because it has too small a user base, but Linux's user base is much smaller. There's an estimated 20 million Ubuntu users worldwide, probably another 10 million or so of other Linux distros. Not to mention, Linux (and thus Steam OS) is easily installed. Adoption isn't a problem. Gaming on OSX doesn't work as well as on a PC because you can't put OSX on custom hardware. > As an aside, Lin…
> It's not like every Windows PC has the same screen resolution and hardware, yet it's the biggest gaming platform... No, but it has excellent binary compatibility, long term game APIs, and stable 3D and audio driver APIs. Which is what matters for desktop gaming, and what Linux does not have. As for screen resolution and hardware capabilities, those matter on mobile (e.g iOS vs Android), and mostly for applications,…
Linux has good enough binary compatibility. I have seen 32-bit applications built on RHEL 2.1 run on RHEL 5. You need the correct libraries and versions, but that's not a difficult problem to solve. See AppCafe[1] by PC-BSD. You may use it if you use plugins on FreeNAS. Lets say that you need fifteen copies of SDL installed to ensure that you can support ten years of games. This is not a problem for a Unix/Linux system with existing tooling.
Stable 3D depends on the hardware and drivers, but gaming already has hardware requirements for graphics and it's getting much better. As far as OpenGL support, recent posts on HN lead me to believe that we are doing okay.
Audio compatibility? Support ALSA and OSS.
Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would hardly call it worst. It does not have the most intuitive UX, but once you get used to it it's quite nice and gets the job done. And it's open source (royalty free). I like it. I'd call it PS-incompatible. Would be nice to see a study on two control groups who each either start learning PS or GIMP for a few weeks and see how they get common tasks accomplished and how they feel about their control group softwa…
Started with Paint.net, went to Gimp, then to Photoshop and currently jumping between Gimp and Photoshop. Bear in mind, I'm a developer who sometimes has to dabble in graphics. I only use GIMP because I can't afford the license on my home computer, and my university supplies my Photoshop license. While I think gimp has the potential to be great, the UI and workflow is painful in comparison to PS. For instance, take c…
> GIMP. Select the selection tool(why???)
Mainly because 99% of learning Gimp is learning how to use selections properly. Gimp is for image manipulation, not drawing buttons.
If that's the kind of stuff you're doing, use Inkscape. Do the Tutorials under the Help menu. They're really excellent and it sounds like exactly what you're looking for.
Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a gamer, why would that be?
Because game companies will likely delay games, cut corners to get cross-platform and claim its too hard, but still charge the same price for less content. If that makes sense.
I doubt it.
Most indy studios use a tool like Unity or gameplay3d to build games, which can already target Linux.
Triple AAA titles from studios like EA already have OpenGL ports for the PS3/PS4, so it's just a matter of adding a layer to interact with X and the input APIs. With their huge amount of resources and budgets, this is child's play.