Live data from Hacker News

Valve joins the Linux Foundation

thenextweb.com

181–190 of 301 posts

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well linux have 10 main desktop managers that are under development right now. Each and every one of them does roughly 80% of what I want from a desktop. And I have uncomfortable experience on all.

Nonsense. There are, at best, a handful of desktop environments targeted at daily desktop users: Unity, KDE, Gnome-Shell, maybe LXDE/Razor if you're being generous. I've love to hear a single specific complaint about an experience you had with KDE that isn't "it was different from windows", especially given that it's the closest to the Windows daily interactions.

Unity, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, Gnome 3, and I have tried to just go with openbox and Tint2.

First - it is different than windows is absolutely valid complaint. Having to tweak muscle memory is highly unpleasant.

A single problem with KDE - windows key cannot be mapped to show the start menu without extension.

Second is that all the taskbars that I found for it were just worse than the windows one in multimonitor setup or ugly.

Also Alt+Tab worked inconsistently.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 syst…

  >  You need the correct libraries and versions, but that's not a difficult problem to solve
Or just ship statically linked binaries. That seems like it would be a good solution for games.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a desktop manager? I know about desktop environments, of which there seem to be 4-5 for Linux, and I know about window managers, of which there are many, thankfully. Please list the "10 main desktop managers" so I can familiarize myself with them. Thanks.

Haha, you've gotta love these armchair Linux critics man.

Indeed, call a person that sincerely tries for the last 3 months to move to Linux as a daily driver armchair critic.

I could live with slightly wooden DE, I could live with the fact that my speakers are buzzing while there are phones connected.

The only real dealbreaker is lack of decent file search in Linux. I want something that delivers the speed of search of Everything and has realtime update. No luck so far.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, you've gotta love these armchair Linux critics man.

Indeed, call a person that sincerely tries for the last 3 months to move to Linux as a daily driver armchair critic. I could live with slightly wooden DE, I could live with the fact that my speakers are buzzing while there are phones connected. The only real dealbreaker is lack of decent file search in Linux. I want something that delivers the speed of search of Everything and has realtime update. No luck so far.

Have you looked into KDE? KDE has a pretty complex file search/tag system called Nepomuk: http://userbase.kde.org/Nepomuk

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> high-end Macs play games just as well as high-end Windows boxes Are you joking? Because even $2000 iMacs come with mobile GPUs. Not to mention CPUs that cannot be overclocked etc. That's comparable to a high-end gaming laptop , not a PC.

> Are you joking? Because even $2000 iMacs come with mobile GPUs. Not to mention CPUs that cannot be overclocked etc. That's comparable to a high-end gaming laptop, not a PC. And what's wrong with high-end gaming laptops? My $1000 MacBook Pro has played everything I've thrown at it acceptably well, and it's not even particularly high-end. It's no longer the mid-90s, when you needed a new $2000 rig every year to keep…

There's nothing wrong with gaming laptops, it's just that both their performance and the experience they provide pales in comparison to a PC. (A PC that costs less, mind you.)

I mean, you cannot realistically say that you can have an immersive experience on a 15 inch, 1600x900 monitor when it comes to graphically intensive games.

Also, with CPU bound games like Arma overclocking can result in a difference of 15-20 fps.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, call a person that sincerely tries for the last 3 months to move to Linux as a daily driver armchair critic. I could live with slightly wooden DE, I could live with the fact that my speakers are buzzing while there are phones connected. The only real dealbreaker is lack of decent file search in Linux. I want something that delivers the speed of search of Everything and has realtime update. No luck so far.

Have you looked into KDE? KDE has a pretty complex file search/tag system called Nepomuk: http://userbase.kde.org/Nepomuk

Nepomuk is indexer, and I am not sure it starts indexing on volume mount, also not sure if it is hooked into fnotify. Everything is reads straight from the NTFS journal - it is really smart little utility that has become my main launcher for everything. But I have not found current in development project that could be used like that - rlocate was closest but it is dead from 3 years.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#187
post #82

Earlier 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…

> There's an estimated 20 million Ubuntu users worldwide, probably another 10 million or so of other Linux distros. And there's 60 million Mac users worldwide, and it was asserted that that's not enough for a good gaming platform. You can't have it both ways. If Linux is a good platform for games (and it may be), then OSX necessarily is as well.

Add to this the fact that only some fraction of those 30 million linux users are interested in gaming.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> high-end Macs play games just as well as high-end Windows boxes Are you joking? Because even $2000 iMacs come with mobile GPUs. Not to mention CPUs that cannot be overclocked etc. That's comparable to a high-end gaming laptop , not a PC.

> Are you joking? Because even $2000 iMacs come with mobile GPUs. Not to mention CPUs that cannot be overclocked etc. That's comparable to a high-end gaming laptop, not a PC. And what's wrong with high-end gaming laptops? My $1000 MacBook Pro has played everything I've thrown at it acceptably well, and it's not even particularly high-end. It's no longer the mid-90s, when you needed a new $2000 rig every year to keep…

well one problem is that you have always had to buy the most expensive macbook / mac to get any sort of dedicated GPU. they've never had a GPU in anything but the absolute most expensive mac. besides that, apple has always had poor opengl software and driver support. they just released opengl 4 support with mavericks and touted it as a big deal, but it's opengl 4.1, which was released in 2010.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 syst…

> You need the correct libraries and versions, but that's not a difficult problem to solve Or just ship statically linked binaries. That seems like it would be a good solution for games.

> Or just ship statically linked binaries. That seems like it would be a good solution for games.

Yup. That's what Steam does...

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked into KDE? KDE has a pretty complex file search/tag system called Nepomuk: http://userbase.kde.org/Nepomuk

Nepomuk is indexer, and I am not sure it starts indexing on volume mount, also not sure if it is hooked into fnotify. Everything is reads straight from the NTFS journal - it is really smart little utility that has become my main launcher for everything. But I have not found current in development project that could be used like that - rlocate was closest but it is dead from 3 years.

Nepomuk is not the indexer, Strigi is. And Strigi has inotify support AFAIK.

EDIT: This is an older post, but I think it shows exactly that: http://www.afiestas.org/nepomuk-is-not-fast-is-instant/

Post reply on HN