Why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX

There's no way they ever would have exposed DirectX to JavaScript. It's not really admitting defeat to implement a web platform feature that customers want when you have no alternative.

They used to be pushing Silverlight as a way to do 3D rendering (which made sense, because it had the DirectX bindings from XNA and .NET is a superior platform for rendering code when compared with JavaScript) but now that Silverlight and basically every other native plugin is on the way out, there's no way they can lean on that anymore.

Honestly, up until IOS and Android there wasn't a large "cross platform" gaming market. Now there is and OpenGL is starting to gain more use...the good thing there is that there are more people writing, buying, and playing games. (Not that OpenGL is being used.)

These vehement kinds of slashdotty style articles about MS's being this controlling conspiracy...you would almost think that...gasp...its a large corporation doing everything it can to make money for its shareholders. I mean, if the roles were somehow different and Apple were the market leader for the most popular gaming platform they would be all sweetness and light and no one would have any reason to complain. (Oh wait...)

It turns out that businesses in that position tend to make "lock in" plays. This post kind of glosses over SGI's history with OpenGL as if they were only ever kind and loving shepherds of an open standard that was created to help children.

Don't use directx cuz "evil" is stupid. If you were writing an application that needed to be cross platform...like a 3D authoring environment...you would probably want to look at opengl. (instead of writing your own...) If you were targeting the windows ecosystem directx has some platform integration features that are interesting. Tooling and developer experience also matter.

This kind of breathless nonsense is boring and silly.

The big problem for OpenGL was (a) Windows platform dominance, particularly in gaming, and (b) weak support for rapidly improving 3D hardware (but that was largely a case of already in progress network effects -- OpenGL drivers suck because very few people care, so even fewer people use OpenGL).

OpenGL was kept on life support in the aughts by high-end 3D products which are often cross-platform (e.g. Maya), and Apple (which switched to OpenGL from QuickDraw 3D after the spectacular failure of the latter -- incidentally OpenGL being "open" was SGI's proactive defense against QuickDraw 3D), and then rebuilt the entire Mac UI architecture on top of it.

OpenGL ES and iPhone have completely revived OpenGL's fortunes -- there's nothing much to worry about now unless Android and iOS both fail in the marketplace.

(It's entertaining that the Stackexchange post linked elsewhere was written more-or-less as a final "this is why OpenGL died" -- it's not dead yet... getting better...)

I don't know anyone that uses desktop Linux, unless I count my sister who I saw using Red Hat at her CAD/CAM workplace four or five years ago. However I am afraid to to state this on HN, given how sensitive and hostile the crowd here can be about Linux.