Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0% • Hacker News Board

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#171

Post by jokethrowaway » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:17 PM UTC

msravi wrote: post #30

I made Linux Mint the primary OS on my son's first laptop some 3-years ago when he was around 12, and he's taken to it like a fish to water. He's even taken to using regolith as his (tiling) window manager now, and prefers to use vim for programming (python/julia/c) rather than any IDE. Also have Mint installed on my mom's laptop - she only uses the browser and is ok with it - she has no idea of what an OS even is. I…

That's a great idea.

It may be too late for me but my sons will be ninja developers who use vim like pros, instead of that Microsoft electron behemoth.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#172

Post by trasz » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

Zambyte wrote: post #151

aitchnyu wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, is there anti-cheat that doesnt need a locked down OS and hardware? Dont understand what you are cheering for.

Yes, and the ones that don't have crazy requirements already work fine. Unfortunately a lot of people don't care about running malware (see: the % of people who still use Windows). Lots of those people would be more likely to switch if they could run their malware on GNU/Linux.

How does the anti-cheat malware suddenly stop being malware when run under Linux?

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#173

Post by weare138 » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

junon wrote: post #145

83457 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that those are anti-cheat clients that are required by many games to be able to play online. Not being able to run on Linux means the game will never see Linux adoption.

The trade-off is that you have literal malware on the machine that is controlled by a third party company that most likely doesn't have their security practices up to snuff.

Sure it sucks but ultimately it's the user's decision and Proton will allow the porting of other Windows apps. If you can use it to run a AAA game it could easily handle business apps. I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say they'd switch to Linux but can't because it doesn't run [insert some Windows app here]. It's a net gain for Linux adoption.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#174

Post by wizzwizz4 » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:19 PM UTC

gear54rus wrote: post #165

junon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trade-off is that you have literal malware on the machine that is controlled by a third party company that most likely doesn't have their security practices up to snuff.

So whats your solution? Let cheaters run around?

Anticheat without malware has been around for ages: simply don't trust the client. Even Minecraft servers manage it.

Instead of playing a constant game of cat-and-mouse trying to prevent forbidden code from running when you can just plug in a USB rubber ducky, put the logic server-side. Ban problematic behaviour, as opposed to methods that might result in problematic behaviour. It takes some ingenuity, but what are gamedevs known for if not ingenuity? (Well, apart from withstanding abusive working environments for long enough that they can be profitably discarded, traumatised, after they can no longer function as effectively as a green new intern… but let's focus on the ingenuity.)

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#175

Post by q3k » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:19 PM UTC

bantunes wrote: post #62

I hope Linux with this Proton compatibility layer doesn't go the way of OS/2 of being so easy to run Windows games that nobody writes Linux ports anymore and as a consequence the performance and overall experience is never as good.

It doesn't help that the Linux ecosystem makes it really difficult to build truly portable truly native binaries.

Static builds? Well, that will work... But wait, you want OpenGL or Vulkan? You'll need a dynamic linker to load system .so's, as that's the standard API available to interact with these APIs on Linux. Want to load dynamic libraries? Well, you'll need to ship a dynamic ELF [1]. Shipping a dynamic ELF with glibc now? Hope you don't intend to run on NixOS or Alpine or any distribution that has an old glibc. Maybe also ship ld-linux.so, all of /lib you depend on and a wrapper shellscript that sequences startup accordingly via that ld-linux.so. That will work, but you still need to load the system OpenGL or Vulkan .so's. Have fun implementing that to work well on every distribution! Remember to respect terms of GPL/LGPL software you now ship. Oh, and I hope you don't use Qt.

Maybe you want to use flatpak? Well, better explain to your users that they need to install and configure it, and make sure whatever proprietary Nvidia drivers they have are also properly flatpak'd. What about the alternatives, something like AppImage/Snap? Those just don't work on Alpine and other non-glibc distributions. Whoops.

Pick an audio API. Pulseaudio? Some people don't run it. ALSA? Good luck, some people run Pulseaudio with ALSA emulation disabled. OSS? Dead, unless someone runs padsp. Pray your users don't run JACK. You'll probably end up on OpenAL, which is now proprietary and/or has an LGPL fork (remember you now have to let users re-link against any other version of OpenAL!).

I sometimes make games and other small interactive demos. I run Linux, and want to send builds to friends also running Linux. The easiest way to distribute these is to build and ship a .exe on a Windows build host and get my friends to run it on Wine, that just works everywhere out of the box. And the .exe's end up smaller and launch faster, too!

[1] - Or go for hacks like https://github.com/pfalcon/foreign-dlopen

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#176

Post by Kaze404 » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

aitchnyu wrote: post #136

Zhyl wrote: post #74

A headline in Linux gaming circles that hasn't hit the wider circuit yet (probably because it hasn't actually been delivered yet) is that Valve are working with Battleye and EAC to get anti-cheat working on Proton for the release of the steam deck. If this happens it will be, without exaggeration, the greatest thing to ever happen to Linux gaming. I'm not expecting a massive increase overnight, but it should mean tha…

Umm, is there anti-cheat that doesnt need a locked down OS and hardware? Dont understand what you are cheering for.

EAC already exists on Linux for Linux games. Only the Windows version is incompatible.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#177

Post by merb » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

vardump wrote: post #57

merb wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Btw Windows built an api based on io_uring https://windows-internals.com/i-o-rings-when-one-i-o-operati...

Nice! Haven't heard about this before, must be something really new? Anyways given extremely high syscall cost due to Meltdown workarounds, batching multiple operations makes more and more sense.

well as far as I know I've read something about it either on lwn or hn and it's really really new. I'm not exactly sure if it is even possible to use.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#178

Post by trasz » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

terlisimo wrote: post #61

deltasixeight wrote: post #19

Just to be fair and balanced I'm a hardcore linux user and gamer and I've tried gaming on linux and I've hit many issues. 365 games on steam and while some windows games work I've hit probably just about every possible issue you can hit with other games. Graphical artifacts, freezing, stuttering, and even full OS reboots. Sometimes I read this thread and scratch my head. I get enthusiasm for FOSS, but enthusiasm to t…

> I get enthusiasm for FOSS, but enthusiasm to the point of delusion I see your point but consider this: 20 years ago you could make the same argument for all aspects of linux, not just gaming. Why use some hobby level OS for serious work when you have Solaris, HP-UX, AIX? Today we have a very usable Linux desktop and pretty much total dominance in the server arena, only because people were at one point "delusionally…

Proprietary Unix systems usually required equally proprietary hardware, which, twenty years ago, was quite a bit more expensive, and also quite a bit slower, than x86.

Also, those proprietary systems usually sucked from the usability point of view, due to being business-oriented.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#179

Post by paulryanrogers » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

fsloth wrote: post #77

deltasixeight wrote: post #19

Just to be fair and balanced I'm a hardcore linux user and gamer and I've tried gaming on linux and I've hit many issues. 365 games on steam and while some windows games work I've hit probably just about every possible issue you can hit with other games. Graphical artifacts, freezing, stuttering, and even full OS reboots. Sometimes I read this thread and scratch my head. I get enthusiasm for FOSS, but enthusiasm to t…

I don't understand why people insist on this shoehorning either. It's like some obscene tribal topos that refuses to die. KDE 1.0 came out in 1998 - 23 years ago (O god I'm old). The discussion of "Linux to replace windows desktop" is over two decades old. In computer age this is something geological. It's like... well, Macintosh came out in 1984. Xerox Alto came 1973. If we go back 5 years we reach Englebart's Mothe…

Games push an OS's limits. So a compatibility layer like Wine is more like trying to implement a browser that implements all of Chrome's API without forking it.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#180

Post by moultano » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #174

gear54rus wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So whats your solution? Let cheaters run around?

Anticheat without malware has been around for ages : simply don't trust the client. Even Minecraft servers manage it. Instead of playing a constant game of cat-and-mouse trying to prevent forbidden code from running when you can just plug in a USB rubber ducky , put the logic server-side. Ban problematic behaviour, as opposed to methods that might result in problematic behaviour. It takes some ingenuity, but what are…

Aimbots need no trust from the server. As long as the client knows things the player doesn't, and there isn't a chain of custody from the physical mouse to the server, you can cheat.