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Comment by zingermc | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately and realistically, this requires you to run Windows. It would be really nice if more games ran on Linux.

Steam runs on Linux and Mac though? Your only issue then is graphics card / graphics card drivers. The games are available, about 1,500 of them last I checked. The best thing that could happen for Linux gaming is that graphics manufacturers start open sourcing their drivers, to the best of their abilities, at least enough to make them usable in games.

> Your only issue then is graphics card / graphics card drivers.

Some developers are only developing for DirectX only. Even some developers who, have in the past (Blizzard) supported Macs, have forgone this in their latest product (Overwatch) because of the additional hassle in doing so.

While this is true, a surprising number of games (using DirectX) run nicely under wine. It's not like 5+ years ago when many titles didn't work and those that did often had problems. Wine now runs a lot of games very nicely.

(Overwatch, unfortunately, seems to be one of the few that doesn't work at all under wine)

You have the same problem on consoles I suppose, but also if companies don't invest in OpenGL or alternative frameworks, then that's another factor. I'm sure there's plenty of other warts to be fixed in Linux as far as gaming is concerned though.

It's still a chicken and egg problem. It's not going away any time soon.

Developers are more inclined to develop for PC, because more people use Windows. More people use Windows, because there is a greater number of games in comparison to other platforms.

It sucks, but thats what it is.

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