Comment by ekimekim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekimekim | Hacker News Reader

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a) A few years ago it was a sub 1% market share and no games bothered. Now it's a sub 5% (disclaimer: I'm making these numbers up) and i'd say approx 50% of indie games and 10% of AAA bother. We fight because we're slowly winning.

b) A dual boot setup is awfully annoying. I keep a ton of things open in a "i'm in the middle of this" state, and shutting everything down/losing that state in order to reboot is a massive cost, and it means in practice that I only ever boot into windows to play games if I plan on playing a specific game for several hours at least - it means I can't play a game casually. Over time, I've started avoiding windows only games altogether. As for not having a dedicated gaming rig: Space, mainly. And cost, secondly. I could potentially set something up, but I'd need to share monitors/keyboard for practical reasons, which is a ton of setup I don't really have time to get right. Other solutions like a windows VM, same reason.

I completely feel you on b. I always have a set of various folders opened and even with shortcuts it's a pain in the ass to reopen them all (because what's open depends on what I'm doing).

It didn't have to be this way. Linux and UNIX desktop environments used to excel at session management and restoration, but if you can even find the option anymore in your desktop environment of choice, it rarely keeps all of the state from all of the apps you would want.

a) It never hurts to let the developers know you want it

b) In theory, you should be able to hibernate Linux and boot in to Windows

> I'd need to share monitors/keyboard for practical reasons, which is a ton of setup I don't really have time to get right

I use a fairly cheap KVM, which isn't problem free, but is less hassle than swapping cables between my macbook and my PC (used for nothing but games). Even swapping the cables between 2 computers isn't that huge of a hassle ;-)

It's still sub-1% market share. Would you design a site that only works on IE6?

That sounds like an interesting challenge, actually..

No, but I might design one that also works on IE6.

That's not an apt comparison.

- IE6 is strictly, inherently an obsolete platform, running on obsolete OSes and superseded by later versions of the same browser

- No one's talking about making the games work only on Linux.

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