Hacker News Reader

Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

Some of these results are off. Shadow Warrior, Shadowrun Dragonfall and Shadowrun Returns are marked as not working, but they definitely work, I just played them on Linux (with an AMD gpu and the free driver). They even worked really well. It seems the author does not have a dedicated gpu, I doubt those games would run well on windows with that laptop.

Some other game that worked for me and marked red there: Spaz, Jamestown and Crayon Physics (I think, might have been another version).

To start those games in window mode is a good way to mimize potential errors resulting from Fullscreen mode, especially in different OSs, and something that many Indie games also do on Windows.

Linux sure is not a perfect gaming platform yet, but this article paints a darker picture than necessary.

View on HN

He is marking things as non-playable if they don't install on his version of Ubuntu. A lot of the failures seem to be due to ia32-libs, which was replaced by other packages some time ago.

The current package systems aren't really a great way of distributing software that won't be actively maintained and updated for new distro releases, which is going to be the case for games.

You've really hit the nail on the head with respect to Linux package systems. They're really designed for open source software and have a major blind spot when dealing with projects that are only distributed as binaries and not actively maintained.

I would go so far as to say that they're simply not suitable for binary only distribution unless the owner is willing to maintain the project. Some alternate solution should be used instead--maybe a Docker like solution? Or just Windows/Mac style "pack up all of the dependances, including glibc, and accept that every install is going to be big and bloated".

that's what flatpaks and snaps are

Fair enough, but I've always found it pretty easy to install older versions of whatever libs a game needs. Steam could solve this problem by keeping an up-to-date list of libs a software needs and either installing the older version next to the current one, or alerting the user if they're running a more exotic distro.

I've had hours of fun playing Jamestown on Linux. I think this article reflects a problem the Humble folks have now they've decided that they're a business. Paying customers expect products that work out of the box. Back when the Humble Indie Bundle was a clearly a charity thing it seemed pretty well understood that the Linux ports were done on a shoestring, and I was happy to support the attempt even if I had to muck around with video drivers and potentially hose my X configuration to make things work. Which they usually did and sometimes didn't.

But today, with competition from GoG, Steam, et al., the Humble Bundle is a commercial product with a charity marketing angle, rather than a charitable giving event. Now that it has customers instead of donors, they shouldn't be surprised that they're getting this kind of response.

humble bundle isn't creating the games or porting them to linux AFAIK. Why does their business model matter?

Because it's a business model. It wasn't always. When they started out, they positioned themselves as a charity. That was front and center, everything else was secondary. You were making a donation, and you happened to get some sweet games that might or might not work. Over the years, they've evolved into a business, and now they have customer expectations, instead of donor expectations.

Side remark: The humble bundle actually organized porting games for the bundle, at least in the beginning. And currently they are creating special games for their monthly bundle.

Yep.. I just tried a couple of the games marked red and they all worked for me without problems..

The problem, IME, is that it's so unpredictable as to which games will work, and which wont. I've had games refuse to work that other people say work fine, and vice-versa. The driver/library dependency system for gaming on Linux is a mess, and I think this accurately reflects that.

Sure, some may work better or worse for you, but that's kind of the point.

I agree. It is very nice to buy on steam for that, where you can return the game easily. But it would be a lot nicer if just everything worked.

The driver situation is getting better and better, I think Linux will arrive there. And I hope they find a good solution for the library dependencies, be it snap or static linking or whatever is out there.

> where you can return the game easily.

Is this true now? It's been quite a few years since I've tried, but it was near impossible when I did.

> The driver situation is getting better and better, I think Linux will arrive there.

Agreed. It's not great now, but it is much better than it was 5-10 years ago

Yes, they changed the system. Now you can return games in the first two weeks if not played more than two hours. See http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds.

Shadowrun works pretty well until it pops up a control on the screen with the clickable areas way off from what's displayed on the screen. Like, unplayably bad. Was running an AMD GPU as well, so clearly YMMV.

To be honest, the numbers looked about right to me. X-Com looks great, but is painfully slow...

That iGPU (HD 4400, 20 EU) is more than enough for most of these games. I guess Intel's Linux driver is more buggy than AMD.

My experience has generally been that intel's linux drivers are pretty damn solid and AMDs verge on broken by default. I haven't really gotten a chance to try the new AMD OSS drivers in anger, but I don't have high expectations.

That said, for a long time everyone gushed about nvidia's linux drivers and I found them pretty damn frustrating.

I get much better performance from AMD's open source driver than from their closed-source driver. Ubuntu 16.04 comes with a version of the 4.4 kernel that has the 4.5 driver changes backported.

The driver that ships with Ubuntu is almost certainly old and even though the chip has enough raw computation power to run games the actual support may not be there.

For what it's worth, I've only ever run across one game that didn't work properly in Linux. Eador has badly fubared graphics and apparently the developer doesn't even care. He only did the Linux port to get on a Humble Bundle I think. It's a shame too because it is an interesting game, even if the developer has a somewhat insane notion of how long people are going to want to keep playing a single campaign.

Intel's linux driver isn't necessarily buggy, but doesn't support the same OpenGL version/extensions. If a game needs those, tough luck on Intel.

My brother's laptop has an Intel HD 4xxx (it might be 4440) and it works perfectly. Intel Linux drivers tend to be good in my experience.

There's no such thing as an Intel HD 4440, there's the common 4000 and 4400, and the less common 4200 and 4600. There are no other entries in the 4xxx series of Intel HD as far as I know.

So likely, your brother has a 4400.

I had Sandy Bridge and now I have Skylake CPU. Work fine most of the time, but crash on some games. I don't know why because error messages are usually ambiguous.

I also have Haswell on desktop with Windows, so maybe I can check these games on different systems.

My experience is that Intel cards produce more problems with OpenGL. But not related to Linux, same on Windows. Part of the reason might be that it's not so common for 3D developers to work with Intel cards so those are less tested.

The other side of the coin is that big name GPU manufacturers spend a lot of time working with game developers to fix issues both with the games and with their own drivers. You often see Day 0 driver updates that coincide with major game releases. This kind of constant test and refinement squashes a lot of bugs over the long term.

Intel doesn't do that. You basically get the driver that they originally wrote for your chip and that's it.

The best Intel iGPU I've found by far is the Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200, which came onboard my system76 galago pro. Runs perfectly on my Linux system, plays far more games than I could on my previous laptop (Intel HD 4400 as well, I think).

I even managed to play Borderlands Prequel(?) with a manageable frame-rate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com