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Comment by wonko1 | Hacker News Reader

I'd imagine it's because little effort is put into optimizing games for Linux.

Overall, I'd guess the Gabe (having worked at Microsoft) is pretty comfortable with that platform, but likes having Linux their as a hedge (with potential to open up new markets too).

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It's not that people aren't willing to put in the effort to optimize games for Linux, it's the reality of graphics drivers being effectively a massive collection of bugs and special cases for specific titles or common programmer errors. If you have a direct line to the manufacturers like Valve does, you can ask for bugs to be fixed, for specific optimizations, or even for engineers to fly over and tune your shaders. For regular developers, you're happy if your game just works.

> I'd imagine it's because little effort is put into optimizing games for Linux.

I wonder what's changed. Used to be people would reboot into Linux for better performance in Quake.

I don't recall that ever being a thing, and my quake addiction began playing on a cyrix based computer at large (for the time) lan parties.

We did a lot of things to eek out more performance but as far as I recall no one was booting to Linux to do anything except run dedicated servers.

It certainly worked for me. Linux ran SNES9x, Quake, and UltraHLE faster than Windows 95/98. I even got better pings. I stopped doing this around the time Windows 2000 came out.

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