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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

> but not serious effort.

Dunno, my Steam Box runs games like Grid Autosport, Mad Max, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex etc. without a single issue, as fast as on Windows (quad i5 + NVidia), and I don't even notice I am on Linux. So thanks to Valve and Feral Interactive, I can slowly move away from Windows to Linux for all my computing needs, not just for programming, Deep Learning and blockchain. What else is missing?

Moreover, I can run a lot of software under Wine, like Adobe CS6 or MS Office, or even many games (it has gotten significantly better lately).

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> Dunno, my Steam Box runs games like Grid Autosport, Mad Max, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex etc.

It runs them now, but none of those games ran on Linux when they first launched. Grid Autosport took 17 months after the initial release, Mad Max took 13 months, Tomb Raider took 3 years (and the 2015 sequel is still not available on Linux) and Deus Ex MD was the only somewhat timely one at 2 months (but the previous game in the series was never ported to Linux at all).

I know not everyone cares about playing games the moment they come out, but many people do. Especially with multiplayer games where the community is most active closer to launch.

If currently Linux has 1% gaming market share, I am thankful they port these games at all. I am one of those early adopters that paid >$1200 for a top end Steam Box, and bought every single AAA game available on Linux even if I might not play them all, just to put my money where my mouth is and perhaps contribute a bit to getting Linux more relevant. It's only going to be because companies will see some money out there as well, so I try to give them what they want.

It's not even 1%.

You might consider saving that money instead of promoting Linux through buying games you won't play.

Compound the interest, and maybe you can find an indie game studio investment instead. That would be a real and substantial contribution that moves the needle.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/looks-like-the-linux-...

That situation will probably change as soon as most games ship with Vulkan: Even if devs devote zero effort to porting to Linux, Vulkan makes it easy to run them with Wine with pretty much the same performance. I can imagine Valve adding Wine automatically with Steam.

Graphics support is only a part of the puzzle. Many devs have never used Linux and know nothing about it. And they hate to learn a new operating system just to support 1% of the players. Building a game for Linux is easy if you already know your way around, but otherwise it can be quite complicated. Valve does offer the compatibility layer (set of system libs like SDL, C++ libraries, etc., that are deployed with the Steam client which your game can use) but this means having to build your game in a chroot environment. Once they see all that, many Windows-only devs just run away.

And then, there are runtime considerations like where you store the player data, cache files, and the case-sensitiveness of the filesystems which many Windows developers are completely unaware of.

So no, Vulcan doesn't give you "zero effort" Linux ports.

Let me put "ports" with quotes. I've played the Windows version of DOOM (2016) in Linux with same performance and didn't do anything special other than copying the configuration that had Vulkan enabled. I can imagine devs just enabling a checkbox in Steamworks to deploy to Linux automatically using Wine.

I don't know what you're expecting, it's not like Playstation and Xbox built empires overnight.

It's not like Playstation or Xbox built their empires at no cost either - they invested heavily in exclusive IP to bring users to their platforms, and nobody is willing to make that investment for Linux. Not even Valve apparently.

IMO making a great Linux-exclusive game by Valve would be equal to starting a war with Microsoft and other publishers. As they want to use SteamOS as a bargaining chip when dealing with MS/EA/etc., it might not yield optimal results to anyone and could even kill any high-end Linux-oriented game development.

I'd agree that the games do indeed run, but I have a big problem with the 'as fast as on windows' part - I have a beefy gaming rig (i7, 1080Ti, 144+ fps is a must), and most games run at 20% lower FPS compared to W10, while maxing both CPU/GPU to 100% utilization. There's also a lot of collateral problems, like borderless window support when running under i3, OBS and other streaming tools are rather quirky etc. I have tried 5 different distros and eventually went back with W10.

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