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Comment by jimmy1 | Hacker News Reader

> Why should they change the way they develop games for 0.1% of their sales?

Have you seen how tight the gaming market has become? You need a niche to get any attention. Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity. It would be on the front page here a lone, a site with an enormous audience at minimum once a quarter. It would appear in countless tech related subreddits, twitter hacker-verse would take off. The “maker culture” would adopt it as its son or daughter.

Sounds like a tremendous opportunity.

We are not representative of the culture but we are hackers and developers and eventually one spark is all you need to start a fire. I have the perception that gamers are dying to get off of Windows, but I could be wrong, I certainly was when I was a gamer.

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I've been in games and game middleware (including in many cases with Linux support) for fifteen years and I have never once seen this happen. Generally there is a tremendous amount of commentary like this from Linux folks and the port neither gets meaningful (or profitable) publicity nor sales that outstrip support. This comment is the stereotypical Linux game post.

When supporting a platform can mean debugging and submitting patches for a users graphics drivers in exchange for a shockingly low conversion rate, it's an easy no for me.

PS I built and maintain an Enterprise AWS GPU app on Ubuntu and the platform is great. But it was very non trivial to get working.

PPS if you spend less than $150/yr combined on all software purchases (including mobile/console) please don't make a case for Linux gaming. TuxRacer is your apotheosis.

> This comment is the stereotypical Linux game post.

I have absolutely no affinity for linux. My times spent twiddling with settings, packages, and getting drivers to work are long behind me. I have been exclusively Mac for almost a decade now, so I am in no way shape or form a "linux gaming homer" I could care less, but I am an opportunist, and I do see an opportunity now (and not 15 years ago)

> I've been in games and game middleware (including in many cases with Linux support) for fifteen years and I have never once seen this happen.

Yes, 15 years ago, Windows 10, with all it's privacy intrusions basically being a spyware OS didn't exist. A Steve Job-less Apple, doubling down on it's disdain for OpenGL and gaming in general at Apple didn't exist (see relevant John Carmack posts). And forgive me, but I would be willing to bet we didn't hear about it your game because I was specific when saying "first class citizen" meaning the game worked just as well on Linux as it did Windows. If you achieved that and still got no publicity I would be shocked. All you would need is one popular twitch streamer streaming Fornite (which also didn't exist 15 years ago, and wasn't pervasive until recently) on Linux or some similar big title and you would have a spark.

I have seen this claim many times, but wonder about it's validity.

It's easy to think that a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would make a lot of stir. But I used to play Heroes of Newerth years ago when Linux support were way worse than today. I also read HN then.

I never saw any special treatment for that even tho I loved the game and it worked really, really good on linux.

Searching on algolia just proves my point: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=heroes%20of%20newerth&sort=byP...

I simply do not buy the story that just because you release it on Linux, have good linux support etc it will spread like wildfire.

S2Games, which made HoN, made a superior MOBA imo but none of my friends play it anymore. They play Dota2 tho. I think the reality of the situation is that no one cares about if a game run on linux or not except extreme nerds that would never use Windows and go through the daily struggle that is desktop Linux.

I used to be one of them, nowadays I only use Windows.

Unreal Tournament 2004 was cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux in 2004. But like this post indicates, the tech support headache isn’t worth it, so these days you can only get the Windows version on Steam despite the cross-platform binaries existing somewhere in Epic’s (back then still Epic MegaGames) vault.

Can you still run UT2004 on the current version of, say, Ubuntu?

>daily struggle that is desktop Linux

lol what year is this? 1999?

but I agree with the rest of your points

Every time someone mentions not using Linux Desktop because they had a lot of issues, someone like you comes out of the woodwork and pretends that Linux doesn't have issues anymore.

Maybe that's yet another reason people don't switch to Linux: the evangelists are annoying and untrustworthy.

> Every time someone mentions not using Linux Desktop because they had a lot of issues, someone like you comes out of the woodwork and pretends that Linux doesn't have issues anymore.

Did someone call me? Jokes aside, as a person using Linux (95% of the time, for ~15 years or so), I can honestly tell that Linux has its fair share of problems. However, for some time, the problems I experience are not more frequent than Macs that I have or the Windows PCs of my family members.

Is Linux perfect? No way. Did it improve over the years? Yes, tremendously. Also, I can say that advanced desktops like KDE can do very nice things for automation and productivity. I'm currently happy about the state of Linux, but it doesn't mean its perfect or the very very best.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that progress has been made. Sound, unless you need low latency, is pretty much a solved problem now, for one.

But there are a lot of reasons that Linux's particular brand of issues are actually still a deal breaker for people, and refusing to acknowledge that will never attract anyone to the platform.

For low latency I've played with Jack a little while I was playing bass. It wasn't very bad, but I don't have recent information on the issue.

I for one do photo post-processing and development on Linux mainly, and have no problems while doing what I want to do.

> ...Linux's particular brand of issues...

Can you please elaborate? I'm interested. Since I'm using Linux heavily and for a very long time, I might be blind to that problems.

Just google around a bit, even just on HN, and you'll find dozens of examples. A lot of it comes down to poor drivers, especially for laptops, but much of it is systemic.

I'm reluctant to go into detail about my own personal blockers because every time I do I end up in a multi-page argument with some evangelists who insist that everything I want to do is completely wrong and I should just change my entire workflow to match theirs.

You're right. Laptop support tends to be problematic, and boils down to selection of right hardware "platform" in the beginning. The worst part is, the right platform is not always budget friendly.

I personally found out that professional class hardware (Dell XPS, HP EliteBook, Lenovo ThinkPad) has the best Linux support out there. I have a EliteBook 850G2 at the office, and except the fingerprint reader (which I don't use), everything is working without any problems. Battery life is also great (~7 hours). However, works for me is not a valid excuse, esp. with hardware.

If you want to discuss further, you can reach me via my profile page.

No, it is 2019 and my Linux Netbook still lacks hardware accelerated video decoding and OpenGL 4.0 support, although the card is a DirectX 11 compatible one.

Well yeah, it is of course much better today I believe. But I wouldn't be surprised if you still have to spend hours in trying to configure stuff if you have the wrong hardware.

Misunderstand me right, it's still mostly on laptops I have experienced issues. On a stationary computer you just get a performance drop, at least for most graphics cards.

I think it's great that it has improved so much and I hope it will continue to improve so that sometime in the future I can return to the promised land.

Tried installing Linux on MBP last month. Ran away screaming after 30+ hours of dealing with drivers issues. I do this every couple of years, hoping that finally THIS time I can get off Windows. Next attempt will be circa about 2021 probably.

Try this is an exercise instead pick a random dell. Attempt to install OSX on it. Post about how huge a hassle this was and how the end result was a non functioning brick and OSX still isn't ready.

If you google computer model linux. If the result is 17 pages of results about how it didn't work you may want to try a different model.

Generally how well your machine is supported is a function of how hostile your oem is towards openness, how different from existing hardware your machine is, how common it is, and how much time people have had to add support.

Current macs aren't well supported. Supporting all hardware under the sun is a Sisyphean task and ultimately an unimportant one. For Linux to be useful it doesn't have to support all possible machines just a good range of hardware.

I've installed Ubuntu 18.10 on an XPS 13, which everyone tells me is well supported by Linux, Dell even sell it with Ubuntu. It won't come out of sleep. Googling suggests other have this problem.

XPS is a range of models and 13 is a size it doens't uniquely identify the model. Does it have the problem under the lts version that dell presumably ships?

I don't know, I just tried installing the latest Ubuntu. I could go and track the version Dell ships for my laptop, and make sure I never upgrade it, but surely that proves the point that Linux is a pain to run?

How did we get from run the latest long term service release which ships every 2 years like clockwork to never update?

You said I should only run the lts version which dell ships...

> Linux on MBP

Well there's your problem. The companies that make the custom hardware that Apple uses in their laptops refuse to release driver support for Linux for basically the same reasons as the writer of this Tweet. Whether the fault for this is on Apple or the manufacturers is up for debate, but driver compatibility with Apple's laptops and anything but macOS has always been a crapshoot and only became decent for Windows in the last few years.

Note: This is coming from an Apple fan who has been wanting to try out dual booting a Linux distro or one of the BSDs but has watched support tickets get answered with "testing MBP drivers on Linux isn't worth our time" from multiple OEMs.

Installing linux on a Mac is your problem. Macs are notoriously a huge pain when it comes to linux compatibility. Tbh even windows isn't that great on a Mac...I'd just stick to OSX on a mac.

When it came time to replace my old macbook air, I got a dell xps 13 and linux works great on that. All of the hardware works out of the box without having to do anything with drivers.

Why not use OS X on an MBP, or Linux on a generic x86 machine? I'm not clear on why this is the only route to get you off of Windows.

Macs have good hardware. Or you might also want to dual boot.

Sad to say, but some Macbook models work great, and others are fucking terrible. I have two models - my older model where the only thing that has ever consistently worked is bluetooth, and a slightly newer one where nothing has ever broken.

Running Linux on new hardware is usually a bad idea, due to the nature of the process you have to expect at least a year before divers for new hardware have settled into distributions.

Then things should be pretty sweet for quite a while. Unless your hardware is really poplar, things will bitrot away eventually, but expect a 5-10 year sweet spot where everything should just work out of the box.

THIS is the problem. Windows drivers start working on day 1 and continue working. The breaks are when we went to 32-bit drivers in NT and when we disabled real-time hardware interrupts in Vista.

Linux needs a driver compatibility story this strong to even start.

On the flipside, while Windows has a greater quantity of drivers available for devices on day 1 of release, Linux tends to have a greater quantity of drivers available for devices at time of install. With Linux, there's no separate step of having to wait for Windows Update to pull the driver, since all the drivers are included alongside the kernel (the exceptions being printer drivers - which aren't developed alongside the kernel - and firmware for wireless NICs if you're going with a strictly-FOSS-only distro).

Meanwhile, I "fondly" remember having to have a USB stick on hand for Windows 7 installs because the default install didn't include wired (let alone wireless) NIC drivers for 90% of the laptops and desktops on which I installed it. Thankfully Windows 10 is better about this (at least on the wired front; wireless drivers are still hit or miss), but still.

> Meanwhile, I "fondly" remember having to have a USB stick on hand for Windows 7 installs because the default install didn't include wired (let alone wireless) NIC drivers for 90% of the laptops and desktops on which I installed it.

I worked in an IT support shop at the time windows 7 was released, and I imaged and installed hundreds of copies of windows 7 over the time I worked there. While you're right about wireless drivers being a crapshoot, I can not remember a single instance of missing wired NIC drivers on install. I'm not doubting that some were missing (there is lots of hardware, lots of manufacturers out there), but it was definitely not as huge a problem. The biggest issue was usually SD card readers and trackpads which required downloading from the manufacturer.

I've done a few linux desktop installs (same job) and the situation was definitely more painful. Issues with sleep/wake, webcams, network drivers (usually wireless), multiple displays were basically guaranteed, and the help process was usually "You're using the wrong hardware", which isn't really helpful.

"I can not remember a single instance of missing wired NIC drivers on install"

Were you pre-installing NIC drivers with your images? That'd be a good reason for the high success rate.

It might also have to do with specific manufacturers/vendors. Most of my installations were on Dells; it's possible HP or Lenovo stuck with chipsets that Windows properly supported out-of-the-box. Linux worked fine in all cases.

dota 2 works on linux though. ;)

> Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity

It does not. Take a look at the Steam games supporting Linux. There's thousands of them, it's not special.

> would buy tremendous free publicity.

That would not buy food on the table. Most money comes from Windows and what games should be optimized for.

See r/choosingbeggars for more entertaining stories on the "value" of "publicity".

Choosing beggars literally think that publicity is payment enough. Linux gamers PAY.

Really a big difference.

> Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity.

This particular game (Planetary Annihilation) was designed with Linux support in mind from the very beginning; as the person who wrote the tweets notes, he and numerous others within the company were huge proponents of supporting Linux. As events proved, it didn't work out for them.

They later admitted they overstated this issue and that their problems were self caused.

You're either underestimating revenue from Windows purchases or overvaluing that publicity bonus. There are already a lot of indie games with Linux support, and triple A developments already sell millions of copies. If that added publicity made another 1000 people buy the game, it still won't be a financially sounds decision.

Heck, I'm mostly on Linux but boot into Windows for gaming... I'd probably continue to do so, even if the games were released for Linux just for that extra performance and significantly less chance too run into an obscure issue with my setup.

win10 really messed things up with the SAAS and telemetry, and integrated update rollups.

the thing is microsoft really painted themselves into a corner. ya see windows was made for all sorts of skullduggery to occur , this was supposed to be a boon for MS but they punched so many holes in W32 that it was secure as a sieve, I know this first hand as i have spent a major amount of time decompiling and snooping through the binaries. the file structures in a windows OS has big voids of zeros for padding, leaves lots of room to insert malcode and fix the file headers, Thread Local Storage is neat, a thread can move data packets through its kernel objects to other objects or static files on swap. And the alternate data paging that win executable files may have is just mindblowing. a file {any W32/W64 file} that every one expects to do one thing can be trojaned by the system as a feature using alternate data streams in a file! IT GOES ON AND ON this and win10 is why i left windows and gave linux a serious try and never looked back. Linux runs games and keeps getting better at it with no cat and mouse game of you modding system files so things work and having MS updates demodd them and then prevent you from making thing workable without major klugeing around.

Literally nobody cares about Linux gaming. It's not even press-worthy because of SteamOS. Anyone who games on Linux does it for the adventure of the process, not because it's convenient.

If you ported your game to the Atari ST or the Amiga you'd get more press and probably more sales.

There's nothing adventurous about using your preferred operating system and enjoying being able to have a working game experience. I've spent significant time in all 3 major OS options over the last few decades, and came to the conclusion that Linux is the one I prefer. A few years ago, I resigned myself to either rebooting to Windows or running Windows in a VM when I wanted to do any modern gaming. The significant advancements over the last year in terms of video driver functionality (both on Nvidia and AMD sides), binary compatibility (WINE/Proton), and more developers releasing native games have been a huge boon and very welcomed. I use Linux full time because it's what I enjoy and feel comfortable with as a primary OS, and I absolutely care about the gaming landscape improving. I'm only one person, but many others won't speak up.

It's like Mac gaming. It sucks. Unless it's a for-Mac native title, which is exceedingly rare these days, it's going to be trash because the publisher invariably uses some crappy DirectX to OpenGL wrapper that cripples performance and crashes constantly.

Developer kits like Unreal and Unity have helped a lot here, but those are far from flawless. Even those struggle with Linux because there's just way too many distributions and way too few standards.

I used to reboot into Windows to run games. Thanks to Proton I don't bother anymore. In fact I dread booting into Windows now because I know it's going to spend 30 minutes patching itself and then reboot on me.

Rhetoric like this is less than effective. Some of us do game in Linux because we don't want a Windows box. So, literally is demonstrably false.

Now, statistically, I realize we don't exist. But at absolute levels, we do.

You've got to recognize you're an outlier.

In practical terms nobody plays games on Linux unless they're using something like SteamOS or, technically, Android.

Given how ridiculously hard it is to get a simple application to run across all the various distributions of Linux that exist, expecting something as complicated as a game to run at all is asking way too much.

Windows is ridiculously hard to support, but at least it has sales volume to justify the work necessary to get a game launched. Linux doesn't.

>adventure of the process, not because it's convenient

There's no need for adventure for me. I prefer to code on Linux and not need to reboot into Windows. Playing games on Linux IS the convenient way for me.

Most people just get a game console or play games on their phone. A very tiny group of people do what you do on Linux.

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