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Comment by malikNF | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft being Microsoft, its such a shame so many video games still only support MS. Over the years MS has become really user hostile (well may be not as much as my samsung android phone I guess) with constant forced updates, forced adverts for their products. And now a DMCA for a project trying to help folks customize windows? Sigh!

Few days ago there was an update on Windows10 and my computer was restarted forcefully, upon booting back up I was greeted by a massive "in your face" type of advert for their Edge browser, couldn't quit it and had to see a big advert from MS about their stupid Edge browser. After I managed to close it, it decided to pin the browser to my task bar without asking me if it should.

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I wish it was just the game makers needing to build for another platform which is the problem. Unfortunately a large problem is also graphics drivers. NVidia and AMD don't do much to help the open source community / linux with the development of their drivers, meaning they don't harness the power of the cards often times by significant margins comparing with Windows. There are other technical hiccups which make a difference as well.

AMD has excellent open source support. They embraced the Linux community a few years ago, and we now have a high quality AMD driver mainlined in the Linux kernel. Games run very well on AMD/Linux, including Steam/Proton.

It's NVIDIA that is completely Linux/OSS hostile, and still follows the broken proprietary driver approach they have been doing for years. On top of that they actively ignore the agreed community standards and build proprietary/inferior APIs because it's less work for them (like EGL).

I'm completely baffled by NVIDIA's approach to be honest. Especially with scientific workloads on Linux. It seems like investing in a small team to build high quality mainlined Linux drivers would be a net win for them for little cost.

Nvidia has always had super high quality Linux drivers. It’s their lack of desire to open source pieces of them to make them work better with desktop Linux that is the issue. I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of Nvidia GPUs used on Linux don’t have a screen connected to them, so supporting wayland isn’t really a priority.

It's really hard to consider these drivers "high quality" if they don't even work with Wayland properly.

Why would Nvidia care about supporting Wayland at this point in time? Steam itself doesn't even work properly with Wayland. 9 of 10 people are going to be using X right now and within the near future.

Wayland offers performance and security improvements over X, and is seeing rapid adoption on GNOME-based distributions. Since both Intel and AMD properly support Wayland through the GBM buffer API, Nvidia is going to be left behind unless they start improving or replacing their EGLStreams API instead of leaving it stagnant.

> Nvidia has always had super high quality Linux drivers.

I assume you've never used an optimus enabled laptop on Linux? Or dealt with the horribly fragmented driver versions? Or the fact the binary blob installer likes to dump random files all over your system? Or DRM/KMS issues in the past? The wayland incompatibilities and refusal to support the GBM kernel API is just the latest in a long history of terrible Linux support.

AMD just works out of the box - high quality and fast drivers with zero config required.

> its such a shame so many video games still only support MS

This is very true. It's a shame, but the only way to help this change is to create the market for video games that support other platforms, for example Linux, as well. Help make it profitable to develop games for Linux

There are already quite a lot of games on Steam that support Linux, especially if you add Wine/Proton [1] to the mix, where 78% of the top 100 games have a score of "Gold" (runs perfectly after tweaks), "Platinum" (runs perfectly out of the box), or is running natively on Linux. This means that you are no longer missing out on the huge library of games you were missing out on just a few years ago.

[1] https://www.protondb.com/

Video games only support Windows because the market share is what it is.

Normal apps are usually easy to port. Native video games, not so much, since they tenf to be quite low-level.

This is pretty different from that. It’s not just that they modified Windows, it’s that they provided a cracked version of the iso. If they just provided the tools to do it, it’d be one thing (and that probably wouldn’t have been attached by Microsoft). But given the evidence, this is perfectly reasonable for Microsoft.

Why are others saying it wasn't cracked and didn't disable activation? Cracked implies copy protection or licensing measures were circumvented.

Why does it matter? No company is going to do nothing if someone else distributes a modified versions of their software -- regardless of the modification. The fact that it's cracked or not is inconsequential to the discussion.

You still have a point, but isn't what you declaim precisely what companies like RedHat, Canonical, etc., do. Mozilla, and Google too, to some extent.

Free software licenses are specifically designed to allow distribution -- the exception that proves the rule. But even so, none of the companies listed will allow you to distribute modified binaries under their exact product names. Hence CentOS, Iceweasle, etc. Despite being open source and free software, these companies still want to define for themselves what "Firefox" and "Redhat" actually are.

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