John Carmack, Kudos to Valve but Linux is Still Not a Viable Gaming Market
ubuntuvibes.com
ubuntuvibes.com
In Valve's experiments so far, Linux gets better performance (higher FPS) than Windows. We're talking 280 vs 315 FPS (or something like that), but that's still better.
The difference is closer to 10 frames a second: 303.4 vs 315.
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/
but that's still better.
True.
I might add that in all humble indie bundles linux users have paid the highest. To be fair, I don't think linux right now is a prime target for games but I do believe that it will be.
Even though I prefer Windows (use & dev), I welcome cross-platform compatibility - more competition, more likely to be usable on future platforms, not locked out myself when I switch platforms, etc.
Linux will be prime time if Valve releases their long rumored Linux console box. Until then the year of Linux will always be "next year" just like always.
Another issue that Loki contended with was the fact that most of their games ran at a lower framerate than the Windows counterpart. Most serious gaming fans want to use their hardware to its maximum potential especially the FPS multi-player twitch gamers. Valve has a lot more leverage in this regard than Loki ever did. We all know (because they said so) they are working with the major GPU players to get better drivers made. But also, they don't just port games, they make them. The Source engine is very popular and they have already tweaked it significantly so not only is it competitive with how it runs on Windows but it actually surpasses it in maximum frames per second.
Another thing Loki dealt with was Linux users were a bit more idealistic in the 90's. We still held out hope that AAA game titles would just "appear" on Linux. Fast forward to the present day and I doubt many actually believe this. The problem back then was that if you expected Free top tier games to just appear you had less incentive to actually buy. I think Linux users are a bit more pragmatic now and are much more willing to pay for a proprietary binary as it's pretty clear that that's the only way you're going to play. So this is a psychological barrier Valve doesn't have to overcome anymore.
Basically, I think Valve is approaching this with the same methodical precision that Tesla is approaching the electric car space. Look at the problems that exist in an objective way and devise solutions one by one until you achieve success. Valve may still falter but it won't be for ignoring any lessons Loki could have provided.
(Especially when you consider the recent gaben statements about win8 being a "catastrophe", and the windows app store stepping on steam's toes)
I think Carmack's response misses the mark. Valve ain't targeting Linux as just yet-another-platform.
It tomorrow MS and Apple "force" people to pay using their App store, they need some alternative.
MS was a great competitor destroyer. You will compete with them, for example with compilers, like Borland or Lotus or Wordperfect or Netscape and they will destroy you first going against your income generators and they will care about the product later, when there is a monopoly.
MS could destroy steam just using their OS control to make steam perform badly, they did it in the past with companies like DR-DOS, with media encoders-decoders(making them use code that they slowed down on purpose so their badly programmed software looked better) and so on.
Surprising that Carmack doesn't support their long view, considering his history of technology advocacy.
Imagine if you had to install the OS onto a Playstation or Xbox before you could play a game? No wonder nobody makes money on Linux.
Notice that nobody has a problem with Linux on their phone, because it comes pre-installed. If Valve can strong arm a few OEMs to preinstall Linux on desktops and laptops (against strong MS opposition), they stand to make a lot of money and simultaneously establish the fabled "year of the Linux desktop".
That there are very few preinstalled Linux options is the reason it hasn't taken off commercially. It's the reason Linux drivers are a huge problem. It is why "grandma" can't use Linux. And it's why John Carmack can't make money.
One option would be for Valve to buy an OEM. Many of them are not doing very well and things are only going to get worse with Microsoft Surface.
This would give Valve hardware talent for designing the Steam Box as well. The Steam Box could easily be just a set-top PC running Ubuntu. Game makers will no doubt see the appeal of that, and start porting games to run on the Steam Box, and therefore Linux.
Several OEM's do just that, but nobody is buying.
> Notice that nobody has a problem with Linux on their phone, because it comes pre-installed.
No, nobody has a problem with these because Android has a good UI on top of Linux. Desktop Linux never came close to achieving that goal, hence its repeated failure to break into the mainstream.
Who? Dell has one 11" Ubuntu laptop on their website, and you have to try really hard to find it. System 76 has no marketing budget whatsoever. Anybody else? Have you ever seen a Linux machine in stores? Ever?
And the Android UI is okay for a phone, but I greatly prefer Awesome on my laptop. Mint, in my experience, has been really great for newbies. I just don't buy the UI argument. Windows baffles all the newbies I know. The "UI" problems with Linux have to do with driver support, and lack of a few big name pieces of software, that's about it.
Well, that and way too much choice. There's no "Linux UI", unless you're talking about bash or something. There's Gnome, KDE, etc. But one or a few OEMs settling on a standard desktop environment would go a long way towards standardizing the user experience, while still allowing us nerds to geek out on different window managers.
There's a lot of truth in there, but also some complex reasons why that hasn't yet come about. A fairly large part of the problem is that Linux has attracted a lot of miserly people. They want free (as in beer) stuff, and are running on older hardware. The idea of paying for software is anathema to them because they're hoping someone will give it to them for free instead, and they're willing to hold out for that. There are others who pick Linux for technical reasons, or for free (as in speech) issues, but there are enough of the cheap bastards to skew the market, unfortunately.
If you could magically move the market so that OEMs offered Linux, and companies provided Linux versions of their software, then I think a lot of what you say would be spot on. But getting there from where things are currently, now that's tricky.
It's basically a chicken and egg problem that needs some established company to make a big bet on Linux to initiate change. That's why I think it could pay off big time. If Valve could draw even a tiny fraction of Windows gamers over to Linux it could kickstart a huge migration away from Microsoft over the next several years, with Valve at the center.
Yes, this. That company may or may not have to take a monetary hit to do so, but I can see it happening at some point.
On one hand, the native installer is almost always updated sooner with the latest features and fixes.
On the other hand, the packaged version is usually vetted against other packages in the system for compatibility and stability, not to mention having all of your updates be done from one place.
Your actual issue is that nobody has either (A) packaged the latest version for you or (B) placed the package in your (likely conservative) repository. You can always install a package without a repository, or, add additional repositories to your system.
And due to the proliferation of package management systems, choosing the right packages from a project's web page is quite confusing. In addition, rpm and dpkg have absolutely horrid command line interfaces, and the documentation is about as confusing as bash's man page. These are not trivial or easy to understand tools, necessitating further layers of abstraction like yum and apt. However, even these "simple" interfaces expose a huge amount of unnecessary complexity. If you disagree, look at the number of command line options in the rpm and dpkg utilities, and the strange and unexpected way that these command line options interact. It's not a clean system at its core. Suppose I want to do something extremely simple such as list all the packages installed on my system, how many words of the man page do I have to read and re-read before I can discover this interface? These tools share none of the simplicity of original Unix utilities, and are large monolithic beasts rather than composable units.
Linux package management is truly awesome, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have faults and that it can't be improved.
Edit: I just checked the manpage, and it seems 'localinstall' is deprecated. Simply using 'install' now does what it used to, though 'localinstall' still works for backwards compatibility. It really could not become any simpler.
Complaining that 'rpm' is complicated is like using git without the porcelain then complaining that it is complicated.
It does two things very well that ubuntu's apt-get doesn't:
1) consistently has the latest versions of your software 2) handles programming languages very well (that is to say, it makes you use rvm, pip, cpan, etc, instead of packaging _any_ libraries).
Those are not ideal for everybody or every system, but it's a damn fine experience for developers' machines.
No such universally agreed upon metaphor exists on OS X. They didn't provide a universal package management mechanism. In many cases, you just drag the package into your Applications directory and it's "Installed."
There is some room for improvement, in the early days, RHEL had a horrendous repository-interface system called "up2date" which was anything but. I think a lot of the uptake in debian systems, such as ubuntu, was that apt-get was so much better than up2date - which seemed to have never been updated after the initial release. Thankfully, yum came about, and now RPM based systems have basic parity with DEB system in terms of package retrieval.
The Net-Net though, is that Linux package management is fairly well defined, but hop onto any OS X system, and try and find out what package a random file belongs to, is basically hopeless.
Also, homebrew has a significantly easier project - OSX+homebrew is almost solely aimed at devs wanted a good experience around their dev environment. By contrast, ubuntu's packaging relies on it doing everything, making it suck for some things.
I'd not like being there, give me a break, put different people on stage, add more visual aids. Too tough to hear, even when I could stop the video and I'm very interested in what he says.
He is right about Linux, Linux is not there and who knows when it will. If tomorrow is, Carmack will support the platform fast. He follows the market.
I don't think that Valve will have this problem.
EDIT: Quake Live works really well but there is a lot of free competition with Q3 type games on linux.
once that's done part of the gaming community will follow and producers will start to take linux in more serious consideration.
doesn't this mean that the engine already has an OpenGL variant? why is porting it to linux such a large task?
Steam is a great step forward. Next, get World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, and Starcraft 2. Then, League of Legends, DOTA 2, etc. All of a sudden you have a legit gaming platform.
Perhaps it is forthcoming: http://kotaku.com/5929569/blizzard-isnt-happy-with-windows-8...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Linux
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Events_leadin...
Linux was written in the first place for x86. Nearly every distribution released since then, major or minor, has primarily targeted it. If a distro doesn't support x86, it's probably for a very specific reason. I don't have any numbers on this, but it's a safe bet that the number of Linux users not running on x86 is pretty close to 0% (plus-or-minus Richard Stallman). Linux runs on anything Windows does, and probably ran there first. There are probably an infinite number of mildly interesting ways one could harp on this general theme: It's not just a technicality to say that Linux already lives happily on x86.
The fact that you're familiar with the word 'distro' suggests to me this is just mild confusion. Benignly curious what your impression was. Were you thinking of Android or old Mac OS?