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FWIW, I was once a 14 year old who wanted to play games on Linux and needed to install non-free drivers to do so. Yeah, it confused me when I first encountered the concept, but it didn't deter me in the end.

I suspect that, once they're using Linux, a bit of friction isn't going to stop them. Rather, the friction stops them from successfully starting to use it in the first place.

Linux introduces a healthy level of distrust to closed drivers - which is good. It doesn't mean they can't be used, but being aware about downsides is a good thing.

Ok let me use another analogy here.

You have organised this conference. You have an audience of millions of Windows users. It's likely once-in-a-lifetime for the majority of them. You are going to give them a hands-on presentation detailing the value of free software and Linux, you will have their undivided attention for a week.

One problem: the organiser fell through with the chairs. There are unassembled ones ready to go, but the company who made those parts require that their guys assemble the chairs. You have some real smart fellas around that figured out how to assemble the chairs, only it's not perfect and there's a bit sticking into your butt.

So you start off the event with everyone standing their respective venues, no chairs in sight. You start off like this:

"We had a problem with the chairs. If you don't want to sit on the dirty floor you'll need to use one of these chairs one of our guys put together." (Not telling them about the bit sticking into their butt, which you don't)

"We can get the manufacturer to build the chairs for you, however, because we don't know how they did it we don't know if the chairs will break. If it breaks you could snap your spine, turning you into a paraplegic."

"Or you could remain standing, or sit on the floor."

How many people will walk out right there and then? Would you?

Some people, who no have reason to trust you over the manufacturer (keep that in mind), might use the ones your guys made. After a day sitting with a pokey bit in your butt, what would you do?

If you had a fully functional chair how long would you stick around for? Who provided that chair?

What have you just done to your potential audience?

The message is important, maybe one day people will understand but never if this hardline approach is maintained.

An honest appraisal of each option is needed for users, up-front during the installation process. They must not go in search of it:

- Open source drivers: poor performance, very stable, likely to not crash.

- Proprietary drivers: high performance, we don't know if you should trust them, if something goes wrong there is nothing we can do.

> Change always comes bearing gifts. ~Price Pritchett

> An honest appraisal of each option is needed for users, up-front during the installation process. They must not go in search of it

The better solution is there should never be a need to search for it. AMD already knows their Mesa driver is all around a better user experience than Catalyst, and are making steps to depreciate work done on the Catalyst side by using a free kernel driver. Hopefully soon they will depreciate it entirely and dedicate all their Linux developers to making Gallium great.

Because Gallium is not just about playing games anymore. It is the basis for every other free software graphics driver besides Intels. It has the potential to revolutionize not just the Linux ecosystem but all operating systems by providing a well architected way to support dozens of GPUs with one system API and one driver model. It has a state tracker model that lets you run OpenGL, DirectX, OpenMAX, EGL, GLES, etc all on top of one driver implementation.

And Nvidia should get in on that, but those who hold the reins over there (business suits) are incompetent twat assholes who don't want to play ball with free software and damn all of us for it, and cripple the industry and any momentum they have because nonsense like "SteamOS only works on Nvidia cards".

OpenGL 4.2 will land soon™. A lot of stuff up through 4.5 after that is already done. Once they catch up on OpenGL, hopefully they can fix the performance.

I completely agree with you on this. "Linux culture" has an attitude problem that WILL prevent it from overtaking Windows if things don't change. Unfortunately, calling out this particular problem (especially among a Linux-ey community) tends to attract the worst of that attitude problem attacking those who see the problem.

> Open source drivers: poor performance, very stable, likely to not crash.

Actually, in my experience the open-source drivers for all my NVIDIA GPUs has been abysmally unstable. I couldn't even boot or install Ubuntu with the graphical interface, because nouveau kept freezing.

You could blame my uncommon but perfectly valid SLI GTX 580 setup for confusing the open source drivers, but the end result remains: the open-source drivers are inferior in every way except perhaps for the "open source" part (which is kind of meaningless if they don't work).

The fear, I feel, is in making Linux follow Windows's user experience, rather than doing its own thing. Meaning, any call for "make it more user-friendly" is heard like "give me windows". It might make sense to rally behind Ubuntu as a user-friendly distro and push that, only mentioning Linux the way "MacOS X is built on Darwin".

Another big problem is packaging for third-party software. Personally I would love to see a system where software isn't distributed as final binaries, but pre-built object files, together with a few very light shim source-files that then get built and linked on my machine, and rebuilt and relinked when the libs they depend on get updated.

SLI is uncommon indeed, and I wouldn't expect it to work well with open drivers, if it often doesn't even work well with closed ones.

Performance of the open drivers is improving.

>. He discovers the Ubuntu automatic installer. Excellent! Just a few clicks and... "non-free?" Does this mean I have to pay for it? Will I need my parents' credit card? Why is there a warning sign? Am I doing something wrong? Could this damage my hardware?

This is how we learn. It's how I learned anyway. A bit of friction is good, IMHO.

Obviously if you just want to install and play, it's less than ideal.

This is, IMHO, the best part about getting your kids into PC gaming vs giving them a console. I got very interested in scripting from seeing what scripts could do in Quake 3. Console gaming doesn't offer the same opportunities for learning / tinkering. This is not to say that games themselves can't offer a level of exploration / tinkering, but you're still confined to a locked-down, DRM'd, anti-cheat, closed-source appliance designed to just play the games, not create / modify them.

> Obviously if you just want to install and play

Yeah, this is where I am coming from. Not many are as persistent as we are.

> So how would a 14 year old wanting to play games on Linux see this? Firstly, he'd install a game such as Borderlands and try it out. He hits a wall with dreadful framerate.

That's precisely why the Steam Machines are supposed to exist. To provide hardware which is supported and properly configured by default.

Note that on Windows it's pretty bad as well, performance wise, if you do not install your GPU drivers from a scratch Windows install. Having to do extra steps is nowhere the exception of Linux.

> Note that on Windows it's pretty bad as well, performance wise, if you do not install your GPU drivers from a scratch Windows install. Having to do extra steps is nowhere the exception of Linux.

Really not true. For a start if you get an out of the box PC it will come with graphics drivers pre-installed (maybe not the best, but good enough to run a 2-year-old game smoothly)

If you build it yourself windows update will almost certainly have graphics drivers for your card

Even if you do have to manually install drivers, it's about a million times easier than on linux

> Even if you do have to manually install drivers, it's about a million times easier than on linux

For nvidia cards you do not need to install anything on your own on most distributions, and it comes with the latest drivers, so I can't see how it can be "million times easier than on Linux". AMD is another story, granted, but that does not mean it's the rule.

While the theory sounds good, the Steambox never evolved to a list of supported configs. Valve stated that Nvidia, AMD, and Intel would all be supported and Valve displayed great hesitancy in providing any specifics. Rich's earlier post on the state of Graphics Drivers remains mostly valid.

In addition, the release of a few Linux games such as Civ5 & Borderlands, have provided sales figures to those companies on whether the investment was worthwhile.

Many companies considered Linux primarily because SteamBox was an interesting market. While some companies were taking a wait-and-see audience, the slow play of SteamBox only makes more people take a wait-and-see attitude.

The OpenGL mess of "4.4 is good enough", while both AMD & Intel failed to deliver good drivers, is further muddled by OpenGL Next. Basically, accepting the OpenGL API needs a re-write and will become more Mantle/Metal/DX12 like. So will Intel & AMD deliver good-enough 4.4 drivers, or do we all wait for OpenGL-Next. Don't forget that AMD just did a 7% layoff, limited resources.

Do you consider the Steambox dead? Why do you write of it in the paste tense?

In Rich's source article, he questions the future of SteamOS and the partners involved in some of the ports are also questioning. Some people have started using past tense. I have no idea what Valve is planning, but my guess is that it's a long term play with limited resources. I'm guessing some of the interest inside Valve has waned.

Remember SteamOS was born before Win8 was announced and Valve was scared where MS was going. Steam on Windows seems pretty safe, the pressure is off.

> Remember SteamOS was born before Win8 was announced and Valve was scared where MS was going. Steam on Windows seems pretty safe, the pressure is off.

It may be off, but Microsoft may become more of a games distributor in the future through their own app store, so it may eat up some of Valve's revenue because MS app store is included by default while Steam is not.

"So how would a 14 year old wanting to play games"

In the real world my son pulls out his school issued ipad and starts playing games. Sometimes his friend comes over and he complains he can't connect to "my" wifi until I whitelist his MAC, whatever, and then they play minecraft on their ipads. Quite often they play games on the xbox connected to the living room TV because its a big enough screen to be shared. He has access to a desktop and hasn't really used it since gaining access to an ipad.

As for myself I go thru phases of dwarf fortress and heavily modded minecraft on my desktop and I just kicked a severe "pixel dungeon" habit on my phone.

My SiL still plays that farming game on facebook, or some modern clone or whatever.

The only thing worse than letting the "gamers" take over linux would be letting the "desktop" people take over linux, whoops looks like we did. Well, there's always freebsd for me.

Oddly enough, I've recently moved fully to Ubuntu, and I have buttery-smooth 60fps Borderlands 2 game play right out of the box.

I wonder what our hardware differences are? I have an Radeon R9 270X, if you have a different brand (Nvidia or Intel) are the open source ATI drivers really that much better?

AMD is actually the furthest along when it comes to their mentality toward FOSS. It doesn't surprise me that you had a good experience with them.

I hope that 14 year old would be told by someone about a distribution that includes all the non-free stuff, such as Linux Mint.