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After suggesting a developer drop Linux support, Vivox have released a statement

75 points by dejaime 7y ago

mmastrac 7y ago
Alternative title: "Company release PR statement saying the same thing less antagonistically without actually changing their mind".
- craftyguy 7y ago
  That's not at all what the article shows.
  - tellak 7y ago
    I read the article and it seems like a fair summary. I mean they even added the onus to bring more games to Linux first and then we will get moving on our part. I’m a Linux user, really a small private company making a business decision doesn’t bother me and people getting pissy about the first message was silly imho. But the only thing that changed here was the pr.
  - shrimp_emoji 7y ago
    It's exactly what it shows. A zealous Tuxist, slighted by the insolence toward their beliefs but bitterly satisfied by the backpeddling was quoted as saying, >Basically yea, but it's nice to know they'll keep their opinions to themselves from now on. I use Arch (Manjaro cough) btw. I practically use Linux exclusively. But stuff like this is kind of funny. We live in a strange (dark?) time with respect to the OS ecosystem. This is an artifact of it. The main OS is a bloated, closed, insecure, arguably hostile one, while the open, free one enjoys a kind of ethereal salience (both pragmatic and ideological) in the hearts, minds, and practice of technologists. That gives the open one a political protection completely disproportionate with its tiny consumer base and economic relevance to consumer-facing capitalists (who drive the entire technology sector).
    - mruts 7y ago
      I don't think the real problem is about Windows tools not working on Linux, but about Linux tools not working on Unix. Stuff like Systemd and Wayland don't even care about anything besides Linux.
TallGuyShort 7y ago
I don't see the big deal. They don't think Linux support is worth it. So a developer chasing Linux support won't use them. Salesman says what he needs to trying to close the deal. Kind of a dumb thing to say, but... Us Linux users are used to being second class citizens in the consumer software world. Vivox just won't get our money either. Eh.
- Yver 7y ago
  That's because the developer's OS support is outside of Vivox's prerogative. They tried to change the developer's plans because they couldn't fit in them. If their reply had been something along the lines of "We don't support Linux and can't help you with that" I'm certain most people would be fine with it. Their original reply makes me think of a hotel that can't accommodate a family of four so they suggest you leave the kids to the grandparents and go on vacation alone. It solves their problem, not yours.
  - TallGuyShort 7y ago
    >> They tried to change the developer's plans They suggested the developer change plans. I agree it was a bit of a dick move to suggest that and I think an apology and training is in order, but... I'm surprised there's a need to "issue a statement".
shmerl 7y ago
The original response was of course stupid. Developers should just use Mumble instead anyway. It's open source and not locked into any specific platform.
- zanny 7y ago
  While I as much as anyone else would love to promote Mumble, the project is certainly languishing nowadays. Last stable release was two years ago and its not like they have nothing to improve on - the stable release is still Qt4 based and the Qt5 version has been in git for over a year now. I'm positive if you polled developers today Mumble would be missing critical features or performance characteristics that Teamspeak / Vivox are working on to improve while Mumble is stalled out because the money isn't there to keep up healthy maintainership in the long run.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    Yes, that can be a problem. But if developers who need it would invest money in Mumble instead of all these blob middlewares, it could progress faster.
CoolGuySteve 7y ago
At least for high performance C++, the Linux toolchain improves code quality by so much. Between valgrind/cachegrind, asan, efence, always having the latest clang and clang_analyzer, and Dockerfiles for continuous integration environments, programming on Windows feels like I have a hand tied behind my back. Even something basic like replacing malloc with your own instrumentation to track errant allocations is basically impossible since every DLL in Windows loads its own allocator. I know Windows has similar tools but wrangling Visual Studio, especially remotely or across multiple developers, is significantly more painful in my experience. Even if you don't ship on Linux, programming on Linux is worth it imo. I mean, Carmack wrote Quake on a NeXT and shipped on Windows, so if he was doing it back in the day, how wrong can it be?
- ryanackley 7y ago
  NeXT wasn't Linux. My understanding is that it was a completely proprietary POSIX based operating system. That being said there is something to be said for POSIX based (unix, linux, os x), terminal based development tools. It's where most of the innovation happens in the developer community. There is also something easy about GUI based development and debugging on Windows. A runtime environment that is fairly standard for gaming is also a big plus.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - asveikau 7y ago
    NeXT wasn't Linux, but the point being made was that it would have been easy to dismiss NeXT as a "fringe" platform at the time. It is an argument for developing with platforms [and porting to them] when they may not be a priority for your end users.
    - thrax 7y ago
      It wasn't Linux but was based on mach Unix iirc. And they weren't cheap.. but they were cheaper than a similar horsepowered SGI workstation at the time, iiarc. But probably 10x the cost of a Windows machine.
someexgamedev 7y ago
Middleware company is right. Supporting the platform is not worth the trouble. Data shows again and again that Linux gamers will be a fraction of a percent of your customers but generate an outsized amount of support tickets. Most of these support tickets will require holding their hand through basic Linux box administration.
- johnchristopher 7y ago
  > Most of these support tickets will require holding their hand through basic Linux box administration. Yeah, customers can be so dumb. https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671 https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671 rm -rf "$STEAMROOT/"* Now, don't get me wrong. I have a dedicated win10 partition for gaming. I gave up that fight a long time ago.
  - shrimp_emoji 7y ago
    I game mainly on Linux (since most games interesting to me happen to be on Linux). Valve has been and is doing a lot of work to expand Linux support. I wonder where Linux gaming would be today without them.
    - jtms 7y ago
      I thought for sure SteamOS and the various Steam Machine “consoles” would create a critical mass, but it seems to just be going considerably slower than I would have predicted. I’m hopeful, but I don’t see the economics adding up right now
      - linuxftw 7y ago
        Critical mass starts with you. If you want to play video games on Linux, support developers and games that you can plan on Linux.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
efficax 7y ago
The 5 people who have linux gaming rigs are apparently very vocal and entitled.
alphaharris 7y ago
I saw the post on Reddit, and I was a little shocked. When I switched to Linux on my primary computer, it was like Steam automatically filtered out the games I didn't like. I immediately spent some money on other games with Linux support. So, there's a market, and it seems to be getting larger over time. What's troubling to me is that the Vivox employee seemed to think the developer just didn't know that Linux was a smaller market, or hadn't bothered to make a rational decision. Then again, I also play things like Adventure, and the odd round of Lemmings.
- Callmenorm 7y ago
  Proton on Steam makes so many windows games work on Linux. For now, its THE main reason I will not leave Steam. No other platform has given as much love for linux.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    I think that Valve/Steam has given more love, earlier and more consistently for Gaming period than anyone else. Yes, they make money. They also work with larger communities to improve the experience for users and gamers. I'm not really a gamer though. I play for a few hours here and there a handful of times a year. Serious question, as I haven't looked... Does proton work on MacOS? In any case, planning on switching my desktop to Linux in a few months when I put together my next desktop (Yay, Zen 2).
  - Freak_NL 7y ago
    Proton really does take Wine to the next level. Even a behemoth like Witcher 3 runs smooth as butter (better than on Windows according to some). I wonder if the increasing popularity of Proton will mean more developers will simply stop targetting or porting to Linux. Games like Tomb Raider and Hitman got proper Linux releases that run great. Will we see a drop in quality with Proton? Or will Proton simply mean that targetting Linux becomes cheaper? That is, there is still a need to perform proper QA of course, but only a minimal amount of coding (mostly fixing bugs found during QA).
spork12 7y ago
This should surprise no one. Linux gamers are a very vocal minority, but also a very tiny portion of the market. I gave up on the linux gaming years ago, after suffering with WINE. Why would companies pour hundreds of thousands in resources to support a platform that has almost no serious gamers?
mruts 7y ago
Why do people care about Linux gaming? Is it that hard to just boot into Windows? Or even, a VM with a pass-through graphics card? It's hard enough to make games as it is. It seems unfair to complain about something when it's clearly not in the developer's interest to waste a bunch of time on something nobody will use.
- cbdumas 7y ago
  I can tell you why I personally care about it. I recently upgraded my gaming PC and I wanted to reinstall Windows on my new SDD. Only I forgot where I put my Windows 7 product key all those years ago and could not for the life of me pull it off of the existing Windows 10 install I had. I spent hours tracking down my key and did eventually find it, which luckily saved me from buying another expensive Windows license. All for what? I don't want Windows, I just want to play the games I've already paid for. If my games and hardware worked reliably on Linux I wouldn't even have to think about it, just download a fresh .iso and I'm off. Video games being locked into Windows is a huge drag.
- dejaime 7y ago
  The thing is, it was clearly in the interest of the developer. Vivox tried to use the "drop it, it's so insignificant" card, but, even compared to the number of Linux gamers, the insignificant market would actually be the "vivox users" market.
- blihp 7y ago
  Because some of us want to game on Linux. I can both dual-boot or fire up a VM but typically won't for games because it's a hassle, especially when I can get most of the games I want to run without resorting to that. Granted, it's a small market that many game devs aren't interested in. That's fine, we'll support the ones who are. But it's far from a platform that 'nobody will use' for games.
tracker1 7y ago
Considering the huge push from Valve to improve gaming on linux, which includes improving Wine etc... The fact that Google's new platform is entirely Linux backed, and AFAIK Sony's next gen is probably Linux as well. It is inevitable that Linux will become a huge platform for gaming.
- archey1 7y ago
  Sony used BSD for PS4, it would be interesting to see if they moved to Linux for PS5 and what would lead to that decision.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Sorry, *nix... didn't necessarily mean to imply that it's only Linux and conflated Unix and Unix-like platforms since a lot of the libraries and tooling will overlap.
- dtech 7y ago
  Unlikely, Valve has been trying to push SteamOS/Linux for years. So far without much success.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    The recent uptick in Linux and Wine support may counter that... it feels like there's been more effort in the last 8-12 months than in the 2 years prior to that. Just the uptick on Gaming on Linux youtube content from previously windows-centric sources would indicate demand is climbing.
bitwize 7y ago
Dropping Linux support is a perfectly sensible thing to suggest. When it comes to computer gaming, all of the tooling, ecosystem, and cash is on Windows.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Even in light of the work of Steam/Valve on Proton and general Linux support. The fact that Google's gaming platform is entirely linux, and a lot of other toolchains for gaming platforms are linux based? That's a pretty short sighted point of view.
- dejaime 7y ago
  Not really, especially when there are dozens of alternatives to vivox. But it is definitely the only thing they could suggest without saying "yeah, you should use Mumble, is objectively better".
Animats 7y ago
That affects Second Life, too. The best solution is to drop Vivox, which is kind of dated and crashes and restarts frequently.
TheGRS 7y ago
This is a very whistleblow-y article. Sensible commenters here correctly point out that a 3rd party vendor shouldn't be sending messages like that, it was unprofessional and ultimately pointless. But the point of the article and subsequent community backlash is the same old self-servicing trope that linux gamers seem to love: "We're here, we're important, we spend money, you are stupid to ignore us!" It's the same thing every time and it's getting old.
kazinator 7y ago
I don't understand how you can develop some voice chat middleware that doesn't work on almost anything that has a C compiler.

75 points by dejaime 7y ago

Alternative title: "Company release PR statement saying the same thing less antagonistically without actually changing their mind".

craftyguy 7y ago
That's not at all what the article shows.
- tellak 7y ago
  I read the article and it seems like a fair summary. I mean they even added the onus to bring more games to Linux first and then we will get moving on our part. I’m a Linux user, really a small private company making a business decision doesn’t bother me and people getting pissy about the first message was silly imho. But the only thing that changed here was the pr.
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  It's exactly what it shows. A zealous Tuxist, slighted by the insolence toward their beliefs but bitterly satisfied by the backpeddling was quoted as saying, >Basically yea, but it's nice to know they'll keep their opinions to themselves from now on. I use Arch (Manjaro cough) btw. I practically use Linux exclusively. But stuff like this is kind of funny. We live in a strange (dark?) time with respect to the OS ecosystem. This is an artifact of it. The main OS is a bloated, closed, insecure, arguably hostile one, while the open, free one enjoys a kind of ethereal salience (both pragmatic and ideological) in the hearts, minds, and practice of technologists. That gives the open one a political protection completely disproportionate with its tiny consumer base and economic relevance to consumer-facing capitalists (who drive the entire technology sector).
  - mruts 7y ago
    I don't think the real problem is about Windows tools not working on Linux, but about Linux tools not working on Unix. Stuff like Systemd and Wayland don't even care about anything besides Linux.

TallGuyShort 7y ago

I don't see the big deal. They don't think Linux support is worth it. So a developer chasing Linux support won't use them. Salesman says what he needs to trying to close the deal. Kind of a dumb thing to say, but... Us Linux users are used to being second class citizens in the consumer software world. Vivox just won't get our money either. Eh.

Yver 7y ago
That's because the developer's OS support is outside of Vivox's prerogative. They tried to change the developer's plans because they couldn't fit in them. If their reply had been something along the lines of "We don't support Linux and can't help you with that" I'm certain most people would be fine with it. Their original reply makes me think of a hotel that can't accommodate a family of four so they suggest you leave the kids to the grandparents and go on vacation alone. It solves their problem, not yours.
- TallGuyShort 7y ago
  >> They tried to change the developer's plans They suggested the developer change plans. I agree it was a bit of a dick move to suggest that and I think an apology and training is in order, but... I'm surprised there's a need to "issue a statement".

shmerl 7y ago

The original response was of course stupid. Developers should just use Mumble instead anyway. It's open source and not locked into any specific platform.

zanny 7y ago
While I as much as anyone else would love to promote Mumble, the project is certainly languishing nowadays. Last stable release was two years ago and its not like they have nothing to improve on - the stable release is still Qt4 based and the Qt5 version has been in git for over a year now. I'm positive if you polled developers today Mumble would be missing critical features or performance characteristics that Teamspeak / Vivox are working on to improve while Mumble is stalled out because the money isn't there to keep up healthy maintainership in the long run.
- shmerl 7y ago
  Yes, that can be a problem. But if developers who need it would invest money in Mumble instead of all these blob middlewares, it could progress faster.

CoolGuySteve 7y ago

At least for high performance C++, the Linux toolchain improves code quality by so much. Between valgrind/cachegrind, asan, efence, always having the latest clang and clang_analyzer, and Dockerfiles for continuous integration environments, programming on Windows feels like I have a hand tied behind my back. Even something basic like replacing malloc with your own instrumentation to track errant allocations is basically impossible since every DLL in Windows loads its own allocator. I know Windows has similar tools but wrangling Visual Studio, especially remotely or across multiple developers, is significantly more painful in my experience. Even if you don't ship on Linux, programming on Linux is worth it imo. I mean, Carmack wrote Quake on a NeXT and shipped on Windows, so if he was doing it back in the day, how wrong can it be?

ryanackley 7y ago
NeXT wasn't Linux. My understanding is that it was a completely proprietary POSIX based operating system. That being said there is something to be said for POSIX based (unix, linux, os x), terminal based development tools. It's where most of the innovation happens in the developer community. There is also something easy about GUI based development and debugging on Windows. A runtime environment that is fairly standard for gaming is also a big plus.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- asveikau 7y ago
  NeXT wasn't Linux, but the point being made was that it would have been easy to dismiss NeXT as a "fringe" platform at the time. It is an argument for developing with platforms [and porting to them] when they may not be a priority for your end users.
  - thrax 7y ago
    It wasn't Linux but was based on mach Unix iirc. And they weren't cheap.. but they were cheaper than a similar horsepowered SGI workstation at the time, iiarc. But probably 10x the cost of a Windows machine.

someexgamedev 7y ago

Middleware company is right. Supporting the platform is not worth the trouble. Data shows again and again that Linux gamers will be a fraction of a percent of your customers but generate an outsized amount of support tickets. Most of these support tickets will require holding their hand through basic Linux box administration.

johnchristopher 7y ago
> Most of these support tickets will require holding their hand through basic Linux box administration. Yeah, customers can be so dumb. https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671 https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671 rm -rf "$STEAMROOT/"* Now, don't get me wrong. I have a dedicated win10 partition for gaming. I gave up that fight a long time ago.
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  I game mainly on Linux (since most games interesting to me happen to be on Linux). Valve has been and is doing a lot of work to expand Linux support. I wonder where Linux gaming would be today without them.
  - jtms 7y ago
    I thought for sure SteamOS and the various Steam Machine “consoles” would create a critical mass, but it seems to just be going considerably slower than I would have predicted. I’m hopeful, but I don’t see the economics adding up right now
    - linuxftw 7y ago
      Critical mass starts with you. If you want to play video games on Linux, support developers and games that you can plan on Linux.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

efficax 7y ago

The 5 people who have linux gaming rigs are apparently very vocal and entitled.

alphaharris 7y ago

I saw the post on Reddit, and I was a little shocked. When I switched to Linux on my primary computer, it was like Steam automatically filtered out the games I didn't like. I immediately spent some money on other games with Linux support. So, there's a market, and it seems to be getting larger over time. What's troubling to me is that the Vivox employee seemed to think the developer just didn't know that Linux was a smaller market, or hadn't bothered to make a rational decision. Then again, I also play things like Adventure, and the odd round of Lemmings.

Callmenorm 7y ago
Proton on Steam makes so many windows games work on Linux. For now, its THE main reason I will not leave Steam. No other platform has given as much love for linux.
- tracker1 7y ago
  I think that Valve/Steam has given more love, earlier and more consistently for Gaming period than anyone else. Yes, they make money. They also work with larger communities to improve the experience for users and gamers. I'm not really a gamer though. I play for a few hours here and there a handful of times a year. Serious question, as I haven't looked... Does proton work on MacOS? In any case, planning on switching my desktop to Linux in a few months when I put together my next desktop (Yay, Zen 2).
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  Proton really does take Wine to the next level. Even a behemoth like Witcher 3 runs smooth as butter (better than on Windows according to some). I wonder if the increasing popularity of Proton will mean more developers will simply stop targetting or porting to Linux. Games like Tomb Raider and Hitman got proper Linux releases that run great. Will we see a drop in quality with Proton? Or will Proton simply mean that targetting Linux becomes cheaper? That is, there is still a need to perform proper QA of course, but only a minimal amount of coding (mostly fixing bugs found during QA).

spork12 7y ago

This should surprise no one. Linux gamers are a very vocal minority, but also a very tiny portion of the market. I gave up on the linux gaming years ago, after suffering with WINE. Why would companies pour hundreds of thousands in resources to support a platform that has almost no serious gamers?

mruts 7y ago

Why do people care about Linux gaming? Is it that hard to just boot into Windows? Or even, a VM with a pass-through graphics card? It's hard enough to make games as it is. It seems unfair to complain about something when it's clearly not in the developer's interest to waste a bunch of time on something nobody will use.

cbdumas 7y ago
I can tell you why I personally care about it. I recently upgraded my gaming PC and I wanted to reinstall Windows on my new SDD. Only I forgot where I put my Windows 7 product key all those years ago and could not for the life of me pull it off of the existing Windows 10 install I had. I spent hours tracking down my key and did eventually find it, which luckily saved me from buying another expensive Windows license. All for what? I don't want Windows, I just want to play the games I've already paid for. If my games and hardware worked reliably on Linux I wouldn't even have to think about it, just download a fresh .iso and I'm off. Video games being locked into Windows is a huge drag.
dejaime 7y ago
The thing is, it was clearly in the interest of the developer. Vivox tried to use the "drop it, it's so insignificant" card, but, even compared to the number of Linux gamers, the insignificant market would actually be the "vivox users" market.
blihp 7y ago
Because some of us want to game on Linux. I can both dual-boot or fire up a VM but typically won't for games because it's a hassle, especially when I can get most of the games I want to run without resorting to that. Granted, it's a small market that many game devs aren't interested in. That's fine, we'll support the ones who are. But it's far from a platform that 'nobody will use' for games.

tracker1 7y ago

Considering the huge push from Valve to improve gaming on linux, which includes improving Wine etc... The fact that Google's new platform is entirely Linux backed, and AFAIK Sony's next gen is probably Linux as well. It is inevitable that Linux will become a huge platform for gaming.

archey1 7y ago
Sony used BSD for PS4, it would be interesting to see if they moved to Linux for PS5 and what would lead to that decision.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Sorry, *nix... didn't necessarily mean to imply that it's only Linux and conflated Unix and Unix-like platforms since a lot of the libraries and tooling will overlap.
dtech 7y ago
Unlikely, Valve has been trying to push SteamOS/Linux for years. So far without much success.
- tracker1 7y ago
  The recent uptick in Linux and Wine support may counter that... it feels like there's been more effort in the last 8-12 months than in the 2 years prior to that. Just the uptick on Gaming on Linux youtube content from previously windows-centric sources would indicate demand is climbing.

bitwize 7y ago

Dropping Linux support is a perfectly sensible thing to suggest. When it comes to computer gaming, all of the tooling, ecosystem, and cash is on Windows.

tracker1 7y ago
Even in light of the work of Steam/Valve on Proton and general Linux support. The fact that Google's gaming platform is entirely linux, and a lot of other toolchains for gaming platforms are linux based? That's a pretty short sighted point of view.
dejaime 7y ago
Not really, especially when there are dozens of alternatives to vivox. But it is definitely the only thing they could suggest without saying "yeah, you should use Mumble, is objectively better".

Animats 7y ago

That affects Second Life, too. The best solution is to drop Vivox, which is kind of dated and crashes and restarts frequently.

TheGRS 7y ago

This is a very whistleblow-y article. Sensible commenters here correctly point out that a 3rd party vendor shouldn't be sending messages like that, it was unprofessional and ultimately pointless. But the point of the article and subsequent community backlash is the same old self-servicing trope that linux gamers seem to love: "We're here, we're important, we spend money, you are stupid to ignore us!" It's the same thing every time and it's getting old.

kazinator 7y ago

I don't understand how you can develop some voice chat middleware that doesn't work on almost anything that has a C compiler.