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It almost certainly is but it's unclear whether it will work. Canonical is a surprisingly small company. Its revenues were $110M last year[0]; compare this to

It almost certainly is but it's unclear whether it will work. Canonical is a surprisingly small company. Its revenues were $110M last year[0]; compare this to Valve, which had an estimated $4.3B in revenue in 2017 or Red Hat, which had $2.9B in revenue last year. Canonical has to keep a sharp eye on staying profitable and, the last anyone heard, their main focus was on their server distribution[1] because the bulk of their income was from server support contracts. Expending manpower on continuing to support 32 bit binaries probably isn't worth what it costs them regardless of what pressure Valve tries to apply. [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-ubuntus-financials/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-ubuntus-financials/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)#Business_plans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)#Business_p...

jcastro 7y ago
I think lots of people are missing the clear economic inbalance here. If you're gaming on Linux and you buy a game: The creator of the game gets a cut, the publisher gets a cut, Valve takes it's cut, NVidia/AMD/Intel got a hardware purchase in there at some point, the porter (Feral or whoever) gets a cut. The Linux distro gets .... absolutely zero. On top of that when things break, people blame the distro. I was at Canonical when we founded a community run PPA to maintain fresh Nvidia drivers, and we couldn't even secure the funding for _3_ GPUs for volunteer developers, we had to apply for community funds. All that so a handful of volunteers can do _years_ of free engineering work that is clearly Nvidia's job. They wouldn't even spot us 3 GPUs for the effort! It's sad, there are people on the Ubuntu desktop team that have been busting their asses for 15 years trying to make the desktop a thing. It's just not a sustainable unless people were overwhelmingly buying a ton of linux games.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > On top of that when things break, people blame the distro. That's because it is often the distro's fault. That's one of the reasons it has been historically such a goddamned pain to port software to Linux: there are bunch of distros and no standards you can rely on. It's a non-platform.
  - jcastro 7y ago
    Sure, the only way to fix that is with more QA, which as it turns out, no one wants to pay for (on the desktop). EDIT: And even if you have better QA and the distro is rock solid, when that binary blob Nvidia gives you that your engineers can't fix breaks, you'll still get the blame.
    - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
      > ...when that binary blob Nvidia gives you that your engineers can't fix breaks, you'll still get the blame. The more things change, the more they stay the same. When MS was getting sued for underspecing system requirements during the Vista era, one of the interesting bits that got revealed to the public during the trial is a chart of Vista crashes/lockups by source: https://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvidia-drivers-responsible-for-nearly-30-of-vista-crashes-in-20/ https://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvidia-drivers-responsib.... The biggest single source? nVidia at just under 29%. Another 9.3% was attributable to ATI (now AMD). Only about 18% were directly attributable to MS itself. Video driver crappiness was reportedly a huge motivation for Microsoft's switch to the WDDM video driver model.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Isn’t this work done mostly by Debian, which continues support?

jcastro 7y ago

I think lots of people are missing the clear economic inbalance here. If you're gaming on Linux and you buy a game: The creator of the game gets a cut, the publisher gets a cut, Valve takes it's cut, NVidia/AMD/Intel got a hardware purchase in there at some point, the porter (Feral or whoever) gets a cut. The Linux distro gets .... absolutely zero. On top of that when things break, people blame the distro. I was at Canonical when we founded a community run PPA to maintain fresh Nvidia drivers, and we couldn't even secure the funding for _3_ GPUs for volunteer developers, we had to apply for community funds. All that so a handful of volunteers can do _years_ of free engineering work that is clearly Nvidia's job. They wouldn't even spot us 3 GPUs for the effort! It's sad, there are people on the Ubuntu desktop team that have been busting their asses for 15 years trying to make the desktop a thing. It's just not a sustainable unless people were overwhelmingly buying a ton of linux games.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> On top of that when things break, people blame the distro. That's because it is often the distro's fault. That's one of the reasons it has been historically such a goddamned pain to port software to Linux: there are bunch of distros and no standards you can rely on. It's a non-platform.
- jcastro 7y ago
  Sure, the only way to fix that is with more QA, which as it turns out, no one wants to pay for (on the desktop). EDIT: And even if you have better QA and the distro is rock solid, when that binary blob Nvidia gives you that your engineers can't fix breaks, you'll still get the blame.
  - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    > ...when that binary blob Nvidia gives you that your engineers can't fix breaks, you'll still get the blame. The more things change, the more they stay the same. When MS was getting sued for underspecing system requirements during the Vista era, one of the interesting bits that got revealed to the public during the trial is a chart of Vista crashes/lockups by source: https://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvidia-drivers-responsible-for-nearly-30-of-vista-crashes-in-20/ https://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvidia-drivers-responsib.... The biggest single source? nVidia at just under 29%. Another 9.3% was attributable to ATI (now AMD). Only about 18% were directly attributable to MS itself. Video driver crappiness was reportedly a huge motivation for Microsoft's switch to the WDDM video driver model.

mixmastamyk 7y ago

Isn’t this work done mostly by Debian, which continues support?