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i (and others) called this 3 years ago[1]. people need to stop using windows, entirely. i recently built a gaming machine, pretty high spec, and i've resolved

i (and others) called this 3 years ago[1]. people need to stop using windows, entirely. i recently built a gaming machine, pretty high spec, and i've resolved to never install windows on it. there are plenty of games i can't play, a few that i would like to. but i wont give money to developers that wont release linux versions of their games - even when they are utilising engines that have linux ports (PUBG being the most recent example i can think of, but any unreal/unity engine based game). there's no reason to use windows any more (for people like us, at least). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14320200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14320200

golergka 6y ago
As a game developer, for most mid-tier inside titles releasing Linux version costs more than it makes, so, no. And regarding using Windows: company's behavior is important, but product quality, especially when it's a tool you use every day for work, is more important. Linux is ok for certain types of developers, it's still awful for normal users, abysmal for office work and obviously not a choice if you develop Windows software.
- franga2000 6y ago
  > As a game developer, for most mid-tier inside titles releasing Linux version costs more than it makes, so, no. What are the main costs of releasing a Linux version of a game when using Unity or Unreal? My limited experience with Unity has been "check the Linux box, click the build button". It even cross-compiles no problem. People I know tell me Unreal is similar. It's not like they have to do a full run of play-testing for Linux. Just check if it starts, play for 10 minutes and release that. We know we're a minority so we're willing to put up with bugs. Even if there's only 100 people who'd buy it only if it ran on Linux, that should pretty much cover the couple hours of dev time.
  - coldpie 6y ago
    I can tell you've never released a popular product on Linux. It's a lottttt more effort than you're implying. To do it well, you need to have Linux as a target from the start of your development, it's not something you can tack on to the end. Linux graphics drivers are very different from Windows (the AMD stack isn't even the same codebase). Linux window managers are... wild. You need to build to an ABI that will be supported across distros, which mostly means the Steam Runtime, which means you need to go learn about and understand that. You can't introduce any platform assumptions ("ehh, I'll just hardcode this path with a backslash... oops"). Once you release, you're talking support for dozens of different distros, different versions of distros, different package managers, different filesystems. I know what you're going to say: "Just support Ubuntu LTS and ignore everyone else". Well, now you've just cut your customer base by at least 75%[1], and your customers on other distros are going to demand support anyway. Do you tell a paying customer to F-off because they're not using a distro with only ~20% of the market? Supporting Linux is hard. So is supporting Windows, but if Windows makes up 98% of your customer base, it's justified. 2%? Ehhhhh. (P.S. I love Linux. See my profile. This is the kind of stuff I deal with every single day.) [1] https://boilingsteam.com/we-dont-game-on-the-same-distros-no-more/ https://boilingsteam.com/we-dont-game-on-the-same-distros-no...
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      Open source your games. Open source is the only practical way that existing distros are able to test and support the majority of packages that they ship. If you do that, the cost of supporting all those other things will fall on the distros, not on you, but you need to actually play ball with them and give them something workable that isn't an opaque binary blob that is illegal to redistribute, modify or reverse-engineer. The feelings you're describing (that you need to shelter 100% of those costs and you have no other options) are a side effect of the game industry's cargo-culting of closed-source business models and refusal to even consider that there are ways to make money from open source.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        > Open source your games. Open source is the only practical way that existing distros are able to test and support the majority of packages that they ship Which might be one of the reasons Linux Desktop is so awful to develop for.
        cycloptic 6y ago
        The "Linux Desktop" is not and has never been a thing beyond a vague marketing term. What you're thinking of is a loose collection of unrelated projects. Pick a single stack and go with it and things get better.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        ....Which might be one of the reasons Linux Desktop is so awful to develop for. You wonder why people ignore your platform? Saying it isn't actually a single platform and instead is dozens of different platforms just means each of those platforms is even less relevant. Saying you're not just one platform with 10% market share but actually 20 with 0.5% each doesn't make the case for shipping on Linux Desktop any better.
        cycloptic 6y ago
  - Chouhada 6y ago
    > What are the main costs of releasing a Linux version of a game when using Unity or Unreal? My limited experience with Unity has been "check the Linux box, click the build button". It even cross-compiles no problem. People I know tell me Unreal is similar. For a simple game that uses the entire UE4 stack, you might be able to get away with that if none of your code is Windows-specific and works exactly the same on the Linux distribution you are targeting. Once you start using your own middleware and libraries from outside of the default engine, you need to make sure every single one works across all the platforms you're targeting. Many won't have a Linux compatible version, and those that do may only work against specific distributions and hardware. Even then: Have they changed the window manager? What have else they customised? There have been many issues with anti-cheat solutions over the years on Linux. > It's not like they have to do a full run of play-testing for Linux. Just check if it starts, play for 10 minutes and release that. For a simple game, you may get away with this. Anything larger will require significantly more testing. I've been a producer on large games, and the QA process starts very early on. You don't 'finish' a game and then QA starts - It's an ongoing process that consists of significantly more than just launching a game. >We know we're a minority so we're willing to put up with bugs Some people don't see it that way though. People who have paid for a product have the right for it to work properly. Tickets for Linux support are often higher [1], so the time investment against payback can be problematic. GPU driver support on Linux can also still be problematic. From feature differences against Windows, to crashes. These all take additional development time. Linux developers are often more difficult to acquire in the game dev world. QA even more so. Game dev is really hard. Some of it is hidden by engines like UE4 on the surface, but as soon as you start digging down into serious development, it's difficult. [1] https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760 https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
    - smaudet 6y ago
      Probably the most relevant issue here is the DirectX stack or using some windows specific API (why? DirectX I maybe got at one point, the others speak to some absurd Microsoft-Is-Best-Cause-I-Paid-Money-ism). > Many won't have a Linux compatible version, and those that do may only work against specific distributions and hardware. Even then: Have they changed the window manager? What have else they customised? Outside of truly exotic window managers, the biggest issue I've ever seen with ports has to do with dependencies. Flatpack/Snaps solve most if not all of those problems. > There have been many issues with anti-cheat solutions over the years on Linux. That's assuming anti-cheat systems are ethical, even. Most games I play I want to be multiplayer, and moddable. Most games I play can do both of those things and work in a cross platform modding language. Not hard. I don't want any anti-cheat systems for a complex game with tons of modding. The only place anti-cheat systems make sense is with e-sports style games. Of which, the best anti-cheat systems work server side. Anything else is invasive and tantamount to illegal spying. Shame on you, go burn in peeping Tom hell you perverse game dev. > For a simple game, you may get away with this. Anything larger will require significantly more testing. I find this incredibly hard to believe. If you are working within the engine the majority of the time, the majority of the game will play wherever the engine works. Which brings us back to one of your first comments: > For a simple game that uses the entire UE4 stack, you might be able to get away with that For which games are you not just using the UE4 stack? I.e. what specific problems are game devs normally experiencing causing their code to be non-portable? A bunch of low level assembly code and non standard C++? > but as soon as you start digging down into serious development I challenge you to define 'serious' development. That sounds suspiciously like you're wasting your time fighting infrastructure, or just doing things in a non-portable manner. Solving problems is cross platform, so you can't be doing much serious game coding, its probably problem solving for your particular platform (e.g., as I already mentioned, doing a bunch of work in DirectX shaders or something).
  - golergka 6y ago
    Well, I've been working with Unity for 11 years now, but my experience with building for Linux is limited, so I'll go with experience from mobile and console development, and say that with shaders (which never ceases to surprise with platform-specific glitches), filesystem (although Unity is supposed to abstract it out, once you get serious about resource management, this abstraction starts to leak), input (because you want to support gamepad with minimum hassle for the player), and million of unknown unknowns that hopefully will be found by QA, but realistically, by very angry players, I'd budget at least a couple of man-months for this. With sales in hundreds or even tens of thousands, we can expect to get about 2% of audience from Linux, which will account for single-digit thousands, or hundreds of copies sold. With a price tag of $10-20, after Steam cut, taxes, regional prices, sales and refunds, it's about $5-10 of revenue per unit, so in total, about $10k. If that would just be the money a single developer got for 2-3 months of work, it could still be fine for some regions (not everyone on HN is from US). But with a studio, you also have to spend money on marketing, payroll taxes, rent, and development of future projects, which most likely sell even worse. So, no, I really don't see how porting to Linux would pay. Most of developers that I talked to who did it admitted that supporting OSX and Linus turned out to be a giant waste.
    - smaudet 6y ago
      I think there's merit to the argument of 'big corporations can't get things done efficiently' here. I think as you mentioned, for a small scale dev it can be done. I agree, shading could be better across platforms, graphics card manufacturers, even, but that all pales in comparison to a large inefficient corp making grossly over-complex games with staggeringly little added value per hired developer (oh yay another 1mil triangles added to the 100th remake of the same garbage FPS or NFL game, extreme sarcasm). But outside EA Games e.g., some of the best games I've ever played were written by solo devs in a cross platform engine you may have heard of called Flash. Yeah, not always smooth sailing on Linux, but it worked, pretty well even.
- soraminazuki 6y ago
  > not a choice if you develop Windows software A minor nitpick, but cross platform development is usually a painful work regardless of which platform you use.
- computerex 6y ago
  > Linux is ok for certain types of developers, it's still awful for normal users, abysmal for office work and obviously not a choice if you develop Windows software. Don't want to get into an OS war here but merely stating your opinion as fact without supportive evidence is not in the spirit of HackerNews. > it's still awful for normal users, abysmal for office work For office work a lot of workload has moved to the web browser. Creating documents and working on spreadsheets for instance can now all be done online with Microsoft's Office offering and other competing products like Google Docs. And why is it awful for normal users? ChromeOS for example is just linux, and that whole platform is targeted towards 'normal users'. I use linux on all of my personal devices and I use these devices to do very 'normal user' activities like watching YT, social media, blogging, etc. There are many communities that consist of 'normal users' like /r/Thinkpads or /r/LinuxOnThinkpad that are currently enjoying linux. Precisely why do you think it's awful for normal users and office work?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    > Don't want to get into an OS war here but merely stating your opinion as fact without supportive evidence is not in the spirit of HackerNews. These things are pretty much self evident. > Linux is ok for certain types of developers Web developers and HP computing. Game developers? Haha, no. Embedded? Too many proprietary toolchains that don't run on Linux. Productivity and business applications? See below section on office work. ML? nVidia [apparently I'm incorrect on this one]. > it's still awful for normal users Alright, this is a bit subjective, but is supported by the stats that show Linux Desktop still in a distant and well deserved third place. You list a few tasks that you seem to believe are "normal user" tasks, I submit to you that you drastically underestimate the things a normal desktop computer user does with their computer, since most of the tasks you listed are now things that people do on phones and tablets. > abysmal for office work In most offices, Microsoft Office is an indispensable productivity tool (which many HNers, having little experience with real office work, will underestimate severely) and it is only supported on Windows (No, the web version is not the same).
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      ML is actually mostly done on linux. CUDA works absolutely great with nvidia binary drivers. Display performance is irrelevant.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
I'd love to be using an open source desktop, but sadly Linux Desktop is still a goddamn garbage fire as far as I'm concerned. Not that long ago (months) I would say that 4 out of 5 of my desktop and laptop computers ran Linux, but now that number is 1/5 because I just got sick of dealing with Linux Desktop bullshit on them. My main gaming rig runs nVidia because it is frankly best in class, and nVidia has shit Linux support so that's a no-go. I also have a used Oculus Rift, which again rules out Linux. There's a reason Windows is still dominant in the Desktop space despite all its problems.
- traverseda 6y ago
  What kind of linux desktop bullshit? Has it been getting worse?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    No, it just isn't getting better. Any time you want to do something even remotely interesting, like install software that is actually up to date and therefore not in the repo, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops. One of my other usecases involved a device with only a 16GB internal disk, so naturally I would like to install applications to an external disk so they actually fit. This is usually trivial on Windows but not possible with any package manager on Linux [0]. I still constantly run into issues with hardware, especially sound and video, that require hours of googling and manually tweaking config files to fix. Oh yeah, and half the time the results from google for any issue applied to the way things were done 5 years ago, which in typical Linux fashion means that there's an entirely new way to do it now that bears no resemblance. [0] Flatpak can do it if you setup an entirely new installation on that disk, but flatpak has its own issues. Snaps can't do it at all, and while AppImage is really great relatively few projects distribute that way.
    - traverseda 6y ago
      Hmm, that's fair. I'd encourage you to try something outside of the standard redhat/ubuntu distros. Manjaro is nice and is pretty much always up to date. Also has access to the AUR, so there are packages for pretty much everything. It's a lot easier to do interesting stuff. LVM can make two disks appear like they're one, but of course if you remove any of them they both fail. Doesn't really solve the underlying "I want to install apps outside of the root partition" problem though.
fock 6y ago
seriously, the problem is apps wanting unfettered, opaque access to your system and data. If the default Steam install can r/w everywhere, anti-cheat needs kernel modules and a game can install a Trojan (like recently exploited with Source) - I say: no thanks to that, have a VM for gaming and all proprietary stuff and say a big fucking NO to the shshow the "games" ecosystem as a whole is...
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
I, for one, like to use my computer. I do not have time for my computer to be some battleground of political OSS zealotry.

golergka 6y ago

As a game developer, for most mid-tier inside titles releasing Linux version costs more than it makes, so, no. And regarding using Windows: company's behavior is important, but product quality, especially when it's a tool you use every day for work, is more important. Linux is ok for certain types of developers, it's still awful for normal users, abysmal for office work and obviously not a choice if you develop Windows software.

franga2000 6y ago
> As a game developer, for most mid-tier inside titles releasing Linux version costs more than it makes, so, no. What are the main costs of releasing a Linux version of a game when using Unity or Unreal? My limited experience with Unity has been "check the Linux box, click the build button". It even cross-compiles no problem. People I know tell me Unreal is similar. It's not like they have to do a full run of play-testing for Linux. Just check if it starts, play for 10 minutes and release that. We know we're a minority so we're willing to put up with bugs. Even if there's only 100 people who'd buy it only if it ran on Linux, that should pretty much cover the couple hours of dev time.
- coldpie 6y ago
  I can tell you've never released a popular product on Linux. It's a lottttt more effort than you're implying. To do it well, you need to have Linux as a target from the start of your development, it's not something you can tack on to the end. Linux graphics drivers are very different from Windows (the AMD stack isn't even the same codebase). Linux window managers are... wild. You need to build to an ABI that will be supported across distros, which mostly means the Steam Runtime, which means you need to go learn about and understand that. You can't introduce any platform assumptions ("ehh, I'll just hardcode this path with a backslash... oops"). Once you release, you're talking support for dozens of different distros, different versions of distros, different package managers, different filesystems. I know what you're going to say: "Just support Ubuntu LTS and ignore everyone else". Well, now you've just cut your customer base by at least 75%[1], and your customers on other distros are going to demand support anyway. Do you tell a paying customer to F-off because they're not using a distro with only ~20% of the market? Supporting Linux is hard. So is supporting Windows, but if Windows makes up 98% of your customer base, it's justified. 2%? Ehhhhh. (P.S. I love Linux. See my profile. This is the kind of stuff I deal with every single day.) [1] https://boilingsteam.com/we-dont-game-on-the-same-distros-no-more/ https://boilingsteam.com/we-dont-game-on-the-same-distros-no...
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    Open source your games. Open source is the only practical way that existing distros are able to test and support the majority of packages that they ship. If you do that, the cost of supporting all those other things will fall on the distros, not on you, but you need to actually play ball with them and give them something workable that isn't an opaque binary blob that is illegal to redistribute, modify or reverse-engineer. The feelings you're describing (that you need to shelter 100% of those costs and you have no other options) are a side effect of the game industry's cargo-culting of closed-source business models and refusal to even consider that there are ways to make money from open source.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      > Open source your games. Open source is the only practical way that existing distros are able to test and support the majority of packages that they ship Which might be one of the reasons Linux Desktop is so awful to develop for.
      - cycloptic 6y ago
        The "Linux Desktop" is not and has never been a thing beyond a vague marketing term. What you're thinking of is a loose collection of unrelated projects. Pick a single stack and go with it and things get better.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        ....Which might be one of the reasons Linux Desktop is so awful to develop for. You wonder why people ignore your platform? Saying it isn't actually a single platform and instead is dozens of different platforms just means each of those platforms is even less relevant. Saying you're not just one platform with 10% market share but actually 20 with 0.5% each doesn't make the case for shipping on Linux Desktop any better.
        cycloptic 6y ago
- Chouhada 6y ago
  > What are the main costs of releasing a Linux version of a game when using Unity or Unreal? My limited experience with Unity has been "check the Linux box, click the build button". It even cross-compiles no problem. People I know tell me Unreal is similar. For a simple game that uses the entire UE4 stack, you might be able to get away with that if none of your code is Windows-specific and works exactly the same on the Linux distribution you are targeting. Once you start using your own middleware and libraries from outside of the default engine, you need to make sure every single one works across all the platforms you're targeting. Many won't have a Linux compatible version, and those that do may only work against specific distributions and hardware. Even then: Have they changed the window manager? What have else they customised? There have been many issues with anti-cheat solutions over the years on Linux. > It's not like they have to do a full run of play-testing for Linux. Just check if it starts, play for 10 minutes and release that. For a simple game, you may get away with this. Anything larger will require significantly more testing. I've been a producer on large games, and the QA process starts very early on. You don't 'finish' a game and then QA starts - It's an ongoing process that consists of significantly more than just launching a game. >We know we're a minority so we're willing to put up with bugs Some people don't see it that way though. People who have paid for a product have the right for it to work properly. Tickets for Linux support are often higher [1], so the time investment against payback can be problematic. GPU driver support on Linux can also still be problematic. From feature differences against Windows, to crashes. These all take additional development time. Linux developers are often more difficult to acquire in the game dev world. QA even more so. Game dev is really hard. Some of it is hidden by engines like UE4 on the surface, but as soon as you start digging down into serious development, it's difficult. [1] https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760 https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
  - smaudet 6y ago
    Probably the most relevant issue here is the DirectX stack or using some windows specific API (why? DirectX I maybe got at one point, the others speak to some absurd Microsoft-Is-Best-Cause-I-Paid-Money-ism). > Many won't have a Linux compatible version, and those that do may only work against specific distributions and hardware. Even then: Have they changed the window manager? What have else they customised? Outside of truly exotic window managers, the biggest issue I've ever seen with ports has to do with dependencies. Flatpack/Snaps solve most if not all of those problems. > There have been many issues with anti-cheat solutions over the years on Linux. That's assuming anti-cheat systems are ethical, even. Most games I play I want to be multiplayer, and moddable. Most games I play can do both of those things and work in a cross platform modding language. Not hard. I don't want any anti-cheat systems for a complex game with tons of modding. The only place anti-cheat systems make sense is with e-sports style games. Of which, the best anti-cheat systems work server side. Anything else is invasive and tantamount to illegal spying. Shame on you, go burn in peeping Tom hell you perverse game dev. > For a simple game, you may get away with this. Anything larger will require significantly more testing. I find this incredibly hard to believe. If you are working within the engine the majority of the time, the majority of the game will play wherever the engine works. Which brings us back to one of your first comments: > For a simple game that uses the entire UE4 stack, you might be able to get away with that For which games are you not just using the UE4 stack? I.e. what specific problems are game devs normally experiencing causing their code to be non-portable? A bunch of low level assembly code and non standard C++? > but as soon as you start digging down into serious development I challenge you to define 'serious' development. That sounds suspiciously like you're wasting your time fighting infrastructure, or just doing things in a non-portable manner. Solving problems is cross platform, so you can't be doing much serious game coding, its probably problem solving for your particular platform (e.g., as I already mentioned, doing a bunch of work in DirectX shaders or something).
- golergka 6y ago
  Well, I've been working with Unity for 11 years now, but my experience with building for Linux is limited, so I'll go with experience from mobile and console development, and say that with shaders (which never ceases to surprise with platform-specific glitches), filesystem (although Unity is supposed to abstract it out, once you get serious about resource management, this abstraction starts to leak), input (because you want to support gamepad with minimum hassle for the player), and million of unknown unknowns that hopefully will be found by QA, but realistically, by very angry players, I'd budget at least a couple of man-months for this. With sales in hundreds or even tens of thousands, we can expect to get about 2% of audience from Linux, which will account for single-digit thousands, or hundreds of copies sold. With a price tag of $10-20, after Steam cut, taxes, regional prices, sales and refunds, it's about $5-10 of revenue per unit, so in total, about $10k. If that would just be the money a single developer got for 2-3 months of work, it could still be fine for some regions (not everyone on HN is from US). But with a studio, you also have to spend money on marketing, payroll taxes, rent, and development of future projects, which most likely sell even worse. So, no, I really don't see how porting to Linux would pay. Most of developers that I talked to who did it admitted that supporting OSX and Linus turned out to be a giant waste.
  - smaudet 6y ago
    I think there's merit to the argument of 'big corporations can't get things done efficiently' here. I think as you mentioned, for a small scale dev it can be done. I agree, shading could be better across platforms, graphics card manufacturers, even, but that all pales in comparison to a large inefficient corp making grossly over-complex games with staggeringly little added value per hired developer (oh yay another 1mil triangles added to the 100th remake of the same garbage FPS or NFL game, extreme sarcasm). But outside EA Games e.g., some of the best games I've ever played were written by solo devs in a cross platform engine you may have heard of called Flash. Yeah, not always smooth sailing on Linux, but it worked, pretty well even.
soraminazuki 6y ago
> not a choice if you develop Windows software A minor nitpick, but cross platform development is usually a painful work regardless of which platform you use.
computerex 6y ago
> Linux is ok for certain types of developers, it's still awful for normal users, abysmal for office work and obviously not a choice if you develop Windows software. Don't want to get into an OS war here but merely stating your opinion as fact without supportive evidence is not in the spirit of HackerNews. > it's still awful for normal users, abysmal for office work For office work a lot of workload has moved to the web browser. Creating documents and working on spreadsheets for instance can now all be done online with Microsoft's Office offering and other competing products like Google Docs. And why is it awful for normal users? ChromeOS for example is just linux, and that whole platform is targeted towards 'normal users'. I use linux on all of my personal devices and I use these devices to do very 'normal user' activities like watching YT, social media, blogging, etc. There are many communities that consist of 'normal users' like /r/Thinkpads or /r/LinuxOnThinkpad that are currently enjoying linux. Precisely why do you think it's awful for normal users and office work?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  > Don't want to get into an OS war here but merely stating your opinion as fact without supportive evidence is not in the spirit of HackerNews. These things are pretty much self evident. > Linux is ok for certain types of developers Web developers and HP computing. Game developers? Haha, no. Embedded? Too many proprietary toolchains that don't run on Linux. Productivity and business applications? See below section on office work. ML? nVidia [apparently I'm incorrect on this one]. > it's still awful for normal users Alright, this is a bit subjective, but is supported by the stats that show Linux Desktop still in a distant and well deserved third place. You list a few tasks that you seem to believe are "normal user" tasks, I submit to you that you drastically underestimate the things a normal desktop computer user does with their computer, since most of the tasks you listed are now things that people do on phones and tablets. > abysmal for office work In most offices, Microsoft Office is an indispensable productivity tool (which many HNers, having little experience with real office work, will underestimate severely) and it is only supported on Windows (No, the web version is not the same).
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    ML is actually mostly done on linux. CUDA works absolutely great with nvidia binary drivers. Display performance is irrelevant.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

I'd love to be using an open source desktop, but sadly Linux Desktop is still a goddamn garbage fire as far as I'm concerned. Not that long ago (months) I would say that 4 out of 5 of my desktop and laptop computers ran Linux, but now that number is 1/5 because I just got sick of dealing with Linux Desktop bullshit on them. My main gaming rig runs nVidia because it is frankly best in class, and nVidia has shit Linux support so that's a no-go. I also have a used Oculus Rift, which again rules out Linux. There's a reason Windows is still dominant in the Desktop space despite all its problems.

traverseda 6y ago
What kind of linux desktop bullshit? Has it been getting worse?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  No, it just isn't getting better. Any time you want to do something even remotely interesting, like install software that is actually up to date and therefore not in the repo, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops. One of my other usecases involved a device with only a 16GB internal disk, so naturally I would like to install applications to an external disk so they actually fit. This is usually trivial on Windows but not possible with any package manager on Linux [0]. I still constantly run into issues with hardware, especially sound and video, that require hours of googling and manually tweaking config files to fix. Oh yeah, and half the time the results from google for any issue applied to the way things were done 5 years ago, which in typical Linux fashion means that there's an entirely new way to do it now that bears no resemblance. [0] Flatpak can do it if you setup an entirely new installation on that disk, but flatpak has its own issues. Snaps can't do it at all, and while AppImage is really great relatively few projects distribute that way.
  - traverseda 6y ago
    Hmm, that's fair. I'd encourage you to try something outside of the standard redhat/ubuntu distros. Manjaro is nice and is pretty much always up to date. Also has access to the AUR, so there are packages for pretty much everything. It's a lot easier to do interesting stuff. LVM can make two disks appear like they're one, but of course if you remove any of them they both fail. Doesn't really solve the underlying "I want to install apps outside of the root partition" problem though.

fock 6y ago

seriously, the problem is apps wanting unfettered, opaque access to your system and data. If the default Steam install can r/w everywhere, anti-cheat needs kernel modules and a game can install a Trojan (like recently exploited with Source) - I say: no thanks to that, have a VM for gaming and all proprietary stuff and say a big fucking NO to the shshow the "games" ecosystem as a whole is...

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

I, for one, like to use my computer. I do not have time for my computer to be some battleground of political OSS zealotry.