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Heavily doubt that those would make people switch. Maaaybe, if their social circle already uses Linux. However, make the next Minecraft, Fortnite or Roblox wor

Heavily doubt that those would make people switch. Maaaybe, if their social circle already uses Linux. However, make the next Minecraft, Fortnite or Roblox work only (or considerably better) on Linux desktop[], and you will suddenly gain a lot more new users. Some of whom will stick around, since all their other apps work the same in the browser. [] Whatever that term means, even the article makes a distinction between that and Chrome OS.

rwiggins 3y ago
It made me switch, anyway, recently - specifically another one of those "Oh, let's finish setting up your computer" (i.e., try to trick you into trying Edge again, probably, or set up a "Microsoft" account) with my only options being "Remind me later" or "OK" was the straw that broke the camel's back. That said, I'm far from your typical desktop user. I'm vaguely Linux sysadmin adjacent, and I ran Linux as my primary OS for many years - until one day I noticed I was mostly booted into Windows for gaming and decided to reclaim that SSD space. Gaming on Linux has come... leaps and bounds. It's actually extraordinary. Still many sharp edges, but the Steam Deck might in fact be the first spark of a revolution here. We'll see, I guess.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  By emulating Windows, while failing to attract anyone targeting POSIX platforms to port their games into GNU/Linux, not even Android.
  - rwiggins 3y ago
    Is this where I'm supposed to say Wine Is Not an Emulator? ;-) Jokes aside, totally right, and unfortunately, in my experience it's often a better experience to run the Windows port under Wine than it is to use the native version. e.g. the native version of Tyranny is just a black box for me, but the Wine version works pretty flawlessly. I think userspace is just too unstable, and game companies probably don't want a forever-ongoing maintenance cost just to keep their old games running.
DeathArrow 3y ago
>However, make the next Minecraft, Fortnite or Roblox work only (or considerably better) on Linux desktop And lose lots of money in that process. :) And what Linux OS should you target? Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, Arch, Android? Target KDE or Gnome? Or maybe XFCE? X Windows or Wayland? Use ALSA, Pipewire or Pulse Audio? Bionic or glibc?
- Gordonjcp 3y ago
  > And what Linux OS should you target? Linux is an OS. It doesn't matter which distro you pick, because they're all the same.
  - DeathArrow 3y ago
    Linux is a kernel. Debian is an OS.
  - surajrmal 3y ago
    Steam runs games inside of a container to provide a consistent environment for the game. It largely ignores the OS and only uses the kernel as a result. Linux distros have tons of differences that make it otherwise untenable to target. You need an army of package maintainers to maintain per distro packages and sort out differences which seems to work for oss, but doesn't for commercial closed source software.
    - Gordonjcp 3y ago
      This is actually a great way of running stuff in "foreign" distros where you can't guarantee the presence or absence of libraries. For example DaVinci Resolve is packaged for (now quite old) CentOS but runs just fine installed on Ubuntu, with absolutely no problems at all. The only thing that might catch out the unwary is that CentOS packages a couple of libraries as default which Ubuntu doesn't but if you're savvy enough to edit video you're savvy enough to catch this. You can also run Resolve in a Docker container so it "sees" a CentOS environment no matter what, and it's transparent across any other distro. There's no real need to do this, although it makes running more than one version easy.

rwiggins 3y ago

It made me switch, anyway, recently - specifically another one of those "Oh, let's finish setting up your computer" (i.e., try to trick you into trying Edge again, probably, or set up a "Microsoft" account) with my only options being "Remind me later" or "OK" was the straw that broke the camel's back. That said, I'm far from your typical desktop user. I'm vaguely Linux sysadmin adjacent, and I ran Linux as my primary OS for many years - until one day I noticed I was mostly booted into Windows for gaming and decided to reclaim that SSD space. Gaming on Linux has come... leaps and bounds. It's actually extraordinary. Still many sharp edges, but the Steam Deck might in fact be the first spark of a revolution here. We'll see, I guess.

pjmlp 3y ago
By emulating Windows, while failing to attract anyone targeting POSIX platforms to port their games into GNU/Linux, not even Android.
- rwiggins 3y ago
  Is this where I'm supposed to say Wine Is Not an Emulator? ;-) Jokes aside, totally right, and unfortunately, in my experience it's often a better experience to run the Windows port under Wine than it is to use the native version. e.g. the native version of Tyranny is just a black box for me, but the Wine version works pretty flawlessly. I think userspace is just too unstable, and game companies probably don't want a forever-ongoing maintenance cost just to keep their old games running.

DeathArrow 3y ago

>However, make the next Minecraft, Fortnite or Roblox work only (or considerably better) on Linux desktop And lose lots of money in that process. :) And what Linux OS should you target? Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, Arch, Android? Target KDE or Gnome? Or maybe XFCE? X Windows or Wayland? Use ALSA, Pipewire or Pulse Audio? Bionic or glibc?

Gordonjcp 3y ago
> And what Linux OS should you target? Linux is an OS. It doesn't matter which distro you pick, because they're all the same.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  Linux is a kernel. Debian is an OS.
- surajrmal 3y ago
  Steam runs games inside of a container to provide a consistent environment for the game. It largely ignores the OS and only uses the kernel as a result. Linux distros have tons of differences that make it otherwise untenable to target. You need an army of package maintainers to maintain per distro packages and sort out differences which seems to work for oss, but doesn't for commercial closed source software.
  - Gordonjcp 3y ago
    This is actually a great way of running stuff in "foreign" distros where you can't guarantee the presence or absence of libraries. For example DaVinci Resolve is packaged for (now quite old) CentOS but runs just fine installed on Ubuntu, with absolutely no problems at all. The only thing that might catch out the unwary is that CentOS packages a couple of libraries as default which Ubuntu doesn't but if you're savvy enough to edit video you're savvy enough to catch this. You can also run Resolve in a Docker container so it "sees" a CentOS environment no matter what, and it's transparent across any other distro. There's no real need to do this, although it makes running more than one version easy.