6 ms·

That is interesting news, but turn the OS market upside down? You can't be serious.

by danssig 14y ago

onli 14y ago
Why not? Missing games are the last and only "serious" issue of Linux. Well, maybe apart from Adobes product. But that's quite seriuos: Not being able to play normal and modern games is why I have Windows installed, and it's why i couldn't convince my nonexisting kids to use linux solely. More Games means more user means more games (means better gpu-driver). It's a really old theory, and i think it's one that is sound, that linux somehow has to start the spirale and end the issue of having not enough user for games and therefor not enough games for users. Steam with some Valve-games could change that indeed.
- codesuela 14y ago
  Games are the only thing you can't run with good performance inside a VM. That's why you can always spin up a Windows VM if you need Photoshop but you HAVE to reboot if you want to enjoy a game. So yes, this would be definitely a game changer
  - freehunter 14y ago
    I've had luck with VMWare and nvidia cards, as long as your processor supports virtulization. Near-native performance, minus the fact that you have Linux eating some of your resources. It gets pretty touchy though, and last time I tried it on an ATI card the drivers didn't support it.
- rowanseymour 14y ago
  I'd say lack of Microsoft Office is the another big issue. LibreOffice/OpenOffice has come along away but is nowhere near as polished, and never quite displays a document the way it was meant to be. That's what kept me dual booting until I got a Mac.
  - onli 14y ago
    I don't agree. That whole cities like munich use linux for their offices shows pretty clearly that this is not a real showstopper. Not saying that Libre Office doesn't sometimes choke on complex documents - but that you are even using proprietary document formats makes the matter complex. It's probably something where one could compromise if you'd want to (or, depending on your job, could). Besides, givenall the online alternatives, their are really quite a lot of ways to not depend on Microsoft Office.
- tsotha 14y ago
  This still isn't going to mean many more games for Linux. Presumably Valve will port the Source engine games, but that's just a tiny percentage of what they sell on Steam. The vast majority of the titles are third party, and even though Steam will give them a Linux distribution channel, it doesn't do much to convince them to create Linux games.
b0rsuk 14y ago
"I would use Linux only, but I like game X and Y." is incredibly common attitude among people who use dual boot. I'm not making this up, the phrase pops up very often on various forums, especially in context of linux ports for newly announced games. You don't see many complaints about GIMP being inadequate (and with the recent news that will be the end of GIMP complaints), or OpenOffice/LibreOffice incompatibility. Yes, once in a while someone has issues with very tricky/advanced spreadsheet or text document, but with minimum goodwill on the part of the creator it can be worked around. Gaming is really the last bastion of Windows. I predict a surge in Linux popularity once Steam is ported, bypassing OSX. And once that happens you are going to see pressure to use it in workplace. Game developers will be releasing Linux versions much more often, like in the old days of OpenGL. Really, there are many people who want to use Linux but hold out because of games.
- NickPollard 14y ago
  Anecdotal, but I am exactly one of these people - I dual boot, and the only reason I have Windows is for games. Then when you suggest this to others, the dual boot puts them off, and they don't want to be without games either. Now there's a long way from 'Steam client for Linux' to 'Most AAA games available on Linux', but that is definitely the largest problem facing Linux adoption on the desktop.
  - freehunter 14y ago
    A couple times a year I blow away my Windows install and go Linux-only. Then a AAA game comes out, and VMWare just doesn't cut it. I've recently gotten tired of Skyrim and put it away for a while, but then the GW2 beta is this weekend...
- qznc 14y ago
  Even with Steam, important games like those Blizzard titles are not available on Linux.
  - nnnnni 14y ago
    Yet.
sandGorgon 14y ago
yes it will - Steam is a juggernaut which will trigger purchase/usage decisions. Creators of libraries and frameworks will have to comply with the standards that Valve will come up with (and come up they will). For example what audio framework will your distro use - Jack? OSS? Pulseaudio? They will have to use what Valve wants you to use, if you want to play their games. Multimonitor support ? HDMI? use the toolkits that Valve will define. I would'nt be surprised if Valve influences the switch to Wayland or something. And the big one ? packaging format. What I'm really hoping for - Valve being able to arm twist ATI and nVidia for better drivers (which may happen anyway because of Ivy Bridge graphics and its great linux support[1] ) This is a Good Thing. Linux has been suffering from a severe framework fragmentation which leads to a very small addressable market. Unifying behind some frameworks will undoubtedly increase that market size. [1] www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=17284
- slowpoke 14y ago
  As long as Valve wouldn't be pushing closed/proprietary standards or other nonsense, I would be very okay with this.
- benologist 14y ago
  No it won't. Login to steam from a mac some time and watch the awesomeness unfold as 1/10th of your games are available. Now make it 1/10th of 1/10th! Unless they convince a significant number of other publishers to do linux versions (while they won't even do mac versions) it's not going to be very exciting.
  - xsmasher 14y ago
    What if Valve expanded "Source" from an engine to more of a platform? If you create your game for Source you can release on Win, Mac, Linux, and a SteamBox/console with relative ease? It's pie-in-the-sky, but that would be a game changer. A linux steam client would be one piece of that plan.
    - maxbaroi 14y ago
      Yes, a lot of people throughout the world are working on write once run everywhere and they're the Java, Go, Python, Ruby, Lua... language developers. And I have to imagine that what you're proposing is Valve write some virtual Steam-Machine that they port to every major OS, then they write a compiler that outputs Steam-Machine byte code. And maybe that could work (though different graphics libraries seem like a very hard problem to overcome). And maybe it would work really well for smaller indie games like Super Meat Boy, Braid, etc. But I don't think it will work for AAA, computation intensive games life LFD2 or Portal 2. I don't know much about game development but from what I've heard, if you're making a game with whoa-mygod graphics then you're doing some really close-to-the-metal programming trying to save every cycle you can. And all the effort (and results) are for naught if you're running your super optimized code on a virtual machine. Portability would be amazing, but are people willing to cooperate and say "I'll live with a game that looks last generation because so someone running a different OS than me can also enjoy it." I don't think so. Disclaimer: I'm not a game developer, I could be wrong about the technical challenges, and if so, please correct me.
bad_user 14y ago
I think it has the potential. It always had. Android already turned the mobile market upside-down. The advantage of Linux is that you can take the pieces that suit your needs, replace the others with your own modules and presto, you've got an OS. Then you can build the hardware for it and bam, you've got a killer machine meant for consumers. Android may be a bad example here, but think of Tivo. Think about it, suddenly every PC maker can assemble some hardware together and call that a games console. The missing piece for Linux was always the software, like games and Adobe Photoshop and MS Office. If Linux gets the support it needs for the games that people love, then I could see its popularity going through the roof.
- w0utert 14y ago
  > I think it has the potential. It always had. Android already turned the mobile market upside-down. In what way did Android 'turn the mobile market upside-down'? The mobile market turned itself upside-down, and Android was just one of the players, along with (in historical order) Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iOS, and as one of the last to arrive on the scene, Android. Not to start a mobile OS flamewar or anything, but I can honestly not think of a single way Android 'turned the mobile market upside down'. It's just a commodity mobile OS like most of the others. That it ended up on the majority of smartphones sold is IMO what you would call a serendipity.
  - hcho 14y ago
    I can walk into a phone shop and buy a contract-free, sim-free smartphone for £50. Sure, it's low end but it is a smartphone. It looks pretty upside-down to me.
glassx 14y ago
Well, it can help OpenGL and other cross-platform frameworks become even stronger. Studios will have more incentive to make games portable from the get-go, instead of relying on Windows/Direct3D. Even mobile, console and OS X users could benefit from that.
- danssig 14y ago
  >Studios will have more incentive to make games portable from the get-go What incentive? 1.5% of the desktop market? If the ~13% Mac market share isn't enough to get most of them to consider it, why would a group nearly 10 times smaller matter suddenly?
  - hollerith 14y ago
    And that ~13% of the market that have a Mac are willing to spend money on apps whereas most of the 1 or 1.5% of the market on Linux have a philosophical objection to proprietary applications and to DRM.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      Do they? There are of course Free Software fundamentalists who will not touch proprietary software but I don't think the majority will fit into that. There are already a number of companies selling proprietary software for Linux.
  - outworlder 14y ago
    Who cares about the desktop market? For games, what matters is the gaming market. Grandma's $100 after rebate machine doesn't count. Gamers are rather picky about their machine and spend a significant amount of cash. They usually tinker with their machines a lot, to get a couple FPS boost. Give them an OS which will let them tune it and make it run all their games, possibly even faster than the alternatives, and they'll switch.
libraryatnight 14y ago
Games are what keep me from using Linux exclusively, I can't be the only one. It would probably make a huge difference.
seanp2k2 14y ago
Currently, games are /the only/ thing holding me and a few people I know back from Linux as our only desktop os. At work, we're at ~90% Linux usage for desktops and >99% for servers.
- dkersten 14y ago
  Agreed. I keep a windows install around mainly to play games. I also use it to test Windows desktop applications that I occasionally write, but I'd happily use a VM for that if I didn't have a windows install.
- Tsagadai 14y ago
  Games is pretty much it for me too. I run Linux at home in a VM (because I'm more comfortable in Linux now than Windows) on Windows so I can get native performance in games. Steam for Linux is definitely a good thing.

That is interesting news, but turn the OS market upside down? You can't be serious.

by danssig 14y ago

That is interesting news, but turn the OS market upside down? You can't be serious.

onli 14y ago

Why not? Missing games are the last and only "serious" issue of Linux. Well, maybe apart from Adobes product. But that's quite seriuos: Not being able to play normal and modern games is why I have Windows installed, and it's why i couldn't convince my nonexisting kids to use linux solely. More Games means more user means more games (means better gpu-driver). It's a really old theory, and i think it's one that is sound, that linux somehow has to start the spirale and end the issue of having not enough user for games and therefor not enough games for users. Steam with some Valve-games could change that indeed.

codesuela 14y ago
Games are the only thing you can't run with good performance inside a VM. That's why you can always spin up a Windows VM if you need Photoshop but you HAVE to reboot if you want to enjoy a game. So yes, this would be definitely a game changer
- freehunter 14y ago
  I've had luck with VMWare and nvidia cards, as long as your processor supports virtulization. Near-native performance, minus the fact that you have Linux eating some of your resources. It gets pretty touchy though, and last time I tried it on an ATI card the drivers didn't support it.
rowanseymour 14y ago
I'd say lack of Microsoft Office is the another big issue. LibreOffice/OpenOffice has come along away but is nowhere near as polished, and never quite displays a document the way it was meant to be. That's what kept me dual booting until I got a Mac.
- onli 14y ago
  I don't agree. That whole cities like munich use linux for their offices shows pretty clearly that this is not a real showstopper. Not saying that Libre Office doesn't sometimes choke on complex documents - but that you are even using proprietary document formats makes the matter complex. It's probably something where one could compromise if you'd want to (or, depending on your job, could). Besides, givenall the online alternatives, their are really quite a lot of ways to not depend on Microsoft Office.
tsotha 14y ago
This still isn't going to mean many more games for Linux. Presumably Valve will port the Source engine games, but that's just a tiny percentage of what they sell on Steam. The vast majority of the titles are third party, and even though Steam will give them a Linux distribution channel, it doesn't do much to convince them to create Linux games.

b0rsuk 14y ago

"I would use Linux only, but I like game X and Y." is incredibly common attitude among people who use dual boot. I'm not making this up, the phrase pops up very often on various forums, especially in context of linux ports for newly announced games. You don't see many complaints about GIMP being inadequate (and with the recent news that will be the end of GIMP complaints), or OpenOffice/LibreOffice incompatibility. Yes, once in a while someone has issues with very tricky/advanced spreadsheet or text document, but with minimum goodwill on the part of the creator it can be worked around. Gaming is really the last bastion of Windows. I predict a surge in Linux popularity once Steam is ported, bypassing OSX. And once that happens you are going to see pressure to use it in workplace. Game developers will be releasing Linux versions much more often, like in the old days of OpenGL. Really, there are many people who want to use Linux but hold out because of games.

NickPollard 14y ago
Anecdotal, but I am exactly one of these people - I dual boot, and the only reason I have Windows is for games. Then when you suggest this to others, the dual boot puts them off, and they don't want to be without games either. Now there's a long way from 'Steam client for Linux' to 'Most AAA games available on Linux', but that is definitely the largest problem facing Linux adoption on the desktop.
- freehunter 14y ago
  A couple times a year I blow away my Windows install and go Linux-only. Then a AAA game comes out, and VMWare just doesn't cut it. I've recently gotten tired of Skyrim and put it away for a while, but then the GW2 beta is this weekend...
qznc 14y ago
Even with Steam, important games like those Blizzard titles are not available on Linux.
- nnnnni 14y ago
  Yet.

sandGorgon 14y ago

yes it will - Steam is a juggernaut which will trigger purchase/usage decisions. Creators of libraries and frameworks will have to comply with the standards that Valve will come up with (and come up they will). For example what audio framework will your distro use - Jack? OSS? Pulseaudio? They will have to use what Valve wants you to use, if you want to play their games. Multimonitor support ? HDMI? use the toolkits that Valve will define. I would'nt be surprised if Valve influences the switch to Wayland or something. And the big one ? packaging format. What I'm really hoping for - Valve being able to arm twist ATI and nVidia for better drivers (which may happen anyway because of Ivy Bridge graphics and its great linux support[1] ) This is a Good Thing. Linux has been suffering from a severe framework fragmentation which leads to a very small addressable market. Unifying behind some frameworks will undoubtedly increase that market size. [1] www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=17284

slowpoke 14y ago
As long as Valve wouldn't be pushing closed/proprietary standards or other nonsense, I would be very okay with this.
benologist 14y ago
No it won't. Login to steam from a mac some time and watch the awesomeness unfold as 1/10th of your games are available. Now make it 1/10th of 1/10th! Unless they convince a significant number of other publishers to do linux versions (while they won't even do mac versions) it's not going to be very exciting.
- xsmasher 14y ago
  What if Valve expanded "Source" from an engine to more of a platform? If you create your game for Source you can release on Win, Mac, Linux, and a SteamBox/console with relative ease? It's pie-in-the-sky, but that would be a game changer. A linux steam client would be one piece of that plan.
  - maxbaroi 14y ago
    Yes, a lot of people throughout the world are working on write once run everywhere and they're the Java, Go, Python, Ruby, Lua... language developers. And I have to imagine that what you're proposing is Valve write some virtual Steam-Machine that they port to every major OS, then they write a compiler that outputs Steam-Machine byte code. And maybe that could work (though different graphics libraries seem like a very hard problem to overcome). And maybe it would work really well for smaller indie games like Super Meat Boy, Braid, etc. But I don't think it will work for AAA, computation intensive games life LFD2 or Portal 2. I don't know much about game development but from what I've heard, if you're making a game with whoa-mygod graphics then you're doing some really close-to-the-metal programming trying to save every cycle you can. And all the effort (and results) are for naught if you're running your super optimized code on a virtual machine. Portability would be amazing, but are people willing to cooperate and say "I'll live with a game that looks last generation because so someone running a different OS than me can also enjoy it." I don't think so. Disclaimer: I'm not a game developer, I could be wrong about the technical challenges, and if so, please correct me.

bad_user 14y ago

I think it has the potential. It always had. Android already turned the mobile market upside-down. The advantage of Linux is that you can take the pieces that suit your needs, replace the others with your own modules and presto, you've got an OS. Then you can build the hardware for it and bam, you've got a killer machine meant for consumers. Android may be a bad example here, but think of Tivo. Think about it, suddenly every PC maker can assemble some hardware together and call that a games console. The missing piece for Linux was always the software, like games and Adobe Photoshop and MS Office. If Linux gets the support it needs for the games that people love, then I could see its popularity going through the roof.

w0utert 14y ago
> I think it has the potential. It always had. Android already turned the mobile market upside-down. In what way did Android 'turn the mobile market upside-down'? The mobile market turned itself upside-down, and Android was just one of the players, along with (in historical order) Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iOS, and as one of the last to arrive on the scene, Android. Not to start a mobile OS flamewar or anything, but I can honestly not think of a single way Android 'turned the mobile market upside down'. It's just a commodity mobile OS like most of the others. That it ended up on the majority of smartphones sold is IMO what you would call a serendipity.
- hcho 14y ago
  I can walk into a phone shop and buy a contract-free, sim-free smartphone for £50. Sure, it's low end but it is a smartphone. It looks pretty upside-down to me.

glassx 14y ago

Well, it can help OpenGL and other cross-platform frameworks become even stronger. Studios will have more incentive to make games portable from the get-go, instead of relying on Windows/Direct3D. Even mobile, console and OS X users could benefit from that.

danssig 14y ago
>Studios will have more incentive to make games portable from the get-go What incentive? 1.5% of the desktop market? If the ~13% Mac market share isn't enough to get most of them to consider it, why would a group nearly 10 times smaller matter suddenly?
- hollerith 14y ago
  And that ~13% of the market that have a Mac are willing to spend money on apps whereas most of the 1 or 1.5% of the market on Linux have a philosophical objection to proprietary applications and to DRM.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Do they? There are of course Free Software fundamentalists who will not touch proprietary software but I don't think the majority will fit into that. There are already a number of companies selling proprietary software for Linux.
- outworlder 14y ago
  Who cares about the desktop market? For games, what matters is the gaming market. Grandma's $100 after rebate machine doesn't count. Gamers are rather picky about their machine and spend a significant amount of cash. They usually tinker with their machines a lot, to get a couple FPS boost. Give them an OS which will let them tune it and make it run all their games, possibly even faster than the alternatives, and they'll switch.

libraryatnight 14y ago

Games are what keep me from using Linux exclusively, I can't be the only one. It would probably make a huge difference.

seanp2k2 14y ago

Currently, games are /the only/ thing holding me and a few people I know back from Linux as our only desktop os. At work, we're at ~90% Linux usage for desktops and >99% for servers.

dkersten 14y ago
Agreed. I keep a windows install around mainly to play games. I also use it to test Windows desktop applications that I occasionally write, but I'd happily use a VM for that if I didn't have a windows install.
Tsagadai 14y ago
Games is pretty much it for me too. I run Linux at home in a VM (because I'm more comfortable in Linux now than Windows) on Windows so I can get native performance in games. Steam for Linux is definitely a good thing.