linux, the very weak system for gaming

[russofris]

You have to set up any OS correctly or have somebody wipe your anus

While this might not be a direct contradiction, Apple does a great job of making it appear that they do this. It's all about the manner in which they deliver though. Games either 'work' or are pretty much entirely unavailable. Under linux, there's a lot in between. Perhaps Valve will fix the presentation aspect a bit, and steam will tell you "Hey, this game doesn't run on your hardware yet, or your kernel, etc".

I half expect Valve to release a stripped-down performance-oriented linux distro to complement steam. Focus on SDL, Kernel, Mesa, OpenAL, and X11. You could pretty much turn any ATI/Intel/Nvidia box into a game console. I started working on one yesterday with ~x86 Gentoo to see how it would run, but the x11 overlay in Layman appears to be broken at the moment.

F

[D0pamine]

While this might not be a direct contradiction, Apple does a great job of making it appear that they do this. It's all about the manner in which they deliver though. Games either 'work' or are pretty much entirely unavailable. Under linux, there's a lot in between. Perhaps Valve will fix the presentation aspect a bit, and steam will tell you "Hey, this game doesn't run on your hardware yet, or your kernel, etc".

I half expect Valve to release a stripped-down performance-oriented linux distro to complement steam. Focus on SDL, Kernel, Mesa, OpenAL, and X11. You could pretty much turn any ATI/Intel/Nvidia box into a game console. I started working on one yesterday with ~x86 Gentoo to see how it would run, but the x11 overlay in Layman appears to be broken at the moment.

F

every game has minimum system requirements if you read the box

I can still play ut2k4-demo with the latest bleeding edge kernel and x11 ect i wonder if it runs on win8.... hows that for stable apis eh?

edit - hows about xbmc as a frontend xD

[russofris]

every game has minimum system requirements if you read the box

Man, I really hate playing devil's advocate here, but.... Games come in boxes still?

[D0pamine]

Man, I really hate playing devil's advocate here, but.... Games come in boxes still?

ones shoplifted or actually paid for ...

i think even bittorrent iso's come with an .nfo file containing minimum system reqs sometimes

[Hamish Wilson]

When it comes to drivers and stable APIs, I can only think of the mess my father is in with his Windows XP installation on his main computer. His old system borked itself as Windows XP is always destined to do in the end, and he needs to reinstall. The problem is he is no longer sure where to get the drivers for his sound card, his TV capture card, and a multitude of other hardware on his machine. I know for a fact that if I stuck the Fedora 17 Live CD in there could expect it to just work with all of these devices. Once you get a properly supported driver in kernel, it will just work. You do not need to go searching through manuals and websites or old driver disks. Once the hardware is working on your computer you can expect it to continue to run for the full life of your hardware, every time you update your system until then. How is this a worse system than Windows?

So why the big complaints about drivers? The problem with this system is that it requires hardware manufactures to actively support Linux - and by support Linux I mean have free in-kernel drivers.Yes, that means somewhat of a delay when it comes to supporting new hardware, but this can be alleviated as Intel had been working to do by working with the Linux kernel maintainers and other parts of the graphics infrastructure well in advance of a hardware launch. Complaints about binary blobs arise from the fact they are trying to shoe-horn Windows drivers on top of Linux. They are essentially userspace applications that also touch the kernel, which is bound to cause trouble. But they are not necessarily necessary and just because Linux does not specifically cater to them does not mean Linux is bad for gaming. It just means that for the moments gamers are not getting proper support from most of their hardware producers on Linux. By proper support, I mean free in kernel drivers.

Just because companies are not doing the work to properly support Linux using it's own systems does not mean that Linux has a problem. It is just that they have yet to see the light yet.

[oldskool69]

hey, its cool so many ppl dropped in to say something about it! keep it going!

do you think it will get better when they drop the x and use wayland?

[russofris]

do you think it will get better when they drop the x and use wayland?

It is quite honestly too early to tell. Wayland has the potential to simplify things significantly, it is just not in a place where it can be used for commercial releases yet. We're at the point where we're seeing experimental liveCD releases, which would put early adopters 1 year out, and commercial releases two years out.

Until then, it's "X/mesa/SDL/OpenAL".

Fingers crossed.

F

[crazycheese]

hi all,

why is it, that i have like 50% better average gaming perfomance in windows 7 compared to lubuntu, for example, no matter, what i do? and why is it, that you always get errors, warnings and crashes everytime you install or run something on linux? i believe it is at the time, that developers make linux a gaming plattform, that is better than windows. every year i try linux again and it makes me sick that its still trash in gaming.

this is one video, that shows, what i tried to "explain" here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh-cnaJoGCw

Lets just go ahead and spawn another two threads:


Windows, the always broken bloated self-infecting piece of monopoly shi-

And

Mac, the egoistic overpriced stripped-down patent troll

Just go ahead!

Until then, it's "X/mesa/SDL/OpenAL".

Fingers crossed.

F

I think, the "OpenAL" part is dead, no? Just like Allegro.

MESA is one of the implementations, which should just follow the (hard to follow) spec (OpenGL).

This leaves developers with "X/OpenGL/SDL" tripple, which is perfectly simple.

[geearf]

Linux isn't suitable for games, mate. I've been running a Linux installation since... forever. About 17 years. It has always sucked for games. The only fun I have with games on Linux is MAME and SNES9x; pretty much the only things that won't result in idiotic glitches. The majority of games always fuck up at something. Probably due to X11 and the various desktop environments having absolutely no standards regarding games. And zero interest in introducing any. From the perspective of X11 and the DEs, games do not exist. They simply don't care about them. So developers have to hack together kludges in order to produce something that kind of works. Microsoft on the other hand always made games a first-class citizen on their operating systems. It's not about drivers, by the way. It's about the very core of the graphical stack not even remotely considering games.

So seriously, what did you expect? You might just as well try to play DVDs on your toaster.

I don't know about that, mate.
Around 2005 or so (not sure anymore) I remember I was playing McGee's Alice with better FPS on Debian than on Windows...
Yes, I was using the Nvidia blob but still...

Now since I move to the free Radeon driver, although we are more than half a decade later....
Sad story...

[PsynoKhi0]

I'm sorry, are the ops on holiday? This thread belongs in the "Gaming" sub-forum.