C4 Engine Drops Linux Support, Calls It "Frankenstein OS"

[johnc]

Now that's interesting: A cross platform game engine that drops support for a platform. Anyway, a developer who can't install Ubuntu... seriously?

Not to belabor the point here but I do not think we're talking about somebody who "can't" install Ubuntu. I think what you see is a person who has 30 hours of work he has to do in every 24-hour day, and he probably does not like when he has to waste time getting things to work because the people who are responsible for making their product work (Canonical in this case) can't be bothered to do their job. So I can understand why he doesn't want to spend ten hours hopping through all kinds of hoops just to get an OS installed on his system. It's a waste of somebody's time.

This is the real world down here. This is what everyone is dealing with and we need to be honest about it if we expect to make it better.

In defense, Ubuntu is a free product and Canonical isn't a charity and doesn't have a lot of money to blow to create a flawless experience.

And NVIDIA should be criticized for not having day-one support for their products in nouveau.

[pgoetz]

Actually one of the developers read this damning list of Linux problems and agreed with it wholeheartedly.
As a software platform the Linux OS just doesn't exist. Full stop.

Some of the complaints in that list (e.g. "No reliable sound system" under Audio Subsystem) are 5-6 years old! Surely people don't have the same complaints about audio now that they had in 2009?

And complaints like this: "Linux developers don't care about backward compatibility - OSS is mostly unsupported nowadays, OSSv4 is no longer being developed." are just plain ridiculous. Try opening a an MS Word document from < 2000 in MS Office 2013, for example "This document is too old to be loaded in this version of office" is what happens. Maintaining backwards compatibility is the performance kiss of death, not to mention a maintenance nightmare.

[haplo602]

Well, his marketing stunt is certainly getting attention.

As to his problems with Linux, can't judge. I freak over systemd and some people like it ... apples to oranges ...

[dungeon]

Not to belabor the point here but I do not think we're talking about somebody who "can't" install Ubuntu.

Well, he actually said that on twitter

Tried all day to install Ubuntu 14.04. Failed miserably. This just adds to my heaping pile of bad experiences with Linux.

https://twitter.com/EricLengyel/status/552672506016825345

Few days after:

I have reached the point where I feel morally obligated to drop all support for Linux.

https://twitter.com/EricLengyel/status/553817772824612864

What kind of shitty sentence is that

[Tuxee]

Not to belabor the point here but I do not think we're talking about somebody who "can't" install Ubuntu. I think what you see is a person who has 30 hours of work he has to do in every 24-hour day, and he probably does not like when he has to waste time getting things to work because the people who are responsible for making their product work (Canonical in this case) can't be bothered to do their job. So I can understand why he doesn't want to spend ten hours hopping through all kinds of hoops just to get an OS installed on his system. It's a waste of somebody's time.

This is the real world down here. This is what everyone is dealing with and we need to be honest about it if we expect to make it better.

In defense, Ubuntu is a free product and Canonical isn't a charity and doesn't have a lot of money to blow to create a flawless experience.

And NVIDIA should be criticized for not having day-one support for their products in nouveau.

Nah... that's bullshit. While I personally work exclusively with Linux distros, I do have to set up a Windows box every now and then. Once you are stranded with a box without pre-installed Windows things can become arduous quickly. And when he states
"This decision was also made to preserve my own sanity since my personal experiences with Linux have been extremely negative and have resulted in huge wastes of time"
it sounds as if he spent days trying to get Linux to work - so he is either inept or has never looked for support or is plainly exaggerating.

[Guest]

If it runs on SteamOS, it will run on every Linux distro with Steam installed. Seems this guy was trying to build directly against the underlying OS.

Well, people are about to get into package format/packagemanager/static_vs_shared_libs debate again.

Steam solved this by simply packing their own set of libraries everywhere (actually, distro libs are used if they are present and found).
Unfortunatedly you can either chose to pack your stuff staticly, go with steam environment or suffer endless pain trying to support more than just one distribution (or you can make damn good software and distributions will do all the packaging for you).

[Dukenukemx]

I spent 3 days trying to install Ubuntu 14.04 on a 2001 PowerBook G4. Eventually I hit a brick wall with 3D acceleration not working. I mean come on canonical. It's not like I'm trying to install Linux on a Sega Genesis here.

[GreatEmerald]

Not to belabor the point here but I do not think we're talking about somebody who "can't" install Ubuntu. I think what you see is a person who has 30 hours of work he has to do in every 24-hour day, and he probably does not like when he has to waste time getting things to work because the people who are responsible for making their product work (Canonical in this case) can't be bothered to do their job. So I can understand why he doesn't want to spend ten hours hopping through all kinds of hoops just to get an OS installed on his system. It's a waste of somebody's time.

This is the real world down here. This is what everyone is dealing with and we need to be honest about it if we expect to make it better.

In defense, Ubuntu is a free product and Canonical isn't a charity and doesn't have a lot of money to blow to create a flawless experience.

Hence the question is why he was trying to use Ubuntu and not, you know, something that has support, like RHEL. Or at the very least use "Ubuntu Advantage". I'm sure the support would have pointed out what he was doing wrong immediately.

[birdie]

As for this..."developer"...the guy clearly has a ego bigger than the Everest, and then, when the s**t hit the fan, "how a engine dev could fail in a "simple" task as to install the easiest Linux distro ?", so , instead of search for help, bet he didn't even googled for it, he just rage quit like an arrogant prick that actually is what he seems to be.

If Linux distros in 2014 are so easy to install, a developer cannot do that, that says a lot about the quality of OSS. What quality, I might add.

[peppepz]

And complaints like this: "Linux developers don't care about backward compatibility - OSS is mostly unsupported nowadays, OSSv4 is no longer being developed." are just plain ridiculous.

Yup, ALSA has been with us since 1999 (that's 16 years now - boy, I feel old) and OSS still works in the very latest kernel version exactly the way it did back then. What better backward compatibility could one ask for?
Not to mention the fact that at the same time the author complains about excessive layers of compatibility, when he deliberately chooses a backward compatibility scenario in order to illustrate that Linux has "six layers of audio redirection", by counting every DLL involved in the working set of a legacy application running on a setup with both PulseAudio's compatibility plugin and Alsa Dmix.