Mesa 19.1 Adds Workaround For Epic Games Launcher With OpenGL

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa 19.1 Adds Workaround For Epic Games Launcher With OpenGL

The latest change merged for Mesa 19.1 is a workaround so the Epic Games' game launch correctly renders when using OpenGL...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-191-Workaround-Epic-Launch

[Adarion]

Obviously this is the wrong way. If the SW does something wrong, the very game SW should be fixed and not mesa acquiring quirk after quirk for faulty SW. This might be one reason blob drivers are so huge: of course, bundled non-sense and 100 language packs you never need, but also quirks, compatibility profiles, cheats for benchmarks and so on.
But I guess it's still "easier" or at least done faster to workaround in mesa than wait for a game (launcher) to change its behaviour.

[Brisse]

Adarion Agree, and also the fact that this shitty games launcher doesn't even have a native Linux release. *sigh*

[sarmad]

What Adarion said. Really frustrating to see hacks added at an OS level to account for faulty software.

[useless]

Obviously this is the wrong way. If the SW does something wrong, the very game SW should be fixed and not mesa acquiring quirk after quirk for faulty SW. This might be one reason blob drivers are so huge: of course, bundled non-sense and 100 language packs you never need, but also quirks, compatibility profiles, cheats for benchmarks and so on.
But I guess it's still "easier" or at least done faster to workaround in mesa than wait for a game (launcher) to change its behaviour.

Totally agree with this. A bit off topic, but you can already see the nasty quirks introduced in the linux kernel because of OEMs (they suck at firmware development and deployment). It should be the other way around.

[smitty3268]

Obviously this is the wrong way. If the SW does something wrong, the very game SW should be fixed and not mesa acquiring quirk after quirk for faulty SW. This might be one reason blob drivers are so huge: of course, bundled non-sense and 100 language packs you never need, but also quirks, compatibility profiles, cheats for benchmarks and so on.
But I guess it's still "easier" or at least done faster to workaround in mesa than wait for a game (launcher) to change its behaviour.

That would be tantamount to just saying it will never work.

The primary issue here is that Epic doesn't even support Linux, so complaining to them that it doesn't work on linux drivers is just going to be ignored.

They could even (reasonably) say that it's working perfectly fine, because they only support the AMD and NVidia windows GL drivers and not the OpenGL spec itself.

And there are other apps/games that are completely abandoned - produced by companies that no longer exist, or which no longer provide any support for something that's several years old. Again, you're never going to get any kind of fix for those apps, which means you are stuck either centralizing the fixes in the driver, or creating some kind of app wrappers that work around each app 1 by 1.

[microcode]

I can't even think of something I use in OpenGL which is compatibility only, it is a feat unto itself that they managed this.

[xiando]

Obviously this is the wrong way. If the SW does something wrong, the very game SW should be fixed and not mesa

That's the immense huge power closed source has over free software in play. If there's some graphics bug playing SuperTuxKart or WarZone it's easy to find out if it's a problem in MESA or the game and it's quite possible to fix it where it's appropriate to do so.

That's just not the case with non-free closed software. You have your binary blob, you can't change it or improve it or see exactly how it works. Your only option is to do what MESA did there; work around the problem. Morally the right thing to do could be to say "screw that piece of proprietary software, if it doesn't work then that's it's problem" but that isn't very user-friendly; all someone trying to use that software knows is that it doesn't work on GNU/Linux.

[theriddick]

If the objective is to entice more gamers over to using Linux so we get a eventual larger market share and companies start taking us more serious, then workarounds are a necessary evil unfortunately. A bug report should be given to Epic in the meanwhile, but they are likely to give the middle finger for the time being...

[RahulSundaram]

Totally agree with this. A bit off topic, but you can already see the nasty quirks introduced in the linux kernel because of OEMs (they suck at firmware development and deployment). It should be the other way around.

That's just the price of being a mainstream OS. If you want software to be widely used, it inevitably acquires quirks. Being idealogical about it won't work.