Rich Geldreich On The State Of Linux Gaming

[justmy2cents]

I'm just keeping the fire lit. I worked on this effort for a couple years and I want it to continue. Individual devs at Valve don't always choose the right things to work on, especially during bonus season. Remember, there are really no bosses over there. The public and developers can directly make a big difference about what people work on at Valve by just publicly pointing stuff out (and backing it up with real data).

except, if this is keeping fire lit, then your approach won't work and i doubt it is beneficial in any way. what you're doing is standing on the street with cardboard sign "THE END IS NEAR" and screaming like a lunatic about 7 plagues. that's not saying you weren't right in some things, you were just wrong in a lot of other things with overspeculations. not to mention that only publicizing bad aspects without touching good when you know your blog gets reposted everywhere.

[matt_g]

I dev in C more than C++ and in Valkyrie you can hover over variables which dumps the full contents and even lets you drill down to ridiculous detail levels.

This is also the case for me I use GDB integrated in Emacs mostly working in C.

I'm not hugely familiar with C++ the last time I used it the C++ standard libarary was seriously broken you had to use tools h++ (anyone remember that) to get most of the features - I still have the manuals sitting in a drawer of my work desk haven't opened them in years. In the '90's C++ was horrible I think a lot of people got burned by poor libraries which alienated a lot of people from using it. Most of the stuff at my work people used C++ for moved to java by the early 00's which has its own set of issues.

I think from a C++ point of view it probably makes sense Windows is more optimised to debug it as C++ has a much larger following in windows world parts of the OS are written in C++ so a strong focus on debugging is unsurprises, *nix tends to be C at the lower levels. I'd be surprised if KDE guys don't have something suitable for C++

[yakman2020]

on non-broken distros gdb "has all the C++ STL display scripts included, you don't have to install a plugin package to dump a std::vector for example"
and in eclipse (which is studio's counterpart, not gdb) you "can hover over a variable and it displays the value"
so it seems like your problems are not in linux, but in you

I find that using gdb with emacs (gud-gdb) has been just fine, even for someone who has used windbg a lot. Recently.

It probably isn't as "featureful" but it also isn't as quirky in a lot of ways, IMO. Either way, it seems like the same tradeoff as g++ vs VC, which is to say it works fine, its free, and you can update whenever you want to, fix bugs in the runtime or even compiler.

[gamerk2]

I also use GDB on Linux and I love it a lot. However, I've done some Windows programming so I might be able to explain what is missing.

Visual Studio is neat because you can hover over a variable and it displays the value. It also shows all the local variables, etc. And unlike GDB it has all the C++ STL display scripts included, you don't have to install a plugin package to dump a std::vector for example.

And windbg does a whole lot of neat things when you learn how to really use it. I like to read blogs like Raymond Chen's Old New Thing and NT Debugging and they often use debugger tricks. Some of the tricks windbg can pull off are really amazing. Yes, GDB can also do them with enough scripting added but like with the STL display, it isn't included by default. Some of the tricks I remember are dumping the state of all the kernel handles, showing what's waiting on mutexes, showing the thread TLS contents, recovering meaningful information from a scrobbled stack, etc.

Pretty much this. Visual Studio's debugging/development capabilities far exceed anything else. I've had to work with GDB ONCE (frontend was GPS, for an Ada project. Choice of language was government decision, not ours.), and it's like going back to the stone age compared to what we have in MSVC. It does it's job, just not as easily as what MSFT offers. Visual Studio is one of the few times MSFT actually put together a solid product.

[Michael_S]

Pretty much this. Visual Studio's debugging/development capabilities far exceed anything else. I've had to work with GDB ONCE (frontend was GPS, for an Ada project. Choice of language was government decision, not ours.), and it's like going back to the stone age compared to what we have in MSVC. It does it's job, just not as easily as what MSFT offers. Visual Studio is one of the few times MSFT actually put together a solid product.

When you have a few billion dollars to throw at your problems, it's easy to get things right from time to time.

Twelve years ago it was easy to hate Microsoft because they made junk. Today, except for the Windows 8 blip, they make lots of great stuff. So we have to fall back to hating them for their monopoly tricks in the 1980s and 1990s, their FUD campaigns against competing proprietary and open source software projects, and their gleefull willingness to wield their patent portfolio like a weapon of mass economic destruction (since they're using it to stifle innovative competitors that would make the technology market a better place for everyone in the world except Microsoft shareholders).

[Temar]

Android is Linux and there are not only plenty of games, at least Android on Intel uses the Mesa graphics stack.

I always have to smile when people are so desperate that they need to bring up Android as a proof for Linux marketshare.

Linux Gaming and Android Gaming are two very different things. Or can you just install Steam on Android and play all your Steam games?

Also, the marketshare of Android x86 is negligible compared to the rest of the Android devices.

[Temar]

of course he can. first, there is much less competition on linux, so he gets bigger share of that 1.5%.

That may have been true when Linux gaming took off. Meanwhile there are so many Linux games out there, people started to choose carefully. Be honest to yourself, how many of the 750 Linux Steam games do you really own?

second, to port to linux from osx is many times simpler, than to port to 5% market share osx from windows, and still games are being ported to osx

Hmm, I'm not sure about that. On Linux you have to deal with all those different graphics drivers which are in various states of development. You have to do a lot more testing and tuning than on OS-X. Also, different distributions use different versions of the graphics stack so you have to do even more testing.

[Pajn]

Pretty much this. Visual Studio's debugging/development capabilities far exceed anything else. I've had to work with GDB ONCE (frontend was GPS, for an Ada project. Choice of language was government decision, not ours.), and it's like going back to the stone age compared to what we have in MSVC. It does it's job, just not as easily as what MSFT offers. Visual Studio is one of the few times MSFT actually put together a solid product.

I would say that Visual Studio falls short off the Jetbrains suite for every single language that Jetbrains support.

[Zan Lynx]

I always have to smile when people are so desperate that they need to bring up Android as a proof for Linux marketshare.

Linux Gaming and Android Gaming are two very different things. Or can you just install Steam on Android and play all your Steam games?

Also, the marketshare of Android x86 is negligible compared to the rest of the Android devices.

Android IS Linux.

If people want to claim "Linux Gaming" is something else then they need to be much more specific. "Linux/X on x86" for example.

You don't see people doing "Linux Gaming" on a Raspberry Pi or a DDWRT Netgear router either, but those are certainly Linux systems.

[prodigy_]

Android IS Linux.

No it's not. Google uses Linux kernel because it's free but Android has nothing in common with what people imply when they say "Linux". This is precisely why RMS insisted on "GNU/Linux" - without the GNU userland it's not the same system and there's no need to pretend it is.