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

[linuxdeveloper]

Eric Lengyel @EricLengyel Jan 12
.@knehcsg The number of personal attacks I've had to endure today (here and elsewhere) reflects extremely badly on the Linux community.

This really irritates me more than him dropping support for Linux for some unknown game engine.

You get rude and disrespectful people everywhere, and it is 100% natural people will start to be defensive if you start to attack them in some way.
We are just PC users, and I am pretty sure Windows and Mac users also act very activistic and rude towards developers for whatever reasons as well.

It has nothing todo with Linux it is just a phenomenon of the internet anonymity and humanity.
Why should I be branded in a bad way just because another ruder human also uses Linux.
I did not recruit them, I am not responsible for them and there is (thankfully) no selection system for who or who cannot use Linux.
If someone is disrespectful other Linux users cannot kick them out of the community.

This is just a way to deflect that he failed to do something and got frustrated and decided to blame the tools and teacher rather than the workman.

[bitman]

Total and utter horseshit. It exploded because Google put their weight behind it. They bet the farm and now they are reaping the rewards.

Put their weight behind it and created good stable development API with reasonable backwards-compatiblity which is a nice development environment.

Don't really agree with that one.
I like android, develop for android, use android etc.

But I think that the reason Android has taken off is that people were very unhappy with the iOS walled garden and a constant stream of weird decisions about things like privacy, etc and for quite a while rather expensive hardware. They probably would have gone to windows phone if it had been viable, in terms of cost, function, and availability, but it certainly wasn't.

This is potentially good news for linux. Assuming that there is a good distro (I'm using mint with cinnamon, have for the last year, and been very happy with it), and the distro manager doesn't develop an overweening fascination with servers and fortune 500 customers to the exclusion of all else, there is no reason for linux not to be popular. IMO.

BTW, folks talking about backward compatibility, android, iOS and MacOS X approach is to replace the hardware quite often. And, in fact, windows is tending in that direction also.

You cant lure consumer with cheap prices if product is broken. Well android is not. Most of apps do not break on next OS update. And most importantly you can target older / wider market share easily. Also dont single out android as one good smartphone. Vendors want consumers to go hardware-replacement way too. I got my galaxy s2 and im yet to see kitkat upgrade from vendor. Sure i installed it myself and using and its great. But the fact that i can do it does not mean its not important. Less skilled people cant do it and i think they should be as enabled as skilled ones.

Maybe problem of linux is too many smart people.. You know - they can deal with all kinds of crazy stuff and its easy once you know how. But there are others less skilled like that same c4 developer. Is it good to make linux just complex enough so people who can throw together application to show cat videos can no longer handle it? I think even those less skilled developers are very important because they fill in part of ecosystem. Some users want those cat videos easily accessible. Hope you know what i mean.

[Zoll]

I wonder how many of you are developers who worked in real projects under Linux? I've been developing under Linux for almost 13 years now and I still face issues, even with new OS installation and graphics lockups. IMO, what we are missing in a universal package format for all distros not the clusterfuck that it is now. I only produce binaries for Ubuntu (and only recent versions) and tell other users to compile on their own for anything else!

[ultimA]

I wonder how many of you are developers who worked in real projects under Linux? I've been developing under Linux for almost 13 years now and I still face issues, even with new OS installation and graphics lockups. IMO, what we are missing in a universal package format for all distros not the clusterfuck that it is now. I only produce binaries for Ubuntu (and only recent versions) and tell other users to compile on their own for anything else!

I, for one, and others before me also posted earlier that they did/do. After already supporting for Mac, Linux development is not *that* greatly different, though sure there are differences. A game developer is gonna have larger problems supporting all the different kinds of graphics hardware, their different sets of capabilities, and all the various driver bugs (yes, I am talking from experience). That is a clusterfuck too, yet Eric didn't say he is not gonna support graphics cards because they are a clusterfuck, that would be ridiculous, wouldn't it?

I would, too, greatly appreciate a universal package format. All the different package formats and directory structures complicate product packaging at most (though admittadly, it complicates that greatly), but packaging is done *after* development. And, for "some" reason, other projects both much larger and much smaller than C4 can manage that.

Well, not that I am interested in C4, I was just surprised how somebody so competent at programming can be so incompetent with other software.

[duby229]

Huh, that's interesting. As a developer, my experience w.r.t. development on Windows/OS X/Linux has been totally opposite his. Seeing that he calls 'sudo apt-get' a problem I can imagine the problem lays somewhere between the keyboard and his chair.

I agree sudo is a problem... If it needs to called on absolutely every freaking thing that needs done... It's a pain in the ass. There are much better ways to escalate permissions. Plus, you don't always need to be root.

[Cyber Killer]

I wonder how many of you are developers who worked in real projects under Linux? I've been developing under Linux for almost 13 years now and I still face issues, even with new OS installation and graphics lockups. IMO, what we are missing in a universal package format for all distros not the clusterfuck that it is now. I only produce binaries for Ubuntu (and only recent versions) and tell other users to compile on their own for anything else!

Oh, how awesome of you to erode the package situation even more, by not following standards. If you want to make only a single package format then that should be LSB-compliant rpm, as that is the standard (another option is making a binary installer).

Also: what do you count as 'real'? I developed at least a handful of C++ tools, using Qt, loads of scripts in various languges, even a few games... All of them work on all major distros, though you'll probably quickly dismiss them as not real :-P.

[duby229]

I wonder how many of you are developers who worked in real projects under Linux? I've been developing under Linux for almost 13 years now and I still face issues, even with new OS installation and graphics lockups. IMO, what we are missing in a universal package format for all distros not the clusterfuck that it is now. I only produce binaries for Ubuntu (and only recent versions) and tell other users to compile on their own for anything else!

Well, that's just sad. It must really suck for you.

[Xaero_Vincent]

I wonder how many of you are developers who worked in real projects under Linux? I've been developing under Linux for almost 13 years now and I still face issues, even with new OS installation and graphics lockups. IMO, what we are missing in a universal package format for all distros not the clusterfuck that it is now. I only produce binaries for Ubuntu (and only recent versions) and tell other users to compile on their own for anything else!

This is perfectly fine for FOSS software. Leave it up to the community to build it on their distro. I often will go to FOSS project pages and the links to "download for Linux" are nothing more than a source tarball and instructions on how to obtain it from your distro's package manager.

None of this is a problem except for closed-source proprietary development. For proprietary closed-source development, this is what tends to happen:

• ISVs only "officially support" a couple distributions--generally Ubuntu and RedHat and only the last few releases of them and that's about it.
  
• A generic RPM and/or DEB package is built--pretty much any other package format is shunned and ignored and that's fine.
  
• The software is compiled against a sufficiently old enough glibc to target distros from the last few years. This is a pain but development can be done either in a chroot or in a simple virtual machine running an old distro guest and project files can compiled and shared across via a virtual network share between VM and host.

If a commercial ISV is looking to "unofficially" support other distributions, they may choose to permit their software to be re-distributed and hosted in distribution repositories and allowed to be re-packaged in the native distro package manager format. To prevent/mitigate piracy, they can either deploy a simple serial key or a sophisticated server-based software activation system.

*OR*

A ".run" universal installer script is written that checks if the required dependencies are installed then installs the app into /opt

*OR*

They can use a self-contained portable package format that will work on almost all distributions because all the necessary libs are bundled and self-contained in a portable executable.

http://portablelinuxapps.org/

[asdfblah]

After reading some of Eric's comments on his forum, it appears he was trying to install Ubuntu 14.04 on Windows 8 via Wubi and it failed. AFAIK, Wubi no longer officially supports Ubuntu after version 12.10 nor does it support Windows 8. Some people claim that that it might be somewhat possible to make it work but it isn't supported and you are likely to run into problems like Eric did. He said he didn't want to attempt to upgrade to 14.04 but felt he had to because he was getting "package dependency" issues with 12.04.

So, he's blaming "Linux" (whatever that means for him) for problems with windows application? Also, 12.04 was well known for having stupid problems with dependencies (the whole lib32 thing)... He shouldn't be touching 12.04, at all.
BTW, what's your source?

Nothing. RMS is apparently a busy man (which doesn't surprise me at all) but why should this fact say anything about Linux?

Well, even if he is a busy man, if Linux was easy and fast enough to install it, he wouldn't need anyone else to do it for him. Just run the installer from the live distro, leave it there doing its job, do something else for half an hour or so (which could include updates and stuff) and come back to use your new system.

[gamerk2]

Wow, this thread exploded. I now realize how much Linux users are similar to Muslim fanatics. Those that think the attack in French was a CIA/Jewish sponsered propaganda machine.

This developer didn't enjoy his linux experience. Can't we believe that? No, he has to have been payed off, or he's stupid, doesn't know anything, even though, well, he has a PhD and 20+ years experience designing game engines.

That makes sense. That's logical.

Yes, I still get browser screen tearing. With Ubuntu, mint, debian, fedora, slackware, arch, puppy, crunchbang. Using gnome, kde, lxde, cinnamon, xmonad, awesome, openbox. I also have that problem using my nexus 5 with android 4.?, 5. My main computer has 8 cores, 32 Gb of ram, runs on a SSD (mostly), and a not so recent Radeon HD6850. So it's not like my hardware can't handle what is going on. It just prioritizes whatever it wants, rather than what I want. I also have a smaller rig with a nvidia chip. Same problems. And I used to have a laptop with an intel graphic card, I can't remember if there was screen tearing, but I wouldn't be surprised. Something is wrong with the scheduler. Or not wrong. Just tuned to a machine, not a user with sensibility toinput/output interactions.

You actually hearing sound coming out of your computer does not mean all is well in the world of audio in linux. I can definitely hear a difference in my speakers between linux and windows on the same hardware. Even from a cr*ppy mp3.

It's so sad to see so many people act like crazy fanatics when someone sees a problem that doesn't seem worthwhile with their favorite system. There are many problems with linux. So many. OSx might seem like a joke. Then you read the 150-250 page documentation to whatever framework you're working on. A recent example for me is "Core Data Programming Guide". Well, after that document, I felt like I knew everything. And that was less than 2 weeks in. Linux, I'm 15 years in and I still feel like so much is hidden. And yeah, I don't have time to read and understand millions of lines of code to understand what GCC is doing (I wish I did, if I was immortal that's probably what I would be doing right now). Windows sounds like a joke. Don't even get me started. You don't know where your data is or what it is doing. But I can make an app in an afternoon that fetches data over the web and processes it locally in an afternoon with Visual Basic. It might do things that violate every programming bone in body, but it works.

I support Gnu/Linux. Every year I give to the FSF, because I believe in freedom. But don't accuse this guy of being payed off or an idiot just because he doesn't see the value of supporting linux. Don't berate him. He is a free man. He can do what he wants. That is what we are fighting for, after all. Freedom.

The problem I've seen, is even when people point out Linux's flaws, the initial response is to deny anything is wrong.

I wonder how many of you are developers who worked in real projects under Linux? I've been developing under Linux for almost 13 years now and I still face issues, even with new OS installation and graphics lockups. IMO, what we are missing in a universal package format for all distros not the clusterfuck that it is now. I only produce binaries for Ubuntu (and only recent versions) and tell other users to compile on their own for anything else!

That's what we're doing where I work; We target Ubuntu, not Linux. And yes, there's a difference.