It's Been Five Years That Ubuntu Has Tried To Improve For Linux Gaming

[grok]

Steam forces you into a user account, an internet connection, reports information about what you do and your hardware/software to Valve. In the older DOS/Windows/Windows XP days you didn't have to worry about that. Or the moronic issue of having to enter a password to play games. Or mostly preventing the use case of playing games when the internet is down or unavailable. (off-line mode doesn't work if you didn't log in when the internet was on, or if you've not even installed Steam/games yet)

And it's another service that could get hacked and leak details of 150 million users, and doesn't fit well if you're running away from Windows 10 and other systems that want to nanny you and provide " customized content to improve the customer experience with the contribution of our partners".

[Del_]

Linux as a gaming platform has improved immensely these five years, but there are more pieces that need to mature. At this point I believe it is simply a game of patience, we are getting there steadily. Valve can at any time step up the effort though, with VR perhaps being the most exciting possibility to push steam machines the next year or two.

[eydee]

Open source gaming will never improve until the tools improve. 18 years of advocating for better tools and nothing has changed. Quake 1/2/3 had gtkeadiant and models were simple enough to edit in tools available. Newer open source engines lack tools and there are no good texturing tools on Linux. Aside from maya and blender so you have to either have money or pray blender works in your workflow. We need clones of light wave, 3dsmax and zbrush.

There could be projects like OpenMW for every single game out there, if people decided to do so. You don't have to make assets, making an open source engine works wonderfully. Just load game data from the original.

[uid313]

Valve's efforts with steam on Linux must be seen as malevolent. I have not seen a more finnicky framework and it still is not 64 bit even when most distros are abandoning 32 bit support. You cannot arrive at this situation otherwise than completely abandoning development, or being willfully malevolent.

I don't even have Steam and I love what Valve have done for Linux gaming.
They pushed for it and created momentum for it.
Now I got graphics drivers with support for OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan.

[DanL]

Ubuntu took a long, long detour into the land of convergence, Ubuntu Phone, Mir, etc. I'm not saying they haven't done anything to benefit the Linux ecosystem in the last five years, but their primary focus has changed a couple times since five years ago.
In other words, I don't think this article is posing a good question, and the discussion about the state of Linux gaming, Steam and/or Wine doesn't involve Ubuntu directly, even if they had a UDS session about gaming 5 years ago.

[DanL]

Steam forces you into a user account, an internet connection, reports information about what you do and your hardware/software to Valve. In the older DOS/Windows/Windows XP days you didn't have to worry about that. Or the moronic issue of having to enter a password to play games.

You know it comes down to DRM. Of course users hate it.

[grok]

Another issue is Steam blacklisting nouveau driver. An almost reasonable thing to do but it prevented to run an old OpenGL 1 game that ran on 1996/97 GPUs (at least pre-Steam under Windows) and that Valve used to launch the Steam platform in the first place, sucking in tens of thousands of users.
I didn't find a --force switch or similar. So, there's a logic bomb/denial of service built-in (amazingly the game ran under llvmpipe at a very constant slow framerate - my computer was sort of accidentally using it)

[leipero]

As most people here said, problem with GNU/Linux is the penetration of the market, just few hours ago I was speaking with friend who started basically programming college, and they get free Office and Windows "student packages" and basically most of the software they need for developement. This is the way to lock people on one platform..., heck, even when I was in high school they didn't give anything for free, but specialized software such as AutoCAD that was required was used in "block classes" (4 times 45 minutes) at least 2-3 days per school week (5-6 days) so that everyone could have enough time to learn. Not sure if there was/is OSS alternative to AutoCAD, sicne last time I used it was in those clasess...

I'm not sure who's fault is that, professors, administration or it's general thing where they simply have to teach in that manner in order for students to be ready and competetive... (in their eyes at least). But despite all those facts above, the very same college hosts mirrors for all sorts of distributions, so clearly there is a love for GNU/Linux amongst administration (inc. teachers) and students.

Bottom line, it's really really hard to get rid of the grip that MS have, even in such areas where GNU/Linux have clear advantages, let alone in areas where it does not (gaming). Personally, I am more of the "old school" and I like "hard copies" of software, preferably without DRM (GOG is a good example), and it's not that hard not to have DRM, really, simple solutions such as keys and online play are good enough reason to buy a game if you really like it (it worked for me, so it should work for anyone, because I am not so easy to buy a game), heck I didn't even need to buy a game, it's a choice to support developers because they did something good. And I'm going off topic..., bookmark video, will watch it after some sleep .

[starshipeleven]

Awesome, another article where "NO" is a perfectly acceptable answer.

[starshipeleven]

It's simple, but yet it seems to be the hardest thing to do. Wine needs to implement windows API's accurately enough to reproduce it's runtime behavior. But because although it -is- an emulator they continue to claim that it's not and as such they don't give a shit about reproducing it's actual behavior. It is completely true that native games are the long term solution, but you need gamers before games, it's a catch22. Wine needs to be able to play windows games.

Wine is Windows "emulation", the article is about gaming ON Linux, not about emulating Windows decently enough to play windows games on other OSes.

Also, your ideas that "Wine sucks because they claim it is not an emulator" is bullshit. Wine sucks because properly mimicking Windows is hell, they don't have enough resources to do that properly, and most people using Wine don't pay them nor contribute back in any way.

FYI: Wine can't be called "emulator" because it is not doing CPU/hardware architecture emulation (like for example console emulators that must virtualize the old console hardware somehow) nor OS virtualization of any kind.

It's re-mapping APIs, so it is a wrapper, or compatibility layer.