Originally posted by rrveex
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- Long term backward and forward compatibility
- Stability
- Rich APIs
- Support for many modern HW and SW features such as HDR, VRR, DLSS, FSR, XeSS, etc.
- Very poor graphics features (check AMD/NVIDIA graphics control panels)
- Very poor/incomplete HW monitoring
- Kernel level anticheats (you can hate them all you want but games using them have an order of magnitude fewer cheaters)
- Powerful tools for overclocking and undervolting (Linux has some but they are extremely basic and limited)
- DCI-P3 monitors support - I now have two such devices and both work horribly under Linux, both Xorg and Wayland
Everything else listed is all related. Most all of it exists somewhere but they aren't available everywhere; HDR, VRR, Scaling, HW monitoring and overclocking, and control panels all exist but they're scattered about and not available in an easy-to-use, synergistic manner. While Linux has Rich APIs, it's rather moot when the projects that make those APIs don't play nice with each other or when features of the API are optional like with Wayland.
I'm not sure about those monitors. I'd like to think all the HDR and colorspace work will help with them, but you know how thinking can go.
The biggest problem is that we're talking about "Linux" like "Linux" is one single operating system when, in reality, it's barely the same kernel from one version to the next in regards to long term hardware stability. It has no module API so anything developed out of tree breaks all the time. Linux is just a kernel and it isn't safe to go from one version to the next without recompiling parts of the OS. Even Godot, the game engine, knows the importance of long-term third party modules not breaking which is why they're focusing on a long-term module API, but not the Linux kernel that powers most of the world. Nope. No long-term stable API/ABI.
It isn't until you go from "Linux the kernel" to "Some Linux Distribution 9.5" that you have APIs for developers to adhere to, but then there's "Other Linux 4.3", "Dave Linux 5", "RebeccaBlack OS", and, well, go to Distrowatch. There are hundreds of distributions that all do their own things with a clusterfuck of APIs and ABIs. UI toolkits, shells, POSIX?, GNU tools?, C libraries, and a whole heck of a lot more.
Something Unix-like/Linux-like that offers one way to do it all would take over the market. If Valve and Oracle teamed up to turn Solaris into a gaming OS based on KDE and OpenZFS, that'd be one monster of an OS that could take on Windows without the burden of the preexisting Linux fragmentation or potential licensing issues in regards to kernel-level anti-cheats.
EDIT: The TLDR is that the same openness, fluidity, and freedoms that make Linux one of the greatest collections of FOSS software are the same things that are preventing it from being able to take on unified operating systems like Windows, macOS, and dare I even say Android since it is a Linux kernel with a set of software that only has the one way to do things.
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