A Message From Valve's Gabe Newell

[ChrisXY]

its not really hard to use prop drivers, unless u have prehistoric hardware or some nongaming videocard.

* Or unless you want your notebook to actually wake up after suspend to ram. My HD 6550 would fail most of the time with not even the hard disk spinning up. Booting with the nopat kernel parameter it got a bit better but it would occassionally hang X with 100 % cpu or just hang the GPU ASIC... The Open Source radeon driver simply doesn't do that. How can you honestly trust a driver from a company that doesn't even manage to wake up their own hardware correctly?

* Or unless you don't want to be stuck on old software. fglrx doesn't support xorg 1.12 yet.

* Or unless you want good xrandr support. With fglrx it kind of works but occassionally fglrx just breaks things. With one release HDMI output simply didn't work. Occassionally it would simply report wrong resolutions to xrandr. It even managed to put 1024x768 as a preferred resolution at the top of the list. While there was a 1600x1200 preferred resolution also in that list.
With nvidia. Well, just watch videos from conferences where people with linux notebooks try to hold presentations. I have the feeling that their nvidia twinview fails more often than it succeeds at displaying the right resolution on a projector... Of course without proper xrandr support you have only basic rotation support. Try connecting one external screen to a notebook and rotate that screen without fiddling with the xorg.conf...

* Or unless you want bugfixes faster than at least 3 months. fglrx and gnome3.

But hey, I think after some time AMD has managed to fix the behaviour that a 3d fullscreen application would be always render in front of everything else, despite not even having the focus - on all workspaces - in some cases even when minimized (!). Took them long enaugh.

* And of course unless you don't want to use Optimus.

That's just the few that come to my mind immediately because I have experienced them all first hand.
The experience is just so much more pleasant with the Open Source driver.



@ Michael
Why don't you wait with writing an article until you have enaugh data and permissions to actually write an article?

[allquixotic]

What a crap... I mean os x. Those are wonderful news! Bring games to Linux and os x can go home.

Yes It's funny that Michael uses Mac as his production box (or at least he is in these pictures) but I don't seriously slight him for it. I know that Michael is generally interested in 3d graphics and gaming for ALL platforms, but that Linux is his favorite platform.

Right, Michael?

[Michael]

Yes It's funny that Michael uses Mac as his production box (or at least he is in these pictures) but I don't seriously slight him for it. I know that Michael is generally interested in 3d graphics and gaming for ALL platforms, but that Linux is his favorite platform.

Right, Michael?

I virtualize Ubuntu on Mac OS X since at least with 10.10 I get better battery life that way then running Ubuntu bare metal on the MacBook Pro..... in terms of Mac OS X app usage, it comes down to just Microsoft Word (when needing special docs or pushing something through its grammar check) or Skype on OS X. So yeah it's basically just using virtualized Ubuntu the entire time.

[Hamish Wilson]

So, as I see it, anyone who opposes open 3d graphics drivers or open 3d engines is an enemy of the FOSS movement and I wouldn't want them participating in such a potentially high-visibility project as Source games on Linux.

Ryan C. Gordon hosts most of the free graphics engines that are available today on his website, free of charge, and has contributed some of his own time and effort to them in the past. I would hardly say that qualifies him as being opposed to "open 3d engines" and being an "enemy of the FOSS movement". While I disagree with some of his statements regarding free GPU drivers in the past (a position which has been developing as time goes on to be more positive I might add) no one can discount his contributions to Linux, either through proprietary or free means.

And I do not even consider myself a pragmatist, at least in the the way most people define it. Call me a zealot if you wish, I often agree with those that are identified as such. And yes, I am using exclusively free drivers on my machine - in fact the only closed source applications I have installed are some games and the FirstClass groupware suite my school forces me to use. I do not even have Adobe Flash installed. So I am definitely not part of this "proprietary camp".

However, I am deeply upset to see these kinds of character assassinations, especially to someone as hard working as Gordon. These accomplish nothing and only serve to alienate the people who are trying to make a difference.

On the flip side of the coin, every game that Gordon has ported runs fine for me on my R600 Gallium 3D system, so they are not the problem. Anyone who claims it is the FOSS drivers that prevents more (because it is a lie to say we already do not have loads) developers to support Linux is talking, quite simply, bullshit. And as the drivers keep developing at an extraordinary pace, we shall continue to prove them all wrong.

[kraftman]

I virtualize Ubuntu on Mac OS X since at least with 10.10 I get better battery life that way then running Ubuntu bare metal on the MacBook Pro.....

So next time don't make a mistake and don't buy a mac. There are always problems with them.

[allquixotic]

Ryan C. Gordon hosts most of the free graphics engines that are available today on his website, free of charge, and has contributed some of his own time and effort to them in the past. I would hardly say that qualifies him as being opposed to "open 3d engines" and being an "enemy of the FOSS movement". While I disagree with some of his statements regarding free GPU drivers in the past (a position which has been developing as time goes on to be more positive I might add) no one can discount his contributions to Linux, either through proprietary or free means.

Granted; but if he wants to change his positions on the open source graphics stack, that's fine with me. People are welcome to revise their opinions and statements as the situations change. It makes no sense to hold a grudge after they've changed their position. But where have you seen him turning his views more "positive" as you said? I guess I haven't been following closely enough to see this actually occur... Shame on me, I guess?

-snip-

However, I am deeply upset to see these kinds of character assassinations, especially to someone as hard working as Gordon. These accomplish nothing and only serve to alienate the people who are trying to make a difference.

Hard working, yes, but sometimes the things that you say can be so damaging as to reverse all the hard work you've done and then some.

If MLK spent years fighting for civil rights and one day said "...but if some states want to continue segregation for now, or even revert to slavery while they consider whether to adopt civil rights for blacks, that's fine with me" -- what kind of leader would that make him? Do you think that might have a slight tainting effect on his legacy beforehand?

This is the sort of thing I see happening with Icculus. He's working both sides of the story; he's advocating open source (and contributing to it) with one hand, while -- to use a word you used -- assassinating its very foundation with the other.

On the flip side of the coin, every game that Gordon has ported runs fine for me on my R600 Gallium 3D system, so they are not the problem. Anyone who claims it is the FOSS drivers that prevents more (because it is a lie to say we already do not have loads) developers to support Linux is talking, quite simply, bullshit. And as the drivers keep developing at an extraordinary pace, we shall continue to prove them all wrong.

I completely agree that the FOSS drivers are not the reason why games aren't coming to Linux. I have nothing to say to this paragraph except that I agree. But this isn't what I was arguing about then, and it's not what I'm arguing about now.

[DaemonFC]

However, I am deeply upset to see these kinds of character assassinations, especially to someone as hard working as Gordon.

Asking people to break the law and/or pay patent cartels for you so that you have an easier time selling your product is not something that is worthy of praise.

[shatsky]

Well, if I was Valve, I would wait for the big upcoming wayland switch before releasing anything (so about a year)?

If they port Source Engine to Linux, they will likely use SDL and it won't be their problem whether player uses X11/DirectFB/Wayland/...
UT2004, for example, can be run in DirectFB, since SDL has DirectFB backend. SDL Wayland backend is in development.

[DaemonFC]

If they port Source Engine to Linux, they will likely use SDL and it won't be their problem whether player uses X11/DirectFB/Wayland/...
UT2004, for example, can be run in DirectFB, since SDL has DirectFB backend. SDL Wayland backend is in development.

Even if they did have any X dependencies, launching a rootless X server for themselves is hardly going to be a big problem on a modern PC.

[Ancurio]

[Image slide]

Just Kidding Michael

You just literally made me LOL pretty hard with that.
Now my stomach hurts. Thanks.