Steam On Linux Crosses 1,400 Games

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Steam On Linux Crosses 1,400 Games

As of today there are now 1,400 games listed on Steam that have compatibility for Linux / SteamOS...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-Linux-1400-Games

[RealNC]

And unfortunately, it's still a sub-par experience. I still boot into Windows to play games. In Linux, playing games means lots of input lag, lower performance, missing graphical effects, the desktop interferes with the game (no exclusive fullscreen mode), etc.

Many of these problems are due to the ports not being as good as the Windows versions, but many are due to the Linux stack not working well with games in general. There's some key people in the Linux Desktop world (who maintain various parts of the stack, being X11 or some window managers) who dismiss video games and don't consider them a valid use of computers. As long as these people have this attitude, Linux will never be a good choice for gaming.

[DebianLinuxero]

There's some key people in the Linux Desktop world (who maintain various parts of the stack, being X11 or some window managers) who dismiss video games and don't consider them a valid use of computers. As long as these people have this attitude, Linux will never be a good choice for gaming.

It's the first time I read about this topic.

So you think some programers neglect some advancements on purpouse because they are video-game haters?

[jrch2k8]

And unfortunately, it's still a sub-par experience. I still boot into Windows to play games. In Linux, playing games means lots of input lag, lower performance, missing graphical effects, the desktop interferes with the game (no exclusive fullscreen mode), etc.

Many of these problems are due to the ports not being as good as the Windows versions, but many are due to the Linux stack not working well with games in general. There's some key people in the Linux Desktop world (who maintain various parts of the stack, being X11 or some window managers) who dismiss video games and don't consider them a valid use of computers. As long as these people have this attitude, Linux will never be a good choice for gaming.

i doubt anyone in the desktop/graphic stack community do not consider games as part of a computer use as you imply. There is no anti games conspiracy here(no tinfold hat needed either), simply put is just damn hard and extremely (time/money) expensive to reach that point when you have to remake the graphic stack with 20 ppl straight from the late 70's to the 21st century in one go. Microsoft on the other hand always was used for gaming and so had a more linear evolution and enough market to justify the big studios to throw trucks of money at it to circunvent limitations.

anyway most of the job is done and the pieces are starting to fall in the proper places(EGL 1.5, GL4.3, HHM, Wayland +dma-buf, nVidia, desktops compositors[only wayland can provide true fullscreen control in X11 have to be emulated btw], proper vsync, STEAM. etc.)

Keep that windows there to play and be patient until all pieces get there, for now is great Valve gave us steam and some ports to climate game developers and check the waters, so thing can be fixed early instead on blow when all is released(AKA see steam linux as a developer preview for now)

[M1kkko]

And unfortunately, it's still a sub-par experience. I still boot into Windows to play games. In Linux, playing games means lots of input lag, lower performance, missing graphical effects, the desktop interferes with the game (no exclusive fullscreen mode), etc.

Many of these problems are due to the ports not being as good as the Windows versions, but many are due to the Linux stack not working well with games in general. There's some key people in the Linux Desktop world (who maintain various parts of the stack, being X11 or some window managers) who dismiss video games and don't consider them a valid use of computers. As long as these people have this attitude, Linux will never be a good choice for gaming.

Luckily many of the problems you mentioned are being worked on and will be partially fixed when the steam machines launch.

Some solutions to the problems include

• Kernel patches to minimize input latency, already included in Steam OS kernel
• Development of the next-generation graphics library, Vulkan. (Because of its low-level nature you can pretty much say goodbye to the sub-par performance of Linux GPU drivers)
• Nvidia PhysX SDK becoming available to Linux developers (for those missing graphical effects). This has already happened and will likely be used in upcoming Linux ports.
• Development of Wayland (not really sure if this helps with fullscreen, but I'd imagine there should be some more focus on it than x.org had)
• Building an entire Linux distribution with the focus on playing games, having hired some key people with a pretty darn good attitude to make gaming experience the best possible.
• And of course, with Linux support becoming available in a large number of game engines, developers are able to develop their game for Linux instead of having it ported later as a second thought. This should improve the quality of upcoming Linux titles.

[dungeon]

There's some key people in the Linux Desktop world (who maintain various parts of the stack, being X11 or some window managers) who dismiss video games and don't consider them a valid use of computers. As long as these people have this attitude, Linux will never be a good choice for gaming.

Sorry to ask directly but please name some, which key people?

[johnc]

I've been thinking about something for the past few days...

We have a lot of people here that are technically-skilled. Some are devs or whatever. Just thinking out loud here... but I wonder if we could form some kind of group to help development and promote desktop Linux or gaming or something? Like what if Valve is overwhelmed with work they need to do on SteamOS and they just want to give a piece to somebody and say "here, do this". Or maybe a company needs help porting a game to Linux. Or maybe it's something Android gaming related or whatever. Is there work out there like that that needs to be done?

[Naib]

Sorry to ask directly but please name some, which key people?

Shall we start with Linus?
While I don't think there is anyone on the Linux world that does not want games (RMS and steam aside), the is a VERY strong bias towards server performance at the expense of desktop performance.
One of the reasons Linus dismissed the brainFskSchedular was it wasn't good for servers and went as far as stating there won't be a kernel option to choose scheduler.
Kolivas stopped developing for Linux (for a while) due to the hostilities.

I can't be arsed to get exact citation but I am sure you know of Google

While the focus of Linux is biased towards server performance then yes, desktop re. Gaming will suffer

[carewolf]

And unfortunately, it's still a sub-par experience. I still boot into Windows to play games. In Linux, playing games means lots of input lag, lower performance, missing graphical effects, the desktop interferes with the game (no exclusive fullscreen mode), etc.

Many of these problems are due to the ports not being as good as the Windows versions, but many are due to the Linux stack not working well with games in general. There's some key people in the Linux Desktop world (who maintain various parts of the stack, being X11 or some window managers) who dismiss video games and don't consider them a valid use of computers. As long as these people have this attitude, Linux will never be a good choice for gaming.

Input latency? Input latency is slower on Windows. Fullscreen modes works fine on Linux, though some games on Linux tend to use it wrong, or use borderless windowed, and then often that wrong too. There should probably be some documents on how to do it right, because half the games seems to get it partially wrong. As long as they do it right though, there is no problem with the window managers or X, at least not with the ones I use.

Edit:: Ironically I have personally been trying CK2 again after not playing it for 6 months. Somehow they managed to break fullscreen again in new interesting ways. Also and more unusual, they broke animation performance in game, so my 6 cores x 2 hyperthreads are 100% maxed out to animate 1fps. I suspect they are doing something wrong there too, and it worked perfectly fine 6 months ago, but that is paradox, patches without bugs are not patches made by paradox.

[Prescience500]

I'm amazed that people on these forums have so many problems with the Linux games. I've around 20 steam games and I only play them on Linux. Only one of them gives me any real problems and I found a simple workaround for it. Maybe I've been lucky or maybe it's because I have not bought any high end games.