Valve's Steam Survey Shows Linux Gaming Fall To One Of The Lowest Levels Ever

[k1e0x]

Codeweaver is a company living mainly from Office and Photoshop under Linux so believe me there is a business here.

The facts are:

- Calc and Writer are ok, but Impress is far, far away from Powerpoint and compatibility is pretty bad with .pstx

- there is no equivalent to Outlook in the open source world. There are good softwares (KMail, Evolution, Thunderbird) but they do not have Exchange compatilibilty (some tools exists but they are far to be stable/usable for a business). The Outlook/Exchange combo is now the primary productivity tool in the world

- No product is actually compatible with Adobe ones, some can open files in their format (PDF and PSD mainly) but none can write them. The problem is : the large majority of business in the world "decided" to use Photoshop and Adobe Writer so as long we cannot at least modify those documents Linux is out of office business
(by "decided" I mean that schools/university have free/cheap licences so that they keep forming students with them and nothing else).

Once again I work 100% on OSS and manage Windows servers and workstation, and I dream about all my company full Linux but today this is impossible, in the media/management/events you have to communicate instantly in the "format of majority".

You think ... Outlook ... is good?? Your problem is the Exchange server, not that there are no good open source email mail clients. Exchange also does support IMAP clients so you just have a retard sysadmin. Go beat some sense into him. Have your artists NOT to ship you raw photoshop files and live in a 2016 world where the client OS doesn't matter. I find it shocking your business does this.. people have all sorts of crap now.. phones, tablets, chromebooks, god knows what.

I couldn't even imagine trying to use Windows servers anymore.. do they still make them? I'm glad I'm retired. I did have the luxury of working for mostly Unix companies, but I've seen Solaris and Linux used as Workstations company wide before, somehow those major well known businesses are still around. All life didn't end when someone got a word doc.

If your business is ever questioning using a closed source product, one of the best arguments you can make vs. it is even if the software does everything we want at a reasonable price how do we know that will continue, that we wont be forced to upgrade, or that the business won't be bought, or change their price or their terms? Believe it or not a large part of the SMS system in the US runs through Sendmail running on OpenVMS servers from the 80's probably still to this day but since Sendmail is open source they can be replaced over 30 years later if they ever do die.

[Passso]

You think ... Outlook ... is good?? Your problem is the Exchange server, not that there are no good open source email mail clients. Exchange also does support IMAP clients so you just have a retard sysadmin. Go beat some sense into him. Have your artists NOT to ship you raw photoshop files and live in a 2016 world where the client OS doesn't matter. I find it shocking your business does this.. people have all sorts of crap now.. phones, tablets, chromebooks, god knows what.

I couldn't even imagine trying to use Windows servers anymore.. do they still make them? I'm glad I'm retired. I did have the luxury of working for mostly Unix companies, but I've seen Solaris and Linux used as Workstations company wide before, somehow those major well known businesses are still around. All life didn't end when someone got a word doc.

If your business is ever questioning using a closed source product, one of the best arguments you can make vs. it is even if the software does everything we want at a reasonable price how do we know that will continue, that we wont be forced to upgrade, or that the business won't be bought, or change their price or their terms? Believe it or not a large part of the SMS system in the US runs through Sendmail running on OpenVMS servers from the 80's probably still to this day but since Sendmail is open source they can be replaced over 30 years later if they ever do die.

OFC there is IMAP. But nowadays people use Outlook to manage their contacts, their events, they create invitations (and not only internal ones), reserve meeting rooms, equipments with it. They share generic mailboxes, notes, retroplanning etc. far more than just send/receive mails.

This is how a company works today, Outlook/Exchange is the core management tool for everyday work.

Concerning Photoshop, the world decided to use .PSD. If you cannot modify it, you are out of business.

[Mez']

OFC there is IMAP. But nowadays people use Outlook to manage their contacts, their events, they create invitations (and not only internal ones), reserve meeting rooms, equipments with it. They share generic mailboxes, notes, retroplanning etc. far more than just send/receive mails.

This is how a company works today, Outlook/Exchange is the core management tool for everyday work.

Concerning Photoshop, the world decided to use .PSD. If you cannot modify it, you are out of business.

Yet again, an alternative such as Notes is just a couple of hours away to be learned. I know it because I had to do it, as well as any other newcomer to my previous client company. For 95% it does the exact same thing, which is more than enough for organizations.

Without Outlook/Exchange, the world would just take a few weeks to readapt without too much of a problem. It's more of a technical adaptation, how would IT set it up and deploy it, but for the functional use case, there's no huge difference.

[schmidtbag]

And yet, when there's Wine news, people go nuts over it. Cause people want to play their games on Linux. So they prey and hope that an update makes their game work.

There's a difference between making games work that will never be ported, and then using wine to "port" a game "natively". People aren't appreciative of half-assed un-optimized work that they could have just done themselves.

This is basically what I'm saying. Except Wines progress is extremely slow. Valve has a lot of experience with Windows, Linux, and Mac, so for them to make a compatibility layer wouldn't be a big issue

I'm still not sure how you think Valve can do a better job than the Wine devs. Just because you compile a game for multiple hardware and software platforms, that doesn't mean you know the slightest bit about how an OS works. Valve isn't exactly on MS's good side, so they're not just going to suddenly know the secrets on how Windows binaries and DX work. That's like saying nvidia could make a better x86 CPU from scratch than intel or AMD simply because they have experience making processors. It just doesn't work that way.

And just as importantly, the user needs to understand that the game isn't running natively and there's no support from Valve. Any complaints should be easily sent to the developers to make them aware that they should make a Linux port to avoid issues and performance loss.

That I agree with.

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

This is basically what I'm saying. Except Wines progress is extremely slow. Valve has a lot of experience with Windows, Linux, and Mac, so for them to make a compatibility layer wouldn't be a big issue. At the rate Wine is progressing, we'll have DX11 by 2017, and DX12 will be by 2025. Meanwhile, not all DX9 games run perfectly, like Dark Souls. Even new OpenGL games like Doom don't work. And I doubt Valve would donate code to Wine developers to improve it, when the same code goes towards CrossOver. Realistically, Valve would either have to fork Wine, or make their own.

I wouldn't call WINE's progress slow. If anything, I'd call it overly sensitive. CSMT was working just fine, for most people. But, it never ended up being mainlined and then it ended up being scrapped. And now they're mainlining it, from scratch, piece by piece. That is what makes it slow, they're being too precise in their approach.

Secondly, Valve coding their own compatibility layer? That is a far cry from what they have been doing so far -- coding games and a gaming portal. Writing a compatibility/translation layer for a set of APIs is wholly different from merely making use of those APIs, which is Valve's expertise.

[torsionbar28]

Maybe it's RedHat's responsibility to make their OS compatible with Steam and Steam games. It seems like they're not meeting your needs as a desktop user. Which makes sense since all they care about is enterprise installs and making Linux as complicated as humanly possible so that companies have to buy a support contract.

Spoken like a true newbie. Maybe you should stick with Nintendo Wii, eh?

[k1e0x]

OFC there is IMAP. But nowadays people use Outlook to manage their contacts, their events, they create invitations (and not only internal ones), reserve meeting rooms, equipments with it. They share generic mailboxes, notes, retroplanning etc. far more than just send/receive mails.

This is how a company works today, Outlook/Exchange is the core management tool for everyday work.

Concerning Photoshop, the world decided to use .PSD. If you cannot modify it, you are out of business.

Change your employer. (and I don't mean quit, I mean change their ideas about things). There are better ways to do things. Your falling into the same trap they are in believing this is the only way to do stuff.

Take a look at https://www.alfresco.com

[Passso]

Change your employer. (and I don't mean quit, I mean change their ideas about things). There are better ways to do things. Your falling into the same trap they are in believing this is the only way to do stuff.

Take a look at https://www.alfresco.com

Well, they are fully happy with a lot of open source products I install and still encourage me to do so.

I just write that support for Outlook (and not outlook 2003...) and PSD files are a real brake for Linux adoption at a global scale. I really think that it stops any evolution for 90% of companies.