There Still Are Some Pain Points For Linux Gaming Moving Into 2018

[phoronix]

Phoronix: There Still Are Some Pain Points For Linux Gaming Moving Into 2018

Five years ago today I wrote about The Problems Right Now For Gaming On Linux with regards to challenges for Linux gaming when it comes to the software and hardware. In the five years since and with seeing thousands of more games be made available for Linux, the situation still is not ideal but it's much better than at the end of 2012...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=5-Year-Problems-Linux-Gaming

[ssokolow]

Now: This has improved somewhat, but still there are many out there who will not buy a full-priced Linux game port, etc. It was just earlier this year that well known Valve Linux/VR developer Pierre-Loup Griffais commented, "Maybe Linux users could try actually buying games if they wanted people to port them!" As a slight jab at some in the Linux gaming community.

I'll say now what I said when the early Humble Indie Bundles lured me back into computer gaming after I quit Windows XP for Linux around 2002 or 2003:

1. I never paid full price in the days of floppy and CD-ROM games and I'm not going to start now.
2. I always have and always will pay a little extra if I'm getting a Windows+Linux combo (ie. giving me the choice between Wine or native in case the porting job is bad) at the time of purchase.
3. No matter how much developers whine about it, I'm not going to pay "Manufacture, Warehousing, Shipping, and Retail store" prices for a digital download. Brand new AAA games on floppy or CD cost $50-60 CA in the era where I was waiting for them to show up used or in bargain bins for no more than $30 CA. (I still routinely pay up to $35 CA on eBay for games that never got a DRM-free digital re-release.) I'm not going to pay $50-60 US (or $25-30 US on sale, for that matter) for a wisp of digital fluff with vanishingly small marginal costs.

[mike44]

You mentioned someday an advanced mouse configuration tool. Any link? I need middle mouse in Blender on Ubuntu 16.04/Unity. Thanks

[illwieckz]

There still are some nice open-source game examples like 0 A.D. and Unvanquished (if they ever get back to releasing) and Xonotic

Michael Unvanquished 0.51 release is on the pipe. Yes last release is a bit old but it appeared to be stable enough to not require an update to play development backports hosted by servers. So people just have to get 0.50 release and join servers to play almost-0.51 games.

Since assets are now properly tracked on repositories too (not only code !) there is now more than 30 repos to follow so we created a very helpful page to track development across all repositories: unvanquished.net/activity :-)

[boxie]

You mentioned someday an advanced mouse configuration tool. Any link? I need middle mouse in Blender on Ubuntu 16.04/Unity. Thanks

search for piper and libratbag

[Pahanilmanlintu]

Sound lag is probably still common? It's been pretty nasty at least with satellite reign and torment tides of numenera.

[Brisse]

search for piper and libratbag

Or 'razercfg' for those with Razer mice.

[humbug]

When this whole steam for Linux effort began years ago a major issue was the quality of the GPU drivers. It seems that this issue is mostly sorted now. Yes there is still work to do but it's a night and day difference compared the how it used to be, and it's crystal clear we are heading in the right direction with drivers improving fast. For the most part everything just works now unless you use an outdated distro.

But still a major issue is the porting overhead. Why is it that the majority of games take a performance hit when coming from windows to linux? Apart from a minority of devs like valve and Croteam, others do not achieve windows performance. This is something that I would love to see more discussion on and what steps can the industry take to alleviate it?

[Azpegath]

Michael, you should really buy and review some Roccat peripherals (mice) since they support Linux natively, including their utility application. I'm very happy with my Roccat mouse.

[Azpegath]

You mentioned someday an advanced mouse configuration tool. Any link? I need middle mouse in Blender on Ubuntu 16.04/Unity. Thanks

With the risk of repeating myself from my previous post: Roccat has a very detailed configuration utility including saving several profiles which you can switch between using a button combination on the mouse. I really recommend it, along with their mice.