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

[Michael]

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.

Not worth buying when unlikely to make up the cost difference in a review of a peripheral.

[Prescience500]

I have the impression that things have flipped. Lack of gaming seems to no longer a major factor holding back Linux adoption on the desktop so much as lack of Linux adoption is holding back gaming on Linux. As things improve in other areas, maybe we'll finally begin to see Linux on the desktop blossom in market share.

[BangoMopar]

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.

According to the manufacturer's website:

These aren’t official ROCCAT™ drivers; rather, they’re coded by enthusiastic programmers. ROCCAT™ is keen to support him wherever we can, and we are delighted to have such an active community.

...And that's only for the mice. There's apparently no keyboard or other peripheral support listed on their site in any way. I'd say they're no better than most other manufacturers. In fact, they list visiting Sourceforge for drivers, which appear to be built using, or at least based on, the open source Razer community drivers. Talk about taking advantage of the community!

If you are using ROCCAT™ products with Linux for the first time, we highly recommend this installation guide:
http://roccat.sourceforge.net/genera...driver_install

...in order to get even the mouse working. I'm not saying that the mouse isn't great...but their Linux support is definitely < great.

[spstarr]

The biggest problem I'm encountering is DRM/Anti-cheats like EAC (EasyAntiCheat) and BattlEye being problems in Wine. The wine developers tell me they have no intention of fixing. what's worse the cheat engines are beginning to detect wine and block it by detecting 'wine64' vs win64 (EasyAntiCheat does this now) and it's up to game developers to enable wine or the game fails to run. They are able to detect wines own function calls in DLLs and then block.

This is going to sink wine for gaming if no action is taken

[PackRat]

Battleye didn't help Fornite cheaters so epic games sued a cheater that was a minor and that worked.

[PackRat]

Making Sdl2 zlib licence was a good move.

[theriddick]

Battleye didn't help Fornite cheaters so epic games sued a cheater that was a minor and that worked.

To be fair the kid was a dick and actually started the whole legal shit storm himself, his mother stepped in and said he was a angel and could never do wrong etc etc... Yes even kids can be sacks of shits too...only requirement is being human.

[ElectricPrism]

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?

This is often because porters do not rewrite the DirectX layer, they simply add a DirectX to OGL or Vulkan layer on top of it which cost more CPU / GPU overhead.

I can see the financial logic behind their decision, as it probably simplifies bug issues, however I personally believe that games designed for both equally will perform better on linux due to the Linux Kernel's superior Disk I/O, Read/Write, Compression, Decompression, and other basic computer tasks being superior due to their optimization for Servers and Supercomputers.

As for the GPU output, I saw a 25% Performance Increase on the RX 480 after 1 year of MESA devs Optimizing, and I expect the situation with Vega to Mimick it. As I recall, some wine games with Gallium outperform their windows counterparts just due to the Core OS performing better. Hopefully someday games catchup and no longer use wrappers.

[Dukenukemx]

1. Open source drivers need more compatibility. Nvidia proprietary drivers usually have no problems with compat profiles while RadeonSi and other open source drivers do.

2. Gamepads like the Xbox 360 wireless controller are still a problem for some games. Wine however has the worse issues with gamepads.

3. Regressions still happen and I was hit with one from Podaka PPA using stable.

4. There's a massive lack of game ports to Linux. This is the #1 issue for gaming on Linux.

5. Fragmentation is not an issue. Windows users see it as an issue. Most popular distros are either based on Debian or Ubuntu.

6. See #4.

[boxie]

1. Open source drivers need more compatibility. Nvidia proprietary drivers usually have no problems with compat profiles while RadeonSi and other open source drivers do.

2. Gamepads like the Xbox 360 wireless controller are still a problem for some games. Wine however has the worse issues with gamepads.

3. Regressions still happen and I was hit with one from Podaka PPA using stable.

4. There's a massive lack of game ports to Linux. This is the #1 issue for gaming on Linux.

5. Fragmentation is not an issue. Windows users see it as an issue. Most popular distros are either based on Debian or Ubuntu.

6. See #4.

yeah, I was hit with a padoka ppa packaging bug as well - it is however a 3rd party repo that is stepping in to fill a void in the way Ubuntu does it's software updates and how fresh the graphics driver development is.

Like the recent push on fedora to get wayland+gnome into shape and the older Canonical paper cuts push, if Canonical spent the better part of a dev cycle testing and fixing gaming paper cuts and issues they would be a much better position