Linux sucks for gaming and this will probably never change

[MrXeno]

lol

[GDRRiley]

On 12/29/2021 at 2:49 PM, Magmarock said:

Since my first post I decided to fire up Ubuntu on real hardware and give Proton a try. To my surprise it actually worked pretty. However! I still don't agree that gaming has gotten better on Linux, at least not in a way that I would consider good. Proton is a part of Steam and can not be used without it. Steam is DRM and belongs to Valve corp

your however here is the issue. you refuse to admit and see all the change.

Steam doesn't always have DRM thats 100% down to the devs

 

it has gotten a lot better over the years. as someone whos main OS is windows with OSX often at school and work. I've had linux test systems over the years and by the end of 2020 I moved my daily laptop to it. was it rough back in 2016 trying to game on linux yes you had a very short list of games and heaving to deal with bad GPU drivers.

On 12/29/2021 at 2:49 PM, Magmarock said:

My complaints about Linux are less to do with Linux itself because I think it's pretty good, (when it's not used for gaming.) and more to do with people such as yourself that think using Linux gives you an advantage when in actuality, it only limited what games you can play and what you can do with Windows. You now have the same technical knowledge as a retired grandmother who never used a computer in her life. Not a good tried in my opinion.But if you want to play lots of games and you don't want to deal with the technical headache of Windows, there is a solution. Use a gaming console. They are much simpler and unlike Linux they are a great choice of platform for gaming.

so then stop saying this a linux software issue and admit that you don't like how hostile the community can be

 

[wasab]

10 hours ago, apostlkpl said:

To be clear, I am NOT a developer. That being said, Windows is generally much much easier to work with than Linux. That is, as a desktop system, meaning GNU/Linux distros. Not "Linux-based" systems like Android or ChromeOS (I don't consider those Linux distros, but merely OSs based on Linux kernel).

GNU is itself a family of operating system that is built on top of the Linux kernel. They have no more rights to the Linux trademarks than like say android or chromeos. Linux Torvalds even complain once how people keep conflating the two. Linux kernel was simply readily available back then and open sourced so GNU people decided to simply go with it. The people at GNU project actually have their own kernels in development. Many Linux distros also do not ship with any of the GNU softwares and calling them gnu/Linux is really silly. You can also call any of the UNIX or BSD systems as GNU if they ship with gnome desktop or tools like the gcc. 

 

Quote

GNU/Linux distros make it hard for developers to work with, or more correctly to keep up. Unless they make their driver/software open source, they have to update their binaries constantly against new kernel and libc versions.

I am a php/react.js full stack developer and these are literally none issue. It is only relevant if you work with low level stuffs. Any dependencies at the application level can be easily install with some packages manager and completely untangle and abstracted away from whatever low level API they might be calling. 

 

Linux is mostly used as webserver. For this purpose, it is literally miles away ahead of windows. Literally, the first thing my project manager tells me when I onboarded with my current company is to avoid windows because many things just don't work. 

 

Edit: if you are talking solely about gaming then perhaps however I am under the impression that most game engine and game development toolkits typically took care of crossplatfrom compatibility issues. 

[whm1974]

14 hours ago, wasab said:

GNU is itself a family of operating system that is built on top of the Linux kernel. They have no more rights to the Linux trademarks than like say android or chromeos. Linux Torvalds even complain once how people keep conflating the two. Linux kernel was simply readily available back then and open sourced so GNU people decided to simply go with it. The people at GNU project actually have their own kernels in development. Many Linux distros also do not ship with any of the GNU softwares and calling them gnu/Linux is really silly. You can also call any of the UNIX or BSD systems as GNU if they ship with gnome desktop or tools like the gcc.

Yes it silly for the Richard Stallman and the rest of GNU to inisite on GNU/Linux as there other stuff from BSD and MIT among others.

[Magmarock]

20 hours ago, GDRRiley said:

your however here is the issue. you refuse to admit and see all the change.

Steam doesn't always have DRM thats 100% down to the devs

 

it has gotten a lot better over the years. as someone whos main OS is windows with OSX often at school and work. I've had linux test systems over the years and by the end of 2020 I moved my daily laptop to it. was it rough back in 2016 trying to game on linux yes you had a very short list of games and heaving to deal with bad GPU drivers.

so then stop saying this a linux software issue and admit that you don't like how hostile the community can be

 

I don't think you quite understand what's being said here so I'll just leave this

This guy did such a great job of articulating my problems with Linux that I pinned it as the solution.

Yo address what you said about Steam. Improving compatibility on Steam only is not the solution to Linux gaming. Also FYT Steam is DRM somes games can be played without the client... on Windows, but if you need the Steam client on your computer even if it's just to use Proton than you're SOL.

[Magmarock]

17 hours ago, wasab said:

Linux is mostly used as webserver. For this purpose, it is literally miles away ahead of windows. Literally, the first thing my project manager tells me when I onboarded with my current company is to avoid windows because many things just don't work. 

 

Edit: if you are talking solely about gaming then perhaps however I am under the impression that most game engine and game development toolkits typically took care of crossplatfrom compatibility issues. 

Linux isn't the backbone of the internet. It pretty much IS the internet. What I said about gaming can also be applied to a lot of Desktop functionalities, but yeah we're focusing on gaming. I was planning to go into further details on another thread as why Windows and Linux have such interesting strengths and weaknesses, but for now gaming remains a poor experience on Linux.

[thedarthtux]

On 12/19/2021 at 6:01 PM, Magmarock said:

......

The truth is Linux is good for certain things; but gaming is not one of them. Out of all the  platforms that can play games from retro gaming PC's with Windows 95 to retro gaming consoles from 30 years ago, Linux is the worst choice of platform. If you ask the community why this is, most will tell you something along the lines of "it's because not enough people use it," or "it's because Microsoft got in first." These are just excuses, the reality is that the Linux community is extremely self sabotaging and goes out of it's way to prevent progress in it's own platform. One of the fundamental reasons that happens is because they don't like closed source software.

So I will have to disagree with you on this. I fully understand where you are coming from, however, I think where you are making a fundamental mistake that most other people make is to assume a Linux gaming PC = a Windows gaming PC. Window and Linux are two very different and distinct operating systems (yes, I know Linux is the kernel as some people will say just like they insist on GNU/Linux rather than just Linux; I for one don't care for any of that distraction). Therefore switching from a Windows PC to a Linux PC or Windows PC to Mac PC or Mac PC to Linux PC and visa versa is identical to switching from a PlayStation console to an XBox console and just because AMD makes SOCs for both does not imply a PlayStation blu-ray disk or hard drive inserted into an XBox will work on that XBox. It is therefore irrational for people to assume their games and applications will work. This is why when switching to Linux, people need to be ready to not only change the way they do things and think, but also expect certain things not to work. WINE/CodeWeavers and since I believe 2014 Valve and AMD have gone a long way to improving compatibility and making the switch from Windows to Linux smoother. However Windows IS NOT Linux and Linux IS NOT Windows therefore compatibility is a bonus given by companies who see a financial and strategic benefit to allowing Windows PC users to easily switch to Linux.

 

Since I fully switched over to Linux in late 2014 (and I could have as far back as 2010 but I didn't want to learn LaTex and so stock with Word and MathType), I have come to discover that there are a ton of native Linux alternatives to productivity, development, scientific, video/photo editing, etc to applications most people use in Windows. In a lot of cases, there are native Linux versions of these Windows applications. As for gaming, you have to go back to what I said about Windows NOT being Linux and Linux NOT being Windows. The file and folder structures are different, the native languages (C#, .Net vs C++) are different you also have to remember that Microsoft cornered the PC market in the 1990s. Most PCs sold to the general public came with Windows installed NOT Solaris, Mac, DSB, Unix, Linux, IBM, etc and PC companies like Amiga, Atari, Sinclair, Acorn, etc were failing and unable to compete. So when PC gaming really kicked off, most if not all studios had a platform to develop for and they focused on that and Linux was not even on anyone's radar back then. All your games are therefore Windows PC games NOT Linux PC games and you need compatibility layers like WINE (which is literally a sandbox containing a set of reverse engineered Windows libraries required for some Windows software to work on a non-Windows PC) to get them working on Linux if the developer did not, as is predominantly the case, release a native Linux version.

 

Therefore when you switch to Linux, just like with other software you need to check for native support or alternatives, you have to check for compatibility via WINE/Proton (see https://www.protondb.com/ for example). In fact, like a lot of Linux PC gamers, you may even have to make the conscious decision not to buy games that do not have a native Linux version or where the developer/studio has not given explicit messages about providing Linux support (native or via WINE/Proton). EA are notorious for not wanting to support Linux in anyway shape or form. However I would suggest going over to protondb and even Lutris (https://lutris.net/) for details about Windows PC games running on Linux. I have been playing FIFA, FIFA Manager and the Sims 3, 4 and SimCity on Linux since 2007 when I first started seriously looking at switching to Linux. I even played most Need For Speed games out back then. The only thing with the games back then was that I needed to go over to sites like GameCopyWorld to download hacked exe launcher files because of the DRM/copy protection stuff that just like Anti-Cheat software until recently were preventing these games that I bought from running on Linux. For me personally anti-cheat has not even been a problem because the only game I play that is online is Star Citizen.

 

It also has NOTHING to do with closed vs open source. Instead it is about compatibility at both hardware and software level. I used to use MatLab on Linux and for a while ran Nvidia proprietary drivers before switching to AMD GPUs. In fact I still use Nvidia's proprietary drivers for CUDA workloads I need to do on my workstation. I also used to use Adobe software and MS Office and MathType through WINE before searching for native Linux alternatives. I spent hours upon hours playing Star Citizen, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Nier Automata, Control, and other games on Linux via WINE/Lutris/Proton. I can't make the claim that any of these games are opensource. It may be slightly different on the hardware side because I only buy components and accessories that are Linux compatible or platform independent.

Here is one of my gameplay footage of Star Citizen a game in active alpha development and constantly changing VCRuntime libraries in Linux (https://rumble.com/vre679-star-citizen-3.16-naade-vs-industrial-espionage-viral-repatriation.html) and for all the other games I am running on Linux in one shape or form see https://odysee.com/@GamingonLinux:0?r=5CJHzrTZKQDYsR6H6N57eMUiYQtzBxgq

 

You can check out people like RawFoxOnLinux (https://www.twitch.tv/rawfoxonlinux) on Twitch for live game play. And for games other people have running on the Linux distro I use now see https://forum.garudalinux.org/t/gaming-news/14035/11

On 12/19/2021 at 6:01 PM, Magmarock said:

For it to continue working for the foreseeable future, it does. Linux doesn't have things like Dot Net, Visual Studio, or direct X. Sure, it  may have things like Vulkan and OpenGL but those don't have the same kind of infrastructure that the closed source software needs for long term functionality. Game developers don't want to work on a game for much longer after it's been released. Once they've release it, they spend the next few weeks or so patching it and then they move on. They don't want to hear about it after that.

This statement is exactly what I mean about people conflating Windows PC with Linux PC with Mac PC. .Net Visual Studio and DirectX are ALL MS proprietary and previously closed source software. They were developed by MS exclusively for Windows NOT Linux or Mac. In fact Visual Studio is an IDE and associated set of libraries developed by MS for programming in C#, Visual C++ and other Visual ### MS languages for Windows. You would have to find Linux or Mac or open alternatives and there are plenty of these. In fact Visual C++ was essentially MS re-egnineering the open standard C++ language to work pretty much only on Windows, just like C## was MS trying to challenge Java if I remember correctly and there are a ton of alternatives now such as Xojo for Visual Basic if we even want to ignore KBasic (https://www.kbasic.org/) which has existed for almost as long as LibreOffice has. So I would say, again you are confusing a PlayStation for an XBox because they have the same SOC manufacturer in AMD.

 

I would also argue here that you have not done enough research into both OpenGL and Vulkan. OpenGL has existed as long as Direct X if not longer, I remember back in the 1990s much of my Windows PC games where running OpenGL and only later on did D3D become a thing when MS saw that PC gaming was becoming a thing and so chose to create a standard for 3D graphics exclusively for Windows PCs. This however did not stop developers from using OpenGL. The issue with OpenGL was that it became bloated. Vulkan on other hand is an AMD developed API, well AMD developed the open source Mantle API (which I remember many techTubers and PC gaming reviewers including i believe LTT mocked back in 2013 as they all said how terrible AMD's Vega GPUs were) that Vulkan uses as its base. In fact AMD only stopped active development of Mantle and handed it over to the Khronus Group because MS had also started developing DX12 with the same philosophical basis as Mantle. So when techTubers were mocking Vega when running benchmarks Vega on DX11 and DX10 games saying NO ONE uses Mantle or Vulkan, they completely ignored where PC gaming was going and why Vega was the first step in the direction of hardware designed for modern APIs such as DX12 and Vulkan. It was easy for reviewers and PC gamers to say, the only reason the Vega 64 was outperforming the RTX 2080ti in World War Z was because of drivers but the reality is it was the underlying GPU architecture being better suited to Vulkan than DX11. Also keep in mind that Nvidia is actively involved now in the development of Vulkan and were working on RayTracing in Vulkan the October the RTX 2080ti was released even though RT is not yet implemented in any Vulkan games. See the following videos for more details but they are by no means exhaustive on the issue of APIs:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This following video didn't really age well even if Linus was at the time justified in his scepticism about what DX12 and Vulkan promised

 

Add to this, Valve are actively encouraging developers to use Vulkan and Cloud Imperium Games developing the insanely ambitious game Star Citizen have chosen to use Vulkan as their API NOT DX12.

 

TLDR and NOTE he says Windows and Linux support with "minimal work"

 

 

More detailed presentation

 

So I think your statement here is confusing a number of things, probably because you may be used to the fast food and highly superficial type way tech reviews and game reviews have been for a long time now.

On 12/19/2021 at 6:01 PM, Magmarock said:

 

Because Linux Distros are being changed or modified by the community in one way or another, the software for it must also be changed and modified to keep up with it. When something is open source, like for example VLC, it's not that big of a deal. The distro maintainers can make the changes they want to the OS and change VLC's code to accommodate. With closed source you can't to do this. This is why Windows is like the way it is. They are always building it on top of old code. This is so old programs including your favorite games can still work on it. It isn't perfect, but Windows has the best backwards compatibly of any platform out there; again, this is by design.

 

 

5 years ago I kept hearing how gaming on Linux had come a long way. I expect to hear the same thing again in another 5 years. In my experience, it's just as bad now as it was back then. All because it's own community is completely inflexible with too much infighting to get anything done.

There's a lot more I could say about Linux but I'll save that for the responses.

 

 

Again I think this is a fallacy. Yes, Linux opens you up to a lot of potential for customisation, but that customisation has no impact on gaming for the most part. If your games library are on Steam, well Valve have had a Native Linux version of Steam since they first released SteamOS and the SteamBox. If your games are on Ubisoft or Origin or GOG, well you have Lutris which is a unified launcher. For GOG you also have things like MiniGalaxy and if your games are on EPIC you have Lutris or Heroic Launcher.

 

As for backwards compatibility, I have games as old as No One Lives Forever, GTA III, Need For Speed Porsche, and XIII all working perfectly fine on Linux using Lutris. I am also looking to test my old Assassins Creed game CDs which I just found last week, games I know work in Linux using Steam Proton.

So was gaming on Linux easy in the past? No! But has it improved drastically in the past 5 years and a much better and ever improving experience now? Absolutely yes!! 

[wasab]

5 hours ago, Magmarock said:

Linux isn't the backbone of the internet. It pretty much IS the internet. What I said about gaming can also be applied to a lot of Desktop functionalities, but yeah we're focusing on gaming. I was planning to go into further details on another thread as why Windows and Linux have such interesting strengths and weaknesses, but for now gaming remains a poor experience on Linux.

Depends on the games like everything else. many softwares for linux are quite amateturish and glitchy, as you can expect from open sourced softwares made for free by some hobbyist developers. However people can not find any alternatives of these windows softwares on linux thus ending up using them and these tend to give linux some bad user experiences and bad reps. Many native games are just very bad ports as well. I play games ported by ferals and several of them run very poorly or none at all after some a couple years. Games made by valve on the other hand, heck, they run better on linux than on windows so those game publishers that do focus on the linux platfrom can ceratinly work magic. 

 

Quote

.Net Visual Studio and DirectX are ALL MS proprietary and previously closed source software. They were developed by MS exclusively for Windows NOT Linux or Mac. In fact Visual Studio is an IDE and associated set of libraries developed by MS for programming in C#, Visual C++ and other Visual ### MS languages for Windows. You would have to find Linux or Mac or open alternatives and there are plenty of these. In fact Visual C++ was essentially MS re-egnineering the open standard C++ language to work pretty much only on Windows, just like C## was MS trying to challenge Java if I remember correctly and there are a ton of alternatives now such as Xojo for Visual Basic if we even want to ignore KBasic (https://www.kbasic.org/) which has existed for almost as long as LibreOffice has. So I would say, again you are confusing a PlayStation for an XBox because they have the same SOC manufacturer in AMD.

The fact .NET/directx is exclusively windows only is more a limitation of the .NET and directx rather than linux. I seriously have no idea why people think a xyz platform is subpar simply because it lacks some xyz SDKs and toolchains that are available on another platform. Rather, i would consider .NET and directx to be subpar because it lacks support for major operating systems. Even microsoft realized this enough that they open source dotnet 5 so it has proper linux support. 

[thedarthtux]

4 minutes ago, wasab said:

Depends on the games like everything else. many softwares for linux are quite amateturish and glitchy, as you can expect from open sourced softwares made for free by some hobbyist developers. However people can not find any alternatives of these windows softwares on linux thus ending up using them and these tend to give linux some bad user experiences and bad reps. Many native games are just very bad ports as well. I play games ported by ferals and several of them run very poorly or none at all after some a couple years. Games made by valve on the other hand, heck, they run better on linux than on windows so those game publishers that do focus on the linux platfrom can ceratinly work magic. 

And that's just it, like you say, it really depends on the use case. I only tend to play cinematic visual quality games because my gaming/media streaming rig is attached to a 7.2 A/V receiver and 4K 65 inch QLED TV. I want the movie theatre experience when gaming. I have not found a single game I own and play on this rig that doesn't work on Linux either native or with WINE/Proton. Other games like Cities Skylines that aren't cinematic in look, I play at 720p or 1080p on my old 2-core laptop and have had no issues with the few feral games (the 3 Tomb Raider games and Total War: Three Kingdoms) I have.

 

With the only exception being Star Citizen, a game in active alpha development still to be moved over from DX11 to its long-term Gen12 multi-thread renderer and Vulkan API, all my games run at 4K 60 on pretty much ultra settings. Fine there are setting I have like the 

vm.max_map_count

that helps to improve performance in high geometry count areas in games.

 

I mean I am not spending every hour of every day playing games and have only ever installed 40 of the 200+ games in my Steam library, but I've had no issues other than GPU driver compatibility issues with any of those games. Actually this brings up another point in GPU selection impacting experience. I have Vega 64, Radeon IV, RTX 2080ti, and RX 6900XT and used to own a GTX 1070 and GTX 980ti. The only time I have had issues with games were with Nvidia driver support on WINE/Proton, most recently with the 495.XX driver issues fixed by rolling back to 470.XX. However, there are also hardware compatibility issues with Nvidia GPUs and the Vulkan API that they are yet to really fix at an architectural level (i.e. the real reason I believe the Vega 64 seemed to beat the RTX 2080ti in World War Z). So depending on your GPU, your experience in Linux could be massively impacted as well.

 

Outside of gaming, there is actually no software that I used on Windows that I did not find a native Linux version or alternative for in Linux and I do compute and data science workloads with video and photo editing. With things like MS word the only issue I have had with alternatives is finding the right or close enough-ish fonts. Once found no problems. The main compatibility issue I have now is that since switching to Garuda/Arch, the crypto mining software I use on Ubuntu is not compatible with Arch because the pool behind it only support Ubuntu and specific AMDGPUpro OpenCL drivers. So even though I can get the application running in Garuda, it only detects the CPU not the GPUs (either AMD or Nvidia). But that is not having no alternative after switching from Windows to Linux, instead it is having no alternative after switching from Ubuntu Linux to Arch Linux; O the irony 

[wasab]

12 minutes ago, thedarthtux said:

Snip

Total war shogun 2 has been crashing on me since 3 years ago. Total war Attilla lacks support for any AMD graphics card and company of heroes 2, the game I play with macos players crashes a lot, on both macos and Linux. Those just some examples of bad ports. 

[thedarthtux]

2 minutes ago, wasab said:

Total war shogun 2 has been crashing on me since 3 years ago. Total war artilla lacks support for any AMD AMD graphics card and company of heroes 2, the game I play with macos players crashes a lot, on both macos and Linux. Those just some examples of bad ports. 

Ouch, yeah that's really bad. Would have thought they would have moved all their games to Vulkan but I guess they have abandoned them? Hopefully Steam deck may encourage them to go back an look at the games again.

 

Reading the Atila page on Steam, it seems that was written only with Nvidia GPUs in mind on Linux so guessing it is still using OpenGL and AMD cards are just bad on OpenGL vs Nvidia cards but idk.

 

From looking at the protondb posts on company of heros 2 (https://www.protondb.com/app/231430) and Total War Shogun 2, (https://www.protondb.com/app/34330) it seems like it is actually a WINE install despite it saying native. If so, then it's probably a whole bunch of issues with VC++ and .net in the WINE prefix. It seems they haven't fixed some of the issues where for are some games, that it is better to run in WINE than using the native Linux build. I remember back when I first tried getting Dead or Alive 6 working on Linux when it first came out, I had to install the Windows version of Steam on Lutris then install the game from there and make changes to the VC++ libraries. Now that installs fine in Proton

[wasab]

21 minutes ago, thedarthtux said:

Ouch, yeah that's really bad. Would have thought they would have moved all their games to Vulkan but I guess they have abandoned them? Hopefully Steam deck may encourage them to go back an look at the games again.

I doubt it. I mean feral has been ignoring all my support tickets.

 

Quote

Reading the Atila page on Steam, it seems that was written only with Nvidia GPUs in mind on Linux so guessing it is still using OpenGL and AMD cards are just bad on OpenGL vs Nvidia cards but idk.

Nothing to do with opengl. They are likely using cuda or something exclusively Nvidia. Game will launch on amd cards but tells your card has 0mb of vram available and the world map is just a black screen. 

 

Quote

From looking at the protondb posts on company of heros 2 (https://www.protondb.com/app/231430) and Total War Shogun 2,

I play with macos players. Windows version, including the one run via steam play can not play crossplatfrom with macos players, windows only. I have windows dual boot for that so I don't tend to use steam play at all. 

[thedarthtux]

2 minutes ago, wasab said:

I play with macos players. Windows version, including the one run via steam play can not play crossplatfrom with macos players, windows only. I have windows dual boot for that so I don't tend to use steam play at all. 

hmmm, sounds like they aren't not doing proper version management or something. Just noticed these in Steam

 

Under SteamOS

Quote

Multiplayer is compatible between Mac and Linux versions running the same game version, only.

Under MacOS

Quote

PRE-10.14 USERS:

Users of OS X before 10.13 can access a compatible version of the game. Right-click the game in Steam Library, then Properties > Betas > ‘mac-linux-1.2.8'. This is compatible from 10.10.3 to 10.13.5.Multiplayer is compatible between Mac and Linux versions only.

Funnily this type of versioning issue is what Vulkan's platform independence helps to resolve...but Apple (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/vulkan-is-coming-to-macos-ios-but-no-thanks-to-apple/). The only reason gamers on different platforms should be ring fenced is incompatible anti-cheat and making sure for FPS and competitive games that 30fps average platforms aren't mixed in with 144fps+ average platforms like when the last gen consoles could only get 30fps. 

 

Will have to experiment with company of heros 2 to find out all the quirks with it seeing that I have it my library. Probably got it in a Steam sale ages ago but have never installed it

[Magmarock]

12 hours ago, wasab said:

Depends on the games like everything else. many softwares for linux are quite amateturish and glitchy, as you can expect from open sourced softwares made for free by some hobbyist developers. However people can not find any alternatives of these windows softwares on linux thus ending up using them and these tend to give linux some bad user experiences and bad reps. Many native games are just very bad ports as well. I play games ported by ferals and several of them run very poorly or none at all after some a couple years. Games made by valve on the other hand, heck, they run better on linux than on windows so those game publishers that do focus on the linux platfrom can ceratinly work magic. 

To bad Valve doesn't make any good games eh? XD. But in all seriousness I don't think repositories are good for closed source software which is why Linux has the kind of problems it does. I understand the appeal of using repos but I've never been a fan of them myself. What you get from a repo is a port of a program put there by the distro maintainers, and if they're not good at coding you're going to run into problems. Call me old fashion but I much prefer downloading programs from the website. The author programmer typically knows what he's doing and as long as you hold on to the exe you'll have a backup that will keep working for the foreseeable future. Repos don't really work this way. Out of all the Linux repos and package managers the DNF system used by Fedora was my favorite, it is by far the most polished and even has built in functionality for backing up. It all has to be done through the command line and won't work with new releases of Fedora, but the fact that it's there is a step in the right direction.

[gtPacheko]

Terrible take. Linux isn't locked to open source software and most users literally do not care.

All libraries and drivers necessary for games to work and run well are available on Linux, and WINE is a great compatibility layer. Valve's efforts with Proton have made me ditch Windows entirely. 

The ONLY game I cannot play yet is Genshin Impact, but I play that on my phone anyway.

[Magmarock]

1 hour ago, gtPacheko said:

Terrible take. Linux isn't locked to open source software and most users literally do not care.

All libraries and drivers necessary for games to work and run well are available on Linux, and WINE is a great compatibility layer. Valve's efforts with Proton have made me ditch Windows entirely. 

The ONLY game I cannot play yet is Genshin Impact, but I play that on my phone anyway.

It's not the software itself, but the way it's implemented does nothing to help with porting closed source software. WINE is a great compatibility layer? WINE is the ONLY compatibility layer; and it's only good when you pretend that emulators, and virtual machines don't exist. In the same way that Linux is good for gaming if you pretend that Windows and gaming consoles don't exist. A modded Wii is a better gaming platform than Desktop Linux.

[wasab]

11 hours ago, Magmarock said:

It's not the software itself, but the way it's implemented does nothing to help with porting closed source software. WINE is a great compatibility layer? WINE is the ONLY compatibility layer; and it's only good when you pretend that emulators, and virtual machines don't exist. In the same way that Linux is good for gaming if you pretend that Windows and gaming consoles don't exist. A modded Wii is a better gaming platform than Desktop Linux.

Dude, there is nothing intrinsically difficult in developing games on Linux vs that of windows or anything intrinsically hindering at the operating system level to make a xyz OS perform subpar vs another operating system. Game developers simply do have as many tools and softwares that are as optimize for creating games on Linux as oppose to windows because developers of these tools focused on windows first instead of Linux or macos. Unity and Unreal game engine are good example. Until recently, they have no Linux support whatsoever. 

 

By ports, I meant games that already run on another platform and then added in some hacks into it to make it function on another platform. In many cases, these hacks involve emulation and compatibility layers not very much unlike WINE that translates windows API into Linux specific ones. The only major difference is that they are part of the binary and these binary are Linux executable, unlike WINE which executes at the runtime level on a windows executable so these ports can be rightfully call "Native Linux games" but make no mistake, a port is far from as optimize as a game that is coded with a specific platform in mind because much of the codebase is still optimize for windows instead of Linux.  Why? Because it makes no sense to rewrite the game from scratch. 

 

If you want to see example, check out game publisher Feral Interactive Indirectx. 

 

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/5cis3p/feral_interactives_indirectx/&ved=2ahUKEwiz_sjG3pH1AhX3k4kEHfq6DcQQjjh6BAgJEAE&usg=AOvVaw0gxw4MIW-fDDqPQFDxi0kq

 

As you can tell from such hacks, things are more likely to break and won't perform as well compare to its original unhacked and unported version.  

 

Quote

 I don't think repositories are good for closed source software which is why Linux has the kind of problems it does

These are not the issues. you can run closed sourced softwares on linux just like you can run open sourced softwares on windows, if they are crossplatfrom. If softwares are made with crossplatform compatibility in mind and not just a shitty port, they are the same from one operating system to another operating system. Libreoffice runs the same on linux as on windows and same is true for closed sourced softwares like Google chrome and steam client. 

 

The open sourced software i talked about are those you compiled from sourced from github. many of them have not been updated for years, have all been abanoned by the developers and run poorly if they run at all. people still get them because no other alternatives are available. 

[apostlkpl]

9 hours ago, wasab said:

These are not the issues. you can run closed sourced softwares on linux just like you can run open sourced softwares on windows, if they are crossplatfrom. If softwares are made with crossplatform compatibility in mind and not just a shitty port, they are the same from one operating system to another operating system. Libreoffice runs the same on linux as on windows and same is true for closed sourced softwares like Google chrome and steam client. 

That's not exactly true. For example, go ahead and install Adobe Reader on your Linux system:

https://linux.softpedia.com/get/Text-Editing-Processing/Others/Adobe-Reader-1963.shtml

 

Yes, the package is from 2014, but I'm sure you can find an equivalent package (from Adobe or not) to test on Windows 10/11.

Chances are that your Windows app will run (even if it's from 2014 or earlier). Any bin/deb/rpm package definitely WON'T run. This is not accidental, that's exactly how it's supposed do work. Funnily enough, some super old games WILL run on Linux but WON'T run on Windows. The funny part is that this happens because of WINE and Windows API, not anything that has to do with Linux.

That's not even a problem exclusively for closed-source software. Go ahead and try to install this VLC package:

https://packages.debian.org/buster/vlc

on Ubuntu 20.04+. Probably won't work. Imagine Windows failing to install a package that is a few months/years old.

 

 

Package managers are indeed NOT a good way to distribute closed-source software. If you check the repositories of any disto ever, you'll find no closed-source software among the dozens of thousands different packages! (Except nvidia drivers and some Broadcom ones of course).

That's why any proprietary software available for Linux comes in separate packages, maintained by the original author and not the repo maintainers. This is also why most proprietary software vendors have given up on Linux packages (like Adobe), cause it's a hell and nearly impossible to maintain.

Heck, even open-source software isn't working right through package managers. Let's take Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for example, most popular packages in the repos (Firefox, VLC etc) are old. And won't get an update. That's crazy, considering every single other platform (Windows, Android, iOS, MacOS) DOES get the latest version of Firefox/VLC/etc instantly!!!

 

Although that's the case for Linux distros, things look a lot different for other "Linux-based" operating systems, like Android or ChromeOS. Now, that's probably an unpopular opinion, but I don't consider those systems "Linux" but rather "Linux-based", the same way MacOS or iOS are BSD-based. The base system (kernel etc) is open source and UNIX-based, but the rest is tightly controlled and proprietary. Despite my "Linux bashing" so far, I consider this a good thing, and I actually think it's better to use Linux kernel than any other kernel at this point (both the OSes I use daily, Android and Chrome are Linux-based, haven't used Windows in years, at least on my personal systems).

 

Again, that's NO accident. The reason Android is FULL of games and Linux only tries to emulate them through WINE, is that Android games don't run on Linux. The kernel is irrelevant. Android games are sandboxed, and running inside a Java-based virtual machine. It's nearly impossible to run Android games on Linux, unless you use an emulator, even though technically one would say that "both systems are Linux".

Android and ChromeOS make it easy to work with Linux, because:

a) They "freeze" on a kernel version and stay there, maybe even forever on a specific device. That way device drivers work indefinitely on said device.

b) They make software and game creation irrelevant to the kernel. You make your Android app, using specific APIs, following official documentation, using official SDKs.

 

Now, that being said, the only possible way to create and maintain a proprietary Linux app/game at this moment is containers. Flatpak and Snaps make it easy for developers to maintain an app without having to target a specific version of a specific distro in a specific update state. So far, there's zero interest from software vendors though, and I don't know why that is.

Also, Google's Flutter sounds promising, but I don't know much about it or how it works.

My own prediction? I agree with OP, Linux (and by "Linux" I mean "GNU/Linux distros") will NEVER be a popular platform for gaming (or proprietary software of any type).

[wasab]

13 hours ago, apostlkpl said:

That's not exactly true. For example, go ahead and install Adobe Reader on your Linux system:

https://linux.softpedia.com/get/Text-Editing-Processing/Others/Adobe-Reader-1963.shtml

 

Yes, the package is from 2014, but I'm sure you can find an equivalent package (from Adobe or not) to test on Windows 10/11.

Chances are that your Windows app will run (even if it's from 2014 or earlier). Any bin/deb/rpm package definitely WON'T run. This is not accidental, that's exactly how it's supposed do work. Funnily enough, some super old games WILL run on Linux but WON'T run on Windows. The funny part is that this happens because of WINE and Windows API, not anything that has to do with Linux.

That's not even a problem exclusively for closed-source software. Go ahead and try to install this VLC package:

https://packages.debian.org/buster/vlc

on Ubuntu 20.04+. Probably won't work. Imagine Windows failing to install a package that is a few months/years old.

That is beacue the share libray is outdated. just install libxml2:i386 libstdc++6:i386 pacakges and it worked 100% fine. i dont excatly call that backward compatibility issues because it is the installer that is outdated that it no longer handle the dependency properly or very poorly written, not the application itself.

 

Again, there is nothing intrisically difficult in writting softwares from linux as compare to windows, except maybe all the different distros, its file structures, and myriads of distro only specific to consider. if you create softwares that are generic and self contained to all of these differences, it is easy to port software from one platfrom to another. Even if there are such issues, developers have many tools to get around it. Snap and flatpak are good but even before that, developers have been containerized their applications with things like docker. for vlc, why dont you just get it from snap? It even tell you to do so on their website. https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ubuntu.html

 

If you want to see true backward compatibility issues, see windows vista. it was a compatibility hell until microsoft patched in some compatibility packs. 

 

Quote

Package managers are indeed NOT a good way to distribute closed-source software. If you check the repositories of any disto ever, you'll find no closed-source software among the dozens of thousands different packages!

you do know commuity repo like AUR on arch has pretty much everythinbg under the sun right? Some devlopers like to avoid repos and the reason could be they dont want to deal with and maintaining dozens of different repos and distribution channels on linux and opted to use a all in one solution. I dont consider this good or bad per se. It is like windows developer choose to let users download installer on their own website rather than having to deal with microsoft windows store and all the headaces that is microsoft.

 

Quote

Again, that's NO accident. The reason Android is FULL of games and Linux only tries to emulate them through WINE, is that Android games don't run on Linux. The kernel is irrelevant. Android games are sandboxed, and running inside a Java-based virtual machine. It's nearly impossible to run Android games on Linux, unless you use an emulator, even though technically one would say that "both systems are Linux".

if you think android is not linux or vice versa, that is completely fine. In your definition, same os in your mind probably means if softwares can run on two systems then they must be the same operating system. very iffy for linux beacuse there have been many highly specialized linux distros that wont run any regular linux applications at all without some work.

 

Android is not a hallmark of good  backward compaitbility either. i publisehd android apps in the past, these projects are all abandoned, i still get emails from google telling me to upgrade to the lastest android api version because they will soon be dropping support for all apps that are on the old APIs. Sure enough, i relook at the apps i wrote 5 years ago, they no longer work on the lastest version of android. 

[Magmarock]

On 1/2/2022 at 9:13 PM, apostlkpl said:

Again, that's NO accident. The reason Android is FULL of games and Linux only tries to emulate them through WINE, is that Android games don't run on Linux. The kernel is irrelevant. Android games are sandboxed, and running inside a Java-based virtual machine. It's nearly impossible to run Android games on Linux, unless you use an emulator, even though technically one would say that "both systems are Linux".

Android and ChromeOS make it easy to work with Linux, because:

a) They "freeze" on a kernel version and stay there, maybe even forever on a specific device. That way device drivers work indefinitely on said device.

b) They make software and game creation irrelevant to the kernel. You make your Android app, using specific APIs, following official documentation, using official SDKs.

Huh I didn't know that. I wasn't too sure how Android was getting games to work on it, while other Linux based software was struggling but now I do. Thanks for that.

[Magmarock]

On 1/3/2022 at 3:14 AM, wasab said:

Again, there is nothing intrisically difficult in writting softwares from linux as compare to windows, except maybe all the different distros, its file structures, and myriads of distro only specific to consider. if you create softwares that are generic and self contained to all of these differences, it is easy to port software from one platfrom to another. Even if there are such issues, developers have many tools to get around it.

I'll just leave this here.

 

[Guest willies leg]

Yeah, Linux does suck for gaming.

Windows sucks for running scalable production workloads, if not for the actual functionality, for the licensing.

BTW windows also sucks on mobile. I winced everytime I saw WinCE.

Word sucks for building a spreadsheet.

Riding a bicycle sucks in the rain.

 

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

 

[Magmarock]

22 minutes ago, willies leg said:

Yeah, Linux does suck for gaming.

Windows sucks for running scalable production workloads, if not for the actual functionality, for the licensing.

BTW windows also sucks on mobile. I winced everytime I saw WinCE.

Word sucks for building a spreadsheet.

Riding a bicycle sucks in the rain.

 

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

 

Pretty much, but what is an example of scalable production workloads. Windows on mobile could've been good but Microsoft insisted on doing everything through te store. Imagine if you could run exe's on Windows mobile. I mean a lot of people would get viruses but, still you could do a lot of things.

[Guest willies leg]

1 hour ago, Magmarock said:

Pretty much, but what is an example of scalable production workloads. Windows on mobile could've been good but Microsoft insisted on doing everything through te store. Imagine if you could run exe's on Windows mobile. I mean a lot of people would get viruses but, still you could do a lot of things.

 

SQL server, for example:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-2019-pricing

 

Gets really expensive really fast.

Postgres, Mongodb, Mariadb, etc. etc. are all really cheap (free) unless you want support, but you aren't forced to buy support.

[wasab]

23 hours ago, Magmarock said:

I'll just leave this here.

 

I have been developing professionally on and for linux for some years but you do you mr. private sector genius.