"The Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation [1], a nonprofit consortium founded by AMD, ARM, Qualcomm and Samsung, among others to develop open-standard specifications for parallel computing, and startup Cloudius Systems are also joining the Linux Foundation today."
I hope something interesting will come out of HSA/OpenCL 2.0 in the next couple of years, and that heterogeneous computing will start becoming more practical for more types of programs.
It will be interesting to see whether Valve can encourage the move to Linux gaming. Their biggest asset at this time is the distribution model of Steam, but that's not sufficient to get the big publishers to develop for OSX, never mind Linux.
OS X is not a good platform for gaming. It has a significantly smaller user base of which only an even more significantly smaller are gamers. Playing on a MacBook (or at least on my MacBook) is impossible, and I wouldn't buy an iMac for gaming.
On the other hand, you can put Linux on anything (for free!), from your mom's 2002 pc to the latest generation hot stuff. This means there is indeed a potential, and somebody just has to set the foundation.
You seem to be contradicting yourself. Gaming doesn't work on OS X because it has too small a user base, but Linux's user base is much smaller. Playing on a Macbook is impossible (presumably for performance reasons?), but you talk about putting Linux on a 2002 PC for gaming. And Linux may or may not run on the latest generation hot stuff, depending on how much time you want to spend to get your newest graphics card working.
I'm not sure what potential you are talking about. If gaming doesn't work on OS X, I can't see it working on Linux.
As an aside, Linux gaming would seem to me to suffer the same fate as the Android market times about a billion. Too many possible variations and massive platform fragmentation. It sounds like a development nightmare.
> Gaming doesn't work on OS X because it has too small a user base, but Linux's user base is much smaller.
There's an estimated 20 million Ubuntu users worldwide, probably another 10 million or so of other Linux distros. Not to mention, Linux (and thus Steam OS) is easily installed.
Adoption isn't a problem. Gaming on OSX doesn't work as well as on a PC because you can't put OSX on custom hardware.
> As an aside, Linux gaming would seem to me to suffer the same fate as the Android market times about a billion. Too many possible variations and massive platform fragmentation. It sounds like a development nightmare.
You sound like an iOS developer. It's not like every Windows PC has the same screen resolution and hardware, yet it's the biggest gaming platform...
Have you ever developed anything for the desktop? It's not particularly difficult to get things to run on computers with different hardware...
- There is a pretty sizable Linux userbase compared to OS X. Not larger, but the same league.
- Any existing Windows PC can be installed with Linux, and many other non-desktop devices already run Linux, so the potential for growth in userbase given the right trigger (i.e. games) is much larger
- A significant portion of machines that run OS X have very low performance hardware. The Macbook is one of Apple's top-selling computers, and it has always lagged in graphics.
So, to wrap it up, both Linux and OS X currently have small share, but Linux has the potential for rapid marketshare growth on capable hardware, while OS X has neither.
Same for OSX. Personally I'm a Windows refugee and I've been bouncing around Mint, *buntus, Deb n Arch to find my favourite and TBH I love what I see. Valve has done great work on their Linux Steam client.
I foresee a few blockbuster games being ported for Linux and Valve using some great marketing for it to win PC gamers over. Eventually it will become the preferred platform. Unlike OSX, Linux isn't hardware locked and CAN spread like wildfire.
The only way I see Linux gaming becoming "the thing" is if it cannibalizes Windows gaming. I think that even if all new games have first-class Linux editions, that will still be a difficult future to realize since you will still have legacy games that are Windows only (and wine will never become anything but a rounding error in that regard. Not in the next few years anyway, maybe 10+ years out playing games in Windows VMs on Linux will become reasonable...)
Look at the stuff Parallels has been doing with getting direct X running Virtualized in OS X. It's definitely possible to do. Heck, if it was possible to run OS X on custom hardware and have drivers that supported SLI, it would run respectably as well.
>It's not like every Windows PC has the same screen resolution and hardware, yet it's the biggest gaming platform...
No, but it has excellent binary compatibility, long term game APIs, and stable 3D and audio driver APIs. Which is what matters for desktop gaming, and what Linux does not have.
As for screen resolution and hardware capabilities, those matter on mobile (e.g iOS vs Android), and mostly for applications, not games.
Linux has good enough binary compatibility. I have seen 32-bit applications built on RHEL 2.1 run on RHEL 5. You need the correct libraries and versions, but that's not a difficult problem to solve. See AppCafe[1] by PC-BSD. You may use it if you use plugins on FreeNAS. Lets say that you need fifteen copies of SDL installed to ensure that you can support ten years of games. This is not a problem for a Unix/Linux system with existing tooling.
Stable 3D depends on the hardware and drivers, but gaming already has hardware requirements for graphics and it's getting much better. As far as OpenGL support, recent posts on HN lead me to believe that we are doing okay.
That or shipping the versions used is usually the way it goes on windows. Take a look at a lot of the games on steam, and many of them will carry an OpenAL dll with them.
Someone needs to dig up pre-ELF binaries for NetHack and XPilot and we can have a backwards compatiblity race, on latest versions of Ubuntu and Windows. Linux has a better chance now that Windows has dropped 16-bit support :)
Kind of. Turning on 64bit by default has resulted in a lot of problems for me, though. It doesn't do the search paths right, I often have 32bit things failing because they stumble on a 64bit dll while linking (or vice-versa).
I don't know if it will solve your particular problem, but I would suggest trying PlayOnLinux. It saved me from having a lot of hassle having different Wine configurations and versions side by side.
Yeah, I do use playonlinux for reasons like this, but to me it's a bit of a bandaid to the pace of patch acceptance to the wine project. Don't get me wrong, in spite of that the wine project moves at an amazing pace, but working fixes sit on their bug tracker for months and months before being integrated into the mainline.
But the mixed 32bit/64bit thing is just a fundamentally broken part of wine that got seems to have gotten turned on by default before it was ready. It makes wine look bad.
> Gaming on OSX doesn't work as well as on a PC because you can't put OSX on custom hardware.
...What? That's a complete non sequitur. There are high-end and low-end Macs, just as with anything else, and high-end Macs play games just as well as high-end Windows boxes. And of course you can put OSX on custom hardware, it's just not a popular option.
> You sound like an iOS developer. It's not like every Windows PC has the same screen resolution and hardware, yet it's the biggest gaming platform... Have you ever developed anything for the desktop? It's not particularly difficult to get things to run on computers with different hardware...
Wow. Have you ever developed high-end games for a desktop? It's a damn nightmare to get fast 3D to run on computers with different hardware. There's a reason that so many devs only work with consoles: targeting a single, specific hardware set reduces development costs immensely. It's getting easier now that pre-fab engines are practical and popular and the developer can fob some of the work off on the engine creator, but testing a AAA game properly requires a bunch of tests to be repeated across dozens of different hardware setups, and you still get post-launch bug reports that the game crashes when run on X video card with Y motherboard.
And all that is just for Windows. Adding Ubuntu support alone doubles the testing and debugging load. I actually do think that Linux can be a successful gaming platform with Valve's backing, but your arguments are not good.
> Are you joking? Because even $2000 iMacs come with mobile GPUs. Not to mention CPUs that cannot be overclocked etc.
That's comparable to a high-end gaming laptop, not a PC.
And what's wrong with high-end gaming laptops? My $1000 MacBook Pro has played everything I've thrown at it acceptably well, and it's not even particularly high-end. It's no longer the mid-90s, when you needed a new $2000 rig every year to keep up with current releases. For the typical gamer, overclocking your CPU hasn't been worth the effort in years.
There's nothing wrong with gaming laptops, it's just that both their performance and the experience they provide pales in comparison to a PC. (A PC that costs less, mind you.)
I mean, you cannot realistically say that you can have an immersive experience on a 15 inch, 1600x900 monitor when it comes to graphically intensive games.
Also, with CPU bound games like Arma overclocking can result in a difference of 15-20 fps.
This is a rather shortsighted view. Integrated graphics are rapidly catching up to desktop cards. The built-in Iris is enough to play games like TF2 with high settings, while the 15" Macbook Pro's 750M is half as powerful as my desktop AMD 6850! Furthermore, desktop PCs are getting ousted by laptops, to the point where I barely know anyone with a desktop anymore. In my view, PC gaming will have to adapt to this new environment, or it will become an increasingly niche market. (The enthusiasts who suggest spending $500 every year just to catch up with all the poorly optimized ports aren't helping.)
And yes, I very much can have an immersive experience on my 15" display, as can many other people. According to the Valve hardware survey, only 32.61% are running at 1080p; most of the rest have to do with less. Giant monitors aren't as ubiquitous as you might think.
>This is a rather shortsighted view. Integrated graphics are rapidly catching up to desktop cards.
I don't see how it's short-sighted, mainly factual. Integrated graphics are cards are rapidly catching up to only the lowest end discrete cards available.
How many people sticking solely to laptops were ever doing much gaming on their desktop back when they had one? I don't think it's useful to conflate all the people replacing their crappy old Dell desktops with a new laptop to people replacing gaming desktops with gaming laptops.
>And yes, I very much can have an immersive experience on my 15" display, as can many other people.
I'm sure plenty of people would have an immersive movie watching experience crowded around a 15" laptop as well, but I'll stick to my large screen TV in the living room personally.
Integrated graphics catching up with desktop cards? You mean the cards that need 300W by themselves in your PC tower? You must be joking. Its not because integated graphic cards are not as piss poor as they were that the gap is narrowing. The high end moves fast too.
I can't seem to load up the steam hw surveys for the various different video cards, but it would be interesting to see how many users are running at or below the latest MBP specs.
well one problem is that you have always had to buy the most expensive macbook / mac to get any sort of dedicated GPU. they've never had a GPU in anything but the absolute most expensive mac. besides that, apple has always had poor opengl software and driver support. they just released opengl 4 support with mavericks and touted it as a big deal, but it's opengl 4.1, which was released in 2010.
Have you been paying attention to Intel's graphics improvements? At the rate they're going, we'll have the power of (current gen) desktop graphics in just a few iterations. I think you could even make the claim that the current Iris graphics are as powerful as current-gen consoles, though you wouldn't know it from all the crappy ports and the lack of a low-level graphics API.
> we'll have the power of (current gen) desktop graphics in just a few iterations
And where will desktop graphics be after those few iterations? Several iterations more advanced. Integrated graphics will never be competitive with discreet graphics, therefore systems that do not support discreet graphics will never be competitive with those that can (in gaming, of course).
Discrete graphics are expensive, noisy, hot, and suck up tons of power. Upgrading your graphics card used to make a huge impact, but each successive generation now yields less and less improvement. (Carmack himself said in the most recent keynote that there probably won't be any "wow!" moments from graphics upgrades ever again.) Furthermore, some of the best looking games of the past few years (Super Mario Galaxy) were designed to run on one of the weakest systems around. As fun as it is to flip every switch in Crysis or Metro, I don't think most gamers care that much about diffuse lighting and ambient occlusion. We're at the point where things really do look "good enough" for all but the nitpicky, and I say this as a PC gamer for 20 years.
You're definitely the only person I've ever heard describe Super Mario Galaxy as one of the best looking games of the past few years. I looked at some screenshots and I have no idea what you're talking about.
While there may not necessarily be more features like ambient occlusion on the horizon, increased raw processing power and memory are going to lead to higher fidelity scenes at higher resolution. You're going to have orders of magnitude more detailed props on screen, and there are going to be orders of magnitude more of them. You're going to have more animation and more flexibility. You're going to have tons more lighting and particle effects acting on those multitudes of more detailed props, and you're going to be doing all of this at 4K.
I don't know when the last time you upgraded your graphics was, but I just went from a pair of GTS250s to a GTX770, and I've had my fair share of holy shit moments looking at games like Crysis and Metro.
Saying that graphics isn't going anywhere is the same as saying 640k ought to be good enough for anybody. It's incredibly nearsighted to assume that progress is just going to stop because things are "good enough," especially in the technology field.
Perhaps they will outperform (current!) mid range GPUs at some point, but from what I understand only the most expensive processors come with beefy integrated graphics.
That means, that even if they manage to beef up their CPUs, buying a cheap i5 with a mid range GPU will cost less. Plus, you can upgrade the GPU separately etc.
Frankly, I don't see the point of APUs but it seems AMD is going in this direction as well. Rumors say they're actually discontinuing their enthusiast CPUs[1].
Dunno, but my MBA ran cs:go way better than my linux box with a dedicated (low end but new) ati card can run cs:source. I'm sure it's a driver issue, but point is that macs current can outperform many linux setups.
Not to mention, Linux (and thus Steam OS) is easily installed.
I updated my desktop to Linux Mint 16 today and discovered that neither Steam nor Wine will install on it. Steam seems to be supported on Ubuntu 12.10 (although it does work on 13.04).
Steam is included in the Linux Mint 16 repositories and you shouldn't have issues installing it from the package manager. Or you can always "apt-get install steam". Like most Linux applications, you are better off installing the application from the package manager instead of from the upstream website.
"Steam is included in the Linux Mint 16 repositories and you shouldn't have issues installing it from the package manager. Or you can always "apt-get install steam". Like most Linux applications, you are better off installing the application from the package manager instead of from the upstream website."
I'm curious what the user base of gaming focused users in for linux world wide. Linux tends to attract developers rather than users who spend a great deal of money on their gaming hobby. Perhaps I am wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love this to work, but it seems like a bit of a stretch to say it will work better than a platform that is already successful at getting people to spend money on games (see Mac App Store, iOS).
>You sound like an iOS developer. It's not like every Windows PC has the same screen resolution and hardware, yet it's the biggest gaming platform...
This coming from the guy who just told someone their problem is that they are running Linux Mint...
> I'm curious what the user base of gaming focused users in for linux world wide. Linux tends to attract developers rather than users who spend a great deal of money on their gaming hobby. Perhaps I am wrong.
I'd wager a good portion of Linux devs are gamers, and likely just dual-boot, have a console, an iPad, etc... Seeing as how the barrier to using Linux is lower than either Windows or OSX, it doesn't really matter how many users currently use it, as much as how many will in the future...
> Don't get me wrong, I'd love this to work, but it seems like a bit of a stretch to say it will work better than a platform that is already successful at getting people to spend money on games (see Mac App Store, iOS).
As we like to say in trading, past performance doesn't guarantee future results... In any case, if you look at something like Humble Bundle, Linux total revenue almost always beats OSX revenue in Humble Bundle sales...
> This coming from the guy who just told someone their problem is that they are running Linux Mint...
Isn't it though? If a program works on every single other distro...
Barrier to using Linux is not lower than Windows. Windows comes installed on almost every PC sold. Linux does not. Therefore more work is required to use Linux.
I love Linux, but "if a program works on every single other distro.." is disingenuous. I have not once had 100% success with Linux on initial install. There has always been something that needed to be tweaked (usually sound or graphics). No, Windows isn't 100% either, but it's more like 98% while Linux is like 92%. For the majority of people, that 6% difference matters.
Gaming on Linux still needs to catch up. NVidia Optimus support is still being worked on. Most platforms don't ship with the proprietary drivers, which are the ones that are actually good for gaming. And from what I hear, the OSS AMD drivers are good at power management while they suck at gaming and flipped for the proprietary ones. AMD also has a problem where they drop support for cards relatively quickly.
I love Linux so much (Crunchbang, baby) but it's so fragmented that unless things change, gaming on Windows is going to stay easier. I don't see any reason why my family would give up Windows with its large library of games and all that support for Linux with its tiny library and not up to par drivers. That might not work on that distro without some workaround.
> Windows comes installed on almost every PC sold. Linux does not. Therefore more work is required to use Linux.
Keep in mind that most people who play games (and I'm not talking about Angry Birds or Facebook games but people who use Steam) tend to build their own PCs.
And installing Linux is just as easy as installing Windows, if not easier (you won't have to go on a driver hunt most of the time for instance).
> Keep in mind that most people who play games (and I'm not talking about Angry Birds or Facebook games but people who use Steam) tend to build their own PCs.
In lieu of a source, how's about you try to disprove it using data that shows that people prefer to buy Alienware (or other branded) gaming rigs over building their own PC's?
Why are you even presuming a "gaming rig?" I have a large Steam library... on Windows, in Boot Camp, on my MacBook Pro. Personally, I just don't see the appeal of max-settings graphics, so I'm not really compelled to "upgrade" to anything more powerful, no matter how many games I play. (Then again, I also don't see the big deal about movies over-and-above theatre/opera.)
I know, but IMO the bar is really low. If you have 10+ games in Steam you're pretty much an enthusiasts. Maybe I'm wrong, I'm mad about games ever since I played the first Doom on my father's 486.
In my view you're either a layperson who plays Candy Crush or iOS games or you know about Steam and GOG and the sky is the limit.
I think the sticking point is assuming that "likes playing games" and "cares about super-amazing graphics" go hand-in-hand. You don't need a gaming rig for Dwarf Fortress. :)
My laptop came with linux preinstalled. Same with my netbook. Neither required much work to use linux.
A standard Kubuntu (or Chakra) install on any Intel/AMD PC made before June will likely work without hiccups or missing hardware. Most distributions include an app to specifically detect/install proprietary drivers (Ubuntu uses Jockey). A browsing of Phoronix.com will provide you with benchmarks showing the NVIDIA/AMD/Intel drivers running neck-and-neck with Windows. But hey, let's not let the truth get in the way of your FUD.
>> Linux tends to attract developers rather than users who spend a great deal of money on their gaming hobby.
Gamers want fun. Gamers don't really care what's underneath. There was a time, back before the illegal deals of Gates when any gamer you talked to would literally laugh out loud at you at the thought of paying serious money for any game not on DOS - meaning Windows.
I don't see ad hominem. He explicitly stated that fragmentation would not be an issue for gaming on Linux, and then in response to someone saying that Steam didn't work, he said "Well, that's because you're running Linux Mint". That sounds to me like a fragmentation problem. I'm not attacking him personally, I'm pointing out that he literally just used fragmentation as an excuse for why something didn't work while at the same time claiming it's not an issue.
Yes, and if you'd read anywhere else in the thread, You'd find that the Linux Mint issue does not happen because there's a package in the LM16 repositories for steam. Which means that the entire issue of LM not running steam is moot. Which means there is no fragmentation issue in Linux as related to steam.
Which means we're left with your Ad Hominem, which you don't see.
> Yes, and if you'd read anywhere else in the thread, You'd find that the Linux Mint issue does not happen because there's a package in the LM16 repositories for steam. Which means that the entire issue of LM not running steam is moot. Which means there is no fragmentation issue in Linux as related to steam.
I don't follow this argument.
1. Linux Mint is Linux. People who run it say "I'm running linux."
2. Linux Mint does not run steam. People who run it say "Steam doesn't work on Linux Mint".
3. This means that the linux market is fragmented.
You can't just exclude Mint from linux for some arbitrary reasons. It's linux and it doesn't run steam.
And Mint is hardly alone. It's very much like android, there's a huge number of possible issues developers need to contend with. This doesn't mean it's a failure, it means that the cost of doing business will be higher than with the relatively controlled Windows ecosystem or the even more controlled console market.
> 1. Linux Mint is Linux. People who run it say "I'm running linux." 2. Linux Mint does not run steam. People who run it say "Steam doesn't work on Linux Mint". 3. This means that the linux market is fragmented.
Hmm. perhaps you'd like some reality:
1) Person who says they run it says "steam doesn't work on linux mint" 2) others come out and confirm that it does actually work on Mint. 3) you argue with person that makes original claim, and ignore that it actually does, in fact work. 4) When pointed out that LM does work with Steam, you reply that you don't follow the argument. 5) you then decide to expand on this false premise that something isn't working with a specific flavor of linux by comparing it to Android fragmentation, even though there isn't a case of fragmentation actually happening.
You still are unapologetic for your ad hominem, and decided to double-down on the fragmentation issue to move the goalposts.
To reiterate: Steam works on all reasonably-current flavors of Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat, Arch, Slackware, and even Gentoo.
Fragmentation won't be an issue because, in all honesty, if people want Steam to work, they'll use either Steam OS or the recommended Linux distro - Ubuntu.
> Gaming on OSX doesn't work as well as on a PC because you can't put OSX on custom hardware.
I'm sure most of those 20 million Ubuntu boxes have top-of-the-line CPUs and blazing fast GPUs, right? Fact of the matter is, the vast majority those machines won't be able to run anything other than 2D games.
Also, before we start condemning OSX as a platform with no games, need I mention Borderlands 2? Metro: Last Light? All of Valve's titles? Civilization? Bioshock Infinite? Batman: Arkham City? XCOM: Enemy Unknown? I mean, come on. At least do some research.
Maybe we should instead speak to potential user base.
For OSX, the potential userbase is always whoever has the money to buy extremely pricey Apple hardware, at least if you want to game on it, since getting a competent gpu almost always requires the rest of the components be really pricey.
For Linux, it is the sum total of all PCs out there with compatible hardware and firmware that can boot a Linux iso. Sure, you have to subtract the subset of the population that would never be able to install it - which is quite sizable - but you also have to consider they don't have to do it themselves, a tech shop or techie friend could.
> It sounds like a development nightmare.
When I develop for Linux, I use the Open Build System and throw my build script up on the AUR. If you are writing games you are using SDL, and if you aren't I personally use qt. Through that, I get FS access, services acccess, apis for almost everything, such that I don't even need to care about what audio backend you use, what your window manager is, what display server you use, etc.
Yes, there might be bugs, but unlike the Windows model, which is write for the buggy APIs because you can't do anything about it, on Linux you send the bugs to the upstream projects they originate from. Yeah, it is about 2 years until that bug fix sees mainstream adoption, but it beats using a buggy DX call for 15 years.
>For OSX, the potential userbase is always whoever has the money to buy extremely pricey Apple hardware, at least if you want to game on it, since getting a competent gpu almost always requires the rest of the components be really pricey.
But the kind of gaming that Linux lacks is the kind that need pricey components. I can play Organ Trail or World of Goo on Linux right now. If I want to play COD, I'm going to need something substantial. That narrows the user base even more.
I think you're over-estimating how much money it takes to get a relatively good gaming computer. You could probably build an entry-level gaming machine for around 700 to 800 dollars. Add in a keyboard, mouse, and a nice monitor and you'll probably end up closer to 1,000 USD. That's still 200 to 300 dollars cheaper than a Macbook Pro or an iMac, and 100 dollars cheaper than building the equivalent system running Windows (OEM Windows Home Premium is 100 dollars).
That would be equivalent to, say, buying a desktop from Dell (300~500 USD) and an XBox One (500 USD), which is a reasonable cost if someone wants to play the more graphically intense games.
>That would be equivalent to, say, buying a desktop from Dell (300~500 USD) and an XBox One (500 USD),
As a reference, the fastest home consoles now(XBO and PS4) are based on an AMD Jaguar core (AMD's version of the Atom), with 8GB of Ram. You can build a (Faster) AMD A10-based machine with the same specs for less than $400 in Canada.
Hell, you could throw a quad core Athlon and a 7790 in a $400 rig and still smoke the ps4 / xbone.
Something like $40 case + PSU, $40 8gb stick of ram, $50 matx motherboard, $70 cpu, $50 500gb hard drive, and a $100 7790 (or even better, the recent price cut 7870s for $130) and you are still under $400.
For a price of a "next gen" console you can build a PC that can run modern games at 1080p. Granted, not the highest settings but even that is achievable for less than $1000.
> And Linux may or may not run on the latest generation hot stuff
I've now installed Linux on two custom built machines, both with new hardware, neither of which were specifically built for linux. I was very surprised, compatibility was really good, and hardware issues were almost none...
> depending on how much time you want to spend to get your newest graphics card working.
Other than the one that had a dedicated GPU (even here, worked out of the box on Ubuntu). But then, this is an area that Valve seems to be focusing on heavily, and throwing steam support behind linux is a good reason to get Nvidia (et al) involved in better driver support.
It's still a longshot overall IMHO, but I do agree that the potential user-base is higher. You can't get a budget gaming Mac - the closest is the iMac for >$1,000, and that can be easily out-performed by a $5-600 custom built box.
> And Linux may or may not run on the latest generation hot stuff,
This is quite wrong. Most of PC gaming occurs on the desktop, and desktop hardware Linux compatibility is excellent. You see more issues on laptops, true, but again that's not where the main gaming crowd is on PC.
I would not go so far as to say that 3D hardware support in linux is "excellent". Probably as good as on Mac, true, but far from excellent. Basically if you want high end graphics on Linux you need to use an Nvidia card and their closed drivers. This closes of a section of the linux community right away. Intel and AMD have open source drivers but AMDs are terrible (no power management, buggy) and Intel still does not approach the performance of Nvidia for 3D gaming. The Nvidia drivers are good, but always lag behind their Windows cousins. Things are improving, but "excellent" is not the word I would use.
See, this right here is a perfect example of "Moving the Goalposts" [1]. We first redefine "excellent" to mean "without flaw", then state that using non-open drivers, which are freely available, no longer makes linux driver support excellent because it closes a section of the linux community. This also comes dangerously close to being a "No True Scotsman" fallacy as well [2].
What's even more interesting is that in a different post, you said that AMD's open drivers were better than their closed ones, citing power management and less bugs as one of the benefits. Here you are doing a complete 180.
Go to Phoronix.com and show me the benchmarks where Nvidia's windows drivers consistently outperform the Linux ones.
Gaming on Mac has gotten a lot better, mainly thanks to Steam.
I'm a huge gamer type, but for assorted reasons my "real" gaming PC isn't actually at home so I'm usually "stuck" with my Macbook. SteamPlay has therefore has been a huge boon to me -- I apparently have 272 games on my Steam account, and of those 121 run on Mac. That's a really impressive batting average.
Of course, a bunch of those I can't actually play due to the absolutely terrible Intel HD 3000 GPU in this thing (Witcher 2? Yeah, right!), but most indie games run fine because they're usually 2D or light 3D.
>> I apparently have 272 games on my Steam account, and of those 121 run on Mac.
How many of those 121 are AAA-titles? I'd like to be a Mac gamer too, but it seems to me there are extremely few AAA grade games available for the Mac. What else is there besides Valve, Blizzard, and .. Borderlands 2 & Arkham City?
I dumped my gaming pc for an iMac a couple of months ago as I got sick of rebooting linux > windows and back to get shit done when I wasn't playing games, and figured OSX was a good middle ground.
It really depends what you're interested in as to whether that's possible for you at the moment. The Blizzard titles all run, the Valve titles all run, LoL runs, and as mentioned in this thread a good portion of my steam library is available.
The big missing pieces for many are the Battlefield series and the CoD series, but since I don't play that type of game I'm fine - ymmv
Well, I've been using a Mac exclusively for a few years now. I just think the gaming situation is still really sad, even if things may be gradually improving.
It's difficult to believe that even 25% of those 121 games you mentioned are AAA quality, and that's what I was curious about. What's your estimate? Could you list a few AAA games for the Mac?
I can't speak for nekro23's library, but mine is ~150 games with 50 available for Mac. I don't purchase a lot of AAA games, but I can go through and list the ones that are/aren't on mac that I would say are of significant quality and a clearly not small titles.
On Mac (49):
All the Valve games - CS/TF2/Portal/HL/L4D
- King's Bounty
- Psychonauts
- Civ 4
- Trine 2
- XCOM: Enemy Unknown
- Two Worlds 2
- The Witcher
- Borderlands 2
- Max Payne 3
Plus Starcraft, Diablo 3 and League of Legends not within steam.
Notable absentees on my full Steam list (152):
- Dragon Age
- Skyrim/Fallout: NV
- Far Cry 3
- Crysis
- Dead Island
- Bioshock
- Alpha Protocol
- Assassin's Creed
- Alan Wake
- Empire:Total War
- Mafia 2
- Mass Effect 1/2
- Stalker
- Supreme Commander 2
The general trend is that most new games are being built on frameworks like Unity and UE3 that are cross platform across the consoles, pc and mac. There's outliers like Battlefield where the Frostbite engine isn't going to get dumped anytime soon, but I think the effort required for cross platform release has gone down to the point where large studios releasing across console/pc will likely also release console/pc/mac/linux.
The fact that I can play the new XCOM game on an iPad is pretty cool as well.
I think the presence of both DotA 2 and LoL is absolutely massive, particularly given the player base of the latter. Serious Mac gaming is probably not an option yet for players who like to shop around and play a lot of single player games, but for people who like me who just grab an online strategy game and play the shit out of it, it's actually fine. I suspect the combination of a Mac + [Xbone|PS4] would get very good coverage at the moment as well.
The problem is that outside of Blizz/Valve's stuff, if you browse Steam's list of Mac games, it's like 95%+ small games made by a lone developer, and that is really sad. No disrespect to those developers, but that kind of games just don't interest me.
But you think things are getting better? Do big game studios actually use Unity these days? That would be kind of.. awesome.
95% is probably a bit high, but I empathise that while indie games are heralded as the antidote to the various malaises brought on by the big studios, they aren't everyone's cup of tea.
Unity is perhaps still predominantly the domain of indies, but the Unreal Engine supports Mac, which is honestly the most important one. Perhaps things will regress a bit with the new console releases as graphical fidelity takes the limelight again and Unity is pushed away by big studios, but I think the point stands that many commercial engines are supporting Win/Mac/Lin/XB/PS and thus there's little reason not to release on all platforms.
Big projects take a long time to finish - the changes are pretty clearly happening but it's going to take a few years.
Nothing about what he said sounds contradictory to me. In short, what I gained from reading his post is that OSX is small and it doesn't have room to grow to host a gaming population because it's expensive and the hardware doesn't lend itself to gaming. One does not simply just build a mac gaming machine for a reasonable amount of money. On the other hand, he's saying Linux does have that potential because it's cheap and pushes by certain distros have made it much easier to use.
The difference here is that every Windows user is a potential Linux user. They just need to download and install some free software. The platform fragmentation is precisely the same as it is on Windows and is largely a solved problem.
You'll be amazed on how it has changed. First, latest Macbook are kinda powerful on the GPU side, even with the integrated one, the Intel HD 5000 or Iris can run modern game at low/med settings. While it's shit for gamers who cares about graphics and performances, for any casual gamers it's sufficient. My Macbook is my work machine but also my gaming machine.
The other things is about Wine, they're working on accelerating the Direct3D driver, and OMG, it's soooo fast now.
I'm running Skyrim on a custom Wine engine (1.7.1 with a patch from the D3D boost branch), on hight/ultra settings on my Macbook Retina, It's running at 80% of the Windows performance. And it's only the beginning, it's far from done.
I also have it running on a friend Macbook Air, it run at medium setting at a solid 30 FPS.
My point is that you can actually plays with Macbook nowadays.
Last I checked Mac OS also had very poor OpenGL support, from what I hear because it's Apple the one writing their own OpenGL driver and building it into the OS. Have they even caught up to OpenGL 4.0 yet? Even if they did, that's still what - 3-4 years behind the others? (4.4 is the latest)
You're not really playing BF4 on that Macbook. There are other non graphically challenging games you can play but not complex 3D games with decent graphic settings. I'm far from a graphics guy but things below a certain threshold just look bad and take away from the experience. I'd rather console game than deal with modern games on "low." Especially when you find yourself in situations where you get random frame drops and massive lag as the system tries to keep up. That's just annoying.
I'm always bewildered by Apple's choice of weak GPUs. These are premium products, why not spring for a decent GPU and call it a day? I imagine a lot has to do with maintaining a quiet experience and selling a thin computer, but at some point form hurts function.
Yeah, BF4 on wine may be unplayable (I've not tested it). About the GPU, My MBPr was shipped with an NVIDIA GT 650M, which is not that bad. And the new one got a 750M.
With those GPU you can have med/hight settings on... on Windows.
I'm really impatient for the release of the Wine version with the graphic boost, it should be able to run most game at 70-90% of their Windows counterparts.
The big problem is with the retina display, you have to run game at 14XX X 9XX to have decent performance, but it can be ugly, because of the display not being at its native resolution.
For the mobile products? Number one consideration is battery life. Discrete GPUs are horrible battery drains that Apple wants to eliminate any way they can, so they can get the MBP to the same kind of 12-hour-life numbers the Air has.
Well, that can be worked around. In the windows world there are lots of laptop models that switch between low power integrated graphics and a high power GPU for gaming. Its not either or anymore. Its not 1998 anymore.
From what I understand Crossover already integrated the performance improvement from the in progress Wine branch into their closed source alternative.
It's still coming soon on the main branch for Wine, but they still have a lot of works to do. But yeah once it'll be merged, both OSX Wine and Linux Wine will benefit from it. And it's a big, big performance improvement.
And if you want to try Crossover, go for it (They have a trial), so you can compare the performance.
I've been playing Dota 2 / Hereoes of Newerth on my 13in mac air for years just fine. My only gripe is the mouse acceleration on OS X... the mouse feels horrible and you have to get third party software to make it only slightly better.
Which third party software do you use to fix the mouse acceleration? I'm in the process of porting some Wx stuff over to OS X, a processes for which work provided a shinny new macbook, but I hated the way the mouse handled so much -- I mean, to the point where I was yelling at the computer -- that I ended up virtualizing OS X on my windows box and developing that way.
I don't know what it is. The Macbook's track pad is miles above its peers -- an absolute joy to use. However, the second you plug a mouse in, the cursor becomes an unusable, inaccurate, enraging piece of garbage.
I game on my iMac. Currently just played through BioShock Infinite, and play StarCraft 2 daily, and really should get back to Guild Wars 2 at some point... but yeah, I'm considered odd by my friends for doing so.
Throw in Diablo 3 and Portal 2 into the mix and you've got what I'm playing these times around on my rMBP13's HD4000. I've actually run through both SC2:LW and D3 on a '09 MBP. Sure you don't get all the bells and whistles, but a steady 25fps (capped through INI settings) matters more to me than shiny effects and had the games be perfectly enjoyable.
The driver performance just isn't there. If you have a cross-platform game and run it on the same Apple machine in OS X and on Windows, the Windows version's gonna be WAY more performant.
As a lesser frustration, most Windows games I play natively support the Xbox 360 controller, whereas almost no OS X ports do.
I was able to play quite a few games (Civ5, Walking dead, Portal 2, Diablo 3) without any issues on a Macbook (Pro 15 Retina first generation). Portal 2 and Walking Dead are quite playable also in my Macbook Air 13 (2010, last model with nvidia board).
Of course these are relatively low requirements games. Do you have examples where the performance difference is relevant, and the games actually unplayable ?
On my mid-2012 11" MB Air, most games around the level of requirements you said tend to run maybe 3/4ths as well in OS X as in Windows 8 (Portal 2 being a concrete example). Not unplayable by any means, but the performance difference is substantial enough that it's worth my while to reboot into Windows.
You're right, but it's moving fast (At least once a year...). I would say that native games are 95% on par with Windows equivalent.
Wine and other "Translator" are moving fast too, in a few release you'll see a lot of big improvements in the graphics area. Crossover latest release already profit from that.
It's been a few years since I tried, but I got much better performance running the Windows version of the Orange Box in Crossover than I did with Valve's OS X port. Is the driver situation significantly different when running in Crossover/Wine than native?
I bought mine refurbished for 1300 euros, which is comparable to the price of similarly specced PCs (and about the average salary of most European countries).
Even if it was three times this price, what has that to do with its ability to play games ?
Playing AAA titles might be difficult if they're badly optimised/don't have low graphics options. Others, like Skyrim, can run on an 2011 Macbook Air if you put the settings to low(though it leaves you with a surprisingly boring experience once the "HOLY CRAP MOUNTAINS!" is taken out of the equation).
If you're into indie games/GoG oldies it makes literally 0 difference what hardware you run most of them on as long as they actually run on that OS.
In my opinion, this will only take off if installing everything is easier than installing Windows + Steam + drivers. If Valve can give you an image to download that has the OS, the drivers, Steam, Firefox, and all the basic codecs you need to use a computer for gaming and common things like browsing the web, reading email, watching video and listening to music, this has a chance.
You shouldn't think of OS X and Linux as two completely separate platforms in this regard, since they share a lot of relevant tech.
I would imagine the work put in to making OS X ports translates well to Linux and vice versa and it's the combined sales that people will consider when deciding whether to port (or what base technologies to build on for brand new projects).
As SteamOS takes off there's also the possibility of using Bootcamp to switch your Mac into a SteamOS machine if that gives you access to better GPU drivers (I believe currently some people do this for windows for the same reason) but of course you can play (mostly) the same Steam games library from either OS.
edit: a quick glance at Valve's site suggests 598 games for Mac, 253 for Linux and of those only 9 weren't also available for the Mac (they're all available for Windows).
On that note are there any changes or improvements on the horizon that would let you fast user switch between two or more booted and running operating systems. It'd be great in the future if you could allocate a small chunk of your RAM to keeping the background machine in a chunk of RSm so it switches faster than you can switch between users on the same OS. E.g. Of 16GB of RAM, 12GBis allocated to the foreground OS and 4GB to the background. Then when you switch you get a near instantaneous switch and the 8GB difference is allocated to the now current foreground system as necessary.
This can be done today using kvm's memory ballooning. Essentially, you install a driver in the guest VM and it takes care of (1) reclaiming RAM from the guest OS when the host OS needs more; and (2) providing more RAM to the guest if needed and available.
While both may be Posix systems, the GUI, mouse and audio apis are much different - so there is still a lot of work you'd need to do. Since both use opengl though, you get rid of half the trouble by porting.
It's also important to remember that many game makers don't make their own engine, and so the engine must support OSX/linux (most classic linux ports have used the unreal engine, or source engine). Unity is quite good in this regard, you can hit a button to export your project to all three different platforms.
While this is great, its a bit sad that Valve is mostly doing all of this now, because they fear losing their dominance on windows to the native Store in Win 8.x
In the end its a win-win for everyone if it works out, just their motives are questionable.
Well, their motives aren't sinister, which is all you can really want or hope for. In a capitalistic market, vanishingly few players will switch to Linux out of altruism.
Which is perfectly fine, in my opinion. Everything is more predictable when each player acts in their own best interests. Then it's just a matter of understanding their incentives.
Yet, players could have some amount of foresight, and not wait untill MS actualy pushes a knife into their hearth (lucky Valve this one was dull) before trying to defend themselves.
>> Well, their motives aren't sinister, which is all you can really want or hope for. In a capitalistic market, vanishingly few players will switch to Linux out of altruism.
There was a time when no one thought gamers would switch from DOS to Windows.
He's trying to protect his business from a hostile actor - Microsoft. They are attacking others like Valve by radically changing the rules for what goes on Windows, and creating their own gateway.
So what's "questionable" about that? The move seems pretty clear cut to me - it's a defensive move against Microsoft's obvious trend for a closed garden of apps and games.
Before Windows 8, Valve seemingly couldn't care less about Linux! It bothers me how Valve tries to make itself out to be Linux's best friend nowadays. They also talk about open source a lot despite them ever releasing only proprietary software.
Leaks from years ago show that the Steam client and Source have both had Linux versions in development since around the time of the Mac beta in 2010 (two years before Windows 8) [0]. Also they've supported Linux servers forever, so you can hardly say they couldn't care less. Also also, haven't they pushed some stuff upstream and spurred interest and development in open source drivers? That's more than many companies that publish proprietary software on Linux.
Windows 8 may have pushed them over the line, and they may only be moving to Linux in order to make more money. Is that really a problem though? I think it's the breakthrough into the mainstream that Linux has been waiting for for decades.
I saw this reasoning flying around a lot when Valve started working on linux. I saw the move from linux initially as a natural extension of developing for the Mac OS. GabeN was quoted saying something on the lines of how the games were running much more stable on OSX then windows and said the problem they had wasn't related to there code.
Then I heard how performance issues. Using games performed (slightly?) better on Linux then on Windows. There was talk about mouse issues on Windows 8 and how some bench marks could be faked.
All this sounded to me was Valve wanted a better gaming environment.
Side note, I don't know how many people would be switching to Windows' store and gaming social features over Steam.
Steam
is a basically a middleman for games taking 30% cut of revenue. Of course they're and should be
terrified of how Apple eliminated middlemen with the App store and the
30% cut of all sales inside the app. There are things like Xfire for the
social gaming features.
Agreed, I'm get the idea Valve doesn't actually care much about linux. For example, in their presentation highlighting some stuff about porting games from win to linux, every screenshot was made in windows
Nothing is questionable - GabeN wants the soft power to rule gaming. So in the times of walled/wallish gardens his goal is to prevent them of locking in the audience and gaining the hard power.
It won't be a win for Microsoft if this transition takes off. Also, of course profits and control are the biggest motivations here, not some inherent wish for linux to succeed.
No, it's clearly a business decision. But I wonder how long it has been in the works, considering that every few months, you used to get these "Steam on Linux" "news" which never translated into anything solid until Steam for Linux eventually came out.
Apart from the fact that I'd like to play it, it's interesting because Linux Steam has a dearth of AAA title (although it does have good indie games like Unity of Command).
If I to play some fantasy football here I might go as far as to say the Win8.x Stores might actually be the reason Valve is ditching it. Microsoft could be aiming for a cut of each game sale a la App Store and try tactics to make it difficult for them to run a parallel store on their platform. When you have a business model like Steam running on essentially the same Win8 store the margins get razor thin.
Of course I don't know for sure but for Valve to back out of Windows the way they did it's definitely a strong possibility. Don't forget "embrace,extend,extinguish".
We do know for sure. Gabe has explicitly stated that the Win8 store with its closed ecosystem model is the reason they hate Win8 and are making SteamOS.
Gabe was the 271st employee at Microsoft[0] and "was the producer on the first three releases of Windows"[1], so I suppose that, even if he hasn't contributed to the very same code as Bill Gates did, there must be an earlier employee who has. I don't estimate his Gates code number to be more than 2.
Oh I forgot Gabe worked at MS, in that case, yeah, it must be pretty low. Gabe worked both at Valve and MS, and both companies have submitted code to the Linux Kernel.
I must say, I'm surprised by how many naysayers there are, considering Gabe thinks Linux is the future of gaming. There really is no technical reason why this can't happen, we just need to make it happen...
Agreed. After years of haranguing Nvidia, for example, it wasn't until Valve started pushing linux gaming that Nvidia FINALLY started clearing the air a bit on their atrocious driver support.
Valve has a lot of influence in PC gaming. Whether it's enough to raise linux as a preferred platform for PC gaming, only time will tell, but I hope it does.
Pro video users have jumped shipped (still waiting for the new Mac Pro sometime this month, 18 months after Tim Cook teased folks after WWDC, years after any serious update)
Actually it seems that some indie developers are already supporting Linux more often than OSX. I have seen on Steam several titles where the title was multi-platform, but multi as in Windows/Linux, not Windows/Mac/Linux. Interesting trend. I would be very interested to hear about sales numbers on Steam Linux from developers or publishers, and see if the time they spend converting their game is worth it as this stage, or if this is simply a bet on the future of the platform.
Flipping through the Linux games section on Steam (which is 11 pages comprising 256 titles) I see exactly nine titles that support Linux but don't support OS X. Subtracting those nine from the total Linux games leaves 247 titles. Subtract those from the Mac game total of 601 titles, and you're left with 354 titles that appear on OS X but not on Linux. That arguably constitutes a trend.
Not only that, but looking at the games themselves makes this even more of a dubious claim.
Signal Ops - Mac version in development, not launched yet.
Aquaria - Mac version was developed by Ambrosia, who doesn't participate in Steam.
Capsized - Temporarily pulled from Steam due to an issue with the Mac port.
DIVO - No public information as it's a one-man dev team without a company name or website.
Salvation Prophecy - Another one-man dev team, the developer mentions he wants to but has no dev experience on Mac.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 - Mac version is in development, Linux version on Steam is a public beta.
Natural Selection 2 - Mac version in development, not launched yet.
Intrusion 2 - Mac version is out via the HIB, it's just not available on Steam yet.
Painkiller Hell & Damnation - Mac version in development, temporarily delayed.
So out of the nine games that comprise this "trend", three that have Mac ports in the wild but aren't available via Steam for various reasons, four have Mac ports in active development, and one who lacks the experience to develop a Mac port but is on record saying he would like to.
That leaves one title who's developer hasn't already released, is in active development, or is exploring a Mac port. I wouldn't mind seeing more games on Linux too but I have to say, I'm pretty sure you're reading into this something that simply isn't there.
Not really. There are countless Android powered game consoles too but it hasn't exactly lead to an explosion in Android gaming.
Releasing hardware doesn't automatically lead to developers providing software. Linux still lacks 100% of triple-A titles not developed by Valve. What's upcoming is almost entirely indie ports.
Whether or not that is enough to start the cycle of shipping units, gaining more attention and seeing bigger titles dip their toes in the water remains to be seen. OS X had a decent advantage at launch, there were already smaller porting shops producing OS X ports of triple-A titles. Gaming on OS X was never popular, but it was there.
Valve is looking to pretty much single-handedly launch gaming on Linux. Nothing here is a trump card, everything is up in the air.
Ok, fair observation. I admit I did not look further into these games past the fact that the Mac icon was missing on Steam.
Comparing the number of games available on Mac vs the ones available on Linux on Steam is not really comparing apples to apples, since Steam Linux just launched less than a year ago, and the pace of releases has been steadily increasing since then.
Isn't this trend of things being on OS X rather than linux helped by things being ported from iOS back to OS X as well? I've noticed a lot of games on the Mac App Store that happen to be on the iOS App Store.
Could be referring to the micro-exodus of users after Final Cut X came out, but then of all my friends in film and video none have switched from Mac since then, only to...
I'd love to do most of my amateur video editing on my powerful ubuntu desktop instead of my macbook air. Is there a good community around any particular video studio project for linux?
I use Linux mostly but log into OS X or Windows for those. I could probably run them in a virtual machine though.
The one thing that keeps me from using Linux exclusively are pieces of software that I use to make music but are only available on Windows (e.g. Guitar Amp Plugins by LePou or various processors by Variety Of Sound). I don't see those coming to Linux anytime soon, sadly.
If Reaper would come out in a native version for Linux and someone invented a way to use Windows VST plugins in it without a performance hit, I might dare switching.
I suspect you would get great enjoyment out of KXStudio [1]. built-in support for Windows VST plugins (via Carla/Vestige). Wine with the WineASIO setup working means that FL Studio (and similar) works flawlessly under JACK. Also, there is nothing in the windows world that competes with JACK and Claudia.
You might also want to check out the Linux Musicians forum [2]. Most of your itches are probably already scratched by someone.
Paradoxically, a piece of music needs to have been noticeable, popular or memorable to be deemed the "worst ever." A piece that was unpopular and quickly forgotten is unlikely to top all-time public polls a few years after it was released. A piece usually needs to have had a high profile at the time of its release, such as an unexpected hit that was highly disliked outside of its fanbase.
I think Gimp is enough of both, to call it that.
Also, OP, I've heard that the CS works quite well (the original, not the pirated) in wine, I haven't tried it myself but maybe it's worth the shot.
Note: I don't like to criticize FOSS, since I'm sure there are intentions are always good, but it's just that it's so bad :(
I would hardly call it worst. It does not have the most intuitive UX, but once you get used to it it's quite nice and gets the job done. And it's open source (royalty free). I like it.
I'd call it PS-incompatible. Would be nice to see a study on two control groups who each either start learning PS or GIMP for a few weeks and see how they get common tasks accomplished and how they feel about their control group software.
I mostly see PS damaged people with bold statements of it's superiority and the rubishness of GIMP. I never seen anyone getting good with GIMP first and then ditching it for PS.
Started with Paint.net, went to Gimp, then to Photoshop and currently jumping between Gimp and Photoshop. Bear in mind, I'm a developer who sometimes has to dabble in graphics. I only use GIMP because I can't afford the license on my home computer, and my university supplies my Photoshop license.
While I think gimp has the potential to be great, the UI and workflow is painful in comparison to PS. For instance, take creating a rectangle with a gradient on it (with curved corners), and a border that fades from one color to transparent (thinking a rectangular button here).
Photoshop: Choose foreground colour and bg color to be the two points on your gradient. Pick curved rectangle tool. Drag rectangle, and change fill type in the top bar to be radial gradient. Click Stroke, and change fill type to gradient. adjust the color.
GIMP.
Select the selection tool(why???) Drag the selection to your desired state. Apply a gradient to the stroke by... I don't know actually. then go to slect, and choose rounded rectangle, and choose the border radius (in %??? what the hell sort of measurement is this). Click Ok. Go to edit, and choose stroke selection, and choose stroke with Paint Brush. (This creates an empty border with a stroke around it). Use Gradient fill tool to create the centre of the rounded rectangle, then resize to fit within the border because I can't figure out how to not apply the gradient to the border which is in the selection.
In the end, you get the same result. But PS's workflow makes more sense. to draw a rectangle, you use... a rectangle tool. In gimp, you select the shape you want and draw a stroke around your selection. I also find gimps export a pain in the ass. Why can't I click save as, and save as a PNG rather than having to export? It's clunky, and a pain to use. No matter how powerful a tool is, it's useless if the interface is non-intuitive. I know they don't want to go the adobe route, but they may consider taking some inspiration from one of the most researched products in the world.
Mainly because 99% of learning Gimp is learning how to use selections properly. Gimp is for image manipulation, not drawing buttons.
If that's the kind of stuff you're doing, use Inkscape. Do the Tutorials under the Help menu. They're really excellent and it sounds like exactly what you're looking for.
Yes, a few, but why not do those in something else...say, Gimp?
I can't think of a decent looking button (even for very loose definitions of "decent") that couldn't have been done with vectors. Can you give me a good example?
No, Illustrator is fantastic for its usage cases. (As I'm sure Inkscape might be)
We were talking about Photoshop replacements. Despite the name, it's very much a hybrid raster/vector tool now, unlike how the GIMP was described above.
>> I'm a developer but I've dabbled in graphics since the 70's with charcoal and paper then computers starting in the 80s'. My younger brother is more talented than me but it's relaxing sometimes. GIMP's UI never has made me feel comfortable but the application is immensely powerful.
I've not spent much time with GIMP, but opening dialog boxes as separate applications put me off of it pretty quick. Got the job done, but I didn't exactly feel like it was helping me do so.
From what I understand, GIMP has only 1 full-time and 1 part-time lead developer, and yet it competes with the flagship product of a company that makes $4.4 billion per year.
I used Photoshop CS6 in a Windows 7 VirtualBox VM, often for editing large RAW pictures. Slower than native, of course, but it was totally OK for occasional photo post-processing. Perfectly fine for typical web design work. This was on a 2011 Thinkpad X220 (i7, 16 GB RAM, no SSD).
Lightroom felt too sluggish and I didn't even bother trying Premiere, but at least having Photoshop available kept rebooting to Windows to a minimum.
And why would you go that far out of your way if PS it's your primary tool? What would you gain by having a Linux box around your Photoshop install?
Once you strip away specialized tool suits and programs that actually sit on top of the OS, most users just need sound, mouse, keyboard, and monitor support so they can run chrome or firefox. Most OSs handle this just fine, so the real deciding factor in your OS should be the tool chain you need to run.
It's so backwards and kludgy to pick your os then try make your toolchain work on top of it.
Some of it runs okay under Wine, some not. A shame, I wish a startup would try and tackle the Adobe Collection at some point, but I guess the capital requirements and network effects are too great :(
DOSBox and Wine make Linux quite perfect for gaming.
Interestingly, for some games, running the Windows version in Wine works better than running a native Linux version they've made of the game. E.g. the native Linux version will complain that some library .so is not the correct version, or that it cannot connect to X, etc...
I appreciate and use Wine quite a bit, but it's far from perfect. A lot of things just plain crash from the get go.
Also, I wish that Steam on Linux would attempt to install and run Windows games via Wine. If I want to play, for instance, Spelunky, I need to close Linux Steam (can't log in in multiple clients, last time I checked) and open Windows Steam in Wine. Maybe there's a way to get Wine games to run in Linux Steam, I don't know. It would just be cool if it did it by default.
Yeah, I've only had success about 3/4 of the time I've used Wine. Maybe less. That's still 3/4 more than 0, so I absolutely love it, but it's definitely not perfect.
Often if something doesn't work, winetricks helps get the right components, and sometimes also settings like the one where Wine creates a "desktop" window inside of which the game gets ran.
Often. And that's why I've achieved 3/4 success rate. But finding the magic winetricks incantations, even with the help of winehq.org, can be an enormous time-sink with low guarantee of success once you've exhausted the standard DirectX/VCRedist stuff.
>> I appreciate and use Wine quite a bit, but it's far from perfect. A lot of things just plain crash from the get go.
This hasn't been my experience. Wine works great, Netflix runs very good on Ubuntu because of Wine. I've played several Windows games on Linux like Unreal which ran better on Linux under Wine that on Windows.
Which completely steers out of the point in the discussion related to this news announcement.
Valve joining the Linux Foundation does have more to do with the next Valve console and less with the desktop. If Valve wants support from vendors and kernel developers, this is clearly a step in the right direction.
Nobody cares about your desktop. Linux runs way more machines than Windows.
In case you do not know what the Linux Foundation is, I will quote it here:
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the
growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000,
the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and
promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and
collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its
members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a
neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative
Projects, Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original
research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and
collaborative software development.
Video, sound, competing standards (which will hinder adoption), antiquated X11. Also when a full-screen X11 overlay (like a game) freezes then the whole desktop freezes (CTRL+ALT+F1 doesn't help).
A Linux enthousiast will forgive these mistakes and find a way around them but Linux noobs wouldn't know what to do.
Even if they would know what to do, it would still be something you wouldn't have to do on Windows, so anyone who is agnostic to what OS he is using and chooses based on practical criteria and not ideology or philosophy, will most often choose Windows over Linux. Linux experience just isn't there (would like to add "yet", but I don't see it even moving in that direction). I said this before and I'm gonna say again - Linux forces user to learn about OS and computer in general, which is not needed for most of people.
>> Linux forces user to learn about OS and computer in general, which is not needed for most of people.
My wife switched in one summer night in 2007, she hasn't looked back, she's a casual user, her laptop came from Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed. I guarantee you, she is the typical, non-techie user.
Because it was pre-installed. Everything was already set up by an expert. Let her install a fresh copy and see how it goes. Then let her install windows on same machine and see the difference.
I'm not sure what you mean about video and sound. OpenGL is first class on Linux distros, sound is almost exclusively pulseaudio now...and X11 is on its way out, hopefully it'll be dead to most desktop users within a small number of years.
Video on dual-screen setups is a bit wonky. Yes it's my fault for using crappy proprietary ATI drivers but try to explain that to someone new to Linux.
I have two issues with sound: 1) Sticking my headphone connector to my laptop's headphone jack does not work. I have to reboot in order to get headphone sound (works on Windows). 2) Connecting my PC to my TV via HDMI and playing a YouTube video ... Last time I heard a scratchy sound like that was when I tried to play a heavily damaged 45" record on my parent's turntable back in the early 80s.
I'm curious when the last time you tried Linux was? I used to have these issues in 2011 which is why I stuck with OSX, but now I use Linux exclusively because these problems are non-existent now.
The vast majority of successful software is arguably based on antiquated principles.
People seem to continually blame X11 as the source of all of Linux's woes, completely ignoring the history of computing.
Most high-end workstations were UNIX-based at one time, and the graphical interface ran on X11. People forget that Photoshop, Internet Explorer, and Adobe Acrobat Reader used to be produced for UNIX and UNIX-like systems.
X11 is not the primary issue at hand with Linux; nVidia has proven that repeatedly.
At most, I'd be willing to agree that X11 is not optimally architected for local rendering context, but again, I don't think that's going to make the huge difference that people seem to imply.
You've just given me a fact I'm already well aware of ("Wayland is being developed...") and then restated that X11 is antiquated, but you've never given me a reason why you think that.
Do you actually know, or are you just repeating something you read somewhere but didn't really understand?
Okay fair enough. No I don't know. It's just what I heard. From what I have understood in the limited knowledge I have of X11, it seems to have no true full screen support, unnecessary layering due to it's legacy client-server architecture and ugly hacks.
Clearly you're passionate about X11 and I would like to hear why it is not antiquated.
Well, it's difficult to explain why something isn't antiquated, but on the points you raised:
1. You misunderstood the full-screen thing. X11 does have proper full screen. The trouble is that it's a bit too proper: the full screen app receives all the keyboard instructions, so how do you switch to a different app? The app needs to release some keys to you, or you need to exit or kill it. This isn't so good for games where you might have a chat program running in the background.
2. The client-server architecture is not really relevant since it uses sockets when it's on localhost.
3. Ugly hacks? Anything more specific?
X11 is a modular architecture and the very fact it's still in use suggests it's an effective one. Look at the difficulty Microsoft had getting compositing working (XP -> Vista), but it was added to X11 without having to invent a brand new windowing system.
I'm not quite as passionate about X11 as you might think. It's not so long ago that I was arguing that I'm excited to see what Wayland and Mir can produce. But it's not because X11 is bad, it's because I think things can be even better.
Your data seems like, off. Ctrl+Alt+F1 does indeed give you a nice way to kill the game. On Windows, you have to hit power reset and hope you don't lose anything important.
Well linux have 10 main desktop managers that are under development right now. Each and every one of them does roughly 80% of what I want from a desktop. And I have uncomfortable experience on all.
What's a desktop manager? I know about desktop environments, of which there seem to be 4-5 for Linux, and I know about window managers, of which there are many, thankfully.
Please list the "10 main desktop managers" so I can familiarize myself with them. Thanks.
Indeed, call a person that sincerely tries for the last 3 months to move to Linux as a daily driver armchair critic.
I could live with slightly wooden DE, I could live with the fact that my speakers are buzzing while there are phones connected.
The only real dealbreaker is lack of decent file search in Linux. I want something that delivers the speed of search of Everything and has realtime update. No luck so far.
Nepomuk is indexer, and I am not sure it starts indexing on volume mount, also not sure if it is hooked into fnotify. Everything is reads straight from the NTFS journal - it is really smart little utility that has become my main launcher for everything. But I have not found current in development project that could be used like that - rlocate was closest but it is dead from 3 years.
Sounds great to me! My girlfriend's Windows 8.1 laptop does about 50% of what I want from a desktop. My work provisioned MacBook Air and OS X does about 70% of what I want from a desktop.
Nonsense. There are, at best, a handful of desktop environments targeted at daily desktop users: Unity, KDE, Gnome-Shell, maybe LXDE/Razor if you're being generous.
I've love to hear a single specific complaint about an experience you had with KDE that isn't "it was different from windows", especially given that it's the closest to the Windows daily interactions.
>A single problem with KDE - windows key cannot be mapped to show the start menu without extension.
AFAIK, that's an X limitation. Already fixed in KDE5/KF5/PW2. Very annoying though, I've retrained myself for Super+Space as my hotkey instead.
>Second is that all the taskbars that I found for it were just worse than the windows one in multimonitor setup or ugly.
Hm, not sure what's up there. My KDE setup is identical to my work Windows setup. Taskbar on each monitor with "start" menu button and the icon-only task manager. Then the panel on my main monitor has my sys tray. Other than obvious icon differences, it's damn near identical to Windows (at least the way 8.1 does the taskbar on all monitors).
>Alt+Tab worked inconsistently
o_0 in KDE? KDE's default alt-tab is identical to Windows's. In Gnome-shell, it acts like OS X's Cmd-Tab. But either way, you can tweak the window switcher to work exactly the way you like- include all windows, only restored windows, switch between apps or windows, etc, etc.
He probably never tried KDE or gave up after 5 minutes. I found that KDE's multi monitor setup is much better than Windows 7's, it's good to hear that in 8.1 you can have taskbars on every monitor.
These guys have so much smarts and common sense, congratulations guys. I'm enjoying Steam on Ubuntu, holding true to my promise to buy games and play them. Even bigger news for me, now I can look forward to purchasing a Steam Machine down the road. Sorry Roku, you've been great but you may have just gotten steam rolled.
I think having a lot of new competent programmers (like gaming company programmers) on your OS results in bug-fixes, performance improvements, and "itch-scratching" that will improve the Linux desktop experience.
I can't think of the downside to gamers, but I can think of the upside to Linux.
Because game companies will likely delay games, cut corners to get cross-platform and claim its too hard, but still charge the same price for less content.
Most indy studios use a tool like Unity or gameplay3d to build games, which can already target Linux.
Triple AAA titles from studios like EA already have OpenGL ports for the PS3/PS4, so it's just a matter of adding a layer to interact with X and the input APIs. With their huge amount of resources and budgets, this is child's play.
I guess, as long as this is kept as an open platform, even in the case that they can't get in the official build, they could still create alternative steam-compatible builds.
The one thing that has forced me keep Windows on my PC is the fact that most games require it. Hearing that such a large player in the gaming industry wants to move to Linux is really fantastic news.
The only thing that bugs me is that driver support is lagging behind so bad on Linux.
I remember when Linus said something about why you should buy ATI for linux gaming. Because they have open source drivers..
In the end I returned my ATI card.
My older Turion x64/hd3650 something laptop is still struggling with whatever flavor Linux. Still a work in progresss to get my Samsung 40" full hd TV through HDMI detected as something other than a 7" tablet screen..hmm.
As much as Linus might not like it, the nVidia closed source drivers are the only Linux display drivers that are production ready for high performance 3D gaming.
I'd say that there have been some major improvements to driver support in the last year. There are two drivers for ATI gpu's out there, the open source driver and the catalyst driver that comes from ATI. The open source driver has been stable for quite some time, but the performance was lacking. The Catalyst drivers have recently been shown a little love that they desperately needed, and there was a kernel patch sometime around v3.8 that fixed a problem with Radeon and KMS conflicts.
Try again, I'm using my HP Minilaptop with AMD components on (X)ubuntu or Linux Mint, 32 inch samsung is detected better in Linux then it is in Windows. (automatically runs it Full HD compared to Windows' 1366x768 )
Cool, could you hint me which version(s) of (x)ubuntu and mint are working out for you? I couldn't get passed the Mint login screen after installation. Couldn't drop to tty either. System froze over :(
I'm now on ubuntu 12.04 which seems better, but still.. HDMI/dual monitor is bugging me out.
This seems to be where Valve is really trying to push - I've seen quite a few quotes from Newell saying their first step is to use their massive leverage to get graphics cards makers to improve their Linux drivers.
There have been rather fast Open drivers for the HD3650 for at least two years now. I'm curious as to what distribution you're using that would exhibit these sorts of problems in 2013.
I had to switch to mostly indie games with I switched to Linux, which is great, there are a ton of awesome indie games. There are some mainstream Windows titles that I can get to run in Steam via Wine, but it's a pain. I really hope Valve can get the big mainstream studios on board.
"The Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation [1], a nonprofit consortium founded by AMD, ARM, Qualcomm and Samsung, among others to develop open-standard specifications for parallel computing, and startup Cloudius Systems are also joining the Linux Foundation today."
[1]:http://hsafoundation.com/