Fast-forward nearly six years. Steam Machines puttered out as an idea, though Valve hasn’t dropped its support for Linux. It maintains a Linux Steam client with 5,800 native games, and just last August, Valve unveiled Proton, a compatibility layer designed to make every Steam title run open-source-style. With Proton currently in beta, the number of Steam titles playable on Linux has jumped to 9,500. There are an estimated 30,000 games on Steam overall, so that’s roughly one-in-three, and Valve is just getting started.
However, the percentage of PC players that actually use Linux has remained roughly the same since 2013, and it’s a tiny fraction of the gaming market — just about 2 percent. Linux is no closer to claiming the gaming world’s crown than it was six years ago, when Newell predicted the open-source, user-generated-content revolution.
While that is undeniably true, it’s now at least definitely more viable to play games on Linux, even if it’s generally nowhere near the kinds of performance levels possible on Windows – assuming the titles run on Linux at all, of course.
After being semi-away from the alt.OS ecosystem for 10 years and coming back recently, I definitely saw the immense decline of development of new apps for Linux by the community. It feels like Ubuntu hit a high around 2010, and then the whole Linux desktop thing got into a huge decline on the points that matter: app development by the community itself. It feels deserted. Minimal changes have been made compared to how I remember the Linux desktop 10 years ago.
However, the market share, at around 2-2.5% has remained steady for 10 years, so that didn’t make sense. Then I saw that article yesterday, and it then made sense how desktop Linux has survived. But it’s indeed on a life support. If Steam decides to drop support (and at some point they will), mostly old people with long beards will still be using Linux on the desktop. There’s no point, really. Not because Linux today is bad a desktop (it’s not), but because no one cares about the desktop anymore as a multi-aspect device. People use the desktop for only 1-2 apps only: heavy games for youngsters, a pro app for professionals. Everything else, is done on mobile. And when you have phones now with 12 GB of RAM, and Linux users still debate how Manjaro only uses 300 MB of RAM compared to Mint’s 900 MB, it shows how out of touch they are.
And it’s now just Linux. BSD is in an even worse shape (not to mention the in-fighting). Young people, who previously would join these ecosystems and start coding found another way to pass their time: code games for mobile. Who wants to create yet another window manager, or have to deal with GTK+ that has no visual dev tools, when hardly anyone uses desktops anymore? Linux’s competition today is not Windows as it used to be, but mobility.
And Ubuntu is taking notice, and they change focus away from the desktop as well. I watched this today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE9mM_ozjoA
And let me go one step further: Apple has already semi-given up on OSX too, since now is nothing more than the dev platform for iOS. As for Windows, it’s quite possible that MS would just give it away at some point, just to stay relevant.
The traditional desktop is all by dead. It’s just the heavy lifting truck, still using the old transportation system, when everyone else has upgraded to magic carpets that can roll-off and placed under their armpit when not used. Nobody cares about trucks, even if they are the ones that move your food, or your Amazon/eBay junk around to be delivered.
Eugenia that strikes me as very true. Gaming (something many people do) was a brake on Linux desktop adoption, and will now be what keeps the desktop period (be in Windows or whatever) from disappearing from consciousness entirely. The desktop that doesn’t support it (as well) doesn’t have a rosy future.
Also welcome back. I’m here after a long hiatus as well. Linux sure seems moribund to me compared to how it was when it was my only desktop. Strikingly so, having not followed it very closely in the interim. The churn of underlying systems marches on (OSS->ALSA->pulse, dev->udev, init->systemd, xfree86->xorg->wayland) but I just don’t see a lot of new desktop apps, and many that I used to use never made the jump to the newest version of UI toolkit whatever. It’s a little depressing really.
> Gaming (something many people do) was a brake on Linux desktop adoption
A very minimal brake. Few people game on a PC (save for Facebook games which also run on Desktop Linux). The amount of systems sold only with Intel GPUs is a testament to that. Most people game on consoles. Or on phones and tablets. If Desktop Linux could grab all the people who never game on their PCs (beyond browser games), it would be in the double digits now.
The problems of Desktop Linux extend beyond games. You have problems like LTS repositories going stale and preventing you from having the latest VLC or OpenShot video editor in your computer. Which force you to jump OS versions or move to a rolling release distro. Which leads to all kinds of upgrade issues and quite frankly is something users shouldn’t be forced to do. Meanwhile in Windows you download an exe and run it. Yes even in some ancient OS version like Windows Vista or 7.
Desktop Linux also has endless problems with power management and dual monitor support.
These are fundamental problems of Desktop Linux related to the centralised nature of the thing (why should the OS vendor or whoever repackage third-party source code into binaries per OS version? Why should drivers be in the kernel tree instead of interfacing via a stable interface with it?), so we are supposed to pretend they don’t exist.
As regards to gaming on Desktop Linux, are you serious? PC gaming sucks hard enough even without the need for running graphics drivers on top of X.org and even without all those compatibility layers. You have to be a PC master race dude AND a Free Software zealot to game on Desktop Linux (beyond SuperTuxKart that is). And anyway the Windows store didn’t destroy Steam so Gaben has lost interest.
Kind of ironic when you consider that Linux (in the form of Android) and BSD (in the form of iOS) dominate mobile/casual gaming.
Minor nitpick, but Linux has a much direct connection with Android than BSD does with iOS. In my opinion.
True, but since Project Treble the Linux kernel on Android is quite different from plain upstream, and who knows, Fuchsia might eventually replace Linux as underlying kernel.
https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/fuchsia
Except that is pretty much a Pyrrhic victory,
On Android’s side, contrary to urban myths, Linux syscalls aren’t directly exposed to userspace.
This are the only APIs that are allowed to be called from userspace.
https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis
And in case one is thinking, oh well, I will just link directly to other .so or call the ioctls I feel like it, Google has you covered.
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/06/android-changes-for-ndk-developers.html
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/07/protecting-android-with-more-linux.html
As for iOS, there is very little of BSD in the Cocoa and Metal APIs used by the large majority of iOS apps, no one is shipping POSIX based CLI apps for phones.
I am not going to debate most people have not gone mobile for their desktop these days but not me… Yes, I am older but don’t think am out of touch and in fact often leading the way. For example, I was on Facebook shortly after it was available for everyone but a couple years later ditched it when seen where it was going and now it’s a popular thing to do in certain corners.. Mobile phones were fun when they were a new thing and I liked to install custom ROMs in the day to get the latest new features. Today, my phone is still a secondary device. It’s great for certain things on the go but that’s it. I even do 99% of my browsing on a PC and also the majority of my messaging/texting. I am not totally crazy… I work in IT so am sitting in front of a PC all day. When I am at home and want to get some project done (or just mindlessly watch Youtube videos) mostly distraction free I am sitting at my desk using the PC with a big display and a mechanical keyboard. When I am in the kitchen or watching TV my lightweight laptop is near by to keep up with messages and the latest news. A handheld 5″ display with no real keyboard seems to limiting to me.
Linux is not taking off on the desktop because it’s still not a good desktop OS compared to Windows or macOS for many reasons. Is it better than it was six years ago? Yes, but that is not good enough.
Mobile is king with the young because they started with a phone or tablet so will stick with what is more familiar. I would argue mobile devices are not the better tool just more mobile. It’s funny, when I hear folks my age and a little older say how tech savvy younger people are I roll my eyes. They don’t seem to realize it was our generation that invented the PC and the Internet. LOL Young people are good at like social networking.
> Linux is not taking off on the desktop because it’s still not a good desktop OS compared to Windows or macOS for many reasons. Is it better than it was six years ago? Yes, but that is not good enough.
Arguably, both Windows and macOS are still catching up to UNIX desktops in their own ways too. Both of them have all kinds of little things that don’t affect most people most of the time (like a vast majority of the issues with Linux) but are still general problems in terms of usability. For example, Windows only got support for accessing ISO 9660 filesystem images without having to burn them to physical media in Windows 10, despite that having been possible on Linux since day 1 of support for ISO 9660 filesystems.
Mounting ISO 9660 filesystems is hardly something that a regular user would care about.
What they care about in terms of desktops are how the GUI behaves (text rendering, widgets L&F, app collaboration, 3D and video hardware acceleration), audio stack, easiness of buying a printer during weekend sales and have it working from the get go,…
I disagree very much about the printer situation you describe. Actually I’d say it is exactly the opposite with hardware: Looking at my USB stick I have drivers for the last three motherboards I bought. All top of the line boards with widely used hardware (like onboard Intel NICs, Realtek audio, Marvel controllers). All of them needed drivers installed before I could get on the internet with Windows 7 and now Windows 10, get sound and get one drive working. In Linux (Debian and Ubuntu) all hardware “just works”.
The only problem I see these days are with people buying Nvidia and I’d say they are asking for trouble.
> For example, Windows only got support for accessing ISO 9660 filesystem images without having to burn them to physical media in *Windows 10
*Windows 8.
I think this conversation though is exactly the point. Eugenia is saying that Linux _development_ has slowed dramatically, and others are pointing that _usage_ remains strong, which Eugenia’s post explicitly mentioned too. This same effect is happening on all PC platforms, and not just in gaming. It seems very strange to me that mobile notwithstanding, a PC is a tool every student/knowledge worker needs, but development has been so curtailed. I really don’t understand why this is happening.
As a developer, my frustration is that user enthusiasm seems to have fallen dramatically. Once a Linux distribution was a bootstrapping tool so that you could go on the Internet and download interesting software to try; today it seems like a provider of a homogeneous experience. And before Linux, DOS was a platform bought by enthusiasts that provided so little functionality that seeking out new software was an essential task. Today Windows users seem much more reluctant also.
One factor that frustrates me is the constant implication that downloading software from the Internet is risky. While it obviously has some risk, it’s hard for me to believe that all the contributions to GitHub are malware. It also seems absurd to tell users that downloading and executing software locally is risky, then have them launch a web browser and execute megabytes of unknown JavaScript while entering financial details or credentials and sending them to somebody else’s server. It’s not that local software is risk free, but what users are encouraged to do isn’t risk free either, and the perspective has been completely lost.
Let’s be honest here. Your’s and Eugenia’s argument is basically “Let’s put Square Tires On A Car”
To which Linux and BSD _development responded “Why?”
Which pretty much sums everything up.
Basically: if we consider DOS also a ‘desktop OS’, the development on the desktop has slowed down.
Just look at Windows desktop, what new applications other than games and browsers are really being build/developed ?
On the other hand, people are building more mobile apps and web-based solutions.
Most of those both happen on Linux (mobile: Android).
I’ve been seeing people claim that desktops are dying for at least 20 years yet they are still alive and well. Sure mobile phones are nice for social media or playing Super Bubble Pop but they are never going to replace the desktop for any kind of serious work (or even any kind of serious gaming; both AMD and Nvidia are doing quite well). No one sits down and writes documents on their cell phone, tapping on the little onscreen keys. Photo editing, video editing, accounting, programming, etc, not happening on a phone. Comparing them to desktop computers is really apples and oranges. People who don’t have a desktop today probably never needed one to begin with. As for Linux, as long as the vast majority of programs are written for Windows it’s never going to really take off on the desktop.
That depends pretty much how much desktop one considers laptops to be.
A laptop is a portable desktop. The workflow on both is the same. Even ChromeOS is getting more desktop-y with each iteration.
I never quite understood why so many seem to think of laptops as separate from desktops or PCs…
Cell phone computing has its place and it’s exactly as you described.. If you’re into social media or time-killing gaming, a phone serves those needs just fine. But for _anything_ else, it’s pretty pathetic & cumbersome. Desktops generate hundreds of millions of dollars each year in revenue — not bad for being dead huh?! So dead that Intel has poured tons of investment into jumping into the graphics card game in a big way soon. You know, cuz there’s no better time to do that than after the casket has dropped…….
What is this “serious gaming” you speak of? 😛 (hm, AMD was probably kept alive by its non-PC hw sales…
and photo or video editing can be quite awesome on suitably large touchscreen…)
I’m still waiting for mobiles to become ‘good enough’ so you can dock it to your screen, keyboard and mouse and be done with it.
I kept using Linux as my desktop in the last 10 years and I can’t say it is less useful or friendly now compared with 10 years ago. But I can count on my fingers the apps I use on a daily basis. But it won’t be different with another desktop, the need is less, we are surrounded by smart devices taking us away from the PC time.
> It feels like Ubuntu hit a high around 2010, and then the whole Linux desktop thing got into a huge decline on the points that matter: app development by the community itself. It feels deserted. Minimal changes have been made compared to how I remember the Linux desktop 10 years ago.
There’s also an argument to be made that desktop UNIX is largely feature complete at this point. Unless you want something really out there, you can easily find a full DE that covers the style you want, so there’s little point in creating such a complicated piece of software from scratch. Similarly, many of the standard every-day tools that normal people actually use on a desktop exist in multiple forms on Linux covering a vast majority of the features most people care about.
Put differently, as a relatively young Linux user (I’m in my late 20’s and have been using Linux for almost a decade now), there’s very little point in me developing new software for the desktop on Linux because 99% of what I care about outside of gaming on a desktop is already there in a form that’s perfectly usable for me, with all (or almost all) of the features I need. It makes more sense for me to focus on developing things that I need in other areas where I need them.
> Everything else, is done on mobile.
No, not really. No sane person does any kind of serious work on a purely mobile device unless they have a physical keyboard for it, and at that point a small laptop is still often a better option (there are some things that it’s remarkably hard to do properly with a touchscreen). Note that I’m not talking about ‘professional’ usage here, but the types of things like accounting and word processing that the average person still needs to do on a semi-regular basis. Once you get past that and into things that are still done on a hobby basis by many people (like software development), mobile usage looks even less ubiquitous. The simple fact is that most people don’t see others using desktops much anymore outside of professional environments or when gaming. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, just that mobile usage is much more visible.
> And when you have phones now with 12 GB of RAM, and Linux users still debate how Manjaro only uses 300 MB of RAM compared to Mint’s 900 MB, it shows how out of touch they are.
Or how out of touch you are. There are multiple reasons to keep memory footprint of the OS minimal other than physical memory constraints. Less space used by the OS means more space you can use for other things, and may also mean less RAM that needs to be kept powered on (smart mobile devices can skip refresh cycles on unused memory to save power, or even completely power down whole banks of RAM). There’s also a very strong incentive to keep using old hardware, which is a whole lot easier with an OS that doesn’t need monstrous amounts of RAM.
Current phone developments are also pretty much “The same as the last, only more!” More pixels, more RAM, more cameras, more storage, more battery, more gimmicks, more everything.
The only real reason right now to continually buy a new mobile phone is that they stop software support after two years and then you are SOL with security. I don’t think the “My P(hone) is bigger than your P(hone)!” is a valid argument for a new one.
ahferroin7,
I agree with your points overall. Despite all the hype in mobile, it has never been a great replacement for PC workstations. It really depends on what you do though. They’re fine for mobile entertainment/consumption (which may be sufficient for most people’s needs), however time and time again mobile devices fall short for general spreadsheets/documents/data entry tasks. Even where it can technically be done on mobile, the experience is limiting and frustrating. Granted many people don’t do those types of tasks in the first place, so they may not care at all, but the PC form factor will remain the best option for more sophisticated use cases for the foreseeable future.
If mobiles were superior or even equivalent at office work, then logically employers would be ditching office computers in favor mobile devices, but that’s not what we see. What we see is mobile devices supplementing computers when employees are away from their desks but with most work getting done on a PC form factor.
I suspect Eugenia Loli is most disappointed by the lack of innovation on PCs. In many ways I’ve felt the same and I’ve had to ask myself if innovation is objectively worse or if it’s just my becoming less excitable compared to when I was half my age. I’ve come to the conclusion that the more we experience, the less opportunity there is for excitement going forward. The PC industry is maturing and is not going to give us the thrills it once did and neither are mobiles for that matter. It’s ironic, but once we get something it seems much less interesting than before we had it. On the bright side, there’s still a lot of undiscovered territory, the next innovations will almost certainly be related to AI,
If I connect my phone to a display (with USB-to-HDMI cable) and keyboard/mouse (Bluetooth) it becomes a surprisingly apt desktop alternative.
nicubunu,
On a trip once I tried to get away with a portable keyboard for my phone instead of a laptop. I admit that the hardware would be adequate, but to be honest it wasn’t a great experience because the OS and apps aren’t as productive as the PC counterparts. Tasks that took a few minutes at home would take several times that on my phone even with a keyboard.
I understand the appeal of having one ideal platform everywhere, but android is just better at mobile. Promoting it as a desktop OS is technically possible, but the result is often regressive for tasks that have been better optimized on desktop systems.
If I were to use a phone/HDMI/keyboard combination for a significant period of time, I’d much rather have the phone running a desktop OS, Ironically all these peripherals become rather cumbersome compared to a normal laptop. I think the microsoft surface is a nice standalone form factor for traveling today without needing any external peripherals. To each their own 🙂
I agree. I use a tablet a lot to browse the internet or watch videos while sitting comfortably in my couch but desktops are better for many tasks. Even with a keyboard, a large screen and a multiwindow environment like Samsung DeX the mobile apps don’t measure up to their desktop counterparts.
I’d be so bold as to say the slow down is because we mostly have software that does what we want. The real development at this point is in things like Virtual Reality. Our normal everyday 2d stuff is going to remain and have it’s trickle of development, but I mean there are only so many features one can add to $program, before it’s ‘complete’. There are tons of development going on constantly though, you only need to look for it. From 3D printing / CAD, to VR, etc. What applications most people use on a day to day basis, email, web, gaming, social media… of course they’re all at the peak of development. What more can you add to a word processor, for example?
As pointed out, this doesn’t pertain just to Linux. But personal computers in general. I mean look at the very minor development points that have come out with macOS releases. I mean they’re so boring they changed the name from OSX to macOS just to gain some attention….
Gnome has always been about small iterations as well. This just means that things are stable and mostly feature complete.
Definitely doesn’t mean there is stagnation in development though, that’s just being shortsighted.
“always”? What about ver 3? 😛
” about small iterations as well. This just means that things are stable and mostly feature complete.
“always”? What about ver 3? ”
It’s what you get when you put square tires on a car or truck.
Even though “the desktop is dead” .. “debate” .. has been beaten to death, once again it needs to be said that desktops still sell in the 100,000,000+ range every year. Only in a bizarro universe would that be considered dead. Further, the rise of mobile devices did cause a decline in desktop use but certainly didn’t replace it. Mobile devices serve certain types of users and use-cases that desktops can’t/don’t. However, desktops serve certain types of users and use-cases that mobile devices can’t/don’t.
Ironically, the rise of mobile gaming appears to be causing an increase in desktop & console gaming thanks to users who’ve grown bored of the same old limited mobile games and want something bigger and better. A lot of younger people who helped make mobile gaming hot have grown up a little and that platform isn’t cutting it anymore.
You guys are kidding yourselves. You can now buy an Chinese made android TV box like the Tanix TX6 for around $50 US and basically play all your Android Games and apps from your phones and tablets on your large screen TV. No need for a High-end pc with a high end video card, Xbox or PS4 at all for anything if you have these one of these boxes, And if you think these mobile games are limited, you’ve been playing lame-assed first person shooters on the pc for far too long.
It’s kinda odd when you almost seem to not be trolling… 😛
I’m sure the Tanix TX6 can serve up a mean round of Candy Crush. That, and nobody will ever need more than 640k of memory!
Ha, Android games are all about the microtransactions, and when developers try to apply that to PC or Console games, they get pissed off (for the right reasons). I can’t stand gaming on my android devices. Not because they don’t perform well, but because of all the ads and purchasing prompts. Plus fingers getting in the way of the screen, etc.
Dude, the Tanix TX6 specs: (Rember this sells for under $50 US)
Dimensions 10.5 x 10.5 x 2.5 cm
Weight 450 grams
CPU AllWinner H6 quad-core ARM Cortex A53 @ 1.8GHz
GPU Mali T720MP2
Memory 4GB DDR3 RAM
Storage 32GB eMMC flash expandable up to 128GB
OS Android 7.0/9.0 with Alice UX
Connectivity Dual Band (2.4GHz + 5GHz) Wi-Fi
Bluetooth 5.0
Ethernet 100 Mbps
2 X USB 2.0
1 X USB 3.0
Video Output upto 6K Resolution
yoko-t, are your Tanix TX6 specs supposed to be exciting? If I were a pc gamer playing everything in 720p on low, I may want to debate. If I were a pc gamer playing everything in 720p or higher, on medium or higher, I would laugh. If I were a pc gamer in the 1080P or higher, high settings or better, I would slap you for even mentioning mobile gaming, much less that sorry Tanix TX6.
friedchicken
How much did you pay for your pc setup? $50 I don’t think so, and that’s why I got out of the PC and later the Playstation and Xbox ratrace. You can dump your money down that particular sewer all you want.
yoko-t, if your theory that a $50 Android TV box and a bunch of Android games are in any way comparable to what gaming consoles or PC’s offer then PC’s, followed by consoles, wouldn’t absolutely dominate the gaming market. Your Tanix TX6 suggestion is like insisting that flying first class is pointless when you can travel by bus for cheaper.
Obviously the people spending money on consoles & PC’s do it to enjoy the vastly better experience it gets them over cheap Android TV boxes from China.
@post by leech 2019-02-21 9:24 pm
Valve should put Steam on the only consumer Linux that’s popular, Android (I thought that was their endgame when they first announced Linux Steam), it would bring marked improvement to the platform.
@post by friedchicken 2019-02-24 10:23 am
…by what measures?
(and bus has its advantages 😛 – by per trip or time, though not per distance, it’s actually much safer than airplanes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comparisons ), so it’s better to take the bus on reasonably short trips)
I do not agree with equating the desktop with it being the only software development. The development momentum on linux, for example, is massive. It’s just that is not focused on the desktop, but for all sort of back ends and services, there’s probably more money invested/made in linux development on the cloud/embedded nowadays than on traditional desktop apps decades ago.
But aren’t you at least glad that, when you come back after that decade, there’s Haiku Beta? 😀
For the moment and the time being the population of unix gamers is small. Is on life support? Far from it.
The last 2 years we have seen a massive improvement, we talking about games that were unplayable or on just working state (just few fps) to full 60fps experience.
That happened because of the work by Mesa project especially AMD (awesome open source drivers), Valve (supporting projects like dxvk) and redhat for working on vulkan implementation.
Also there’s a lot of advancements for games development tools, Blender/Krita/Godot stack is gaining more and more spin among indy developers.
Just yesterday i was reading that AMD is looking for 10 more developers to work on their open source platform and that’s great.
There’s a long way to go but the future is bright and a huge space for improvement and collaborations.
Gaming isn’t a hobby, it’s a business. Yes, it certainly does seem to be on life support, not “far from it”. Why? Because after 6 years of heavy investment and no movement in market share, it’s obvious that investment is not paying off. All the time, work, money, and jump in available games hasn’t moved the needle. Sure, all that might make a small handful of people happy & feeling like there’s hope, but the rest of the world doesn’t care any more today than they did back when “Steam Machines” and Value `are finally going to make Linux gaming a thing`.
Linux gaming has one of two futures to look forward to… Either it will continue to be a Valve pet project subsidized by Windows gaming. Or, Valve will get tired of flushing money down the toilet.
Investment? What investment? You talking about Steam on linux or steam machines? None of those matter for Unixes because those are just closed corporate tools. To invest on to something means to truly contribute and valve has some amount of contribution in Mesa project mostly the last couple of years due to the people they hired since 2017.
Was it any massive contribution that was heaven upon our linux desktops but sinful windows gamers simple don’t wish to abandon bad habits? Of course not. It has been just a shy investment to explore foreign vistas beyond windows landscape and sametime threat the lord and his little “xbox for windows” thingy. If you want to see a bad investment, play artifact.
Again, you people really stayed on the clickbait title. Read the content. The fact that market SHARE doesn’t change doesn’t mean that linux population has staled.
Until yesterday we could hardly start any game on wine and all we were playing was quake3 and unreal. Then we got many indy games. Then, 3 years ago vulkan arrived, compatibility and quality have skyrocketed and we just started.
The last couple of years have been very exciting for a linux gamer and gets better by the day, more contributions are always welcome (*cough*nvidia)
Why aren’t all those `indy games, skyrocketing compatibility and quality, very exciting and getting better each day` winning anyone over? It doesn’t matter what current Linux gamers think, it matters what everyone else thinks because like I said, gaming is a business and for Linux gaming to ever be a thing it will take a mountain of investment and winning Windows & console gamers over. Yet after all your bulletpoints it seems Linux gaming has failed to make any noticeable headway in either of those areas.
You’re more than welcome to believe Linux gaming is a burgeoning new realm with a fantastic future ahead of it. And that 2019 IS the year of the Linux desktop!
You keep burbling the same “mountain of investment” but you hardly show any evidence for that claim.
The vast majority of the games do not have a linux port. Most so called AAA games have to be wrapped through wine.
A huge amount of games depend on API of windows that is simply not yet implemented in wine so they are either unplayable or missing. People are actively working on it.
A number of games use anticheat rootkits that cannot be implemented in wine.
From all the above you can figure out that someone cannot recommend at this moment a unix OS as a drop in replacement for windows.
But things are getting better by the day and a time will come sooner or later when you will recommend to somebody, not a techy, to change to Unix and he will ask you if he can play games you will be able to answer immediately YES. This is a marathon not a sprint.
I suppose I’ll state the obvious (again).. For Linux gaming to ever come even remotely close to being considered competition, it would take a massive amount of work – game developers, gpu vendors, Linux developers, bla bla.. And that work will never happen for free, hence it WILL take a “mountain of investment”. Thus far all the investment that has been done has been met with no gains in *market share*. Linux gaming from a business perspective has proven to be stagnant, not burgeoning as you claim. There’s no real motive for companies to invest because there just isn’t the ROI to justify it. In fact it’s worse because it’s proven to have extremely low potential for ROI. You need to understand that gaming is a business first & foremost. If financial gain were removed from the picture, gaming would be all but dead just like nearly everything else.
Oil companies don’t pour investment into fields *known* to have very little oil. I understand you’re a hopeful dreamer, but that’s the black & white of it.
I don’t have a massive Steam library, currently it’s 59 games including a few native Linux titles. But I gotta say, Valve has done a great job with Proton! I’ve only tried 5 of the Windows titles with Proton up to now but all of them run great. On my i7 920 machine with a RX580 they are indistinguishable between running on Windows, except for one that has some minor graphical glitches but that is hardly noticeable.
Working and non-working titles can be browsed at https://www.protondb.com/. The list is already huge and is growing daily, it really is a great achievement.
I’m in my 30’s and using Windows 10 mostly for gaming reasons. On a technical level I am quite happy with Windows since the Vista version (used Vista, 7, 10). I could not say the same thing for versions I used before from 3.1 to XP.
However I don’t like how Windows, Nvidia drivers, several other applications try to get telemetry data from me.
I have used Linux as my main OS for 2 years in 2006-2007 and it was mostly a pleasant experience. Then I bought a gaming desktop and switched back to Windows.
I would love using a Linux desktop instead and seeing Proton and gaming on Linux slowly becoming better and better, I’m hoping that in a few years it would be possible. Right now I’m not willing to compromise on the many games I would miss by going Linux.
These days even vanilla Wine is much better at playing Windows games. Native Linux games come usually from small indie developers, who need a publishing platform and Steam (and GOG to a lesser degree) are useful here.
It’s true. I use Wine to play a lot of games like Oblivion and Empire At War which do not work properly on the same machine running Windows 10.
In general, for a game more than a couple years old (or any Unity or Unreal game), Wine just works ™
> even if it’s generally nowhere near the kinds of performance levels possible on Windows
Actually, most of the titles I own that run natively on Linux get significantly better performance there than they do when run on the same hardware under Windows. Graphics quality is usually a bit worse, but I consistently get far more stable frame rates, better input latency, and better battery life gaming in most cases gaming on Linux than I do on Windows.
TBH, if it weren’t for the facts that getting stuff running properly in Wine is a serious pain in the arse and a few of the games I play regularly are Windows only, I wouldn’t even be running Windows on my primary gaming system.
Get a clue guys. Pc Gaming itself was dying out long before 2013 and any amount of games for Linux wasn’t going to change that. The Sega,Nintendo,PS2,Xbox other console game machines changed the market forever for games And people like myself were interested in linux were never interested in PC gaming. I got a PS2 instead. Why? Because PC Games and Gaming *SUCK*
So this comment “Linux is no closer to claiming the gaming world’s crown than it was six years ago” is really laughable because it’s literally not true. There was never the interest for this kind of thing to begin with.
PC gaming is still doing far better than consoles are by a significant margin. In fact, the _only_ reasons that most people buy consoles over PC’s for gaming are pricing and simplicity. You can get far better quality on a decent gaming PC than a console, can achieve equally low input latencies with equivalent controllers, have a significantly larger selection of titles, and don’t lose the ability to play everything in your existing collection when you upgrade to a newer system.
As far as gaming on Linux, _you_ may not have interest, but a lot of others do, and this is spurned on in no small part by the fact that most developers are pretty demonstrably being lazy in not supporting Linux natively in their games (anything that runs on Unreal Engine or Unity can run on Linux, you just need to not box yourself into a corner with your design choices).
The question isn’t if “a lot” (however many that’s supposed to mean) of people are interesting Linux gaming, it’s whether or not that number if big enough to make it a viable business attracting investment. The answer to that is pretty clearly no. Valve is still the only company taking it seriously after years of pouring money into it with no gain in market share. The biggest benefit Linux gaming is to Valve is probably tax-related.
The biggest benefit Linux gaming is to Valve is not being at the mercy of a predatory move by Microsoft.
Relying on a single actor in position of power is never a good thing for your company. Valve wants to maintain a B plan just in case Microsoft attempts something like totally closing down 3rd party installs on Windows.
Linux is the smallest part of Valve’s revenue. Not much of a plan B.
Those are pretty important things… (and you surely have some research which demonstrates only them, while discarding factors like great console exclusives or much better party multiplayer or innovative inputs or portability)
“Those are pretty important things… (and you surely have some research which demonstrates only them, while discarding factors like great console exclusives or much better party multiplayer or innovative inputs or portability)”
Yeah. Main reasons I bought my PS2 was because of the Final Fantasy games and their siblings and it’s DVD player not to mention it could also play the PS1 titles too.
Well, many of us live in a free(er) digital world and linux as much BSDs are general purpose operating systems so it doesn’t really have to do with what’s mr/mrs yoko-t’s or b00gie’s interests are but how much time and money people wish to invest to something they want to implement. If people want to play games on linux it’s their right to do so. I also don’t like systemd and containers but as long they don’t get in my way im fine with that. Diversity is great.
And btw if you would have actually read the article you would have seen that
“The overall percentage still has a lot of ground to make up, but the number of Linux gamers on Steam continues to grow at a similar rate as those playing on Windows,” Steam developer Pierre-Loup Griffais told Engadget. “It looks like there might actually be an increase trend in Linux gamers starting from October when we released the new Steam Play [Proton] beta, but it’s too early to tell if it’s had a real lasting impact.”
Meaning that a) steam and pc gaming overall still prospering b) linux gamers do increase, as much the other platforms, but they do.
You could also argue that Windows gaming on Steam life support.
It would be foolish to do so but yes you could.