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Followers of the Penguin, Marcin Iwiński, one of the founders of CD Projekt RED, has spoken out about why the developer of The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077 has not yet shown any support towards Linux.
Citing an issue deemed a myth by many, especially by Ryan "Icculus" Gordon who took to busting this myth during the Steam Developer Days of 2014, Iwiński believes that if you are going to support Linux, you cannot simply pick one distribution to support. Instead, he feels that CD Projekt RED would have to take to supporting at least five.
Source (from 1:29:16).
There you have it. SteamOS will somehow negate having to support five Linux distributions and defeat the beast that is distro fragmentation once and for all.
How do you feel about CD Projekt RED's reasoning? Will SteamOS bring the desired changes? I, personally, can only keep on hoping and ask you kind folks to keep on voting for GOG, sister company to CD Projekt RED and reseller of its games, to finally add Linux support. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Citing an issue deemed a myth by many, especially by Ryan "Icculus" Gordon who took to busting this myth during the Steam Developer Days of 2014, Iwiński believes that if you are going to support Linux, you cannot simply pick one distribution to support. Instead, he feels that CD Projekt RED would have to take to supporting at least five.
Marcin Iwiński, CD Projekt REDFirst of all, we have a lot of respect for Steam and we think they are very, very good business guys and good gamer friendly guys and that's really, really important. We like what they are doing and with the Steam Box, if they will be able to deliver a cool console, definitely, we are interested in having a game there.
You know, one of the reasons we have not released The Witcher on Linux is that we most probably have to address five different versions of Linux and this is always terrible to support the quality of the games afterwards. The patches, the updates, and everything. If Steam will deliver a constant Linux environment, call it SteamOS or anything like that, we would love to have our games there because, you know, the more people play our games, the better for us.
Source (from 1:29:16).
There you have it. SteamOS will somehow negate having to support five Linux distributions and defeat the beast that is distro fragmentation once and for all.
How do you feel about CD Projekt RED's reasoning? Will SteamOS bring the desired changes? I, personally, can only keep on hoping and ask you kind folks to keep on voting for GOG, sister company to CD Projekt RED and reseller of its games, to finally add Linux support. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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CD Projekt Red folks really surprise me with being so clueless on this subject. Usually they do proper research. I think it's complete unfamiliarity with Linux of their top management that is the problem here.
About dropping Windows - you don't need any Windows to play Witcher 1 and 2, they perfectly work in Wine. Witcher 3 will be a problem however, because it will use DirectX 11 and will be 64 bit. So native version would be really great.
In the past, GOG folks at least said they considered supporting Debian, Mint and for some reason Chrome OS (which is pretty weird, since stock Chrome OS does not support native applications, you need to unlock it in developer mode to be able to install native stuff).
To me that statement sounds like "Crap, I'm gonna miss the bus. Don't run, stay cool! I'll have to pay a fortune for a cab but at least the others won't laugh at me. I'll just tell them I prefer cabs to crowded busses."
Of course it makes sense to let others scout the territory if you're scared of it but now the best they can hope for is to become a "me-too" brand.
Well, "fragmentation" is obviously a smoke screen they are trying to hide behind.
Not that it is a non-issue, steam games run better on some distros than on others (OpenSuse, I'm looking at you!), but that's the problem of the Distros in question not Steam's.
GOG and CD Project know this. If not, if they really didn't get it by now, they're doomed.
They'll bring The Withcer 3 to Linux, but they'll do in Steam (DRM and game-as-a-service annoyners) and not in GoG.com.
I hope this is only at start, and when they realize Linux don't byte, jump fearless into it, adding support in GoG.com, not only to W3, but to all games in their cathalog that have a native Linux version.
And who says they "cared" about any of the other OS's per-se ? all of them are basically a means to an end.
However when you see that you can start making a platform "your own", you start caring a lot more for it.
ALSO, a lot of technologies and drivers have matured.
an Army of indie developers have adopted open technologies (specially on Web and mobile) , html5, openGL, etc.
HIB, kickstarter and early access are helping fund those devs.
OpenGL is defacto in mobile and 4.x is feature parity with DX.
Android has inspired many of the new OSs and shown that there's life after Windows.
There's a lot of pieces in this chicken/egg puzzle, Valve is finally polishing and pushing those pieces and getting the mainstream (and bigger companies) to consider transitioning.
For my love for the sequel I'd probably go for a Windows installation again to play it though, but on SteamOS or how ever you call it .. wonderful. I'm sure I'll get it running on Debian/Tanglu as well myself (even though, I'm considering getting a "steambox" for the living room, but I'm yet undecided on that).
But you can still run the old binaries with old libraries on a modern system...
http://www.swanson.ukfsn.org/loki/
If a game publisher wanted to make things easy for us Linux users, they would simply maintain such a collection of the needed libraries. Those who want to run the game with distro-provided libraries (with possible security bugfixes and all) could still try to do so, but that's outside of the scope of the game publisher.
This is the same concept as packaging up all dlls needed by a game, which has been an accepted practice among many windows developers...
That is because of the way the package manager works. Nothing else. Still, there must have been a quite serious flaw in the way that GIMP was packaged for such an event to occur.
Gordon says in his talk that it is best for commercial game developers to avoid the package manager anyway, and on that I heartily agree. It is best left to free software applications and system components which are properly under the distributions or package maintainers control.
And if you want convenient installers for them, you can find them here:
http://www.liflg.org/
How should I? I never used Ubuntu.
I have used SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, Arch, LFS.
And if that did in fact happen, that sounds like a bug in the dependency of that particular package to me. Like I said, mistakes happen. This is not a fundamental problem with package managers in general.
From what I know about apt, the only way this could happen is if
1) Nothing else depended on Xorg
2) Xorg was not properly recorded in the profile(*)
(*) Whatever that was called in Debian; profile is the Gentoo term for it. A bundle of packages defined as the "base" for a certain use case. I know Debian has that as well, but you just select that once at the installation phase and then you can forget about it.
In that case, apt would decide that Xorg was not used, and automatically remove it. In either case, should be a) a very uncommon thing to occur b) not fatal since apt asks your okay before it does anything.
Do you have any sources for that story?
That's not a feature, that's a braindead idea.
First of all, this leads to increased HDD usage, as you're going to have multiple copies of the same thing. Yeah, not quite that important anymore nowadays, but still, icky.
Second of all, this leads to increased memory consumption, since you will need to have in memory each distinct library in use.
Third of all, and most importantly, you will then have several slightly different version of the same library with different patches applied all over your system. An old version of GTK had an usability bug? You need to manually update all copies you've got on your system. There's a security issue with, say, libssl, openssh or gnutls? Congratulations, you now have multiple attack vectors open on your system.
Do you actually advocate that as the way to go, to do away completely with package managers and shared libraries? Seriously?
Also, again, no one is stopping you from shipping your game with all its libraries. You can already do that if you want to. You do not need to rely on any external library at all. Repeat after me: You. Can. Already. Do. That.
Yes, that was an oversight in glibc 2.3.2 that broke backwards compatiblity for certain binaries compiled against 2.2. We've been over this already.
You can use the old libraries, and they still work perfectly. But wait a minute, this is what you're favouring in the first place; a binary shipping with all its libraries. Why are you upset that the binary doesn't mesh with the system libraries you don't want anyway?
The proper fix of course would be to just recompile the thing. Unfortunately Loki was already dead when glibc 2.3 came along.
Now stop gish galloping...
things like that were ages ago.
anyway ubuntu is moving on to click-packages...
http://www.jonobacon.org/2013/08/21/ubuntu-in-a-nutshell-app-upload-process/
I know, and the only way to get rid of bad package maintainers is to get rid of them, have the developer bundle the libraries like they do in windows. Also I used Ubuntu as an example because it was designed to be easy to use and it isn't fucking easy. If Ubuntu is suppose to be easy to use Linux, Linux is doomed and somebody having issues on Ubuntu is more likely to get support because it's the most mainstream, so If I have an Ubuntu problem, it's easier to get support for because there are more people that have the same issue and it's easier to search for that fix vs. if it happened in another distro.
It's not standard yet, I'll be happy when every distro uses it.
Do you really want bother about compatibility of the games published by Loki? This company hasn't existed since 14 years. I also use Mac, and I want to indicate that Apple removed Rosetta and many other parts of the Mac OS X that means you always have to use Mac OS X 10.6 or older, if you want to play some classic games. I don't see this problem in Linux because I still can play SOF and Heretic 2 on Ubuntu 13.04 x86-64, and I think that worse problem now is the fact that I can't buy many old games for Linux, because are unavailable on eBay, amazon etc.
as much as i would like to agree, i can't. Gtk is concrete example when shipping hard linked lib is a must. Gtk has been overridden by gnome people and ever since that Gtk is complete fail. depending simply on Gtk is equal to naked jump on nail bed
- you can't rely widget will exist in next .x version. if gnome doesn't need it... it flies. no one ever questioned if any other developers need those (just look xfce and cinnamon mailing lists)
- there is simply no respect for other developers that use Gtk. just imagine how it feels to realize that all standard dialogs changed to have buttons in title which is gnome imbecile decision only
- theme changes .x release
the only way to save Gtk would be forking it while there is still time.
Not every distro is consumer desktop / mobile oriented like android, windows, mac, etc. So not all will want or make use of this.
Is up to the USER to decide to use this type of consumer oriented distro or not. Not for every distro to use this stuff. But the majority will always be using the friendliest distro , so no big deal there.
Anyway this won't affect Steam, most linux games should already build against the STEAM CLIENT RUNTIME or include their dependencies and not rely on package managers, etc.
What exactly inspired this little rant? So far all I have seen from you is one mention of a badly packaged program which was probably only a problem for a very short amount of time on one specific Linux distribution. People make mistakes. It happens to all vendors on all platforms. Deal with it.
Apple for the longest time was downright hostile to game developers, and bases their business on people using and buying the latest and greatest. This does not surprise me in the least.
Indeed, and what liflg does with their installers is actually no different than what GoG does on Windows. Being able to run 14 year old binaries is actually pretty impressive. The bigger problem is as you say the abandonware issue, which GoG has been able to mostly solve on Windows but liflg has only had limited success in trying to fix on Linux.