Hello fellow penguin enthusiasts. I spent the last weekend in Brussels, Belgium attending the FOSDEM conference -- a free event focused on free open-source software, and a place where free-software developers can meet, share idea and collaborate. There was no shortage of Linux-related content, and it was really exciting to meet and listen to people working on software that you directly or indirectly rely on every day.
Gaming was not the main focus, but there were several talks that I thought you may find interesting. I selected 4 talks that I wanted to highlight. The first two are more high-level focused on gaming directly, while the last 2 are more technical dealing with the Linux graphics stack in general.
Hope you find these interesting. And checkout FOSDEM and many other talks they had.
Godot Engine
Juan Linietsky, the main author and development lead of Godot Engine, talked about Godot and how they created a third person shooter demo using tools like Blender, Gimp, Krita and of course Godot Engine. He gave the presentation and ran the demo on a Linux machine. Source
0 A.D., a libre real-time strategy game
Nicolas Auvray, the project leader of 0 A.D., talked about the features of the game itself, and integration of the modding service https://mod.io/ into the game. Source
Virgil 3D GPU
Elie Tournier talked about the Virgil 3D GPU project, a virtual GPU implementation for QEMU. He showed a demo of the Heaven benchmark running pretty smoothly. The project still has a long way to go. It currently lacks support for Vulkan, Windows guests, and Direct3D, so it is limited in usefulness for a Linux gamer wanting to run games in the virtual machine. But quite impressive nonetheless. Source
Mesa memory usage
Ian Romanick, a software developer for Intel's open-source OpenGL driver, and Intel’s representative to the Khronos Board, talked about the nitty-gritty details of inner workings of Mesa, and how they managed to substantially reduce the memory usage of shaders. It is basically a talk about optimization, and how he approached the problem. Source
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Quoting: LinasI really don't get why people spend so much energy supporting a platform that is so anti-gaming like macOS.
tl;dr: economic reasons.
I'd say the obvious answer is, they sell more copies on macOS than on Linux. It's still worth porting to macOS and get a positive outcome from an economic perspective. That's still not the case for Linux, or at least not in general. That's why you see lots of game devs dropping Linux support, or rather creating a macOS version than a Linux version. An example is Frostpunk, which will come to macOS, but 11bit studios said they won't support Linux anymore. They tried in the past, as many devs tried... but then they realized it wasn't worth it. Only those devs who saw that porting to Linux was worth it, will continue the Linux support with future titles. And those are getting less and less. At least that's my impression.
So, even with a rather small percentage with ~4% of the gaming market share (according to the steam hardware survey) it's mostly profitable to port to macOS. But mostly not with less than 1% on Linux. That's why people still spend so much energy on supporting macOS as a gaming platform. Also it's probably easier to support an OS that's controlled by one company, so there are only little differences between the hard- and software configurations. Unlike Linux, where you have as many hardware configurations as with Windows, but with Windows you have more or less only one software configuration. On Linux there are many different kernels, library versions, etc. Though the steam runtime is helping here, it's still an issue. That's where all the support requests are coming from, which will cost the dev money.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like this situation either. And there are some devs who'd rather drop macOS support than Linux support. But the numbers still just show, we don't buy enough games on Linux so the smaller devs can make a living out of it. Sure, there are exceptions, where the Linux percentage is exceptionally high, but in general it'll come close to what the steam hardware survey shows. Especially for big titles, where many gamers are buying it.
I bet big companies and publishers could just cross finance Linux support and really help getting rid of any obligations towards windows. They probably make enough money so it would carry no weight. But they just don't want. They rather keep that money. Which is sad, but also up to them.
I do my best to show devs respect and thank them for creating native Linux versions. Or, if their game works with proton, I let them know I'm playing it on Linux. So they see, there are Linux gamers who value their work. It's difficult to measure it, but I'm sure we help spreading the word about their games, when we play them on Linux. And that's an important thing, though it will not show up in numbers regarding Linux sales. I just wish that companies would see this too and thus support Linux.
Sorry for this wall of text...
Last edited by Corben on 12 February 2019 at 8:06 am UTC
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Quoting: CorbenI do my best to show devs respect and thank them for creating native Linux versions. Or, if their game works with proton, I let them know I'm playing it on Linux. So they see, there are Linux gamers who value their work. It's difficult to measure it, but I'm sure we help spreading the word about their games, when we play them on Linux. And that's an important thing, though it will not show up in numbers regarding Linux sales.I'm happy to be able to tell you, yes it will. Buy something and play it on Proton and it shows as a Linux sale. Valve has been quite explicit about this.
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 12 February 2019 at 11:30 am UTC
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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI'm happy to be able to tell you, yes it will. Buy something and play it on Proton and it shows as a Linux sale. Valve has been quite explicit about this.Yep, I know it will show up as a Linux sale, when I buy it on Linux and play it with proton ;)
I was referring to the sales that are made, because I as a Linux gamer have bought and played a title and told other people about it because I like that game and thus they buy it, but they buy it on different platforms. This is hardly measurable, but kinda is caused because I had the possibility to play it on Linux. Maybe my wording wasn't clear enough to reflect what I meant, sorry about that.
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Quoting: CorbenQuoting: LinasI really don't get why people spend so much energy supporting a platform that is so anti-gaming like macOS.
tl;dr: economic reasons.
Yeah, I do realize that money is the answer. Yet somehow macOS has this aura (for the lack of a better word) surrounding it, making it appear somehow superior in the eyes of developers and mere mortals alike. Even in areas where it is clearly not the case.
I commented particularly on 0 A.D., which is open source. So they don't earn anything from supporting macOS as far as I know. And yet, people will go great lengths to make their software work on macOS, even when it's holding other platforms back.
Similarly at work nobody bats an eye when people want a Mac, yet I get weird looks when I mention Linux. Even when our servers are Linux, it somehow baffles people to think that you can also develop said software on a Linux desktop.
I guess the point is that just being better is not enough. We also need to win their hearts. Somehow.
Quoting: CorbenSorry for this wall of text...
Right back at you. :)
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Quoting: LinasI guess the point is that just being better is not enough. We also need to win their hearts. Somehow.
There is one thing that Apple has plenty of and Linux barely has any of, and that is marketing and advertising. Apple has somehow managed to create a cult that will follow Apple through ice and fire while also for some reason defending Apple's anti-consumer behaviour. To people in this cult, it doesn't matter if Apple puts out shitty products for insane prices and provide terrible support. The cult followers will still keep buying Apple.
GNU/Linux isn't big in the consumer space because it has no marketing or advertising. Those who use it are usually IT professionals, tech enthusiast or similar that seek it out on their own terms. Average Jane and John Doe usually doesn't do that. In a way it can be a blessing for us since it creates this sense of a tight community, but on the other hand we have this issue with being too small of a market-share for commercial software to care about us. :|
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Quoting: CorbenAhhh, I get what you were saying now. Sorry, totally got past me the first time.Quoting: Purple Library GuyI'm happy to be able to tell you, yes it will. Buy something and play it on Proton and it shows as a Linux sale. Valve has been quite explicit about this.Yep, I know it will show up as a Linux sale, when I buy it on Linux and play it with proton ;)
I was referring to the sales that are made, because I as a Linux gamer have bought and played a title and told other people about it because I like that game and thus they buy it, but they buy it on different platforms. This is hardly measurable, but kinda is caused because I had the possibility to play it on Linux. Maybe my wording wasn't clear enough to reflect what I meant, sorry about that.
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Quoting: BrisseThis is the main reason I follow ChromeOS with some interest. I'm not really a Google enthusiast, but it's the only desktop Linux being marketed.Quoting: LinasI guess the point is that just being better is not enough. We also need to win their hearts. Somehow.
There is one thing that Apple has plenty of and Linux barely has any of, and that is marketing and advertising. Apple has somehow managed to create a cult that will follow Apple through ice and fire while also for some reason defending Apple's anti-consumer behaviour. To people in this cult, it doesn't matter if Apple puts out shitty products for insane prices and provide terrible support. The cult followers will still keep buying Apple.
GNU/Linux isn't big in the consumer space because it has no marketing or advertising. Those who use it are usually IT professionals, tech enthusiast or similar that seek it out on their own terms. Average Jane and John Doe usually doesn't do that. In a way it can be a blessing for us since it creates this sense of a tight community, but on the other hand we have this issue with being too small of a market-share for commercial software to care about us. :|
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Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: BrisseThis is the main reason I follow ChromeOS with some interest. I'm not really a Google enthusiast, but it's the only desktop Linux being marketed.Quoting: LinasI guess the point is that just being better is not enough. We also need to win their hearts. Somehow.
There is one thing that Apple has plenty of and Linux barely has any of, and that is marketing and advertising. Apple has somehow managed to create a cult that will follow Apple through ice and fire while also for some reason defending Apple's anti-consumer behaviour. To people in this cult, it doesn't matter if Apple puts out shitty products for insane prices and provide terrible support. The cult followers will still keep buying Apple.
GNU/Linux isn't big in the consumer space because it has no marketing or advertising. Those who use it are usually IT professionals, tech enthusiast or similar that seek it out on their own terms. Average Jane and John Doe usually doesn't do that. In a way it can be a blessing for us since it creates this sense of a tight community, but on the other hand we have this issue with being too small of a market-share for commercial software to care about us. :|
I don't know much about ChromeOS, but isn't it more like Android than a traditional GNU/Linux distribution? Android runs on Linux and it's the number one most widespread OS in the universe. That didn't seem to help the GNU/Linux desktop much except unintentionally closing Ubuntu bug #1.
Last edited by Brisse on 12 February 2019 at 8:38 pm UTC
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Quoting: BrisseNot as far as I can tell. I mean, Android genuinely isn't Gnu/Linux in the literal sense that it doesn't use GNU. ChromeOS is more like a Linux distribution with a weird, deliberately limited Desktop Environment. It's not that hard to get it to run normal Linux software, and lately I seem to recall Google making it officially possible (not, like, easy or obvious, but possible) and starting to move away from the whole "browser is everything" schtick, at the same time as they are coming out with less-wimpy Chromebooks. I get the impression they are starting to quietly try to move ChromeOS up the price tiers from their little niche in "disposable laptops", which would mean they'd need to be a bit more general purpose.Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: BrisseThis is the main reason I follow ChromeOS with some interest. I'm not really a Google enthusiast, but it's the only desktop Linux being marketed.Quoting: LinasI guess the point is that just being better is not enough. We also need to win their hearts. Somehow.
There is one thing that Apple has plenty of and Linux barely has any of, and that is marketing and advertising. Apple has somehow managed to create a cult that will follow Apple through ice and fire while also for some reason defending Apple's anti-consumer behaviour. To people in this cult, it doesn't matter if Apple puts out shitty products for insane prices and provide terrible support. The cult followers will still keep buying Apple.
GNU/Linux isn't big in the consumer space because it has no marketing or advertising. Those who use it are usually IT professionals, tech enthusiast or similar that seek it out on their own terms. Average Jane and John Doe usually doesn't do that. In a way it can be a blessing for us since it creates this sense of a tight community, but on the other hand we have this issue with being too small of a market-share for commercial software to care about us. :|
I don't know much about ChromeOS, but isn't it more like Android than a traditional GNU/Linux distribution?
I wouldn't be surprised at some point to see beefy Chromebooks set up so you could play games on them, presumably involving Steam and some behind the scenes compatibility with the Steam runtime, although they might instead start by putting their game streaming service on 'em. Whatever the case, as far as I can tell yeah, unlike Android, ChromeOS is pretty much genuine Linux and it's a space worth watching as Google slowly tries to grow Chromebooks past their modestly successful little niche.
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Quoting: BrisseI don't know much about ChromeOS, but isn't it more like Android than a traditional GNU/Linux distribution?Sort of. It is a minimal Linux system that boots directly into a modified Chrome browser. It is more like a desktop Linux than Android internally, but Google has intentionally locked everything down so that you cannot install anything not signed by Google.
There is also Crostini project from Google that sort of allows running desktop Linux applications on Chrome OS. I say sort of because it runs a full blown virtual machine on top of Chrome OS, including own Linux kernel and everything. This means that the integration is not seamless. For example there are problems with keyboard layouts, and you get no graphics acceleration, among others.
Google could easily allow installing stuff directly on Chrome OS, but they don't want to.
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