If Linux were that mainstream it’d be a lot more widespread by now. It isn’t helping that there are too many distros out there and not just one or two primary distros that people can latch onto. It suffers from fragmentation just like Android and iOS do between the various versions.
It’s better than it used to be, but it is still by no means user friendly. And remember, for most linux gaming, you still have to deal with some sort of wrapper, such as WINE. The vast majority of users are either not inclined to learn and deal with the necessary steps to make most games work, or are just not savvy enough to do so, with a lot of them being in between those two extremes.
It’s easy for someone with technical expertise to claim it’s “easy”. It isn’t. And on the Mac side, Apple appears to be gearing up the process of locking down operating systems with its T2 security chip. Linux users are finding that particular setup quite problematic as linux generally needs low level access to the system, which the T2 chip obsfuscates (sensor data is impossible to get on those systems outside of what Apple allows thanks to that chip).
No, it isn’t the manual everything nightmare from back in the Yellow Dog Linux days (that was fun BTW, getting it to work on a PPC 604/200 Mac), but it still isn’t where it needs to be yet. Right now, the only reason for me to run linux would either be learning experiences and/or if I had a pfSense router (basically a computer running linux and acting as a router). Of course, for the price of a higher end pfSense router w/ SFP+ and 8 GbE ports, I could just get a 72 core Mikrotik router with four 10GbE SFP+ ports and a managed switch and I’d have 10Gb/sec network speed for NAS <-> computers.
Ez Pz for those that know what to do, the guy came out with a lot of you have to jump through a few hoops , and to be fair the majority of people would not be interested in having to muck around and jump through hoops or even having to get wrappers to get them to run
They want to be able to install the game and play NOT install the game and do a dozen other things on top of that to get it to run
I linked the video to illustrate that we are well beyond the 1990s Linux. Even the compatibility layer software is becoming more robust. There are hoops with non-native games. Native games don’t have that requirement.
Linux isn’t coming from a wealthy corporation that hires Jeff Goldblum to do commercials that air during the superbowl. Everyone knows and expects Sony to run ads for the PS-5. Game publishers have Sony to thank for doing the heavy lifting of promoting the platform, thus cultivating a market. This is why corporate funded products like Windows, PS-5, and Xbox are considered mainstream.
Valve/Steam, and to a lesser extent GoG, have already done the work of promoting Linux gaming. So, if Blizz made native 64-bit Linux game clients there is no need for compatibility layers and wrappers. Steam already has native Linux games.
Blizz would need to build native versions of the launcher and game clients (same as Steam). Next, they can work with the more popular newbie friendly and gaming focused distros to get the launcher into the repositories. Once the launcher is installed via a few clicks, the Linux gamer is at the same install point as the windows gamer.
Blizz could alternatively partner with Valve and companies like Feral Interactive to get native versions of their. The partnership would be similar to the one between Blizz and the Chinese developer that works on the Chinese version of D3 and Immortal.
With native games, launching and playing, on Linux, Windows and Mac, would be nearly identical (no hoops).
We can buy powerful Linux based PCs and Laptops. System 76, Dell, and HP will sell pre-built PCs with Linux pre-installed. There are other vendors but 3 come to mind.
Please check out the author/developer of Carbon Copy Cloner blog entitled “An analysis of APFS enumeration performance on rotational hard drives”, this is someone that very familiar with how it works as well as speed. See
Steam is a platform for publishers to make games. Steam itself isn’t making linux clients, the developers would be. Valve doesn’t actively do anything other than promote that a game is linux compatible via its OS icon in the listings. The only reason they’re actually compatible in many cases is because the game is available on SteamOS, which is a variant of linux, but pared down for the STBs that Steam is on.
Making a native linux version is more work than you give credit for. I’m actually surprised ConcernedApe did so with Stardew Valley, but I guess they figured it was similar enough to OS X’s BSD underpinings that it would be less effort. It does require in most cases though that the developer use Vulkan or OpenGL (or both) as their APIs, since DirectX is not native in linux. Blizzard ended OpenGL support permanently not too long ago on all platforms outside consoles, but the console developers handle that.
Bare in mind that making a linux client also means supporting yet another platform. That’s likely been the biggest roadblock given linux is still a niche OS no matter how you slice it. Even OS X has a larger footprint than linux.
Yes, they do sell them with linux preinstalled. You can get Raspberry Pi setups with linux preinstalled too. But that doesn’t make it mainstream in the consumer space in the least. Linux is still primarily sold to enterprise customers with those prebuilt systems.
Most people want point, click, play. In most cases linux still does not offer that. It’d be a whole lot easier to get behind from a user perspective if there were a dedicated distro that the majority of users were on instead of fractured all over the place, each with their own repositories and dependencies. Until that gets resolved, linux will remain resigned to being an enterprise solution and hobbyist OS in the consumer space. Outside of that, its primary use is educational to learn skills with.
I already did. That’s part of how I know how APFS works. It still spills metadata everywhere regardless of media, meaning you’re driving up the queue depth significantly on NAND media, which slows them down significantly, especially when coupled with 4k block reads/writes.
The issues with platter based drives has been known for much longer than that article has been up. It’s why Apple didn’t make APFS mandatory for regular hard drives for so long. You take APFS vs. HFS+ and HFS+ is going to beat the snot out of APFS every single time for performance. APFS only wins with the features Apple brought over from ZFS.
You are mixing bits and pieces of facts and non-facts. Valve does make native Linux games. Here is one example:
~Artifact on Steam
(the above example is a hi-rez, 64-bit native Linux game, and direct competitor to Hearthstone)
Its a Linux game because it is a native Linux executable there is no compatibility layer or wrappers involved. Steam, the windows app., is a game launcher (with other features) which serves the same purpose as the Blizzard launcher. Steam has a native 64-bit Linux version of its launcher. It looks the same and works the same as the windows version. You can launch native Linux games from the Linux version of the launcher.
Native Linux Executable = no compatibility layer or wrapper software.
What do you mean?
Making native games on the various modern OS platforms requires the same kinds of work and relative amounts of work. You write code and compile the code. The time and effort requirements only differ by days to weeks and I’m not suggesting that Windows is the shorter path. Blizzard obviously has more experience on Windows, but then again they have more experience on Windows compared to the yet to be release PS-5.
OpenGL and Vulkan (the successor to OpenGL) are open standards. DirectX has always been a proprietary API coming from Microsoft. Since Vulkan is an open standard API, using it leads to greater portability. Vulkan matches and in many cases exceeds the performance of DX12.
More fear and misinformation. Supporting yet another platform isn’t a show stopper or stumbling block. Nobody cries foul just because they have to support the PS-4 platform, when they fully intend to make a PS-4 game. Your niche argument was squashed in my prior post, where I explain that there isn’t an accurate way to determine the usage count of Linux desktops. All of the arguments fall flat because all of the referenced methods are akin to using a flash light in the dark to accurately determine the size of the planet. Its just absurd.
Mute statement ^^. Raspberry Pi isn’t desktop Linux and isn’t a gaming hardware or software platform. With respect to Blizzard porting any or their games to Linux, let’s keep the discussion to Linux running on AMD/Intel 64-bit CPUs with AMD/Intel/nVidia based graphics subsystems. This is what Windows 10 runs on for gaming. Mainstream is a subjective term. If you are attempting to juxapose “mainstream” and “niche” they both fall flat as arguments. One is subjective and the other is inaccurate.
Native Linux Steam games are point, click, play. What a Steam user does on Windows is the same thing on Linux. Linux native games on Linux are the equivalent of native Windows games on Windows. There are no hoops to jump through. Compatibility layer software such as WINE/Proton bridge the access gap, in varying degrees, to Windows games on Linux. If there were native Linux ports of the games then there would be no need for WINE/Proton.
What I’m requesting is a native 64-bit Linux Diablo 4 game developed and released in tandem with the Windows, Mac, and console versions of the game. This is to bring the widest and most inclusive audience together around for D4.
There is absolutely no need to homogenize the Linux platform. My Linux native Steam games run without extra steps on both Manjaro and Linux Mint. I don’t run Ubuntu, but I would expect that the games would behave the same on that distro since SteamOS and Ubuntu are Debian variants.
If Blizzard wanted to limit their distro. focus they could start with these:
Arch/Manjaro (and a few other Arch variants)
Ubuntu (and some of it flavors such as LinuxMint)
Debian
SuSE (maybe)
Fedora (maybe)
I would skip Gentoo/Slackware/Mandrake (and their variants) for official support, and any of the specialty distros (ex: KNOPPIX). Here is the beauty of Linux… Blizz doesn’t have to use my list as the determining factor. Blizz can engage the Linux community to help determine the distros. they should target first, any follow up targets, and distros. to avoid.
One of the pillars of Linux is diversity and choice. This is why Linux runs on everything from super computers, PCs, gaming consoles, smart phones, enterprise servers, to enterprise and consumer grade routers, and so much more. There is nothing to resolve with respect to your statement.
Imagine gaming on a Mac. Or owning one at all, for that matter. Dell is probably the worst of the worst, but at the end of the day, it still has Windows. LUL
So does any Mac computer as well. For non-techies, Boot Camp makes that possible. For techies like myself, we do an install from a UEFI GPT formatted USB stick and then just apply the latest Boot Camp drivers for Apple’s keyboard/mouse products (if necessary). It’s essentially native Windows minus all of the hardware sensors on any Mac using a T2 security chip.
The Windows installer is on the USB stick, not Windows itself. That’s standard practice even for PC users so they have a means of reinstalling or fixing a borked install in an emergency.
No, I know what you’re saying. And I’m saying, Windows users do not have an OS X installer on a flash drive. Mac is overpriced trash, but don’t take my word for it you’re free to do your own research.
Next time a critical update borks your WS or PC desktop so that you have to rebuild the OS, update to latest patches in serial fashion then install all you proE or like apps, then finally recover your data back to what it was, you will consider what is trash and what it is not. Enterprise doesn’t sneer at either OS these days, move on. One totally bootable snapshot of a MAC OS is way faster to restore, and be productive seriously.
I build my own computers. Built this one in '16 and I’ve not had any issue of the sort. Sounds like I should get a Mac if I planned on hitting a bunch of… indecent websites. No one is judging you.
Actually it’s a fact, not every MS critical update does something but utilizing W10 doesn’t make one immune to remote system admin level patches that are pushed allowing something to go awry. This is based on looking at hundreds of computers after a patch. I am serious also, some need a full scripted reinstall, data restore. Most of the time you breath a sign of relief when it goes OK without users down. Judging this based on you luck on a home desktop is not equivalent.
At the very least this topic will be quite old before we see any D4 available to any platform. We are all stuck in the same rut. I just hope in the end its a great game to replay often.
