LOOOOL
You’re kidding right? I sincerely, hopefully hope you are.
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But then the evil overlords, who will soon be in partnership with Blizzard themselves, will be able to “spy” upon him.
You should wait until after the acquisition. Once Microsoft owns Activision-Blizzard, lobby them to invest in a Linux client for a 20 year old video game that will be used by literally tens of players. I mean, it sounds like a veritable license to print money.
This is such a sad thread, OP just asking for his OS of choice to be supported and y’all just bullying for no reason. Reassess yourselves
I wish they’d support Linux too, it’s my preferred OS. I just didn’t bother to ask because I assumed they won’t. There’s not a lot of us but there are a lot more of us than you guys think.
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Only because certain platforms refuse to work natively with Linux. It’s the same with Adobe. Funny enough, macOS is a Unix based operating system, just like Linux. It wouldn’t be that far of a stretch for them to alter the macOS version of these applications to accommodate Linux users, as well. Especially since half the work is already done in the first place.
I find it funny when people say Linux is outmoded. Linux holds the market share for everything but desktop computers. Android (70.98%) surpasses iOS (28.41%) for phone and tablet operating systems. Linux holds 96.3% of the market share for web servers. Linux powers 80% of all IoT (smart devices) on the market today. Even Microsoft favors Linux for their IoT security and Connectivity servers over Azure Sphere.
Everyone that has any type of connected device uses Linux in some fashion or another every single day. To say there’s not enough Linux users is laughable.
Edit: This is the current market share for desktop OS:
The three at the bottom are Linux, Other (stated as other because those people don’t give telemetry data), and ChromeOS. All of which are Linux-based operating systems. That brings Linux market share up to 8.32%. FreeBSD is at 0.01% and is a Unix derivative, but uses a lot of the same code since Linux is based on Unix.
Technically, if you go by Unix based OSes, everything but Windows should be included.
Anyway, 8.32% is significant, and opening WoW up to that many more players could potentially give more users access to Blizzard games.
Even if this were true, and it might be true if mobile and embedded OS’s and indoctrination of school children with ChromeOS all manage to push Windows out of relevance… surely you have to realize that the day Linux is dominant is the day that Linux is also collecting telemetry data too, right (or as you call it, “spyware”)?
Do you really think Apple, for whom ad revenue is now one of their fastest growing businesses, a business set to explode with their AR product(s), and Google, a business built on advertising, are going to not collect every waking second of your life?
Do you really think that Microsoft couldn’t see the writing on the wall and pivot to a Linux kernel while keeping the same Windows GUI everyone is familiar with AND still be the dominant desktop endpoint? For the end user this change would be basically invisible.
Wake up Craig. Any dominant OS is going to collect telemetry for debugging. And all of the most likely candidates for dominance are going to be in the ad business.
That’s not a good thing.
Citation needed. Genuinely curious because every benchmark I’ve found has been (A) a modest performance improvement of 10-20% and (B) the consistently spotty track record of available linux drivers means regardless of whether or not something benchmarks higher on linux it’s more likely to “actually work” on Windows. Arguably one of the biggest selling points for 6.0 is simply “more driver support” which is just a problem you never experience on Windows.
This is not applicable to gaming where you are going to want to be powered. It’s not applicable to most production jobs where you are going to want applications that are simply not distributed on linux. We see this everyday with M1/M2 Apple machines, which despite having an incredible chip, suffer from a huge lack of applications actually compiled to run on that chip, let alone run on MacOS.
TBF, most of the AWS and Google Cloud footprint is linux machines running hypervisors that run Windows VM’s or platform agnostic webservers.
They are not the ones who are out of touch with the player base, the player base is not a bunch of penguins. It’s almost entirely Windows players with a small cadre of Mac loyalists.
If Blizzard is making any platform-based pivots, it’s going to be a pivot to cloud streaming and mobile gotchya-games like Diablo Immoral.
They can even kill 2 birds with one stone by telling linux users to stream games via the browser. Not what you are looking for but it’s a far more likely 5 year outcome with the Microsoft acquisition.
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There’s not enough people with Linux knowledge that will work on a video game support desk queue instead of anywhere else they could be paid more and do more.
That’s one thing that developers and the customers don’t understand about the software business, it’s not just writing code, you have to provide support for that code. And that’s very expensive.
A support desk with Linux skill for WoW? I bet that would budget out at well over one million dollars in red ink a year. How many dollars will a Linux port bring in? Not that much I bet.
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Reassess yourself. Blizzard is a business and a business needs to make money.
There are not enough linux world of warcraft gamers for it to be profitable to port the game to linux and provide ongoing support for it.
Well at least you know.
No rational business owner would invest substantial resource for an extremely small portion of their customer base. No matter how vocal.
At least you know.
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Maybe read my post before you drop a take.
Even if Linux is currently niche, it’s really in everybody’s best interest to push for a Linux version of whatever games they play.
The whole reason that Valve is shipping Linux on Steam Decks is because they’re trying to avoid a future where Microsoft has decided they want to be like Apple and e.g. force all software purchases through the Microsoft Store. It’s not altruistic by any means — obviously they’re trying to keep their game marketplace Steam relevant — but it also aligns with the public interest of keeping things open and competitive.
Microsoft has had an iron grip on PC gaming for ages now. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like Apple is poised to provide meaningful competition… while their M-series integrated GPUs are actually great, like as good as low-to-midrange RTX 3000 series on the top end M1 Max/Ultra which is more than enough for the vast majority of games, they haven’t shown institutional interest in bringing down the software barriers to make porting more games to Mac feasible. So if MS is to ever have real competition the only other place it could possibly come from is desktop Linux.
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There is nothing wrong with being passionate about tech, or a particular platform. Indeed, a passion for tech can be a great benefit.
However, zealotry and tech tribalism almost always leads to problems.
Now, I’m not necessarily saying that the OP is being overly zealous, but I want to simply advise caution.
I’ve been using Linux in various capacities (systems administration, network engineering, cloud services, and desktop use) for nearly 25 years. I’ve also used Windows, Mac, *BSD, and Solaris over that time, as well. I’ve lived in a world of tech tribalism for much of that time. Heck, when I was first learning to appreciate Linux, I was a zealot, myself.
Linux has come a long way from being Linus Torvald’s scrappy kernel project bundled with some GNU software by a couple of different small organizations.
In the early days, we hoped that one day it would topple the giants of tech (at the time, that was mostly Microsoft), and that one day, users would see the light and use this superior operating system. (We were comparing it to Windows NT 3.x, 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows 9x/ME at the time.)
Well, reality turned out interestingly different.
Linux did rise to great heights, but not in the way we had expected. Linux is everywhere that we don’t see.
Linux dominates the Internet and cloud services infrastructure. It dominates the appliance and “Internet of Things” market. And of course, there’s Android, which as others frequently point out, is technically Linux kernel-based (though it has little else in common with Linux desktop or server distros).
However, on the desktop (defined as business and personal or gaming workstations), Windows continues to dominate just as it has for thirty years. Apple has vastly upset the entire mobile industry, much to their credit, but on the desktop, Mac continues to be a stalwart minority. Then there’s Linux.
I’m going to just say it, and perhaps this highly subjective, but in my experience Linux kinda sucks on the desktop.
Now, let me clarify that rather inflammatory statement.
Linux is a completely competent desktop option for certain basic conditions. My mom uses an Ubuntu desktop as her daily driver for basic web browsing and e-mail needs. I use Fedora as a technical workstation for remote administration. For these things, most distros are great.
However, for the needs of many desktop power users (including gamers) today, Linux falls terribly short. Here are the key weaknesses:
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Distribution/packaging system fragmentation (and while Snaps, FlatPak, and AppImage are all more universal software management options, the number of options alone is history repeating itself with fragmentation).
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The transition from X11 to the Wayland framework compositors (primarily in GNOME and KDE Plasma) has been bumpy, due largely to design limitations with Wayland.
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Third party commercial (closed source) drivers are a serious problem on Linux due to fundamental kernel design. In short, Linux was designed for open-source drivers that could be compiled to match the version of kernel being compiled. Closed-source pre-compiled drivers have to match the kernel version, which creates immediate problems with distro version lock-in. There are wrapper work-arounds for this, but the problem persists. Indeed, the problem is substantial enough that it’s caused Google to continue research longterm ways to transition from Linux-based Android to something else (Fuchsia).
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Desktop/workstation features are not keeping pace with hardware advancements, particularly regarding HiDPI (4K, 5K, and other high-resolution scaling, particularly with fractional scaling per-application). Lack of biometric authentication support is another good example.
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There’s no money in the Linux desktop, and therefore the development lags behind. RedHat (now under IBM) focuses on the server/cloud market. Canonical is trying very hard to follow suit.
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Commercial developers care about market share, not ideals. Some products have a large enough install base to cover multiple platforms (web browsers, for instance). WoW is one of the few AAA titles for Mac because Blizzard has a legacy of supporting the relatively small Mac gaming community. We see as much Mac software as we do because there there is and has always been a substantially large community of professional content creators and producers who use the Apple ecosystem. However, this market doesn’t exist for Linux. The high-dollar Linux market consists of servers and embedded devices, not desktop users.
This is the reality of today, and furthermore, this has been the case for the last 20 years. The technology has advanced, across all platforms, but the situation and challenges remain very similar today as they were in the early 2000s. At this time, there is no indication that this will change any time soon.
That having been said, market disruptions do happen. Apple has shown this repeatedly, and it’s why, despite Mac maintaining modest desktop share, Apple is one of the most powerful and influential companies in the world today. They disrupted the mobile market and have taken and maintained substantial control over it to this day. That’s impressive by any standard.
Microsoft, the mighty giant of the '80s and '90s, was shut-out from the Apple-Google duopoloy in the mobile market. That’s impressive.
So, there’s certainly been market upset and change, and it’s not impossible that another shift could favor some kind of Linux desktop solution. However, history shows that disruptions are by definition inherently unpredictable. We can’t say exactly what this would look like.
For all we know, a Linux desktop future would involve Microsoft radically shifting some future Windows to being Linux-based. (Which is not what most Linux open-source fans had in mind.)
It kind of boils down to this:
The very attributes which Linux fans love, such as freedom and choice, are the characteristics which make Linux unsuitable for overwhelming desktop market share. Most users don’t want freedom and The Paradox of Choice. They want support and reliability. (It would be reductive to boil it down to the old order vs chaos argument, but you can see how it goes this direction.)
In conclusion, I love Linux. I maintain severs and network infrastructure that depends on it daily. I keep a little home file server running Fedora. I even use it on occasion on the desktop (both GNOME and KDE Plasma). However, my day-to-day work is on a MacBook Pro, and there’s a lot of love about macOS. My gaming is (usually) on my home Windows PC gaming rig. (And while I don’t love Windows 11, I will admit that Windows is a solid if imperfect operating system. It gets things done.)
All platforms are imperfect and have their issues. They also all have things to love. I try to always look at the glass as half-full and recognize this.
Moving away from tech tribalism and zealotry is not easy (and it’s something I fight often), but ultimately it’s a more rewarding and enlightening path, and I encourage folks to take a step back and just appreciate all the platforms for what they have to offer, while being fairly critical of their faults.
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Here’s a video showing the performance on Manjaro / Wine at 1440p max settings:
But these major breaches are almost always human error.
In Equifax case, for example, it was due to human error in patching known vulnerabilities, storing passwords in plaintext, and not segmenting internal systems from one another. These human errors allowed for rapid movement throughout Equifax’s nextwork upon breach.
I mean, I’m not saying that you’re wrong in spirit, in arguing that no system is perfectly secure. But major security breaches are most often human error, and by an overwhelming margin.
As far as I’ve seen the most common type of “hack” is just some software engineer given too many hats to wear not fully understanding permission models and inadvertently doing things like setting up AWS S3 buckets such that they’re accessible by the public. A lot of this stuff could be prevented by companies just having a team of people dedicated to security to catch things like this instead of trying to make their devs do everything.
Yea but insurance is usually cheaper.
This is human error of another sort.
If we use linux, I think we now that option exists. That’s not the point.
I will never lose hope. Linux support please blizzard! deb and rpm like most softwares are doing nowadays. Or some snap with the battle net launcher.
If you aint doing nothing wrong you got nothing to worry about