I'd argue that Debian can be considered as such. Yes, Ubuntu may be stealing the spotlight due to its commercial support, but even it is based on Debian.

As a casual Debian user, one can only hope that companies take interest in it, and not some XYZ based on it. Many more projects would benefit if it is supported more.

On a related note, Ryan Gordon just gave a talk on porting games to Linux for Steam Dev Days and the slides are available.

(I hope you don't mind that I shrunk the hyperlinked portions of the text I quoted from your post. Having everything underlined made it difficult to read.)

Anyone care to make a prediction of what the Linux market share will look like 3 years from now?

Some interesting points on page 7 (myth busting): https://icculus.org/SteamDevDays/SteamDevDays2014-LinuxPorting.pdf

Thank you for posting the link. It seems like a very balanced report. Distro differences and packaging system do not seem to be the major obstacles but rather the choice of required middleware and available tools and minor system specifics like the character encoding.

In principle one could probably minimize these problems by developing for windows and linux simultaneously using one IDE, cmake and other commong tools. That way one will be restricted more in what one can do but at the same time gain one more OS. It might be worth it.

Surprisingly, Icculus started to use slides :)
Some intersting points but overall just scratching the surface or too polemical/political focussed (GPU drivers are good? ;) propaganda...). About "Distro fragmentation is a non issue", partly it is a minor issue for him as he knows the quirks for 15 years & knows to bypass them. The other aspect, on which he is right middlewares and isolation layers against the distros can reduce the problem. But if we look on slide 29 we see where he comes from and what he proposes: "Get it running: •Use SDL2!•Use OpenGL!•(maybe) Use OpenAL!•Use the Steam Runtime"
The Valve controled "Steam Runetime" as solution of the linux ecosystem problems? In the beginning he talked about the advantages of linux: "no walled garden". But with this approach we can end very fast in Valve controled "walled garden" infrastructure, lossing one core advantage of a open source communtiy driven ecosystem. While technical this could be a solution, I'm really not sure if I would want to pay this price for games on linux... :/

1) Gordon has plenty of ports which don't need the steam runtime collection - which btw is no magic thing. Mostly various version of open source libs that they (Valve) bundle together. The only exception to this is the Steamworks stuff

2) It's steam dev days, of course the steam runtimes are going to get mentioned.

As for "he knows the quirks". The same can be said about the compendium of gotchas when programming for Windows. It's programming, not rocket science. Stuff gets found, documented, fixed/worked around, life goes on. Game development of this scale is something new on Linux. Of course there will be bumps in the road.

Stop trolling. You're getting tiresome. If anyone wants to see just how clueless you are it's enough to read your post about the BSDs.

For games? I think it may end up between 3% and 5%. Depends a bit on how the turnaround of the steam machine is going to be, and how it will be counted towards any market share (i.e. under Linux or as a separate entry)

Is GOG reading this? GOG, are you?

So many errors in so limited content. Game development & porting is NOT something new to the ecosystem, e.g. Loki was founded 1998. The problems for developing in linux coming NOT from bugs which gets "fixed/worked around, life goes on" they come from the architectural inherent unsharpness and instability. And pretending in a vague way, somehow this applies to an similar order to a platform which invests a riddiculous amount of energy in preventing such shit, is pretty.... well, stupid.

This is a typical response by zealot proponents who limit by such short-sighted argumentation the progress of the open source ecosystem since the 90s. A opinion not fitting in their simple world with a superior and flawless linux (only hindered by bad, bad M$ and other proprietary evils) get's diffamed as FUD or being clueless. One reason why the linux ecosystem stands still architectural wise and real innovation comes from the outside (e.g. Android, Steam), valid criticism and innovation gets bashed.

For instance also the great developer you cited, Ryan Gordon, SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure : "In the course of working with Linux, Gordon says that he discovered that "Linux sucks at a lot of important tasks." He noted that Apple has solved a number of the things that Linux does poorly (though he ceded that Mac OS X also does many things badly), and that Linux developers should be "stealing some stuff" from Apple. Gordon pointed to the Time Machine backups and universal binaries that allow users to install software on PowerPC or Intel-based machines and have them "just work."" Gordon was so hurt by the hostile responses to FatELF that he seriously thought about leaving linux overall. So, feel yourself lucky that he decided to stay, it was tight.

Ultimately, I don't care if I tire, bother or threat the simple structured dualisitic world view and comfortable feelings of some useless traditionalists. These are only roadblockers to a better and hopefully finally successful free and open source desktop OS. Created by people like Gordon, Poettering, Molnar, Kolivas etc.

So Shaddim, everyone who disagrees with you is a propagandist while you are an honest, unbiased, objective observer, is that it?

I'm not interested at all in discussing how we can achieve further polarization, I'm interested in a successful free and open desktop platform. Linux, as prime candidate, failed here, badly, for 15 years. We need to fix that. And, I'm not sure if I share the enthusiasm of many to the white knight "Valve" and their solution SteamOS. I think at least some people, especially in the gog forum, should share my feelings of discomfort on this take-over of linux as gaming platform by a commercial company who is an outspoken supporter of DRM and lock-in mechanisms.

You speak about zealotry yet you have pages of endless ranting about stuff which *you* and *only you* consider as being roadblocks and problems. The same stuff, in every post, again and again.

You may argue that such attitude might be needed for, well, pigheaded zealots but there's a case to be made about you being one since, apparently none of the counter-arguments presented to you are valid. From your POV. So there you are posting the same inane bullshit again and again mixing truths, half truths and truncated facts in such a way that it fits your line of thinking and argumentation.

Problem is that you're not the arbiter of the discussion but a participant in it and as such you don't get to pick which arguments are valid or not. Sure, you can pick and choose for yourself but you do not get to dismiss others just because they do not agree with you.

I'm quite amazed you did not find something by Gordon from his teenage days. Who knows, maybe he liked PDPs and VAXes more. Or LISP Machines. You bring up something he said in 2009 as definitive proof that you are right. Good job. This is 2014 and the guy seems older and wiser. If you're so interested in developer drama go watch the lkml for a few weeks and it will seem that at any point people won't be working on the kernel anymore because, awww, their feelings got hurt and their butts clenched.

In Gordon's case at least he got to make a case about a feature he wanted and advocated for. It did not get accepted. Tough! The thing is that with your precious Microsoft, Apple and others like them he wouldn't have had a chance to even have his proposal read and discussed. He had that opportunity in the open-source world.

When more people tell you that you're drunk, you should go to sleep.

It is a lot more unified on Windows, though. But then, this is just starting like you said.