oh look for some reason nearly every non "linux is the best" comment is dvoted , wonder why...

linux users are in a dilemma if they go to steam cause it actually have linux support and invest in proton development , but steam is clearly a drm store , so buying games there considered as supporting drm, if only they would have a store which linux friend and drm-free

yeah each win release they said this , and each year they say next year will be good for linux , and yet their market share remains insignificant at least for gaming desktops


oh no the regular people those pesky regulars are completly fine with playing on desktop pc-s what a horrible hobbi ...
I wonder what do you play on if not a desktop?

then go play on those grocery stores terminals ...

you can dvote me now

I wasn't aware. I'm glad AWS has some competition. I don't think Jeff Bezos is the kind of guy you'd want as a dictator for life, he's not benevolent.

However, as it turns out, most vms on Azure are Linux though: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-linux-took-over-everything-including-microsoft-azure/

In the advent of a disruption in PC gaming, I don't think Microsoft would drop the ball and Windows will vanish. Most shifts are not that sudden.

I just think another alternative would gradually acquire more mindshares, because it is better.

Between MacOS, consoles and mobiles, most game studio already need to take multiple platforms into account and for the PC platforms at least, there is even existing tooling to abstract away a lot of the platform details for games (maybe not for next Gen AAA games pushing gpus to their limits, but certainly indie games).

Really, I think the future of gaming is to be as platform agnostic as it can. The only beneficiary of platforms lock-in are the platform holders, certainly not the game developers who want to reach as much of an audience as they can and certainly not the customers who want choice.

I don't see much of a point. You get most out of discussions when you engage with people you disagree with.

If I'm about to downvote someone, it means they're probably gonna get some moderator love soon, because what they posted was vile.

People leaving Windows because they hate it won't necessarily like Linux. A vast majority are going to hit a complexity wall at some point and give up in frustration instead of persevering for a few months to get acclimated with what is a very different OS. Which is too bad because that investment pays off in the long run.

But not everyone has the desire, skill or time to do it, and that's fair enough. In those cases there are no alternatives to Windows IMHO, unless they want to jump on the Apple bandwagon.

Linux is user friendly. It's just...

Proton makes gaming on Linux a lot easier, yes, and it integrates with Steam.

But I don't use Proton or Steam and yet I do 100% of my gaming on Linux. Currently have 181 Windows games running without issues. I'm not saying it was effortless to get here, but once everything is set up you're good to go for life. I've been using the same Wine prefix for 3 years now and have moved it across multiple rigs and Linux installations. Think of it as a "portable windows environment" you can just copy around wherever you like, 100% offline and thanks to GOG also DRM-free. Sounds neat, doesn't it?

I'll echo some of the more astute residents here and say that GOG is indifferent to Linux at the moment, not necessarily unfriendly. I do think there's a market for increasing revenue 5% at least and GOG is being too lazy to capitalise on it, but that's just me. But that will eventually change, given the direction of things.

Valve is making Linux more mainstream due to Steam Deck. And it will be with Arch and KDE (my setup)! Crazy. There's huge buzz these days due to them. They are advancing Linux gaming and we should be thankful, despite my dislike of Steam.

Plus Linus tech tips migrated to linux as a dare, and that generated, what? Millions of people watching the vids?

You apparently need 3% of the population to support something to enact change. Hell, macOS in gaming is at about 4% from STeam survey, and it gets way more support and ports than Linux. So it's not far off.

Whatever the market share, the point is that people who are in it, have found it's better and offers more. THat's really the whole point of supporting GOG too - we've all found something here that makes it more favourable for us to use their services. This is despite GOG having a miniscule market share and less features and functionality than its competitors. So the argument is very similar and if you're on GOG and start shouting obvious things like 'tInY mArKeTsHaRe! Not worth it!' then you need to take a look in the mirror.

how much time it needs to set them up average with testing and fixing ?

On average, as much as it takes installing them, since most simply work out of the box.

For those that don't, there's either a fix/workaround on ProtonDB or on Wine's AppDB which you can apply - in that case, under 30 minutes. For graphical issues with older games, you can try and see if cnc-ddraw helps and so on. I haven't spent more than a few hours to get something running.

And there are of course some exceptions which simply refuse to run because of incompatibilities or missing implementations of APIs in Wine, but the situation is constantly getting better. For example a lot of games which relied on mfplat (Microsoft's Media Foundation Platform) were unplayable a year ago without serious workarounds, but now work natively thanks to Proton/Wine devs.

You know I do wish MicroSoft would open source their DirectX's like at least DirectX 1 to DirectX 11.

Recently I think it was just in 2020 MicroSoft did something like how DirectX to Vulkan is doing and made DirectX 9, DirectX 10, and DirectX 11 into DirectX 12 wrappers or something like that.

Also Microsoft ported DirectX 12 to Windows 7 in 2019. World of Warcraft is one of the first PC versions of a video game to do it and I tried it.

If MicroSoft can back port DirectX 12 and WDDM 2 to Windows 7 64-bit then I am sure MicroSoft can open source DirectX 1 to DirectX 12 fully.

It would be even more of a benefit to video game developers to open source DirectX 1 to DirectX 12.

You can back port newer OpenGL versions and Vulkan to older Linux Operating Systems (OS's) right? At least I read that from time to time from Linux users.

I have been using Unreal Engine 4 on Windows XP when they updated that time since 2015 when Epic Games released it 100% for free for everyone on planet Earth to use and I just kept wishing how MicroSoft would make DirectX 11 added to Windows 7 64-bit.

Imagine if MicroSoft open sourced DirectX 1 to DirectX 12 and it ended up working on Linux to.

There is a reason VALVe is removing OpenGL from the Linux versions of their video games and replacing them with DXVK, because VALVe themselves even said OpenGL is slow and sucks.

Although I am very mad at VALVe for removing DirectX 8 from Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, all of their video games that run on the Gold Source engine, because now they stutter and freeze every now and then running on OpenGL, where on DirectX 8 I never had that problem playing those video games in 2005 and so on.

Also MicroSoft did something I think it was in 2019 is increase the draw calls for DirectX9 for some reason so that the classic old 2011 version of the PC version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim can make better use of mods.

Also MicroSoft did release some parts of DirectX 12 as open source.

Why did MicroSoft do this and not 100% fully add more draw calls constantly in updates to DirectX 9, DirectX 10, and DirectX 11 and fully open source them? I do not know, but I wish MicroSoft did.

The thread surely has the usual crap going on, so I'll just quote this post and say that I wholly agree with you. Wish GOG was (more) interested in offering games on the Linux platform. It's a platform they officially support, but seemingly do very little to actually support. It has been disappointing for a number of years, and purchases here have therefore dropped a great deal for me. It is pointless to buy games for a platform I don't have (windows). Sure, there is Wine, but I don't want to de facto support developers that don't care about Linux, and GOG that don't care about Linux. Then it's better to wait.

at least they should drop ubuntu and start supporting arch

Why is that, because it's more up-to-date or because of Steam Deck maybe?

I'm not a fan of Canonical but GOG supporting Ubuntu is handy for me being on Debian - I couldn't even figure out how to install Arch :-D.

Support for Arch is not a great idea unless a big company like steam is planning on there Deck to run on it. Mainly because the options for linux are so often varied. You just cant make everyone happy.

Yes. Me too. I'd wish they'd open-source their older offerings of Windows overall (at least the ancient stuff). It would make maintenance of legacy Windows software (well, games really) a lot easier.

Indeed. I think it would make a big difference if Microsoft would show that users of "legacy" software on their systems won't be left hanging.

All you need is a community of developers willing to do it.

I think ultimately, the greatest challenge with maintaining an aging kernel is to maintain aging drivers with newer hardware and gpus are particularly non-standard compliant in this regard.

But some gpus have well maintained open-source drivers so assuming you stick to one of those, its very feasible.

However, I think the least effort path may be to adapt a newer distro to whatever an older Linux game is expecting. Given the ecosystem it ran on then was open-source, if you know its dependencies then, you can backtrack what it needs.

I imagine it would help a lot of legacy games run on Linux.

I think he gives a solid answer: https://www.quora.com/Is-OpenGL-a-good-API-to-start-3D-game-programming-or-are-there-preferable-alternatives/answer/Terry-Lambert

I did OpenGL back in 2005 or something when I was in university and I guess back then, it was hot, according to Valve in 2012 anyways: [url=https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133824-valve-opengl-is-faster-than-directx-even-on-windows#:~:text=In%20short%3A%20OpenGL%20is%20faster,a%20frame%20in%203.69%20milliseconds]https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133824-valve-opengl-is-faster-than-directx-even-on-windows#:~:text=In%20short%3A%20OpenGL%20is%20faster,a%20frame%20in%203.69%20milliseconds[/url]

But if I had to make a game nowadays, I'd be looking for a cross-platform game engine.

I think their latest ceo is warming up to open-source a lot which is good.

Otherwise, you have maintain everything yourself indefinitely and you become a blocker for everyone who wants to build and maintain things on what you did.

I think at some point, even with proprietary software, the right thing to do via your users is to say: "You know, I'm not gonna maintain the myriad of things you guys got going on an aging platform I no longer wish to maintain, because that's crazy, but here's the good news: I'll give you the source code for it and you can do it yourselves"

Well, I think that is the way it is now because GoG is in general side project for CDPR, so they did their bet for windows, plus there is not a big community around, so that's a logical decision. But yes, this would be great to have proper support for linux.

Microsoft's long-term goal is a streaming subscription service that works on any device. Their current support of PC gaming is nice though, and should last for many years as streaming faces many difficulties to get over. Until that point MS wants a platform agnostic subscription service that includes Windows.

The real short-term "threat" from MS is subscription exclusive games, in my opinion. Those will come eventually.