Secondly while Steam and others are going more cross platform with the Mac, you will not see Mac games end up being ported to GNU+Linux. The technical hurdles are smaller after Mac porting but the legal ones are larger.

-c

Interface standards are a moving target on Linux. Particularly since many users \”play\” with their systems to suit themselves.

If I develop a game for Windows XP I have a level playing field. 90% of the machines with WXP will simply run the game despite user use/abuse.

If I need a particular version of some library, I can ship it with the game and install it with little concern that I will damage the system. This is not true with Linux.

I recently tried to install Privateer Gemini Gold on a Linux box I have. It is a sarge Debian system and the game will not run because my version of glibc is too old. The Linux installer does not dare upgrade my glibc for fear of breaking my system. (Google this to see what I mean.)

Since Linux is a non-uniform OS it is a harder target for game makers. One of the greatest attractions of game consoles is that the target is well defined fixed piece of HW and SW.

Also, at the least a Game could have support for a specific distribution, such as Ubuntu. I think that the gaming company could make use of community support to ensure that it works on others, with a central \”HowTo\” make it work on anything.

The game could be installable through the distro\’s package manager also, so you just insert the disk and install the game. Patches can do that way too. I\’m sure that there are a number of ways to deal with this.

You are right though, it\’s not necessarily simple :-)

-c

http://braid-game.com/news/?p=364

The developer was trying to make a port of his game to Linux, but the inability of the Linux evangelists to give a satisfactory solution to the issues expressed (mostly related to some Xlib API shortages) looked to me a very bad symptom, the developer ended up really exasperated. Maybe we should demand more advances from the X Consortium to better match current game development requisites?

I\’m all for enabling choice but not if it means that silly basic things don\’t work out of the box and confuse the user/developer. For instance, Gnome apps still don\’t skin properly under KDE and vice versa and KMix functionality is still variable. We still have several packaging formats and buggy/incomplete configuration tools that work fine one minute and then randomly bork core files.

Worst of all though, worst of all, the command line still hasn\’t died. Unless the function being performed involves an engineer, a priest, a chicken and a stone altar, the end user should NEVER ever see or require the command line. Instead of being able to install basic things by a single point-and-click action and then having the damned thing work, end-users have to trawl forums to find the correct phrase to type in. You daren\’t ask a question and if you do some self-righteous tit jumps down your throat. Oh and you can\’t copy and paste it into Konsole because there might be non-printing characters that\’ll stuff it.

GTK/Gnome fanboys argue with Qt/KDE fanboys over whose is better, raining down fire and brimstone on anyone that disagrees. Little do they realise that most users (and potential users) simply don\’t care. I\’ll repeat that: most of us simply don\’t care. What I want is for the bl**dy thing to just work! I really don\’t give a toss what toolkit or which GPL version was used. If it works I\’ll use it, if it doesn\’t I won\’t.

And the old \”if you think you can do better do it yourself\” cr*p doesn\’t wash either. The vast majority of users simply cannot, repeat CANNOT, make their own applications.

Frankly, there are a myriad of reasons why serious software companies are avoiding and will continue to avoid Linux. Chief amongst these is that Linux is the IT equivalent of the Church of England. Too many voices, too many little empires, too much factionalism, too many precious Marys ready to get offended, no clear overall direction, no clear overall leadership, no unity and total confusion for those on the outside looking in.

Linux needs to start making hard decisions:

1. Which ONE body is in charge?
2. Which ONE body is answering technical questions?
3. Which ONE packaging format is to be standard?
4. Which ONE Sound API is to be standard?
5. Which ONE Graphics API is to be standard?
6. Which ONE set of configuration tools is be standard?
7. By what date must all the major GUIs be fully interoperable?
8. When is X going to get a kick in the bum?
9. When is the GNU toolchain going to get a kick in the bum?
10. Which location(s) for system, app and config files is to be standard?
11. When will we stop moving the goalposts?

Choice and Standards are not mutually exclusive; it is strong standards frameworks that promote real choice by making things easier. At the moment we pretend to offer choice, but in making things so technical, involved and difficult, we force non-technical users to stay with Windows and hence, in the real world, we offer no choice at all.

Yes we can solve some of the technical issues (such as bugs and API shortages) in the same way we do now. If, however, we want to make a serious OS that really is right for the innocent non-technical end-user, we need to make root-and-branch reform to our hierarchies, our methods and, most importantly, our attitudes.

We need to stop living in cloud-cuckoo land.

YOU FORGOT ONE THING:
You can still choose an major linux-distro like ubuntu, and make your game work on it out of the box. After all, the OS is free and takes no time to install, unlike windows and Mac OS(oh you need a $2000 mac too)

So the only point to not have linux commercial gaming is that there is too little of a market share.

Worst of all though, worst of all, the command line still hasn\’t died.
…
[T]he end user should NEVER ever see or require the command line.

I am so tired of this straw man argument. The one and only problem with Linux on the desktop is that Linux isn\’t a desktop OS. It can be run as a desktop, I\’ve been doing so since early 1995, but it is not built nor designed to function as a desktop OS in the way the desktop world has been conceived by Microsoft and Apple. If you look at the history of Unix you\’ll see that the desktop was implemented as what we now call thin clients; X Terminals.

This does not mean that Linux can\’t be a desktop OS. Just that it will take a different perspective to achieve it. In the 19 years I have been using Linux the closest distro that came to being a great desktop solution was the old Corel Linux, now floundering as XandrOS. It\’s another case of what could have been.

[Linux] will always be the \”SHAREWARE\” O.S. and it will always be like a cheap imitation of the real thing.

You think that Windows is the real thing? You think they got it right and we\’re trailing behind, but have you ever considered that maybe it\’s Linux that got it right, not the others? If so why would we want to copy them?

Sounds like what you want is a free (or really, really cheap) copy of Windows, not Linux. So go use Windows.

-c

What I do not like about a point-click system is that you can only do what the buttons are defined to do. Surely you have used point-click system that lack some global apply function and require a tedious sequence of points and clicks to perform some operation.

A sane person that has CLI, editing, scripting and/or programming skill might well choose to exercise that skill simply because it is an easier to do what is needed at the moment than it is to create an interface that will also allow someone else to also perform the operation in the future. In the particular case I have in mind, I can\’t fix the d@mn thing myself because the effing program (a windows application) is not open source.

I frankly think that you need consider learning how to use the tools that are at your disposal. If some tool is missing, you could always create the missing tool and contribute it to the code base (I at least try to do that). Of course that is more difficult than simply whining that some favourite tool is missing. This much I must say. after having seen 10 year old children navigate Ubuntu with great aplomb I feel justified in saying that Ubuntu is incredibly easy to use — IMO, more so that OSX or W7.

I am not interested in Linux because it is inexpensive but rather because it is malleable. If I take my time into consideration, for me Linux is not inexpensive as it requires never ending learning but the cost is worth while for me. You may see it differently.

I can play most of the games that I want to play on Linux with wine. If a given game is slower on Linux that I prefer it to be, then I upgrade my hardware. If I find tricks that cause some game to work better, I tell Crossover about it (I try to give back to community that I benefit from).

Firstly… Linux will _not_ fail. You might have forgotten something, it\’s free. And the GUI being the reason for lack of games, or companies lack of porting. Is irrelevant. There are many multi-platform GUI\’s. They won\’t write it for GTK, ok, they won\’t write it for QT, ok. If they wanted to have a consistent GUI across all platforms, they can use one. (And why should we tell them what GUI to use? I thought the actual ***GAME*** mattered) Thinking that M$ supporting Linux will entice game companies to support it are, terrible ideas, really, why? That would mean less Windows, and that would mean less, less, less. Last time I checked, they aren\’t aiming for that. – And why is being different wrong? I want a desktop I can change. That I can mess w/.

Why should a company that I would pay money to, tell _me_, the consumer, what my system should be. What it should look like. -I can change a background and toggle transparency. THANKS MS! That is so worth my money!- I\’d rather spray-paint my monitor screen, it\’s cheaper, and gets a close result)Kidding, don\’t get a knot(

And beside that, the static binary included would work. Or I don\’t know… Remember back when you *NEEDED* to upgrade for a new game to work in Windows?
\”You have DX 8? Ohhh, sorry, you need DX 9. Upgrade it and it will work for you\” – \”Ok\”. If the upgrade breaks something, then most likely, the included static will work. What are we afraid of? A few extra MiB\’s? If the system has it installed already, the static could just not be installed.

Flamzors…..