PCGamingWiki Looks Into Linux Gaming With 'Port Reports' 77
AberBeta writes: PCGamingWiki contributor Soeb has been looking into the recent larger budget game releases to appear on Linux, including XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Borderlands: The Pre–Sequel produced by Mac porting houses Feral and Aspyr. Soeb reports that while feature parity is high, performance could be a bit better. Performance differences aside, the games are finally arriving on Linux — now the userbase needs to expand to make a virtuous cycle.
What does Bennett Haselton have to say? (Score:1, Funny)
I'm not much a gamer so I probably need to rely on other's insight to have this issue clarified for me. Has anyone by chance read any piece by Bennett Hasetlon on gaming? I wouldn't mind his insight before I make up my mind. He's a frequent contributor.
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I thought Bennett was busy writing inane and irrelevant "suggestions" about how to treat Ebola (since he's SO MUCH smarter than every doctor & nurse ever) after we intentionally infected him?
Then again, the recovery rate in the U.S. is depressingly high... let's drop him into a random village in Sierra Leone and see how well the local Witch Doctor reacts to his "suggestions".
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You fail to understand. None of that happens by choice. When you're raised in the ghetto, abandoned by your father and your mother is uneducated and often unemployed your odds of getting out of that vicious cycle are not good. Then actual racism which while not as prevalent as in the past but still exists kicks in and things become worse. I look at it and I have to admit I don't know what to do about it but I know what we've been doing isn't working. Instead of trying to fix the World's troubles we'd b
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You'll be blown away by what happened next!
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Sorry, but I'm not interested unless [profession] hates him because of it.
Gabe Newell is perhaps the biggest driver of this. (Score:3, Insightful)
The Seismic Event would be Newell confirming Half-Life 3... and saying it's coming to Steam OS (Linux) first.
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Indie games were already being made for Linux before Steam came along. Legacy games were also available. They're a non-moving target, so they are relatively easy address with wine or dosbox.
It's the AAA titles where the real gap was.
Re:Gabe Newell is perhaps the biggest driver of th (Score:4, Interesting)
> If lowering the price to $0 doesn't work, you can only point fingers at yourself.
Yeah. It's not like there are no other factors involved like a 30 year entrenched monopoly or zero companies that are doing any real marketing for the product or the fact that the company that "does everything right" can't manage to get past 10% market share.
Although none of that really matters. I just care about the AAA titles that play as well (or better) on Linux as they do on Windows. I don't have to put up with an inferior monopoly product just to play a cool game.
If Gabe feeling threatened by Microsoft can cause the 20+ year association between WinDOS and games to shatter then that's a win for all of us.
I know gamers that would dump Windows tomorrow if they could.
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As a gamer, I disagree with your last sentence. Windows is far more than OS that runs games for me. First and foremost, it's OS that runs everything I need, including games. Second, it runs it efficiently. And third, it requires minimal technical know-how, so when I don't want to be a system admin much of a time but just a user enjoying the game, I can do just that.
Linux has a long way to get anywhere near parity on these important issues. As a result, gamers aren't looking to "dump windows" any time soon.
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Games on Linux will have to provide a better experience than on Windows before anything dramatic happens
Not quite necessary. Games on SteamOS providing a better experience than games on PS4 or XBOX1 is all that's needed.
Anyway my PS3 YLODd, which means even if I fix it it's on its last leg, and I have no interest in the PS4, and I actually DO hate on Microsoft, so It'll suck to have to buy the presequel twice but I'm jumping on, personally.
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The difference is that Steam offers all those indie games in the one place and takes care of the payment process.
Re: Gabe Newell is perhaps the biggest driver of t (Score:2)
The Linux userbase has been a great supporter of indie games these last few years. That fact should be celebrated more than any big title releases IMHO.
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The Seismic Event would be Newell confirming Half-Life 3... and saying it's coming to Steam OS (Linux) first.
I know that is a popular idea, that if we just had some good games on Linux, people would start to embrace it.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but that isn't going to happen.
I don't use Windows because I'm "forced to", I use it because it works well, everything runs on it, it supports just about everything in the PC business, and its cost is so low, it might as well be free.
I have no compelling reason to move to Linux. I have no compelling reason to move anyone else to Linux. It doesn't offer me anything w
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> I don't use Windows because I'm "forced to", I use it because it works well, everything runs on it, it supports just about everything in the PC business, and its cost is so low, it might as well be free.
I have known plenty of people that use Windows because they think they are forced into it. This idea goes all the way back to the 80s.
They would still think that way if not for tablets. Tablets look just different enough to the untrained eye to get people off of their "must be DOS compatible" fixation.
T
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You pick an apple, I pick an orange... there really is little difference...
So if we weren't using Windows, we'd be using OS/2, or GeOS, or OS X, or something else...
Same difference...
Linux has had 20 years to prove itself, clearly it is not the right solution, or it would have made some traction at this point...
You assume that we must all leave Windows at some point... Why? I don't see anything to push people off their desktops and laptops any time soon. Google has tried with Chrome OS, and that is a ni
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Yes . . . and it has. Hell, even demonstrated by the article in question here, or does "a big enough audience to justify day-one releases of AAA games" not count somehow?
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Yes . . . and it has.
Linux has about 1% of the overall desktop market...
It has held that number for a long time now...
It isn't growing...
Perhaps you just have a different viewpoint, or perhaps you view success differently, or... well I'm not sure what...
Linux is a success in the server market, but an abject failure in the desktop market. That is simply not likely to change.
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Let's be honest, SteamOS is done. Steam got exactly what they wanted from Microsoft and dropped it like a hot potato (so sorry, you'll never get to use that cool controller).
Consider that for decades Microsoft has not allowed anyone, anyone to touch the user experience. Even after Netscape's antitrust lawsuit over active desktop, even after BeOS withered and died hoping someone would sell a windows computer with dualboot, or hell just a windows computer with a "Setup BeOS" icon on the desktop. Steam is
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Let's be honest, SteamOS is done. Steam got exactly what they wanted from Microsoft and dropped it like a hot potato
I completely agree with you... Steam saw the threat, needed to create their own threat...
Microsoft saw that and countered...
Mission accomplished...
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If a game runs on SteamOS, it runs on Linux. SteamOS is Linux. And not in the way that Android is Linux, SteamOS is just another Linux distro. Based on Debian, specifically, but booting into Steam's UI instead of GNOME. Which is still included.
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yesish... If they use API calls that depend on other window managers toolkits (since SteamOS is a Debian with GNOME fork), you would at least need a dependencies package and sometimes even that doesn't work. I remember having such issues with metacity (GNOME 2, this was replaced with Mutter in Gnome 3) dependencies when running a different window manager, I think Enlightenment. I pretty much needed to kill Enlightenment, start GNOME, and then could run the program. I had a lot better luck with GTK apps runn
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Games generally don't know or care about the window manager; they're doing their own interfaces in OpenGL. And any APIs specific to Steam aren't an obstacle, because Steam isn't restricted to SteamOS (although they only package it for Ubuntu). Heck, some games don't even require X.
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Wait, there's such a thing as a cool controller?
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But no, the Microsoft Experience is inviolate, the holiest of holies, eternally immutable. No matter how much hatred it gets, it Must. Not. Be. Changed. And then Alienware ships a Windows 8 PC that boots to Steam instead of Metro. SteamOS's job is done. When no-one was looking, Steam took Microsoft and snapped it like a twig.
Or Microsoft found out they must cede the battle to avoid losing the war. That doesn't mean Valve should get complacent, once you make a threat like that it'd better stay credible. If they back down too far Microsoft might try for a blitzkrieg shoving the Microsoft Store down users' throat before Valve has time to rekindle the SteamOS project. At the same time they don't want Steam to go mainstream to avoid making it a real enemy to Windows.
The performance difference only matters... (Score:2)
... if you can be bothered to reboot. I have a perfectly good Windows installation for gaming on my multi boot PC. I just can't be bothered to use it so I play whatever's available on the "other operating systems" natively and whatever works fine in Wine. At this point, I think only Witcher 3 is capable of making me reboot.
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Or if you don't have a Windows 7 installed.
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I found myself playing Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel on Linux due to the fact that it kept crashing on Windows. After several re-installs of the game, steam, and the required dependencies, I found out that it has a Linux install option.
So I rebooted, installed, and been playing since.
Not as smooth as Windows, but it doesn't crash.
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FWIW I get random crashes on Win 8.1 . Supposedly happens on certain video cards, even with the latest drivers, and an update is supposed to be coming to fix it.
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I suspect this is because 8's install base is so tiny, they probably haven't properly tested it on 8.
It works fine on 7 for me.
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Same experience for me with Borderlands 2. Linux version drops FPS a bit at some points but it has never frozen entirely as I saw happen on Win 7.
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Right now, the hot topic in gaming is the ability to stream your experience for other people to see.
I thought the hot topic in gaming was sending death threats to women. (I kid, I kid.)
But, seriously, what? Why would anyone want to watch someone else play video games? This would be like watching someone else read a book or someone else make a phone call. What the hell is the point? Go play the game yourself!
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There's a massive difference between watching professional sports and watching a single guy throwing balls at a hoop. I'm pretty sure we're talking about some random guy streaming a video of himself with his headset talking about whatever game's in the background, not "E-sports" or whatever the analog to professional sports would be.
Even then, professional sports are a social activity. You watch the big game with friends and beer. You go to the game with friends to cheer on your home team with other peop
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While I do agree with you that livestreaming is overstated, just about everything you said in support of that seems irrelevant. People actually do watch home run derbys and golf. Although there are multiple people involved, these are in fact single player games, and you compete only in the sense of playing the same game at around the same time to compare scores. To a lesser extent, things like bowling and curling and pool also get airplay. And every Olympics, there are solo sports like gymnastics and di
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I love to watch people play chess.
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Have you never heard of YouTube? Try searching for "let's play", sometime. Some of those videos have over a million views. Even the less popular stuff, like Minecraft, pulls in enough advertising money for these people to make a living from it.
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That's actually not true, I use OBS all the time on my Arch Linux box, and although it was pretty rough a few months ago, it's made leaps and strides since then. It isn't quite at feature parity, but I'd estimate that it will replace the original OBS codebase in about 6 months.
Arch package: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/obs-studio-git/
Github: https://github.com/jp9000/obs-studio
Wine works fine for lots of games (Score:1)
Although I don't have the careful performance charts of the link in the OP, I've been perfectly satisfied for years with Linux performance on the large-budget games I've played recently: Lord of the Rings Online, EVE-Online and Minecraft. My frame rate has been very smooth on the desktop and fat laptop, and quite playable on my 2GB RAM Acer C720 Chromebook running Crouton... around 20-40 fps on the latter for LotRO and EVE. For LotRO it seems to crash less than running it natively on Windows. Although I
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You don't. I didn't claim it was, although I admit the title could be less specific. ("...perfectly satisfied with Linux performance on...") I'm looking at the larger issue of mainstream Linux gaming.
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Well WINE should run Windows games relatively well, since they implement Windows API calls on Linux. Basically, it's Windows on a different kernel. As for graphics, there were two versions last I checked - one converted DirectX to OpenGL and the other (Gallium3D) used DirectX calls directly. I haven't used WINE in a couple of years, so I'm not sure what the state of things is today or which they default to using.
I am a Linux Gamer (Score:2)
I also game under Windows and OSX, but I'm trying to stay on Linux more and more for my gaming. Most of it is in Steam, with a couple under Wine as well. I'm used to occasional graphical or sound glitches, or really laggy input problems (I'm looking at you, L4D2).
Creeper OS (Score:1)
I do not think SteamOS is of any relevance today. And it wont be important next year.
I do not think Steam 4 Linux is a perfect alternative to windows. And at best it will be a acceptable although rough alterantive to windows next year.
But I do now that Steam 4 Linux DOES deliver. Not big time but every month a little bit bigger. I bought over 200 games for Steam and even though I did care little about running games on Linux I still have over 60 games running on linux.
I did not expect that when Steam 4 Linux
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I bought over 200 games for Steam and even though I did care little about running games on Linux I still have over 60 games running on linux.
You are coming into this from the wrong direction. If you already have a collection of Windows games there will always be some games that only work on Windows and not on Linux. Therefore Windows will always be the better game OS for you. However, if you are Linux user that does not yet have any games then Steam is godsend. New users are born every day. For those people it doesn't matter what games other people have in there collection, it's what games they can buy that counts. Just like new users don't lame
*nods in approval* (Score:2)
Didn't do much for Loki games (Score:1)
it wasn't the price (Score:2)
I have a stack of Loki games. All but the last two were paid full price (those were during the shutdown). The problem was the delay. Shelf life of most games is shorter than the porting delay. Of course, now the libraries needed by the games are incredibly obsolete, although LD_LIBRARY_PATH helps.
Patches (Score:2)
Do they keep patches in sync with the Windows version? How long before I can no longer play with my Windows mates?