Thanks To Valve, More Than 1,500 Games Are Now On Linux 281
An anonymous reader writes: The Steam Store crossed the threshold this morning of having 1,500 games natively available for Linux. Timberman, a 0.99$ video game was the 1,500th title, but while there are a lot of indie games available for Linux, in the past three years have been a number of high profile AAA Linux games too. What games (old or new, free or paid) would you like to see available for Linux systems?
99% shit (Score:5, Insightful)
99% of these games are shit - but so is 99% of everything
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what he said. 1500 games and i still have to have a volume for MS Gameloader.
Open world city (Score:5, Interesting)
What games (old or new, free or paid) would you like to see available for Linux systems?
This is kind of obvious answer...but some big open world "dicking around in a city" game like Grand Theft Auto, Saints Row or Sleeping Dogs would be nice to see.
Re:Open world city (Score:5, Funny)
Try Tux Racer
Re:Open world city (Score:4, Informative)
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Those I play (Score:4, Informative)
The games I play - and the only reason I am still on windows:
-Everything Blizzard makes (WoW, Diablo, Starcraft, Hearthstone, Heroes of the storm and Overwatch when it becomes available.
-Battlefield (and derivatives, including Star Wars Battelfront)
Blizzard should be able to do something since they already have support for OSX.
EA could be a bigger problem.
I spend a lot of time in steam games - and welcome all they have done for gaming on Linux. I loath wrappers though as they have a tendency to cost on perfomance an example is Civilization V on Linux is painful compared to windows on trhe same machine.
Re:Those I play (Score:5, Funny)
EA could be a bigger problem.
Yeah, EA has problems making their titles work right on Windows.
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I haven't had any problems with WoW for the best part of a decade in WINE, if you need a data point. I don't even remember whatever hacks I needed to get it working. Except that I run it in its own desktop session to simplify fullscreen mode. Similarly Diablo and Starcraft. I ran HotS a few times, seemed to work well enough. No idea about Hearthstone.
FreeBSD (Score:4, Interesting)
Dear Valve
Can you work w/ the FreeBSD project to make this available on the BSDs as well? I'd love to play Civ V on this laptop running PC-BSD
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Popular games (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I think the most important games to get to run on Linux are games that are popular with the general gaming population. Videos games are parts of 21st century general culture. Being able to access (play) them would be a good step forward.
Of course, I'd love some weirder, less common games to be available as well.
Amazing! (Score:2)
Thanks to Valve! Absolutely no game developers involved at all!
Portal 2 would be nice (Score:2)
Portal 2 would be nice, but that's more of an ATI/AMD issue where I am currently standing...http://imgur.com/a/2Nd9h [imgur.com]
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Works perfectly for me with a Radeon R7-260X.
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And mine would be a "01:00.0 Display controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Venus PRO [Radeon HD 8850M] (rev ff)".
Star Wars Battlefront (Score:2)
Correction (Score:3)
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World of Warcraft, please. (Score:2)
No more lame excuses, Blizzard.
Not good enough (Score:3)
I recently moved from console gaming to PC gaming. And I really, really wanted to move to SteamOS because I do NOT want to deal with Windows when I want to simply sprawl out on the sofa and play a game.
And I waited ever since they announced the thing to see how it does. The thing is, they're never getting those big titles to work natively on Linux. Small games? Sure. "Indy" games? Maybe. But the big ones? No way.
I consider myself a casual gamer (if anything). I play those games where you can get immersed for a few months. I don't play the little and indy games. And they will /never/ get a Skyrim ported to Linux. Or Fallout 4, or Mass Effect, or Assassin's Creed. Furthermore, there's a very spotty record of EA games showing up on Steam to begin with - and why would they when they have their own service?
SteamOS (and other Linux, by extension) have a lot of games now, but they're mostly not very good ones, and not the big titles. If that's what you're into then that's great, but it's no competition at all to Windows or Playstation/XBOX.
And yeah I know there's in-house streaming, but that defeats the point of using SteamOS in the first place.
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I have done just that. And it actually works a lot of the time. But I still have to deal with drivers and updates and Windows weirdness. And I have to use Steam to start Origin games. And sometimes Steam takes too long to start and other things get in the way and stay on the screen in FRONT of Big Picture mode. And no matter what I do, I still need to have a keyboard and mouse in the living room, which annoys me greatly.
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Yeah, but that's kind of the point - I need to have Steam running, and Origin running, and if I ever get a Ubisoft game I'll need THAT running, too...
I have a small keyboard and small mouse (I prefer that to an integrated touchpad). Doesn't matter if they're small, they're still here (; The real deal with that is mods and mod management. Mods were one of the big considerations about moving to PC so hell if I'm not going to use them!
I use a controller because it's really, really uncomfortable to use a keyboa
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It's not about whether it works or not, it's about them being here at all (:
Re:Not good enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that I'm going to really dispute anything you said, but never is a very long time. There's a huge section of the smartphone, tablet and console gaming market that doesn't and won't run DirectX, so even ignoring Steam and the PC there's a solid future for OpenGL. And with Vulkan doing significantly less [architosh.com] there's hope that Linux support in general and open source support in particular will be much better. I mean, Valve has already written an open source driver for Intel, it took two developers two weeks and is ~27 kLoC - though I assume they generously copied bits and pieces from the mesa driver. The GLSL to SPIR-V compilation comes on top but it's generic and already written, it's only the SPIR-V to target that is unique for each card. Android has already picked it as their next-gen API, that's certainly not a bad ally.
If Vulkan can become a first party rendering target for Source 2, Unity, Unreal Engine 4 and CryENGINE which I assume they will since they don't want to lose the smartphone/tablet business, the hurdle to produce an AAA game on Linux is that much lower. Maybe the bar still won't be low enough, but lower than it is today. Particularly if Valve paves the way with a good first party title or two, if a year from now Half-Life 3 launches with same day Linux support a lot could change in the next few years. Then again, it might also be just wishful thinking...
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There's a huge section of the smartphone, tablet and console gaming market that doesn't and won't run DirectX
Smartphone and tablet games are touch-controlled. Because touch is so different from keyboard or gamepad control, you might as well write a completely separate game with a separate engine for mobile platforms. And for games released on both PC and a console, DirectX still runs on Xbox One; in fact the X in Xbox stands for DirectX.
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Tell you what, when I can't get the next Elder Scrolls and Mass Effect games on PC, I'll buy a PS4 or whatever number it is.
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The Witcher 3 isn't available for SteamOS, so whether it's big or not is a moot point.
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There's actually no official announcement for it.
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I can't find this official announcement (just some references to it happening), but for the sake of argument lets assume it's there and easy to find. All this does is raise MORE issues.
First, this is not the first time we've heard a Linux version is coming (even officially) only to have it never happen.
Second, even when they do happen, they show up a year (or more!) later than any other version, and still cost the full-price even though they're half-price on all other platforms by now.
So yeah, not helping.
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The difference is that these games will come out for Windows, which I can easily install on my gaming computer, well before they come out for SteamOS (if at all). And they'll want $60 for that version while the Windows version is $30.
Look, I know that if they set up a build chain, they can do rollouts for Linux with minimal effort. But I don't think they will do that.
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Console CPUs are using custom instruction sets? I assumed they were using a regular AMD APU architecture, just with custom numbers of execution units.
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Wii U uses four customized PowerPC G3 cores and a Radeon-derived GPU that has presumably also been customized.
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Oh, well, I guess you've changed my life, and magically all the games I actually do play are now suddenly available on SteamOS, rather than... wait, let me count... zero of them.
Again, I am not, and never did say that nothing will be available on SteamOS. I'm saying a tiny fraction of AAA games will be. I'm saying there are entire studios that have no reason to suppo
Long-time console exclusives (Score:2)
I'm saying there are entire studios that have no reason to support SteamOS.
There are also entire studios that have no reason to support Windows. One of them is Nintendo, and another is whichever company is developing the next Halo for Microsoft.
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Luckily, none of those make any games I'm interested in playing.
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I actually hate labels and kind of regret using that term, but I wanted to provide some context.
I /am/ a consumer of games. I pay for them, and I buy hardware to play them. When I say I'm a "casual" gamer I mean I don't go out there and buy every game ever made. They DO make a lot of games I like, an enjoy. I just don't want to pay $60 (or $40, or $30, or $20, or $15) for a game I'll only enjoy for like a day or two.
My friends who consider themselves "serious" gamers will just buy EVERY game. Whenever there
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All my text games run on Linux. What more can anyone ask? Text mode Tetris, boggle, minesweeper, space invaders .... a rich environment. And that's not even mentioning my Infocom games.
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Text mode Tetris
I wonder how long until The Tetris Company uses its 2012 legal victory over Xio Software [slashdot.org] to go after Free Software Foundation for including M-x tetris in Emacs [gnu.org]. Tetris co-founder Alexey Pajitnov is an out enemy of free software [slashdot.org].
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They'd still have to port their games to SteamOS. And they won't. Again, zero incentive. Call it a chicken-and-egg thing if you want.
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I don't think they believe they'll make more money than they'll have to invest in it.
Game controllers (Score:2)
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It's probably more important to ask about vendor support for Linux, not Linux support for vendors. It's likely that a random gamepad or gizmo won't work, because the vendors aren't yet taking it very seriously. The solution here is not to buy a random gamepad or gizmo; do your research first. It may eventually happen, but we have to demand it.
Gamepads work on Linux (Score:2)
I own two kinds of "random gamepad": several brands of "generic human interface device" and Xbox 360 game controllers. Both work in SDL on Xubuntu 14.04. The biggest practical problem, whether on Windows or on GNU/Linux, is button layout Babel [pineight.com] for anything that's not an Xbox 360 game controller.
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CoH2, GTA V, Don't Starve (Score:2)
Those three would be a good start... but real question is "Will it play the next game my friends decide to pick up?" because I once had a decent setup for the games we played at the time. Then those changed and WINE couldn't keep up. The games I play myself, well those I control. The rest is more of a collective decision where I get a vote, not a veto.
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Don't Starve is a 2013 action-adventure video game with survival and roguelike elements, developed and published by the Canadian indie company Klei Entertainment. The game was initially released via Valve's Steam software for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux on April 23, 2013.
Thanks, I wasn't aware it was Linux native (gave up gaming on Linux a while ago), just saw that the WINE rating was garbage. Okay one down, two to go...
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It's like you deliberately picked mostly Linux-supported titles.
Or maybe you really have no idea what's available for Linux...
It's genuinely the latter, I got on board with Linux as my primary desktop around 2007 and quit about 3.5 years later in 2010 so my experience is ~5 years out of date. At that point Steam for Linux didn't exist so my go-to place was to check the WINE database. Perhaps I should give it another go, Windows spyware edition isn't tempting. Then again, I got ~4 years left on this Windows 7 license until EOL and I'm very comfortable where I am. It's nice to know the transition wouldn't be quite as painful this ti
Decent performance? (Score:2)
First, I'd like to see decent performance.
I only keep Windows around for gaming, plus a couple of Adobe applications. The last game I bought over Steam, I was happy to finally be able to put on Linux. Geez.
Crappy graphics - couldn't see a damned thing. Mouse lag of nearly a second (move the mouse, watch the mouse cursor slowly move to the new spot) - utterly unplayable. I rebooted, installed the same game on windows, it was (unfortunately) like night and day. Naive theory: No DirectX and/or crappy drivers.
A
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Part of the problem is a bias from the user; if Linux performance sucks for a game, it's Linux' fault; if the Windows performance sucks, it's the vendor's fault. In reality, it'll almost always be the vendor's issue, either because the video card manufacturer's drivers suck or because the game did not properly optimize.
In either case, it's a matter of time and will to make it happen. Hopefully it does. I counsel patience and pressuring the appropriate vendors when you have the opportunity.
Optimization takes time, and time is money (Score:2)
Part of the problem is a bias from the user; if Linux performance sucks for a game, it's Linux' fault; if the Windows performance sucks, it's the vendor's fault. In reality, it'll almost always be the vendor's issue, either because the video card manufacturer's drivers suck or because the game did not properly optimize.
Optimization takes time, and time is money. If the publisher didn't optimize the game, it could be thought of as GNU/Linux's fault for not being enough of a market to make optimization profitable for the publisher.
Steam has been great for Mac too! (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't remember ever seeing a Linux game on Steam that didn't also work on the Mac. I think if you use Valve's tool set to create Linux games, Mac compatibility is a "freebie". This has been huge for Mac gamers. Before Steam, Mac gaming was a wasteland. Now it's viable.
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Similar for Linux games; once you've ported to MacOS, Linux is going to be significantly cheaper, since the hard work of agnosticizing your code is done.
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If Mac ports exist, then where are the Linux ports like Elite: Dangerous [elitedangerous.com]?
Why? For the PR i guess? (Score:3)
Look at the Steam stats. Only 0.92% of Steam users use Linux. There is no way companies that do this are making much money at it. Heck, they would even be better off porting their games to Windows Phone first.
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Small percentages can hide large numbers. 1% of (say) a hundred million users is a market a million in size. Once you've saturated your sales on the Windows side of things and your sales start to slow to a crawl, maybe you're selling a trickle, you can get a healthy bump from selling to that smaller portion of the market a year down the line.
Depends on how well a game adapts to touch (Score:2)
Heck, they would even be better off porting their games to Windows Phone first.
That depends on whether or not the game's control model can be adapted to a 5 inch touch screen. Point-and-click games work well, such as Fruit Ninja, Pipe Dream, match three games, Threes clones, or much of the ScummVM library. So do shmups, Marble Madness-type games, or anything else that can be adapted well to a laptop's trackpad. So do one-button endless runners, such as Temple Run or Jetpack Joyride or SFCave clones with "Flappy" in the title.
Other genres, not so much. I tried the Mario/Giana-style pla
And it even works with Intel chipsets (Score:2)
This article reminded me to download the Steam client and see if it would run on my Ubuntu 15.04 Linux box with an Intel chipset, and it does! I am most pleasantly surprised. I knew they were doing a lot of development with NVidia chipsets, so I wasn't sure if you needed an NVidia card for the client.
Most of the games I have are older ones like Left 4 Dead and Half Life 2, so the framerates should even be acceptable. (Intel chipsets may be weak compared to current generation AMD and NVidia hardware, b
Ivy Bridge runs PS3-class games (Score:2)
Intel chipsets may be weak compared to current generation AMD and NVidia hardware, but compared to the cards of a decade ago they're pretty powerful.
Agreed. A previous Intel CPU (Ivy Bridge with HD 4000) runs Skyrim playably at 720p according to Anandtech [anandtech.com]. This puts it at least at parity with the PlayStation 3, which also runs Skyrim. In turn, because so many AAA PC games prior to 2013 were also released for PS3 and/or Xbox 360, they should have settings that scale down to PC hardware comparable in performance to those consoles.
Steam? More like Humble Bundle. (Score:5, Informative)
Humble Bundle has ported over a hundred games to Linux, so they deserve a lot of credit for actually making Linux games, rather than just creating a store to sell them.
http://blog.humblebundle.com/p... [humblebundle.com]
Re:Blizard Games (Score:4, Informative)
They run really well on Wine.
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"natively available"
I know Wine Is Not an Emulator, but it does tend to more or less behave as one when you need it to run a game intended for a different platform.
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Blizzard is known to test its games on Wine, or so it seems. Like unofficial, untold support.
Re:civ (Score:4, Informative)
You do know that civilization V runs on Linux, don't you? And provided you have a discrete graphics cards, it runs pretty well.
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Civ 4 is rated Platinum in Wine (Score:3)
Civ4 doesn't run on Linux
AppDB says otherwise. It's rated Platinum as of May 2015 [winehq.org].
I'd try Civ 5 - since they've splintered Christianity into 3
Did they also split Islam into 2 (Gummi [wikia.com] and LaBeouf [imdb.com])? Because I can think of a lot more than 3 divisions of Christendom: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Baptist, Methodist, Jehovah's Witnesses, Latter Day Saints, etc.
Religion in Civ (Score:2)
In Civ V - Gods & Kings, there are 11 religions - Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shinto, Sikhism, Taoism, Tengrism and Zoroastrianism. Here, unlike in Civ IV, one can rename the religions.
In Brave New World, Christianity is split into Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism. Although that begged the question - why not other religions as well? Islam would have Sunni and Shia, Buddhism would have Mahayana and Theravada and Hinduism would have Shaivya and Vai
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And so is Beyond Earth.
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Seriously, if you use steam and have a Linux machine, go ahead and install Steam on the Linux box. You might be surprised how many games show up in the list when you start it up. Stuff you might never expect like Bioshock Infinite for example.
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To me, freedom in software is about choice - including the choice to emulate Windows, run binaries, have DOSBox, run VM's, etc
Who has actually said you can't do that?
The second someone says to me "But it's an open system, you can't do that", it's no longer a open system.
You CAN do that, but the second you put proprietary software into it its not an open system anymore. If the goal is to have an open system, running closed software is self defeating.
Re: hardly something to celebrate (Score:2)
I disagree.
The goal is not to have an open system. Your goal may be, but for the vast majority it is not.
An open system, to me, means choice, as the parent poster said. If I CHOOSE to run a walled garden game distribution software on my system, that is MY DECISION.
There are many open alternatives to many, many softwares. Which one you choose is no business or concern of the Linux Foundation.
Re: hardly something to celebrate (Score:2)
If the fanatics like the Anonymous Coward that started this thread ever have any sway in decision making of open technologies, we won't have that choice. At least, not the convenience we have now.
While I don't play video games, I do use some commercial software (Adobe Photoshop, mostly). This mindset that EVERYTHING must be open and free will destroy the current balance we have now.
For example: I welcome the DRM system in Firefox. I find services like Netflix to be useful. Being able to utilize it on Firefo
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For example: I welcome the DRM system in Firefox
I don't. Because now firefox isn't really open.
If adding DRM support into Firefox means I get Netflix without the run-around then I feel we have progressed forward.
Keep progressing forwards until we've reached the place we started: proprietary software.
The MPAA wants 'trusted path' to play blu ray for example. That means all the drivers, kernel, and software; basically anything that touches the video stream, and anything that controls the software that touches the video stream, they want to sign it so you can't modify it.
Do you welcome a linux kernel and video drivers you can't modify to play blu-ray? Does that represent
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You seem to contradict yourself. If you're fine with proprietary software (I am as well), then why are you against "trusted path" in the kernel - in what way proprietary kernel is different from a proprietary user application?
The kernel decides what applications will run and what they are allowed to do. An individual program only controls itself. I am fine with running a program on my system that I don't necessarily have the ability to modify. But I still control the operating system, and the permissions that program operates under.
Trusted path strips me of that.
Just install untrusted Linux kernel and forfeit your ability to access paid content.
Today its forfeight paid content. Tomorrow, its just forfeit content.
Re: hardly something to celebrate (Score:2)
* I use Linux because I prefer it. Not because I am making a political or philosophical statement.
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Look into Vulkan (Score:3)
Games for PlayStation 4 use Mantle, which forms the basis for Vulkan, which is OpenGL 5 in all but name.
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There's even more Mac games than Linux games on steam and Macs don't have DirectX either.
For games that require leading edge graphics I would tend to agree that deviating from DirectX isn't commercially acceptable. However most games these days are ported from the consoles which have much less powerful GPUs than a typical gaming PC.
It's not OpenGL per se that's the problem, it's the quality of the OpenGL drivers under Linux. Having decent OpenGL drivers is a lower priority than good DirectX drivers for NVid
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Still waiting.
Kind of a classic Linux user comment. ;)
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Wine is like running Qt apps on GTK based DE (Score:2)
Exactly. Apps that use Wine on a GTK-based X11/Linux system are conceptually no different from apps that use Qt on a GTK-based X11/Linux system.
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Borderlands 2 has been available for a year or so and runs great on Linux.
I haven't bought the pre-sequel yet (waiting for a complete pack with all DLC), but it's been available since almost day 1 (perhaps even day 1).
How should I fund free game development? (Score:2)
The game world is so dependant on proprietary software. [...] It just reinforces this idea that proprietary bits are OK
How would you recommend to fund the development of free games with AAA-class production values? Or would you prefer that the engine be free and the assets (models, textures, maps, audio, and scripts) be proprietary?
AAA games, players for rented movies, and tax preparation software are three classes of software [pineight.com] for which the free software community has failed to produce a viable business model.
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Why doesn't your keyboard work well with the generic USB Human Interface Device class driver built into Linux?
Hardware compatibility (Score:2)
I read so often the only reason people are running Windows is the games.
That and the fact that very few laptops ship with Linux. Those that do, such as from System76, come in a restricted range of sizes. I looked at two 10" detachables (ASUS Transformer Book and Acer Aspire Switch), and essential things were broken on both.
Settings > Display in Xubuntu (Score:2)
Xubuntu 14.04 has Settings > Display, which lets me mirror or span my desktop between my laptop's monitor and my HDTV. If that's too coarse-grained for you, you can sudo apt-get install arandr, which is what I did during 12.04 when Settings > Display supported only mirroring, not spanning.