OK then that’s my bad, misunderstood the situation then.
It’s good that he does and I certainly give him credit for that. All I meant to say is that it’s not all “Linux is bad because shit can happen”. Because yes absolutely it can. But that can happen on any system.
Also from what I’ve seen most of the time it is just as you said, people copy pasting stuff in their terminal they don’t understand. But really, personally I still see that fault on the user.
If you don’t understand something, then why would you just copy paste it? I don’t know how to fly a plane either, do I just get into a cockpit and hope for the best? I don’t think that would end very well.
On the bright-side: Bricking a fresh install is really not a big deal, it would be more of an issue for a long-term-used system. But obviously I can understand the frustration.
Probably will at some point, if YouTube deems it to show it to me at some point, I don’t have him subscribed because most of his content doesn’t really get me.
Eh, IDK, that’s for the moderators to decide, but probably.
On Pop!_OS installing Steam is literally going into the Pop!_Shop searching for Steam and hitting install. It does not require the terminal at all to install Steam. Which is the way most non-technical people would probably end up installing it unless they ended up following some outdated all-purpose guide.
Once again if using the graphical app shop like options on a lot of distros you will get a normal pop up error message. Hell even with a GUI front end of a package manager you will get a GUI pop up you can read.
Normal people will probably just use the Pop!_Shop most likely.
The only way that would happen on Pop!_OS I think is if you start using PPAs/other repositories.
Pretty much what I am trying to sum up here is that shouldn’t be the out of box experience for a new user on Pop!_OS as far as I am aware. Like maybe if they google how to install it and find some outdated guide, but I feel that’s also an existing issue on Windows just you generally can’t screw the system as hard on Windows. Just wanted to point out that I don’t think most people would end up in the terminal on Pop!_OS.
On the topic of this thread though it would be nice if devs just shipped their games either as flatpaks or appimages then we wouldn’t have to worry about it having outdated dependencies. Even if they have it setup for require x minimum version eventually the API of the library will change enough that some calls will either be changed or no longer exist causing issues even if you can install it. So something like flatpaks, snaps, or appimages that just pack all the necessary libraries in one package are definitely the way to go for games.
Feel like this post here sort of shows the toxicity mentioned earlier in the Linux community. The thing is I don’t think the vast majority of people know anything about OSS. The sheer amount of customers/people I’ve dealt with who have never heard of software like VLC is honestly staggering to me, because before I started working with the public I thought it was the most ubiquitous video player that the vast majority of users used. Now I get calls from lawyers who can’t play a video in h265 because they’re using Windows 7 or earlier versions of Windows 10 and the default player can’t play it. So why would they know that this is what we’re known for if they’re not even familiar with some of the most popular OSS out there?
Gaming companies and executives certainly are toxic who probably have little experience if none when it comes to development, but even if we start looking at indie developers you have to start asking the question “How many of them are actually familiar with OSS/Linux?”. Most people that get into indie game development generally do it due to loving games and wanting to make their own. How many of those people have had much experience with OSS or Linux? Probably not many and their only knowledge about it comes from the horror stories they’ve gotten from other devs of “Oh we spent so much effort porting it for 1% of the community to constantly be complaining”. Which could be due to a bad port, Linux users being more likely to report, or any number of things.
What we need is more good posts like this reddit post about the positives of porting to Linux as well as posts on HOW you should go about porting/packaging your games on Linux. People seem to always want everything in native form vs a packaged blob, but in the case of games they are more like media they aren’t going to be continuously updated. For things like that packaging them in flatpaks, snaps, or appimages are the way to go. Considering the library aspects of a game are so small relative to the rest of the game it won’t really matter size wise, and as for blending in with the rest system most games are fullscreen anyways so it not respecting your theme really doesn’t matter like other applications. Games already have a decent load time compared to other basic applications so longer load time doesn’t really matter a ton. Really none of the cons for flatpaks, snaps or appimages apply to games much.
Also apologies to @FaunCB didn’t mean to single you out there, but just one thing I’ve realized over the years when working with the public is honestly the vast majority of people aren’t aware of what OSS is let alone the community around it. So rather than assume they’re being dumb/idiotic I assume it’s just plain ignorance. Ya there is a lot toxicity/corruption of game developers/companies I could rant on about for who knows how long just like you mentioned, but not really the topic of the thread.
The problem here is expecting Linux to be windows.
Let’s face it! Linux is not windows.
I am a technician, not a gamer. It has nothing to do with game skills but primarily game interests.
You speak of Linux as one single flavor. It’s not!
There are so many branches and forks of Linux that you have to rely on stability of the releases and their long term support.
These you will find in the major distros easily.
I can’t tell you how many outstanding distros fall by the wayside due to lack of interest and utilization.
Developers can easily get discouraged.
And it doesn’t help much when they get destructive criticism by people who expect things to suit their tastes without making an effort to customize.
Let’s not forget the simple fact that the gamer world is just a small part of the computing culture.
Computing started out as a research tool and rapidly evolved as a business tool.
Gaming capabilities was an unthought of bonus.
And early game developers took advantage of that and became rich.
Since the beginning of the windows era, early os’s were centered around business and research.
Unix primarily ran businesses and windows was not developed enough for that purpose.
But Unix was not cost effective for the personal computers usage.
That is why Linus Torvaldis developed the Linux kernel. (As a free alternative to unix).
The fact that you are free to customize the code is the core principle of Linux.
But it’s also the primary reason why there is lack of support on many issues both hardware and software.
Someone who has always been a MS user is not usually exposed to the inner world of software and computer systems operation and structure.
And therefore have a limited understanding of how much they interact.
Setting up a windows computer with its stock of its basic packages is dead simple.
Many Linux os’s are also simple. And many are far more difficult to install because of so many choices for formatting and software packages.
Many people who complain about Linux fall into the major category of failure of expectations (as in expecting it to be the new windows).
You are taking the step onto a different path! Don’t be afraid to ask for guidance! And know from the onset that you will stumble from time to time,
Just pick yourself up and learn from it
Learning more about your software (in detail) allows you to make the good bug report.
So the question is, How many non developers know how to use debug?
And how many gamers are actually developers?
We are on the tech forum here so we are far more tech savvy than the average person.
How we represent the technology world dramatically influences the choice of the average person.
A good example of this is probably Rocket League. It’s built on UE3 which was before UE started supporting linux builds. It took them a year (iirc) longer to complete the port to linux than they had originally announced, this was even with support from valve in the porting process. Once the port finally came out it wasn’t exactly stable and did generate a lot of linux specific bugs. The final nail in the coffin seemed to be the maintenance burden when they were trying to move towards a newer direct x version, source for the direct x part: Rocket League is dropping Mac, Linux because of crazy-low player counts [Updated] | Ars Technica
They also mentioned that supporting linux was less necessary because proton/wine allowed linux users to still play it. This might sound like proton hurt native linux gaming but the reality was that running under proton was actually both more performant and more stable than the native port, at least in my own experience.
This is also an interesting point. This isn’t really just a problem with games but with linux software in general, which as other posts point out is why things like flatpak, appimage, and snap exist. There was a lot of pushback on these formats, but some of the major problems have been mostly fixed. The slow startup times, for example, are much better than they were a couple years ago. Honestly it surprises me that valve hasn’t adopted some form of packaging like this for native linux steam games. In my mind the biggest costs are the duplicated libraries and the decompression of the package, but the decompression thing already happens with steam and wasting storage to duplicated libraries is better than the game not working.
Well looking at estimated US numbers there are 4 million professional developers and 225 million gamers (rounding some from the numbers found by my quick google search). So assuming every single professional developer is also a gamer (they’re not) then we’re looking at 1.8% of gamers are also developers.
Honestly, I would bet there are more developers who don’t know how to use debug than non-developers who do know how to.
Looking through the rest of your post I don’t think people want linux to be the next windows, they just want their software to work. Which if you think about what a kernel is then that’s really not a terrible thing to expect. A kernel is really just an abstraction of the hardware so that software can just work without having to deal with the specific details of every single piece of hardware out there. Once you get to the OS level it’s really the same thing, in this case it’s an abstraction to make software work together.
Also, Unix not being cost effective wasn’t so much the reason Linus created linux, but it was in a round about way the cause of him creating linux. Essentially he was using Minix at the time (which was cost effective for personal use at a cost of $69 nice which included Tannenbaum’s book about OS design) and the terminal emulation in it wasn’t very good so it would cause him problems when he used it to connect to his University’s unix system. So, he wrote his own hardware level terminal client. Then he got frustrated that he couldn’t download things with his terminal client which was important since connecting to the unix system is how he could access the internet. So he had to write a disk driver for his terminal client and during this he realized he was basically writing an operating system. So he decided he might as well go ahead and try to write something that he could replace his minix system with, and for what he meant by his system he said it only had to do the things he cared about in minix. So really it was just created to replace minix for himself so that he had working software (the terminal emulation) that he could download stuff with while still being able to program and whatnot / was a cool project. This can all be read about in his book: GitHub - limkokholefork/just-for-fun-linus-torvalds
Now, a lot of the stuff that we attribute to being the reasons he wrote linux are really just the reasons he stuck to his method of distribution not even the reason he started to distribute it that way. Note that he says in his book that the reason he initially uploaded the code was just to show that he actually did write an operating system.
