Do you honestly think linux will take over as a gaming OS?

I know you guys like Linux and I do as well, but do you realistically seeing it take over?

PC Gamers pick Windows not because the driver performance is better, Linux could have the best drivers and that won't help it much. Even if 95% of Windows games were ported to Linux, people will still want that extra 5% because that 5% is their favourites like Bethesda games and even in a best case scenario where their favourite game if their favourite game gets reverse engineered in an open source engine like OpenMW, they won't use it because there are mods that are dependent on script extensions via dll injection.

But aside of that, they use windows because it has ALL of the PC Games and they don't want to inconvenience themselves by having Linux as the host OS and use a Virtual Machine with GPU Passthrough every time they want to run their favourite game just so they won't have to mess with wine and at that point, they might as well run windows without Linux if they need to go into a VM just to do what they do everyday. Though things might be different if Valve can get all of their third party publishers to release for Linux only. At this point, Linux is only a "in case of emergency, break glass" OS for gaming for the event if and when MS blocks all unapproved software and you have to jailbreak windows to install Steam.

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I think you have too many generalizations there. Sure your points are valid for some (maybe even most) people. But it never hurts to improve the diversity and in my opinion there should be no reason why applications should be OS dependent. Ideally this whole topic will be solved within the next 10-20 years through broadly accepted standards that serve the needs of multiplatform development and usage.

But maybe that's a bit naive.

I'm saying 95% won't cut it and even if it had 100%, that wouldn't fix the problem of a modding infrastructure that's dependent on DLL injection. It's all about convenience and Linux is less convenient than Windows.

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I don't see it taking over, but I do see it as becoming a viable alternative with a decent slice of the market share.

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Are Microsoft products really going to be worth it going forward ? They have Office that brings in most of their revenue from business and Windows from oem sales.

Libreoffice works fine for me and is free. If Microsoft loses the office cash cow in business markets there going to have to do something or shrink a lot.

Im taking several years down to line not this year or next year mind you.

I don't know, it will take a lot just to equal current mac market share and even then, mac doesn't have that high of a percentage of steam users.

I saw a demonstration of Doom running in Vulkan. It won't take much to change the code to make it run native on the Linux kernel.

Also, once Microsoft pushes out that kernel change that allows binaries compiled for the Linux kernel to be used on a M$ system. There will be almost zero incentive for anyone to write code for native windows, unless it ends up taking a huge performance hit in running the Linux ELF binaries on windows.

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Take over not really...Viable choice that has a good deal of the desktop market share sure...

And windows are not more convenient they are more familiar. Not the same thing and much more difficult to overcome than just simple convenience. If windows were just more convenient I would easily see them gone on 10 years time the moment sth more convenient comes out (Linux or other)...Its not that easy...

There was an OS/2 Subsystem in NT4.0 and that didn't help OS/2.

Right now it won't. As we get more along into people finding windows annoying and as windows breaks itself then yes it is completely possible. With Vulkan out wreaking havoc, soon there won't be a need for the 800 dollar ports that small devs have to worry about and big devs won't be able to bitch anymore.

I think the main problem is we took something that was more meant for servers and cli and added the wrong stuff to it. Kinda like fanboying but honestly its for the better of people. We're like a cult.

Within 10 years M$ is going to be in a similar position Apple was in when they kicked jobs out. Since they kicked out all the devs that had a sane mind and knew how to actually fix the problems everyone is having, thi shit is going to pile up and they aren't going to know what to do. Now, in the event they don't fuck up as bad as it looks that they will, it'll just be a head to head deal.

Nope, and it never will cause it doesn't offer you any thing that Windows will do for you from a gaming standpoint

Except that whole thing where windows breaks and you have to either reinstall and restore everything or wait 2 months for an update, where in linux we could set up a system in SystemD that reads JournalCTL and auto corrects.

But even so you still don't have to completely redo everything in linux if you know how to read and think.

M$ put in the "Automatically Finds Drivers And Updates" because of that.

You have bad luck cause no one else complains about windows breaking to the point of dis-use..

Linux will never be the go-to gaming platform, and SteamOS' failure was proof of that.

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Its hardly a failure its just theres no one to work on it because valve can't sway the card companies to work more on drivers. The OS is done and now valve has a big gas over getting games ported. They just did Saints Row, SOMA is next, and a whole shit ton more. If I remember correctly Alien Isolation and Outlast 1/2 are on there as well.

I think AMDGPU will help with that and supposedly NV is working more on linux drivers now. We'll have to wait and see.

It absolutely was a failure..

Linux small library was the main reason, and drivers were finnicky.. No PC gamer wanted a console, and no Console player wanted a PC.

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I think the whole point of the Steam Machine was "Hey dumbass that says you can't hook up a PC to your TV. This isn't the 90's, PCs have HDMI and your TV has HDMI".

Console gamers aren't THAT stupid.. They know how to hook up a console or PC to a TV, now building a PC that would be something they may not know how to do.

They're not usually stupid, just ignorant and a lot of their pre-conceived notions about PC is misinformation and legacy information that doesn't apply anymore.

Well there's many reasons for not wanting to use a PC for gaming, and you can't judge someone just because they aren't on the platform.

I know, but there's a lot of misinformation out there like the one that say they don't want to be "hunched over a desk" and as for the console gamers that are educated about PC and chose consoles... Well, you can lead a Horse to water, but you can't make it drink.