Generally, no, this is not the case. The few AAA developed games that come to Linux are generally ported by third party groups. One of the most recent AAA games to get a release on Linux is Rise of the Tomb Raider, which was ported by Feral Interactive. Big publishers generally aren’t too interested in making a Linux port available, so smaller port houses like Feral and Aspyr pick up the tab for the publishers. The PC port of Rise of the Tomb Raider was released in 2016.
Bioshock Infinite was ported by Virtual Programming, and isn’t a completely native port. Virtual Programming has been working on ARMA III for Linux currently.
Right now, it’s just individuals like Ryan Gordon and others, as well as port groups listed above who are still responsible for making most of those ports happen. Though indie developers and b-tier developers have been doing Linux ports themselves when they can.
That is not entirely true. Valve does have that Artifact card game getting a release later this year:
And it will have a simultaneous Windows/ Linux and Mac release this November. What’s funny is that the game is using Source 2.
I’m not talking about a shitty Hearthstone clone, I’m talking about the first person experience they’re known for. Me saying “Valve will never make a game ever again” is like saying “Disney will never make an animated film again” and people say “Murr, what about pixar?” when it’s obvious I’m talking about their hand drawn films.
Until Valve makes another quality first person experience, they’re dead to me as a developer.
I really enjoyed the video, for obvious reasons, but also for the aspects regarding the Linux community. This is really the message I want to hear to help build a more welcoming community, specially for game publishers.
Were in this weird time now where we got excellent tech on Linux (Mesa has never been that great, Vulkan does amazing things, …) but at the same time we lost support from a bunch of publishers that either had a negative first experience or were driven away by outright toxicity by the community.
I fully agree with Wendell when he says we’re in a transitional period, and we need to leverage the tools we have on linux to go through this period, and build something great.
Valve despite their apparent lack of activity, do contribute a lot to the Linux ecosystem. After all they are hiring Keith Packard, who promised great things during last DebConf. I just feel that if Epic did finally take a stance and actually supported Linux instead of leaving a semi-open source engine in the wild then we’ll have the real leverage to make publishers look at Linux again.
Meanwhile, Lutris will happily fill the gap. We only got one graphically demanding game on Linux this year with Rise of the Tomb Raider so DXVK is really a relief in that regard. We’re finally able to play most high profile games on Linux, with a mostly acceptable performance drop.
While we are trying to gain the interest of publishers, DXVK keeps the platform technically competitive and even helps in the development of Mesa or the Vulkan specs, which will then benefit native games.
All this recent activity has really changed the way I envision the project. I have started working on an upcoming release when all I had previously planned was the 0.5.0 release which is months away. I’ve recently been able to reproduce and fix bugs that needed to be fixed urgently so I hope the upcoming 0.4.19 version will improve the experience for a lot of users.
Have you seen the windows end of the Steam storefront? Shovelware abound, so at least the Linux end is keeping up with the trends.
I get the feeling influencing factors were different back than. windows was the up and coming at the time with the ease of use software and office. OS/2 was making its self appealing to try and keep/gain users.
Now windows is not so inviting and getting worse all the time. Linux is on the up and up, all be it slowly, so they are trying to make any transition that people may want or need as easy as possible until the market and programmers catches up to native. The pressure on the user base is looking like it is going the other way this time compared the the Win-OS/2 shift.
We never shifted to OS/2 because NT was fine and even though OS/2 was 100% compatible with DOS and Pre-9X Windows Apps because it was made by Microsoft Engineers and it had a Windows License in OS/2 and if you buy ArcaOS today, you get a free copy of Windows 3.11, nobody made OS/2 Apps because developers thought “Meh, the people that use OS/2 will just run the DOS or Windows 3 Version. Oh, Microsoft released Windows 95 and NT 4.0? Well, I guess I’ll build my new software around those new APIs, screw the OS/2 Users.”
If this is “transitional period”, why is it taking so long? Transitional periods aren’t supposed to take over a quarter of a century. I’m sure that was Castro’s Excuse when his central planning wasn’t working. (Not to say the GPL is Communist or Socialist)
I am no expert, it always looks to me the the reason is fractured unfocused development. Stuff like this:
With almost no overruling “head” of linux everyone does their own thing thinking they have the best solution, but there are not enough people to back the project, the people are part time coders and the scope of what every they want to do is very specific.
Some of them are great and worthy of development and backing but it is not anyones job to tell people what to work on. Then they get slow enough in their development that newer hardware comes out and newer competing software comes out and they now have the original project to finish and now all these new features or hardware to support too if it is to work properly.
Just too scattered is why it is taking so long. but some of the bigger projects are gaining momentum, again slowly but at least people are starting to band together rather than all working on competing standards. Some of the projects are even starting to compliment each other, like the pass through and looking glass. So it is getting there and the more of this development focus and collaboration continues and improves things will get there.
I do not see how a transitional period has a deadline. Every process of a technology to come to maturity and become widely used takes a long time, especially when you have to compete with something that is already established. It is even more true for FOSS that everyone involved is there for the long run and not interested in immediate profit. These things work in continuum, as long as a technology moves forward it always feels like a transitional period.
The only reason proprietary technologies feel non-transitional is that short economic incentive favors slower progress and cause many of them were accepted even if half-working cause there was no alternative.
You may feel that way cause you are not interested for the type of games that this progress has provided. But just because you do not happen to like the games it does not mean that the progess is not there.
I’m not disagreeing with you. Clearly Valve’s making this card game to test the waters with more micro transactions and long term profitability. This is their first Android game. I would love to see Valve develop another proper game, Left 4 Dead 3, Portal 3, Half-Life 3… just count to 3, Valve. They do also have some VR projects in the works, and claim to be working on some other games.
But at the same time, this is still a Valve game, and it is being targeted for multi-platform release. Which is why I said “not entirely true”.
That new chat client in Steam pisses me off too. It does feel like it takes up more space, but at the same time also more constrictive than their previous chat app.
Got a question for all the linux gamers here. Is it possible to install games/programs onto a different partition in GNU/linux?
In windows I have one 128GB SDD for operating ssystem only. Then 2TB HDD that is split into 3 partitions. And all my programs and games are installed on 2TB HDD.
I do this in order to save space on my SSD and in case I need to re-install OS I don’t lose the rest of my data.
It depends. Normal programs installed through your package manager can be installed on a different partition, though this setup might be tricky for newer users, and so I wouldn’t recommend trying it. With steam games and manually downloaded programs (like DRM-free games from GOG or Humble Bundle), it is very easy. By default, steam games are downloaded to your home folder. Wine programs are also installed in your home folder. Many users have their drives set up so they have a smaller SSD for root, and a larger drive for /home, and this is easy to do and supported by the installers of common distributions.
Could i not just permanently mount the home folder to a large HDD partition and then mount the folder where program files are installed onto second large partition.
On Linux, programs installed through a package manager don’t reside in one folder, like they do on Windows (C:\Program Files). Instead, there are different files placed throughout the file system (/usr/bin, /usr/share/, /usr/lib, etc…), with different directories having different purposes. You could mount a partition at /usr to catch most of these, but I would highly recommend against it, and this would be a generally unsupported configuration. I’ve never needed more that 60GB or so for my root disk, and then I have /home mounted on a much larger disk with games and the like.
If you want a partition for your games yeah of course you can do it. But the partition must be a linux partition (ext4). If you are using steam you have to set the steam folder to that partition. If you are using lutris you have to make the default working directory on that partition and you will be fine. That is basically how i also do things. Also a good idea is to have the partition automount at start-up.
The system stuff and applications (like steam and lutris) themselves is a bad idea to have on a different partition than the root but game data , which are the largest ones, you can do no problem.
How many GB does linux take up after installing. Windows takes 40GB and then misteriously keeps growing even if you don’t store any files in your User folder.
Most Linux distributions require fewer than 10GB. Lighter distributions can take only a fraction of that. Some extreme cases, like alpine, can have a fully installed base system in only a few megabytes.
Why the DXVK guy doesn’t accept donations; he’s been working for Valve since February:
In addition to that, we’ve been supporting the development of DXVK[github.com], the Direct3D 11 implementation based on Vulkan; the nature of this support includes:
Employing the DXVK developer in our open-source graphics group since February 2018
Providing direct support from our open-source graphics group to fix Mesa driver issues affecting DXVK, and provide prototype implementations of brand new Vulkan features to improve DXVK functionality
Working with our partners over at Khronos, NVIDIA, Intel and AMD to coordinate Vulkan feature and driver support
