For long-suffering Linux users who have endured the dearth of high-quality action games on their open source desktops, the wait for better game developer support soon may be over. New technology is making Linux more attractive to game makers. In fact, it may keep Linux under the hood, so players will have no clue Linux is inside. Until now, game makers have relied primarily on Windows PCs and gaming consoles powered by proprietary alternatives to the Linux OS. However, Linux-based systems specially designed for gaming are on the rise.
The answer is simple...NO! Not only is less than 5% of the PC games released in the last 10 years functional natively on Linux (the rest will have to use the kludge mess that is Wine) but honestly the graphical subsystem on Linux is a bad joke, see how Mozilla disabled hardware acceleration on Linux because of how flaky and buggy X is when it comes to GPU acceleration.
Its really not a surprise that Valve supports Linux, considering their engine is crap that hasn't been updated since 2004. Look I like Steam, I really do, but the valve game engines are so ancient its a bad joke! The modern engines just don't support OpenGL and would cost a mint to switch, what the PS3/PS4 uses is a stripped to the bone GL-ES and NOT the full OpenGL, not to mention since the stink over OpenGL V3 that its fallen seriously behind DirectX and has to be jury rigged to support modern features using shims, its just not a real competitor.
As much as I like the IDEA of a game console that guys like me can build, tweak, and sell this is simply a product that the market doesn't exist for. those that play PC games have a Windows gaming PC, those that want plug and play buy consoles, with SteamOS you get to pay PC prices for a system that supports less than 10% of the Steam catalog, probably not even 5% of the top 1000 popular software programs run on Linux, so all you are doing is hamstringing your system.
Oh and don't forget Torvalds flipped the bird to Nvidia because of how much trouble he has had with their drivers, AMD drivers are known not to be very stable or anywhere feature parity with their Windows drivers, and intel is weak sauce when it comes to gaming...yeah not good on the Linux front.
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Linux Gaming: If You Build It, Will They Come?
Posted by: Jack M. Germain July 25, 2014 11:23 AMFor long-suffering Linux users who have endured the dearth of high-quality action games on their open source desktops, the wait for better game developer support soon may be over. New technology is making Linux more attractive to game makers. In fact, it may keep Linux under the hood, so players will have no clue Linux is inside. Until now, game makers have relied primarily on Windows PCs and gaming consoles powered by proprietary alternatives to the Linux OS. However, Linux-based systems specially designed for gaming are on the rise.
Its really not a surprise that Valve supports Linux, considering their engine is crap that hasn't been updated since 2004. Look I like Steam, I really do, but the valve game engines are so ancient its a bad joke! The modern engines just don't support OpenGL and would cost a mint to switch, what the PS3/PS4 uses is a stripped to the bone GL-ES and NOT the full OpenGL, not to mention since the stink over OpenGL V3 that its fallen seriously behind DirectX and has to be jury rigged to support modern features using shims, its just not a real competitor.
As much as I like the IDEA of a game console that guys like me can build, tweak, and sell this is simply a product that the market doesn't exist for. those that play PC games have a Windows gaming PC, those that want plug and play buy consoles, with SteamOS you get to pay PC prices for a system that supports less than 10% of the Steam catalog, probably not even 5% of the top 1000 popular software programs run on Linux, so all you are doing is hamstringing your system.
Oh and don't forget Torvalds flipped the bird to Nvidia because of how much trouble he has had with their drivers, AMD drivers are known not to be very stable or anywhere feature parity with their Windows drivers, and intel is weak sauce when it comes to gaming...yeah not good on the Linux front.