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- brstilson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10IT's a shame, too. I play Unreal Tournament in Linux (the pc version installs and runs natively) and I get a good 20 fps boost over Windows.
- imacyco, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Gaming support would make Linux the champ in my eyes as well but its not a priority IMHO.
- Mejogid, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I'm not sure when you last tried games in Linux, but wine and cadega have come a long way recently. Cadega plays pretty much any main stream/older game you throw at it, and wine has good support among older games and is making steady progress up other fronts. Some games even run faster under wine than on Windows! (At least on my system with an nVidia card).
IDSoft has been very good to the Linux community (although the quality of their games has certainly gone down lately), as are Bioware and Epic. I think if we can get a few major game engines over and convert a couple of developers to the faith (Valve and Crytek would be my two), we'd be most of the way there.
(let me dream) - wtfdan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4WoW runs fine in Cedega, even on Direct3D on an ATI card. In fact, it runs faster using DirectX in Cedega than it does OpenGL in Cedega or OpenGL in WINE.
Unfortunately, it still doesn't change the fact that you lose a (to some) significant amount of performance using this method over running it in XP. - cakefart, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4It's not WoW.
It's not Word.
It's QuickBooks, PhotoShop, PowerPoint, and Outlook. - Runesabre, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I think Linux has definitely had significant success in the server arena. Nearly every web hosting ISP offers a Linux option for web hosting.
IMO, Linux will be considered significant for the desktop when you can walk into Fry's, Best Buy, CompUSA or other consumer electronics retailer and go to the "Linux Software" section of the store just like you currently do for Mac and Windows.
To get to that point, I think Linux needs to focus more on standardization for ease of 3rd party software distribution, configuration and support as well as backwards operability.
There are too many Linux variations out there, none of which have an appreciable controlling share of the Linux market that a software development company could reasonably focus their resources developing, distributing and supporting.
On top of that, the frequency at which Linux distributions are released coupled with no guarantee of existing applications working without re-compiling and possibly even re-coding puts a signficant drain on companies trying to keep their software working over the long-term.
Windows is dominant on the desktop because it's easy to distribute and support software implemented for it and there's a very reasonable probability that once a company spends the $$$ to get an application built and working for Windows, it will continue working over several years rather than being crippled within six months and requiring more work - Mejogid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4You don't need to focus on a specific distribution - you can use a proprietry installer, or you can make packages in a few key formats. There's no chance of the distributions disappearing in the near future.
Take Opera - they've done a good job at providing a web interface for many distributions, but all point to one of a few packages on their FTP server. Id soft use script based installers for their game engines which work across pretty much all distributions. You could even release libraries under a dual lisence to allow most of the tricky work to be done by the community, without actually harming software sales. - ISVDamocles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3That's what the Linux Standard Base http://www.freestandards.org/en/LSB and FreeDesktop http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/ are trying to achieve.
Most distributions have (nearly) completed implementation of the standardized filesystem hierarchy defined by the LSB 3.1 Specification, and GNOME and KDE have been actively collaborating to make each others applications run seamlessly under the other's WM.
Now all we need is the major distributions to standardize on .deb packages :) - Anpheus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3No offense, but if you do 10 installs and each one starts out as the same base system, why not just duplicate the virtual drive?
Perhaps Linux virtualization works differently from what I've seen, but in every case I've seen there is a single file that contains the virtual hard disk and other information that can simply be duplicated. - WiskyDrinker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I don't think you understand, listen to that podcast again.
- benplaut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Good summary, bad title...
please, submitters, ask yourself 'does it make sense? is it a complete title? does it portray the story?'! - wtfdan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Also, @imacyco
If Linux wants more marketshare, they'd best MAKE gaming a priority, because many geeks are gamers, and if Linux supported games just as well as Windows, you'd see a HUGE shift in the amount of people using it.
Ubuntu took a step in the right direction by trying to appeal to the average end-user. Unfortunately though, the average end-user hasn't even heard of Linux. Gamers have. And if those gamers start using Linux? Imagine the possibilities. - spectrm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3newsflash - the money isn't in gaming. Red Hat and SuSE could give two sh*ts on a shingle if some basement dwelling geek uses their OS to play games. They care about what Big Whig and his board of trustees plan to do with their 1.2billion dollar IT infrastructure and 500K+ in yearly support subscriptions.
Gaming is small potatoes to the game that MS, Red Hat, Solaris, and Oracle are playing. - jamesdwi, on 10/12/2007, -5/+6Well linux's current answers for vitalization, save on hardware costs, but they really don't do much to save on administrative costs and that is what really kills the bottom line, currently if you deploy 10 virtual machines on Linux you get to do 11 installs even if you automate the process an install takes an hour. Also there is no real control for sharing disk space, besides using a shared NFS file system. And networking is even worse. If you want to give 2 of the virtual machines a higher priority to band width and limit the rest to a smaller portion of it. You have to study a number of highly confusing how-tos.
If you use the latest features of Solaris and even more so Solaris Express. Deploying virtual hosts becomes almost a real-time event, instead something that takes an hour or more. With Solaris you can share disk space easily and impose quotas and space guarantees with just a simple command or two. check out http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2006/08/day-in-life-of-solaris-11-admin.html if you wish to see how Solaris does vitalization the easy way. Though the document mostly highlights Zones. Some of the features work in XEN as well. - overlordmead, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1my sweety was asking in her completely naive Mac-user mind whether I have Quickbooks on here, gnucash just wasn't cutting it. Try explaining open-source to her....
- wtfdan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You might be better off asking...
Why does the title start with: "The Path to..." . - mcdpa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm using VMWare in Linux with virtual machines for several versions of Windows and a couple Linux distros. Unless I try use something heavy on 3D, the virtual machines are snappy. "I/O performance was 3-4 times slower" ... not in my experience, but having plenty of memory is important if you intend to run several VM's at once.
- illicium, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1And any decent semi-professional/professional audio sequencer/DAW. (That is, not Ardour/Rosegarden/whatever, and not Fruityloops running in wine with 5000ms latency)
- sgtpinky, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@spectrum
Ah, money isn't in gaming? Try explaining that to the guy that worked out that the games industry made more money than Hollywood last year...
The only question really is how best to get your share of that money. Really, the major appeal that Linux has over MS products is the pricetag.
In terms of business contracts - there is always going to be money there. People that make money, spend money to make more money. - berfmurret, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@ illicium
AMEN. i think mackie is supposed to port tracktion 2 soon? at least thats what i have heard in passing. tracktion would cut it for me. though i have been wondering the past couple of weeks what ableton live would be like in WINE?.. NI Reakor? im so close to dumping windows. :( just have to get past that DAW/VST thing thats keeping me in XP. - Grimboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well, the original objective of linux was to provide an entertaining little os kernel for hobbyists to develop, I think it has always forfilled that objective. I suppose in this context success means widespread adoptation, which it hasn't got.
- lassel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Please enlighten me. Why is virtualization such a great thing?
Seems like a vaste of a lot of good resources to me. The virtualized systems I have worked with has had really bad performance. Esp. I/O performance was 3-4 times slower.
Wouldn't a manageable form of chroot jail be a more efficient way of reaching the same goal? - pwrstick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I just installed Parallels on Ubuntu, and the one thing I can see that is nice is not having to take the time to boot XP. I still boot XP if I'm going to game, but now I can do all of my work within Linux on XP very quickly without having to shutdown Linux and then boot XP, do something, shutdown XP, boot linux (you get the idea).
And it runs fast! No problems with it that I've seen, though I've just run Dreamweaver so far. haven't had a chance to try out Photoshop yet. - metalhed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Well, that all depends on what your definition of "Linux success" is, doesn't it?
- blueroo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2If it takes you an hour to perform an automated install, you are doing something terribly wrong and should re-evaluate your competence. It takes me all of maybe 5 minutes to deploy a new Xen domain.
- mynameisneo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0well, with such an intense question like that, since when was linux not a success?
- Runesabre, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Gaming Companies don't jump on the Linux bandwagon because the support costs of trying to support the multitude of Linux variations combined with the developer costs of constantly re-fixing their games every time one of the multitude of Linux variations is updated would outweigh the extra 5% of sales they might make from Linux users who haven't already bought the Windows version of their game and playing it on their dual-boot machine.
- malkir, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0While I don't think linux has 15% market share, I do think game developers would be wise to develop for linux. Absolutely anyone can use linux. Shoot they could even put a linux distribution on a cd and put it in the gaming package.
- truck87bp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Gaming....With the huge rise in Linux usage, it seems to me that Gaming Software Company's should jump on the Linux bandwagon, provide drivers and start reaping profits from increased sales. If 15% of the population is using Linux and growing, their profits could do the same.
:) - chess007, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2I don't see how virtualization is a good thing, considering the "blue pill" issue. But thats only on specific processors. It would however, be a way to root any OS; linux, Windows, whatever.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1983037,00.asp
There's only one known way to detect it, and that is mentioned in SecurityNow episode 54.
http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm
"Leo and I continue our ongoing discussion of the security implications and applications of virtualization and virtual machines. This week we examine the "Blue Pill" OS subversion technology made possible by AMD�s next generation virtualization hardware support. We debunk the hype surrounding this interesting and worrisome capability, placing it into a larger security and virtualization context."
For those people who don't like Steve Gibson, many others have came to the same conclusions about the Blue Pill thing. - llbbl, on 10/12/2007, -8/+5Step one begins with Native gaming support and no I'm not talking about Tux Racer. Too bad will only happen if game developers start writing in opengl instead of direct3d because there is no way MS is going to release direct3d. Trying to play games like world of warcraft in Linux can be a nightmare, trust me.
- Reidtheweed01, on 10/12/2007, -5/+0Huh?
Since when was linux a sucess. - wsq314, on 10/12/2007, -11/+0nmljljkljkljkljkl
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