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Bucket said:
Yes, you're the lone voice of reason because you dare to think that Valve can't do what these developers have managed quite well on their own: make their game work on Linux machines.

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chungy said:
Not really sure what the "hope" is for; the developers have simply taken the effort to port their games to the platform, and it doesn't necessarily have any greater kinds of pains than any other platform port (be it Windows, Mac OS, Xbox 360, whatever).

As for your "truly universal binary", try not to fudge up terminology so much -- I believe you mean a binary that runs across all the major distributions and runs well without issues, most of those games already run just fine as such (and there are shitty ports, still; blame those specific developers, not the platform). On the other hand, if you mean universal binary more in the lines of Mac OS: there was (is?) such an effort: FatELF. Linus thought it was nasty and it enver got into mainline Linux.

FWIW, Csonicgo, you managed to have valid points to an extent. I'd argue sound systems aren't really that big of an issue anymore but there's still a bit of work to be done on them.

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Bucket said:
Yes, you're the lone voice of reason because you dare to think that Valve can't do what these developers have managed quite well on their own: make their game work on Linux machines.

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Phml said:
Anyone who believes Linux and average user can go together is utterly out of touch with reality, and anyone who interprets this as implying I dislike Linux is part of the problem.

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K!r4 said:
Last news: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...item&px=MTExMzA

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Working with hardware vendors

We’ve been working with NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel to improve graphic driver performance on Linux. They have all been great to work with and have been very committed to having engineers on-site working with our engineers, carefully analyzing the data we see. We have had very rapid turnaround on any bugs we find and it has been invaluable to have people who understand the game, the renderer, the driver, and the hardware working alongside us when attacking these performance issues.
This is a great example of the benefits that are the result of close coordination between software and hardware developers and should provide value to the Linux community at large.

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Csonicgo said:
What needs to be done in Linux:

Sane Sound libraries (Not another pointless abstraction layer over 3000 more extraction layer)
Sane Display/IO systems like Wayland (http://wayland.freedesktop.org/) With major hardware vendor support

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chungy said:
Theres this too, which is every bit as misleading too. It could potentially be made into a much more complicated-looking diagram, but it was made in response to that particular diagram for Linux :P

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fraggle said:

CSonicGo's complaint in a previous comment is about sound latency. Low latency audio output is actually a really tricky, difficult problem to address. To avoid stuttering you generally need an audio buffer to ensure a continuous stream of sound to the output device. The larger the buffer, the less chance of stuttering, but the more latency you add. Unsurprisingly, for most uses, stuttering is more of a problem than latency.

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K!r4 said:

Isn't this kind of fixed with RealTime-kernel? It is used in specific distro though.

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The RT-kernel (RealTime-kernel) is a modified Linux-kernel, that alters the standard timer frequency the Linux kernel uses and gives all processes or threads the ability to have realtime-priority. (This means, that a time-critical process like an audio-stream can get priority over another, less-critical process like network activity. This is also configurable per user (for example, the processes of user "tux" could have priority over processes of user "nobody" or over the processes of several system daemons). On a standard Linux-system, this is only possible with one process at the same time.

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K!r4 said:
Wrong choice of words, sorry. Like you say, it isn't a fix.

Wikipedia:

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I know it is used in Ubuntu Studio.

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Nomad said:
I wonder if ChromeOS will support Steam natively ;D

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Jonathan said:
In fact, something that caught my eye in that article somewhat backs up my theory:


Why hire kernel and device driver hackers if all they're doing is porting Steam and the Source engine?

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