Linux one day run games?

Shane

Shane

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Staff member
As the title asks....Do you think that one day in the future Linux will be able to run any pc game for windows without any issues? .exe?

Only i cant understand why they cant,I know its an entirely diffrent os Obviusly thats why, But theres alot of people working on linux and its Open source so why has nobody made it so it can run games without Wine?

Surely use Gamers dont have to put up with Microsoft forever. :D

Sorry if this is a dumb question but im curious.
 
If you were working for a software company would you put all the extra time/effort/money porting your software to an o/s that has only a about 2-3% of the desktop market?

If linux were more popular on the desktop market then it may happen. But thats a long way off!
 
But thats exactly why not many people use Linux i think,Because it cant run games properly.

If it somehow was able to run games properly then i think ALOT of people would be ditching Microsoft, and when it became more popular which im sure it would software companies might just start porting their stuff for linux too.

I would switch if it could do gaming Even if it was one distro,i would happily pay for it.
 
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The main reason why this will be very unlikely to happen is because of Direct X. Microsoft is not going to willingly support a version of Direct X on Linux. There are several games out that have native Linux support: The Unreal Tournament and Quake/Doom series for instance. Some games also have pretty good support through Wine, like Source based games.

What you are suggesting is Microsoft supporting the Open Source community for Gaming purposes. This is highly unlikely. Microsoft is in the business to make money, and they have a death grip on their IP.

Don't let Steve Ballmer read this thread... He will probably have a stroke.
 
So why is it steam games work so well on Linux? and those other games you mentioned?

Thought Unreal Tournament and Doom used DX?
 
Nevakonaza said:
So why is it steam games work so well on Linux? and those other games you mentioned?

Thought Unreal Tournament and Doom used DX?
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UT and Doom were ported to Linux. In Windows the run under DirectX or OpenGL. In Linux they run under OpenGL only. Some of the Valve games that use Source (and even some of their older ones), not all games on Steam, use Direct X and some Direct X games work fine under Wine. I'm not fully sure of the specific reasons, so I can't give you examples. Valve has also expressed an interest in porting a few of their games to OpenGL on Linux just like ID has done with the Doom/Quake games.
 
Direct X is just a set of APIs, Linux just needs it's own set of APIs to give applications direct access to hardware, which well kind of defeats the purpose of POSIX permissions but I am sure you can develop around that.

Also, Linux will never have an .exe that highly defeats the purpose of Linux. That will soon go away in Windows too as you can already see some apps need to be ran as administrators. Authentication is the best defense against malicious software that wants to install itself automatically.

The main problem is people don't want to take the time to learn the differences and they want it to work for them with little or no effort. While I agree an OS should be easy to use, but there needs to be some sort of compromise between a learning curve, security, and ease of usage.
 
tlarkin said:
...
Also, Linux will never have an .exe that highly defeats the purpose of Linux. That will soon go away in Windows too as you can already see some apps need to be ran as administrators. Authentication is the best defense against malicious software that wants to install itself automatically...
Click to expand...

Can you elaborate on this? I am not understanding what you are trying to say here regarding the executable and how that corresponds to running a binary as an administrator.
 
Zatharus said:
Can you elaborate on this? I am not understanding what you are trying to say here regarding the executable and how that corresponds to running a binary as an administrator.
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Any app that needs to access library files outside of your ~/ in *nix is going to need permission to install, and thus proper permissions will be applied via sudo.

Where as in Windows you can just double click any old .exe file and it runs as root with out any authentication needed.

The way Vista gets around it is, you need to run an app as admin with out a password but more of a GUI interaction and that is the start of their migration. After all, Microsoft bought 100s of millions of dollars of security code from Novell, and this was not too long ago, and it was from the SuSe Linux product since Novell no longer makes or supports Netware really.

Now in some cases an app is not self contained in *nix and it will need access to library files in another directory. Typically it creates sym links or what not to those files or the installer script will set permissions for that process to access them.

That is the best way I can explain it and I am not a software developer.
 
Actually, that clears it right up for me Tlarkin. I understand where you were going with that now. Much obliged, sir.
 
I guess as linux becomes more and more popular, more people will develop games for the platform.

Developers and business people alike will see the huge potential in writing games for linux.
 
vinnie107 said:
I guess as linux becomes more and more popular, more people will develop games for the platform.

Developers and business people alike will see the huge potential in writing games for linux.
Click to expand...

Well for a while a few game developers wanted to develop onto OS X, now Job's being the unilateral business thinker he is (which is a great thing for certain aspects of Apple, after all he helped them come back out of huge debt) he didn't want to work with game developers.

No since 10.5 Apple released what they call Core Animation, which is an API that allows direct access to 3D and GPU hardware thus giving Leopard and all the other apps the "eye candy" they have. You must admit that OS X sure does look pretty.

So, this is in a way, their version of Direct X, yet not too many developers are jumping on it. EA and Id are, but they are two very large and well known developers. Blizzard is another one that will be utilizing it. I haven't checked in a while but some developers are jumping over to OS X, but that doesn't mean they won't stop developing for Windows any time soon.
 
vinnie107 said:
Thats interesting but I thought we was talking about games for linux?
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I was drawing a parallel that even if Linux comes out with a standardized set of APIs that work on all distros (good luck with that!) game developers probably still won't take advantage of it, unless there is a demand for it. Not every computer user is a gamer, and not every Linux user wants to play games either.
 
Sorry guys but I didn't read every post, just skimmed.

Linux was originally made by a engineer for engineer so they could easily do building plans and so on (look it up). So I guess originally they didn't think it could, but since you can put Linux on your Digital Wristwatch, I guess sometime soon it will mold into a game of sorts or something.
 
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