More Software
Yes, there is probably more windows software available. But I would also argue that whatever you can do in Windows can also be accomplished in Linux. This old argument is quickly becoming irrelevant.

Not really, tons of software is still Windows only.

You can sort of do everything, many times with workarounds or inferior software. Most people (me included) are not going to go for that.

More Documentation
Seriously? Microsoft is going backwards on documentation. There have been plenty of articles and complaints about how little documentation there is for Win10 and its various patches/updates. This lack of documentation is one of the reasons I avoid certain patches in Windows Update nowadays.

Not documentation by Microsoft. Documentation resources by users, which multiply as much as the users do.

More Job Relevance
Yes, there are probably more Windows support jobs out there, but you don't have to run the OS personally to work a job supporting it. Gone are the days of DOS commands, IRQ conflicts, driver problems, configuration settings, and working black magic to get the OS to behave. Any monkey can punch a query into Google and come up with an answer in a few minutes. Rather, I would argue that a professed knowledge of Linux implies competency with other operating systems as well.

Linux is vastly different from Windows and if you have no basic competence in using Windows that makes you weaker in just about any job interacting with computers.

More Availability
This is simply not true. Let's ignore the store-purchased-box delivery model, since it is quickly becoming irrelevant (if it isn't already). The Windows Store is a very immature product with a ton of problems. This very thread is a testament to the issues surrounding it. On the contrary, the Linux RPM/DEB system is mature with over a decade of support and development. I would argue that the Ubuntu system of using SPM is the 2nd most mature software delivery system, right behind Apple. Even STEAM is placing a priority on support for Linux, making the "Linux sucks for gaming" argument weak as well.

More availability of the OS, not software for it. You buy a computer today it comes with Mac OSX or Windows.

Want to install Linux on it? Have fun using the OS you don't know how to use to burn a DVD/write a bootable USB and spending an hour installing a OS before using your computer.

Oh and the "Linux sucks for gaming" argument is still very valid. Yeah you can play lots of games on Linux, but if you can't play the games you want to play who cares?

ZellSF,

All of your points are very good.

I suppose the argument regarding Win10, the Windows Store, and iOS or Android comes down to this: How much privacy and control are you willing to give up for a little convenience?

When it comes to cell phones, it seems like every Android app wants to know who all my contacts are, my location, and every other bit of personal information it can possibly extract. Personally, I'm not willing to give up that information, so I go without Facebook, Twitter, Waze, Google+, etc etc etc. I'm just not willing to sacrifice my privacy for that little bit of convenience so I stick with older "dumb phones" or my gimped Android. It can still access the web and Gas Buddy, so I continue to choose it over my "dumb phone" collection. (Yes, I'm perfectly aware that my general location can still be determined via cell tower connections.)

When it comes to computers, I kinda feel the same way, but I'm more concerned with control. It feels like Win10 just takes away too much control that I'm not willing to give up. So, I'll be switching to Linux eventually. I am not intimidated by reading manuals or having lots of options that I may never need. However, I am concerned with a lack of options that I might someday want. I also strongly resent the serving of advertisements which are built right into the damn system. That is just insulting to me.

When you mention "inferior software", I suppose it depends on how you define "inferior". To me, the inferior software takes away control and invades privacy. To you and maybe others, the inferior software is less user-friendly or requires reading the instructions, or tinkering, or delving deeply into settings. Personally, I find the ongoing invasion of privacy by corporations and governments so offensive that I'm willing to do without the products and technology that demand it.

ZellSF wrote:

Want to install Linux on it? Have fun using the OS you don't know how to use to burn a DVD/write a bootable USB and spending an hour installing a OS before using your computer.

You're right. This is why there will never be a mass migration to Linux. Microsoft has correctly understood that the unwashed masses don't want to learn how to use their computers, so what we're getting now with Win10 is less of an "operating system", and more of a desktop appliance. It is less an evolution of Windows and more an evolution of Web TV. (Remember that?) Fortunately, we still have an alternative available for those who are willing to take a keen interest in how things work. I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty; it's how I got into this hobby in the first place. I remember the days of tinkering with autoexec.bat and config.sys for hours just to get a stupid game working.

ZellSF wrote:

Oh and the "Linux sucks for gaming" argument is still very valid. Yeah you can play lots of games on Linux, but if you can't play the games you want to play who cares?

You're right again. However, were starting to see something different from the usual "product differentiation" or availability of "exclusive titles" meant to convince consumers to choose a specific system/model/console/OS. Now, with Windows Store, you're also being asked to swallow a poison pill in addition to locking yourself into a "digital ecosystem". When "the games you want to play" require you to give up privacy and/or control, are they really worth playing?

Most of us here on VOGONS recognize the need to maintain a Win9x box, or WinXP box, to play certain games the way they were meant to be played. Likewise, I demand to have a primary desktop system that respects my privacy and gives me complete control over it. I don't have a problem running games on another box while denying it my personal information and data. It's a hoop I'm willing to jump through so I can maintain some dignity.

You can probably guess how I feel about this "Internet Of Things" foolishness that is currently going on. I just don't think my appliances need to have internet access. I don't give internet access to my TV or Blu-Ray player either. There is no goddam good reason to connect everything in your household to the internet, except as a means for corporations to extract your personal information for the purpose of selling it. People are actually paying for the privilege of having their information sold! Huxley just had no idea friggin clue how far corporations would take his ideas and run with them.

I can rattle off a lot of software for Windows that has no linux equivalent or a very poorly designed one with absolutely NO support. This last one is a HUGE issue especially for businesses. From office software, to multimedia software, to cad and other design software, development environments and tools, it's just not there other than for hobbyists and server room gurus. That's not to say that there isn't a ton of great software and utilities available, there is. However when it comes to industry related things and the stuff that people can intuitively use without a company having to spend extra money on long training seminars, Windows is the clear winner.

Then there is games, I have looked into this a little bit lately. What I see is windows emulation mostly via wine and not direct ports much. Sure there are some but the catalog is very limited. The obvious answer as to why this is, is because that's not where the money is. Development studios and publishers are not going to spend the money and effort to port to linux when there just isn't enough money to support it.

I can rattle off a lot of software for Linux that has no windows equivalent or a very poorly designed one with absolutely NO support. Unsurprisingly enough, those are the utils whose absence makes me want to start throwing things when I want to get *anything* done on a win* machine.

A lot of Linux software has the best support there is - a huge group of active users *and devs* who post regularly on forums and know whatever you're trying to use inside-out. Give me that any day over a contracted, only-for-business-subscribers "support" phone number behind a paywall that leads to a call center somewhere. Linux apps are really good for getting instant-gratification answers to your questions.

WINE works for what it is... And yes it even runs a lot of modern 3D games well if you want that. The "triple A" titles (whatever *that* means) don't often come to Linux (or Mac for that matter) - yet - but the more creative, experimental indie stuff that I enjoy almost always gets a port if it wasn't developed on it in the first place. I don't want to play "Call of Duty XVIII", I want Fez, Antichamber, Distance, Qube, etc etc...

The easiest way to get big devs to support Linux is to just start using the damn thing, instead of whining that there's no software for it. Don't think for an instant that e.g. Steam doesn't keep stats on how many people are downloading for which OS.

Just to drive the point home, here's the first page of Linux games on Steam. Note the bit at the bottom where it says "page 1 of 158." Also note some pretty 'big name' titles right there in the top results. Saying there's "no software" on Linux just isn't true.

One last remark and then I'll shut up. :p Isn't this forum supposed to be about *old* games? DosBox, ScummVM, Fusion, VICE, PCEM, VirtualBox, MAME, MESS, etc. etc. are all native and happy on Linux, so the library of runnable titles is probably in the hundreds of thousands. The *only* system I've tried to emulate and found I can't do it natively is the 3DO ... and the *one particular* emulator available for that thing runs fine on WINE.

The problem with proprietary games on Linux is that they seem to hinge the use of proprietary binary blob drivers. Those keeping on the bleeding edge of things, especially with the Kernel, cannot really make use of such closed source drivers.

I ran into a game I got a refund on rather quickly, it uses UDK yet for a Unreal engine game it was completely inoperable. I had less than 1 frame a second for no obvious reason and the process would just chew 100% CPU on a single core to no end. I couldn't even navigate the menus and even the opening videos played like a crawl.

EDIT: For the record, UT3 running under Wine. Serious Sam 3: BFE natively under Linux. And all Source engine games run perfectly fine for me, on the FOSS radeon driver. So there's no excuse for what happened to me with Chivalry: Medieval Warfare other than absolute incompetence on the developers.

xjas wrote:

The *only* system I've tried to emulate and found I can't do it natively is the 3DO

Even with 4do under RetroArch?

xjas wrote:

I can rattle off a lot of software for Linux that has no windows equivalent or a very poorly designed one with absolutely NO support. Unsurprisingly enough, those are the utils whose absence makes me want to start throwing things when I want to get *anything* done on a win* machine.

Fun fact: I googled "Windows software missing on Linux" and I got a lot of information about Windows software people felt were missing or subpar on Linux. I googled "Linux software missing on Windows" and got the exact same results 🤣

The thing is, Linux's very open source nature means if something is so lacking in Windows, someone will port the Linux version. That's why claiming Linux has better software support makes no sense.

It has worse software support and only attracting more developers is going to change that (and you mostly do that by attracting more users in general).

xjas wrote:

One last remark and then I'll shut up. :p Isn't this forum supposed to be about *old* games?

Personally I hate this attitude, just because you like old games you can't like new ones. It doesn't really make any sense.

Even when playing old games I find I have to rely on workarounds like WINE for stuff like Demul, nullDC, Ootake, Project64, SSF and Xebra.

I've also had much higher success rate getting old Windows games running under Windows than I have WINE.

xjas wrote:

Just to drive the point home, here's the first page of Linux games on Steam. Note the bit at the bottom where it says "page 1 of 158." Also note some pretty 'big name' titles right there in the top results. Saying there's "no software" on Linux just isn't true.

Uh has anyone said that like, ever? I'm just saying there's a lot less and 158 pages is not a huge fraction of Steam's library.

xjas wrote:

The easiest way to get big devs to support Linux is to just start using the damn thing, instead of whining that there's no software for it. Don't think for an instant that e.g. Steam doesn't keep stats on how many people are downloading for which OS.

Convincing a few people on forums to switch to Linux is never going to be enough to do that. You need some sort of really good reason for people to switch. Now there's just reasons for them not to.

Oh and Steam do keep stats, they're publicly available even.. Developers can look at them and see how much more players they can reach by making a Linux version. Currently less than 0.5% of Steam users run Linux.

I think the only reason major developers are bothering with Linux right now is because they're worried about Microsoft's future plans. Which is good of course, just nowhere near enough to get software parity with Windows.

KT7AGuy wrote:

Most of us here on VOGONS recognize the need to maintain a Win9x box, or WinXP box, to play certain games the way they were meant to be played. Likewise, I demand to have a primary desktop system that respects my privacy and gives me complete control over it. I don't have a problem running games on another box while denying it my personal information and data. It's a hoop I'm willing to jump through so I can maintain some dignity.

Fun thing for some people to consider: Linux virtualization now allows PCI-e passthrough. So you can virtualize a Win10 computer for your gaming needs and get the exact same gaming performance as natively. It's not exactly easy to setup yet though, but possible. No reason left to run two separate boxes.

Of course if you do either of those things (set up a dedicated box or virtualization) then you're still supporting Microsoft. Not as much as using Windows as your main OS sure, but still quite a bit.

ZellSF wrote:

Fun thing for some people to consider: Linux virtualization now allows PCI-e passthrough. So you can virtualize a Win10 computer for your gaming needs and get the exact same gaming performance as natively. It's not exactly easy to setup yet though, but possible. No reason left to run two separate boxes.

I've only seen this theorized than put into practice though, and I doubt virtualizers would be able to have decent vsync or input response/handling, especially given my bad history with Linux and its poor queueing of mousewheel events requiring a paravirtualized kernel that's really fussy about non-Free drivers to even be useful at all

leileilol wrote:

I doubt virtualizers would be able to have decent vsync

Why? There will be no abstraction for the GPU. The idea of pass-through is that the GPU rasterizes directly to the display.

leileilol wrote:

or input response/handling, especially given my bad history with Linux and its poor queueing of mousewheel events

Considering everything is handled through evdev (both keyboard and mouse), why are you having trouble with mouse wheel events and not everything else?

leileilol wrote:

requiring a paravirtualized kernel that's really fussy about non-Free drivers to even be useful at all

Only Xen could be considered esoteric from a Kernel perspective. KVM is almost stock in this day in age, and Virtualbox requires a loadable module which for the most part is automatically built on install.

leileilol: the point here being not to virtualize any of the devices you think are going to be problematic, but use them directly.

it's very possible and doesn't have any huge drawbacks beyond the extra resources you'll have to dedicate to it and the difficulty setting it up.

This isn't theoretical, people are already doing this.

ZellSF wrote:

Fun fact: I googled "Windows software missing on Linux" and I got a lot of information about Windows software people felt were missing or subpar on Linux. I googled "Linux software missing on Windows" and got the exact same results 🤣

Because Google didn't find any pages with words in that order, silly, so it ignored the quotes (Maybe in a few days, it'll find this thread...) 😉

ZellSF wrote:

xjas wrote:

One last remark and then I'll shut up. :p Isn't this forum supposed to be about *old* games?

Personally I hate this attitude, just because you like old games you can't like new ones. It doesn't really make any sense.

Yeesh, posting while tired ... I didn't mean that as in "old games are all we should care about on this forum", I meant that as in "here's another datapoint to support my argument that Linux is fine for gaming, in addition to all the discussion of Steam, etc. above." You don't have to read too literally into it.

ZellSF wrote:

More Job Relevance
Yes, there are probably more Windows support jobs out there, but you don't have to run the OS personally to work a job supporting it. Gone are the days of DOS commands, IRQ conflicts, driver problems, configuration settings, and working black magic to get the OS to behave. Any monkey can punch a query into Google and come up with an answer in a few minutes. Rather, I would argue that a professed knowledge of Linux implies competency with other operating systems as well.

Linux is vastly different from Windows and if you have no basic competence in using Windows that makes you weaker in just about any job interacting with computers.

I don't have time to argue every single point here but I just wanted to interject - if you're working in the sciences, Linux proficiency is just about *required.* Nobody does serious scientific coding or development on Windows. Yes, I am fully aware that other industries are vastly different but scientific research positions comprise a pretty big subset of "jobs interacting with computers."

Looking around my office I even see a bunch of nice Xeon-based Mac Pros running various Linuxes. I have Fedora on a Dell i7 tower and a PowerMac under my desk.

leileilol wrote:

xjas wrote:

The *only* system I've tried to emulate and found I can't do it natively is the 3DO

Even with 4do under RetroArch?

Well that's a new one to me! Was a few years ago that I tried it, I may not have known about it back then or it was too incomplete at the time. I may have to go check that out, thanks!

http://www.pcgamer.com/why-pc-games-should-ne … al-apps/#page-1

Peter "Durante" Thoman, creator of PC downsampling tool GeDoSaTo published an article today.

Stiletto wrote:

ZellSF wrote:

Fun fact: I googled "Windows software missing on Linux" and I got a lot of information about Windows software people felt were missing or subpar on Linux. I googled "Linux software missing on Windows" and got the exact same results 🤣

Because Google didn't find any pages with words in that order, silly, so it ignored the quotes (Maybe in a few days, it'll find this thread...) 😉

I searched without quotes (I think Google stills weighs words by order). Of course those queries are very similar which is why I clarified that I did try some other more specific searches. I didn't end up with a whole lot of software where people though Linux had a way better selection than Windows.

Personally I'm in favor of advertising Linux for the strengths it does have while also being honest about what you're giving up.

DosFreak wrote:

http://www.pcgamer.com/why-pc-games-should-ne … al-apps/#page-1

Durante wrote:

"... If this future—one in which Microsoft gradually incentivizes UWP and the Windows Store at the OS level, and gradually disin […]
Show full quote

"... If this future—one in which Microsoft gradually incentivizes UWP and the Windows Store at the OS level, and gradually disincentivizes Win32 and competing stores—ever came to pass, many of the wonderful things we love about PC gaming would be imperiled. The preservation advantages of perpetual backward compatibility. The large set of third-party tools free to interact with any game and enhancing or customizing our experiences. The competitive distribution market which results in the lowest prices and most frequent deals compared to other core gaming platforms.

And most near and dear to me, the end to a platform on which enthusiastic fans of a game can continuously improve and polish it, and ensure that it is easily accessible to future generations, even decades after the original publisher lost interest or ceased existing.

Handing Microsoft—or any other company, but given Microsoft’s history it’s particularly egregious—the metaphorical keys to the castle and giving them th possibility to enact such change, regardless of the likelihood of them actually implementing it, is something I can never countenance ..."

Part of me really wants to see this happen, just for the glorious, nerdy, awkward outrage that would ensue.