Category: Thoughts

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Will Linux/SteamOS eventually replace Windows for gaming?

Digital Foundry posted a video on YouTube asking the question “Will Linux/SteamOS eventually replace Windows for gaming?“

The short answer is: No, never.

WINE/Proton will always be at least one step behind the current state of the real Windows operating system and many parts of commercial game development simply cannot take place natively on GNU/Linux for proprietary and licensing reasons of third party dependencies alone.

GNU/Linux might be great for Open Source stuff – but because of its GPL license and the fact that most parts of its runtime environment and libraries are also licensed under the GPL, it can quickly become a legal nightmare for Closed Source products. That’s the main reason why Apple’s operating systems and the Nintendo Switch OS and Sony’s Playstation OS are built on top of FreeBSD and not GNU/Linux.

And now I will stop calling it GNU/Linux and will just call it Linux instead. For those who don’t know: The software generally known as Linux is just an operating system kernel, it is NOT a full operating system. Traditionally, the GNU “GNU’s Not Unix” parts bring the missing pieces to the table that make Linux a full operating system. And then come the so-called distributions that take all those pieces and configure and customize them in their own – incompatible to each other – fashion and ship them as individual operating systems. For example, what runs on Ubuntu or openSuSE or Red Hat or Gentoo is out of the box not necessarily compatible with the ArchOS-based SteamOS by Valve Software, even though they all are Linuxes… Confused yet? We have not even spoken about the many different graphical user interfaces and desktops…

Linux is such a diverse landscape that it’s chaos incarnate.

The many different distributions and their varying software versions make the deployment of binary builds on Linux a complete nightmare – Linus Torvalds himself pointed that out, and in that same public appearance he also mentioned that Valve could only solve the deployment problem by creating huge statically linked binaries.

There was another quote in that video that I want to comment on:

“Using Windows is annoying at times.”

My response to this:

Absolutely. And yet, it still is lightyears ahead of any Linux desktop system and even macOS.

Windows still is the only platform that has viable solutions for ALL (industrial) niches and it also is the only platform that does NOT need to carry a second OS in a VM around to run industrial software to get things done.

In commercial satellite communications, for example, there exists a shitload of management and configuration software for super-expensive bread & butter hardware that only runs on Windows – and that’s an industry where I spent ten years of my life earning my living. In biological/genetic research, where I also spent a few years heading an IT department, the situation is the same: Microscopes costing a million Euros a piece only support Windows. The list goes on through other industrial niches.

People who always advice other people to install a Windows VM for the one or two apps that don’t run natively on Linux or macOS fail to understand that having a second OS in a VM DOUBLES the administrative overhead while at the same time reducing available system resources, sacrificing performance and usability while at the same time significantly increasing the complexity and actual cost of ownership. In short: It’s very bad advice, usually coming from naive wishful thinking and blind ideology.

I’m using computers since the very early 1980s and I’ve been in professional IT for over 35 years now – I’ve used it all, from the Sinclair ZX81 over the Apple II and the early IBM PCs to IBM mainframes and large long-term storage clusters with robotic tape libraries that are required by law to archive (genetic research and/or clinical) data for 30 to 60 years.

I’ve spent two decades of my life personally maintaining hundreds of Linux servers and I’ve also had and owned dozens of Macs – if anything, I am platform agnostic, but I also have decades of real world experience with each platform.

I’ve used Linux desktop systems and Macs for my personal stuff for years – but I always had to get back to using Windows because something I needed never was available on any other platform. And at some point you need to accept that a platform is only truly viable when it does NOT need to carry around another platform in a VM to get the job done.

Nobody will ever invest in porting software to a new platform or even rewriting existing legacy software just because icons in cornflower blue are now the latest hype – and Windows is the only platform that actually cares for longevity. The developers at Microsoft go through great lengths to provide backwards compatibility for software that was written decades ago. In contrast, Apple breaks something with every annual macOS update – and when you don’t have the source code of the software that you’re using on Linux, well, guess where that will take you after a distribution upgrade.

Love it or hate it: Where people do actual work and where bread & butter jobs need to get done in a finite amount of time, despite its many flaws and problems, the only functioning “one size fits all” platform still is Microsoft Windows.

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The best games of the last few years… are mostly old games

It’s quite obvious that the gaming industry nowadays mostly sucks. There hasn’t been one AAA production recently that’s worth remembering.

The last AAA game that I really, really loved was AC ODYSSEY (and that because of the Odyssey part in the name; I couldn’t care less for the totally unnecessary AC parts in the game). But the game was so big, I cannot go back to it and replay it. I spent over 200 hours in that world.

Other than AC ODYSSEY (2018), only UNCHARTED 4 (2016) and GEARS 5 (2019) stuck in my memory. That’s how pathetic the AAA gaming industry has become.

As for 2023… The best release this year so far was the QUAKE II remaster. There you have it. A 25 year old game is the best new release of 2023 in my book. They did everything right with this one: It runs like a dream, it plays awesome on all devices where I have it, it has great atmosphere, no fucking woke message, and it’s just fun to play.

Other great new games this year were the indie games DREDGE and SIGNALIS. At least they were so good that I have not forgotten their names – most titles this year were not so fortunate, I must say.

THE CALLISTO PROTOCOL was a gigantic piece of garbage – awesome graphics, but a super shitty, non-fun game.

DEAD ISLAND 2 and DYING LIGHT 2 were also greatly disappointing. I actually rather replayed the original DEAD ISLAND and DEAD ISLAND: RIPTIDE and the first DYING LIGHT this year than spending any more time with their sequels. And let’s not even talk about the annoying characters in DEAD ISLAND 2 that completely kill the game.

I’m afraid The ALAN WAKE remaster and the DEAD SPACE remake didn’t get me hooked either. While the new DEAD SPACE might look better than the original game, the new character models and the modified script just feel wrong. The ALAN WAKE remaster also suffers from the changed character models and the atmosphere in the original game felt much better – and darker; which is what that game is supposed to feel like.

The reality somehow is that I am replaying old Xbox 360 and Xbox One games on my two Xbox Series consoles instead of playing new titles – the new stuff just doesn’t do anything for me anymore. A few weeks ago, I replayed the entire GEARS OF WAR franchise… Only to start with GEARS OF WAR: ULTIMATE EDITION again after I had finished GEARS 5. Playing Marcus Fenix never gets old and the first entry in the GEARS saga is still plain and simple awesome: It oozes atmosphere and just works.

Nowadays game developers seem to believe that instead of creating interesting worlds, stories, characters and gameplay mechanics, modern games are just a vehicle to deliver a woke message and squeeze money out of their players (through microtransactions and in-game stores) – not to mention that it’s now normal that AAA titles are released as technically broken trash.

Older titles like GEARS OF WAR, however, just provide the escape games are supposed to give the player. That difference is why new games are only annoying and suck and why old games are still fun even after all those years. It’s a great thing that Xbox treats backwards compatibility as a first class citizen.