Hello everyone! How’s everyone doin? Good? Great! So I recently dual-booted my laptop with Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04. I’m really liking Ubuntu so far! I was wondering the other day why don’t more developers port games to Linux? I have a few theories! First of all, there are so many distributions of Linux. Making a game work for all of them would be tough. A counter-point would be that many distributions are based off of other distributions. Many are based off of Fedora and Ubuntu. So if you make a version of your game work for those theoretically if should work for a distribution based on those. Just a theory. I’m not too familiar with the underlying workings of Linux, just a heads up, but it is something I want to learn!
Of course, Valve has developed a Steam OS that is a Linux distribution. Gabe Newell said that Linux is the future of gaming. And I can see his point. The control that Linux gives you would allow someone to design an operating system optimized for gaming. The issue with this is I imagine you would optimize it for specific hardware because gaming really relies on computer specs. (I’m sorry but your Compucolor 8001 probably won’t be able to play World of Warcraft with 32KB of RAM) I can see AMD and Nvidia having their own OS. But… oh no… if both companies have their own OS then I see explosives for, for example, the AMD OS. Which would be bad. Console exclusives are bad enough (I’m sad I can’t play Quantum Break, looks so awesome) but OS explosives on top of that!? Let’s hope it never comes to that.
Right now Windows is the favorite for playing video games. One thing Windows has over Linux is that Windows is unified! Linux has 100’s of versions. And I don’t see peope flooding to Linux to play games. Peope don’t want to maneuver a command terminal just to play Call of Duty. It would be an unnecessary barrier. Anyway, I was thinking about this and thought I would write something up. I don’t think this is everything. I tend to forget things as I write. I hope you enjoy this and if you have any input be sure to put it in the comments! Thanks!
-Mike
Bluecow Radio 