Re: [OT] A significant
On Jul 24, 2007, at 4:40 AM, terryc wrote:
It is a no brainer for me as well. I always buy the windows
versions of games now. I know I will get a far longer playing life
out of them. The past Linux versions of games (and other apps) are
impossible for me to get running on any of my linux systems.
I don't know about that. I have Windows games I can't play anymore
because they require an old version of Windows that doesn't have
drivers for modern hardware. And I have a lot of DOS games that
don't have sound anymore because modern sound hardware doesn't bear
any resemblance to a Sound Blaster or Adlib card. Older versions of
Linux can usually be coaxed into working by retrofitting a newer
kernel to get newer driver support. The userspace interfaces for
things like sound and video have stayed relatively stable for a
surprisingly long time.
Macintosh stuff is out because it is closed software and closed
hardware.
So is a Windows gaming system if you put a decent video card in it.
NVIDIA makes the best, most compatible cards for gaming, and their
drivers are notoriously closed-source.
Mac stuff does have one major advantage -- the hardware is much more
standardized. There's only a few video cards you have to support
instead of dozens. It's almost more like targeting a console than
targeting a PC, that way.
I think it'll be long time before any OS can compete with Windows for
the sheer number of games available, though. Windows courted the
gaming market early with subsystems like DirectX aimed at high-
performance graphics. Linux took longer to adapt the slow, clumsy
network-socket based X Windows system to doing high-performance 3D,
and it's also only recently that Linux systems became standardized
enough that you can supply a binary and reasonably expect it to run
on most users' systems. That said, it's come into its own lately.
The Linux build of Second Life runs flawlessly on my SuSE Linux box
and gives me a frame rate as good as I get under Windows on the same
hardware (as long as I'm using those pesky closed-source NVIDIA
drivers, of course).
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