GOG: Linux "the next major frontier" for gaming as it works on a native client
xda-developers.com733 points by franczesko 4 days ago
733 points by franczesko 4 days ago
I'm very hopeful that Linux gaming will save the open PC desktop despite big tech is coming to destroy it. Or at least keep PCs alive for another decade. Gamers are still a huge factor as hardware customers.
GOG creating a Linux launcher and Steam Box with SteamOS coming out soon should benefit PC users in general not just gamers since Microslop sees Windows like a social experiment where they can test AI on unsuspecting lusers, as an ad platform and a store front now.
I also feel like this is an insane opportunity for companies who previously did not offer Linux native clients to start doing so and see some of a hike in sales specifically coming from the Linux crowd. I would absolutely pay good money for high quality Linux compatible software, after all, its not free as in free beer. I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course. I think maybe Ubuntu did? I don't know that Arch ever has. I think its a wasted opportunity to fund Linux distros by taking a small cut (probably not 30%) from commercial products directly on those app repositories.
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.
Why would a bunch of volunteers put a ton of effort to create infrastructure so people (corporations, really) can make money?
Flathub is making inroads into having paid apps but they’re explicitly not a distribution really
It would fund their projects. Imagine if more Linux distros has enough funding to fully hire part-time volunteers full time? Those companies will sell them without those stores. This at least gives them a piece of the pie.
The entire point of the free software movement is to promote free software principles and software rights. What I think many Linux distributions would prefer is a model where companies who do benefit from selling software and hardware are funding them indirectly, so they can focus on continuing to promote free software in a more neutral way, without the pressures and potentially misaligned incentives that come from running a store front can bring.
There are distributions like elementary OS which are happy to sell you things with this model, though, but I just don't think it's surprising many distributions would actively prefer to not be in this position even if it leaves money on the table. This sort of principled approach is exactly why a lot of us really like Linux.
It's really unfortunate the term "free software" took off rather than e.g. "libre software", since it muddies discussions like this. The point of "free software" is not "you don't have to pay," it's that you have freedom in terms of what you do with the code running on your own machine. Selling free software is not incompatible with free software: it's free as in freedom, not as in free beer.
Nobody in this comments thread appears to be confused by or misusing the term "free software". We're talking about free software vs (commercial) proprietary software.
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly
Free packages remain unaffected, but now there are optional commercial options you can pay for which fund the free (as in free money) infrastructure you already take advantage of so that these projects are fully sustainable. I imagine some open source projects could even set themselves up to receiving donations directly via package managers.
I promise you, everybody understands the general idea, but adding a built-in store to your operating system is far from a neutral action that has no second- or third-order effects. It isn't that it somehow affects "free" packages. Incoming text wall, because I am not very good at being terse.
- It creates perverse incentives for the promotion of free software.
If development of the operating system is now funded by purchases of proprietary commercial software in the app store, it naturally incentivizes them to sell more software via the app store. This naturally gives an incentive to promote commercial software over free software, contrary to the very mission of free software. They can still try to avoid this, but I think the incentive gets worse due to the next part (because running a proper software store is much more expensive.)
Free software can be sold, too, but in most cases it just doesn't make very much sense. If you try to coerce people into paying for free software that can be obtained free of charge, it basically puts it on the same level as any commercial proprietary software. If said commercial software is "freemium", it basically incentivizes you to just go with the freemium proprietary option instead that is not just free software, but also often arguably outright manipulative to the user. I don't really think free software OS vendors want to encourage this kind of thing.
- It might break the balance that makes free software package repositories work.
Software that is free as in beer will naturally compete favorably against software that costs money, as the difference between $0 and $1 is the biggest leap. Instead of selling software you can own, many (most?) commercial software vendors have shifted to "freemium" models where users pay for subscriptions or "upsells" inside of apps.
In commercial app stores, strict rules and even unfair/likely to be outlawed practices are used to force vendors to go through a standardized IAP system. This has many downsides for competition, but it does act as a (weak) balance against abusive vendors who would institute even worse practices if left to their own devices. Worse, though, is that proprietary software is hard to vet; the most scalable way to analyze it is via blackbox analysis, which is easily defeated by a vendor who desires to do so. Android and iOS rely on a combination of OS-level sandboxing and authorization as well as many automated and ostensibly human tests too.
I am not trying to say that what commercial app stores do is actually effective or works well, but actually that only serves to help my point here. Free software app stores are not guaranteed to be free of malware more than anything else is, but they have a pretty decent track record, and part of the reason why is because the packaging is done by people who are essentially volunteers to work on the OS, and very often are third parties to the software itself. The packages themselves are often reviewed by multiple people to uphold standards, and many OSes take the opportunity to limit or disable unwanted anti-features like telemetry. Because the software is free, it is possible to look at the actual changes that go into each release if you so please, and in fact, I often do look at the commit logs and diffs from release to release when reviewing package updates in Nixpkgs, especially since it's a good way to catch new things that might need to be updated in the package that aren't immediately apparent (e.g.: in NixOS, a new dlopen dependency in a new feature wouldn't show up anywhere obvious.)
Proprietary software is a totally different ball game. Maintainers can't see what's going on, and more often than not, it is simply illegal for them to attempt to do so in any comprehensive way, depending on where they live.
If the distributions suddenly become app store vendors, they will wind up needing to employ more people full time to work on security and auditing. Volunteers doing stuff for free won't scale well to a proper, real software store. Which further means that they need to make sure they're actually getting enough revenue for it to be self-sustaining, which again pushes perverse incentives to sell software.
What they wanted to do is build a community-driven OS built on free software by volunteers and possibly non-profit employees, and what they got was a startup business. Does that not make the problem apparent yet?
- It makes the OS no longer neutral to software stores.
Today, Flatpak and Steam are totally neutral and have roughly equal footing to any other software store; they may be installed by default in some cases, but they are strictly vendor neutral (except for obviously in SteamOS). If the OS itself ships one, it lives in a privileged position that other software store doesn't. This winds up with the exact same sorts of problems that occur with Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. You can, of course, try to behave in a benevolent manner, but what's even better than trying to behave in a benevolent manner is trying to put yourself in as few situations as possible to where you need to in order to maintain the health of an ecosystem. :)
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I think you could probably find some retorts to this if you wanted. It's not impossible to make this model work, and some distributions do make this model work, at least insofar as they have gotten now. But with that having been said, I will state again my strongly held belief that it isn't that projects like Debian or Arch Linux couldn't figure out how to sell software or don't know that they can.
It's just that they do not want to.
Big businesses are already contributing a LOT of money and manpower into Linux development (especially kernel).
They could simply fund developing app store extensions in the same way redhead enabled systemd to happen. Both Sievers and Poettering were working at Redhat at the time.
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly
I think you're alone in this.
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.
One of the advantages of open source software is the ability to distribute said software with relatively few restrictions. It simplifies life for the maintainers of Linux distributions, those who manage Linux systems, the end user, and software developers. Making a package manager a retail product store would complicate things for everyone.
That said, the only thing preventing the distribution of proprietary software by most Linux distributions is policy. If a distribution wanted to do so, and the vendor's license allowed for permissive software distribution, they could do so. The vendor could implement their own mechanism for selling and distributing license keys. The advantage to them would be using a common software distribution method without having a middleman taking a cut. (Think shareware, or even physical software that included a license key.)
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.
That's essentially being done with Flatpak.
Linux is largely still built on the old (and indeed, outdated) Unix trust model. The system itself is assumed to be trusted, and the primary security boundaries on the system are drawn between users. Since Linux package managers actually install and manage the base system as well as end-user software, anything the package manager installs is treated as part of "the distribution", and thus trusted. It's not a good idea to use such a thing to install proprietary, third-party software. The curation and vetting of the distro maintainers is actually vital here, and when you add a third party repo, you're giving it a lot of trust. At the same time, why would distro maintainers give free labor to integrate proprietary software? Most are not super interested in that, and even if they are, they don't generally have the rights necessary to redistribute, let alone modify, proprietary software. On the other hand, those third-party developers and publishers don't want to master and manage a half-dozen different packaging formats, and various other packaging ecosystem differences that vary across distros.
Flatpak is positioned to solve all of these problems, and it's no secret that enabling (relatively) responsible use of proprietary software is one of the goals. It enabled distributing a small number of large, common runtimes of which different versions can safely coexist on the same system, addressing fragmentation. To reduce the amount of trust given to installed apps, it separates what it installs from the base system, and offers sandboxing to help limit the permissions granted to an app that still runs under the OS user of the person using it. And it supports third-party repos that publishers can run themselves.
I'm not currently a daily Flatpak user, so idk how much the current reality lines up with that goal, but that's where the movement towards this is on the Linux desktop today.
It makes zero sense for traditional distros to have payments. They exclusively repackage software. You want direct to customer platforms (Snap, Flathub, etc).
The dnf, deb, or pacman tools could point to a repo where the packages have paid activation.
Companies can already do that. This is how redhat works in its entirety.
This has nothing to do with the base distribution
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.
It's not "zero cost" but plenty of proprietary software with native linux clients will do things like set up Ubuntu package repos. You're pasting a handful of lines in the command line (or for the fancier stuff downloading the isntaller that does that for you) and you're off to the races
There might be a boutique business that could help with installer/package repo mgmt for people wanting to ship linux clients and take advantage of the auto-updaters and the like. Maybe.
The package manager can't help with subscription schemes based on short lived licenses.
> I would absolutely pay good money for high quality Linux compatible software, after all, its not free as in free beer.
What software are you looking for?
About the only thing seriously lacking is a proper competitor for Photoshop and Illustrator, really.
proprietary != commercial
You can have free commercial software, and proprietary shareware, the opposites are oxymorons.
Thanks, for downvoting pointing to definitions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software
Oh common guys, can you at least start a discussion, why you think proprietary and commercial software should be regarded as the same, or something?
Discussion against the prevalent groupthink sentiment are considered haram and shunned on HN.
I know it's unfair but it is what it is.
I wish there was some independent vote quality assessment process (a bot working on the HN backend) gently adjusting account standing factor based on their votes on the obviously true/false comments. After a while troll would simply see zero impact of their votes and comments assigned 0 karma at the outset. For not bringing the positive impact to the community.
I agree with your point on the difference between proprietary v. commercial, but it’s a bit hard to parse your example. “Free” is kind of an unfortunate word choice, as it obscures the gratis v. libre distinction you’re trying to point out.
Free/libre commercial software is indeed possible, and I’d love to see more products utilizing this model. We do need to keep in mind that “cracking” such software becomes legal (which is probably not a big deal because people would do that anyway).
Steam developing proton was what made it possible for me to change fully. No dual boot or anything needed. It's great.
Funnily I also run GoG games through steam proton.. But looking forward to the GoG client working!
Steam with Proton is simply incredible.
And now it doesn't even split games in "Linux" vs "Windows"; it simply assumes all games run on Linux. And they mostly do! Though to be fair I had to tweak a couple to make them run, and Space Marine II absolutely refuses to play past the cutscene, but most other games "just work".
God I hope Valve gets serious with Steam OS and it becomes a competitive target for PC games. They're making amazing progress with the Steam Deck, and I'm so ready to be free from Windows.
Is there something wrong with the many distros that make Steam a really easy install, or in the box? I mean Bazzite literally has a FS Steam option in the box for installers that's pretty close to the Steam OS experience with broader hardware support.
I'm trying to word this without sounding dismissive of Bazzite for simply not being from a big company with money to throw around. I'm sure the people making it are doing great work. But I just don't get the feeling it's anywhere near the position it needs to be a "real platform" that could disrupt Windows. It has to be looked at from the perspective of publishers, and whether it's worth their money to target a new platform.
Valve has good, stable funds to pay a team full time to build and support Steam OS which, over a long period of time and with enough user uptake, I think will have better chances of getting publishers on board with ensuring their games work on something that isn't Windows. Hell, they could probably make deals with publishers to say "hey, here's a pile of money to make sure your game works on Steam OS day 1, and put it in all the ads" and get the ball rolling that way.
Gaming is a tough space to crack. I think Valve's money and their history of supporting the most popular gaming platform on PC inspires more trust needed to make their platform a standard target.
The PLATFFORM from a game publisher's perspective is still going to be Steam/Proton on Linux... More likely than not, it's all still mostly going to be Win32/64, but with improved Proton testing/targetting... this will be for SteamOS or Steam on other Linux distros... it's the same.
From your perspective you aren't waiting around for "completion" ... in terms of scope, most of it is built on efforts from Fedora/Redhat with enough customization to make it friendlier to gamers. Linux distros aren't like Windows, they share a lot and are largely interoperable or compatible with a few major camps.
But very little of this affects what will happen with games. Your experience with Steam on pretty much any Linux distro is likely to be as good or better than Steam on SteamOS.
Edit: to clarify, there are differences between Linux distros... but the fact is, that Steam on pretty much any modern/updated distro will be a very similar experience wether it's "SteamOS" or something else that you aren't having to wait around for. For that matter, you can put together a current AMD system with up to a 9070XT and run SteamOS today, the hardware is supported and you don't actually have to wait for it if you don't want to. You may find the experience better with a desktop distro, if you plan on using it more or as much of a desktop as game platform. And more so if you want to run a non-amd GPU.
The core of bazzite has nothing to do with being from a big company or not. The complaint doesn't make much sense given the foundation Bazzite is actually built on is sponsored and developed by Fedora/RHEL.
Maybe I'm downplaying what the Bazzite team is actually doing, but from afar it is Fedora Silverblue with gaming related tweaks out of the box, probably targeting handhelds and common gaming hardware in testing.
The actual issue of adopting a new operating system is already rearing its head on this thread. "What's Bazzite? What's Silverblue? SteamOS, is that linux? Is that different from this other linux?".
There's too many options for someone that wants to sit down and play a game. Unless a major OEM decides to push Linux on their systems, SteamOS is generally the only real competitor in this space due to reputation and control of the PC gaming market. Time in the market, versus timing the market is what comes to mind here.
Paradox-of-choice issues are overblown. Every Linux distro is a repackaging of the same core components and same software. The PC is standardized for the most part, there is not much commodity hardware that lacks support, and the popular hardware that needs particular support (Nvidia drivers) is catered to by any popular distro out there.
Users are mostly afraid of wasting time trying Linux (any Linux) and having to go back to Windows for reason X, Y, or Z that they didn't even know about. For my partner who doesn't game, reason Z is one particular feature of Microsoft Word (the shrinkwrap application, not 365 Copilot App or whatever) that isn't emulated by LibreOffice or Google Docs. For competitive PC gamers, it's kernel anti-cheat. The Linux desktop story in general has been to slowly whittle down these reasons until there really is no good excuse for users not to switch and for vendors not to support the OS, even through compatibility layers.
The problem I have with this approach is that ultimately you're trading one owning company for another, rather than building to a standard that anyone could build around.
Because someday Valve may no longer be privately owned, and we're potentially back where we started. If we support having strong OSS ecosystems around computers we don't have to fight this battle over and over again.
Valve slow-rolling SteamOS and being coy about it ever being released as a "standalone, supported" OS is only because they're a private company and can build for open source ecosystems.
Too bad Proton and Wine are open-source, and they can't really remove them from the ecosystem...
So if your game runs under Wine/Proton today, there's a pretty good chance that game will continue to run years from now. I've had better experience with really old games under Wine than actual Windows for that matter.
SteamOS is actively shipping on consumer hardware today, that's the real major difference here. People who don't even know how to install their own operating system are using it.
There isn't a downside to these other distros like Bazzite.
Considering the Steam Machine will come with SteamOS, it looks like they are going all in.
I was amazed that the PC port of Spider-man Myles Morales worked perfectly with no tweaking at all. That’s the newest AAA game I own (I think), and it runs silky smooth and hasn’t had any issues.
It wasn’t that long ago that Wine was only really useful for games that were at least 5-10 years old. Proton is amazing.
I'm still wondering why Apple hasn't taken a few billion of their trillions and just built/bought a Proton style layer for macOS.
The computing power is there, we just need the ability to run Windows-only games on Macs with a single click.
WINE crawled so that Proton could run.
Like even in 2014 WINE worked well enough for most games for me. Proton just made it utterly effortless, and lets me run AAA games like RDR2 and CP2077.
I would say that WINE did 90% of what had to be done, then Proton came and did another 90% so now we are 99% there.
Proton is amazing and it's really three different subprojects that deserve a lot of credit each.
First is Wine itself, with its implementation of Win32 APIs. I ran some games through Wine even twenty years ago but it was certainly not always possible, and usually not even easy.
Second is DXVK, which fills the main gap of Wine, namely Direct3D compatibility. Wine has long had its own implementation of D3D libraries, but it was not as performant, and more importantly it was never quite complete. You'd run into all sorts of problems because the Wine implementation differed from the Windows native D3D, and that was enough to break many gams. DXVK is a translation layer that translates D3D calls to Vulkan with excellent performance, and basically solves the problem of D3D on Linux.
Then there's the parts original to Proton itself. It applies targeted, high quality patches to Wine and DXVK to improve game compatibility, brings in a few other modules, and most importantly Proton glues it all together so it works seamlessly and with excellent UX. From the first release of Proton until recently, running Windows games through Steam took just a couple extra clicks to enable Proton for that game. And now even that isn't necessary, Proton is enabled by default so you run a game just by downloading it and launching, same exact process as on Windows.
Im not super familiar with the space.
Is the only reason for needing Proton is to do direct x api translations?
Games use plenty of other win32 APIs. Creating windows, running processes, opening files are all APIs.
Something like wine is needed to do that translation too.
right but some games like CS have native linux clients. Is it that hard to recompile the game to run under linux?
It often is hard. If you’re using win32 APIs extensively, you’ll have to port your code to Linux counterparts.
There’s also the issue of forward compatibility. Sometimes you just can’t run an old Linux game on a newer distro, while it works fine in Wine. Or it might partially work: for example, I’ve managed to run a Linux build of Heroes of Might and Magic III, but didn’t get any sound, because it relied on some ancient sound API (pre-ALSA; perhaps OSS?). Windows version works great in Wine to this day.
For some game engines though, porting is really easy. There are some piracy groups releasing Linux ports of Unity games (that don’t have an official Linux version) by just replacing the game executable with a compatible one from another game.
Most gamers don't give a shit about openness. A much more likely outcome is "big tech" following the numbers and slowly making Linux unusable by using EEE or any other tactic under the pretense of usefulness.
> Most gamers don't give a shit about openness
I don't think this is a given. I think most gamers so far haven't cared about openness because pragmatically, it didn't matter for them.
Now they're seeing the long-term effect of not caring about that though, which is why we're suddenly seeing a movement of gamers moving to Linux, and trying to get others to move with them, because they realize the importance now, as their desktops are slowly collapsing over Microsoft's decision to let AI do all the programming, and having zero QA before releasing stuff to the public.
They don't care about it as an abstract idea, but they do notice that Windows 11 is worse than Windows 10 was worse than Windows 8 was worse than Windows 7.
I'm not saying there have been zero useful improvements in later Windows releases, but 7 looked good and did what you told it to. "Openness" is a very abstract idea but "Only does what you tell it to" is a selling point for Linux.
You know it's not going to upload all your documents to OneDrive and then erase them from the computer.
I don't think most people would argue that Windows 10 was worse than Windows 8
My opinion on that may be colored by the fact that I had a Surface Pro 3, the one place where Windows 8.1 was actually great to use, and taking away some of the focus on tablet use was a regression. Overall you're right though, outside of tablets W10 was an improvement, because 8 tried to stick the tablet UI into desktops.
I was recently connecting to some server with the Windows 8 derived version of Windows Server and gosh that full screen start menu is stupid with a mouse.
Yes, but when they go out creating that aquarium PC tower with rainbow lights, they will install W11 Pro as usual.
Ironically I built a Linux box for mainly local models with some RGBs because I wanted tasteful accent lights to match the room, but my motherboard isn't supported by OpenRGB so they're stuck on either nothing or 'unicorn vomit' mode until some indefinite point in the future. This is the first time I've run into a stereotypically Linux issue in nearly a decade (on sane hardware) I think!
Not a fan of those aquarium PC cases though, they sacrifice airflow for aesthetics which isn't a great shout. I have a 5090 and a 9950X in a more traditional case and my temperatures are fine with air cooling alone. Not sure you'd get away with that in an aquarium case with poorer airflow, at least without it sounding like a hairdryer all day.
Anyone know of a living successor to Silent PC Review? Was a great site back in the day but it shut down and got replaced with a marketing slop page.
Great reviews back you could get cases with multi-layered sound deadening side panels instead of windows.
Do you run linux at the moment? I've personally found my switch to CachyOS from Windows 11 one of the biggest factors in making my PC run silent/near silent. Happy to elaborate if you're curious.
I never understood the giant focus on side windows. If you want to see your components while you're using your PC, why not just build inside a transparent case, or build on a workbench/open style (caseless)
ATX spec is designed for positive pressure/airflow, so you’ll generally run hotter in open air.