Why wasn’t Linux seen as a competitor to Windows in the gaming sphere, similar to the console wars during that time? What stopped it from challenging Microsoft’s throne as the de facto OS for PC gaming?

>>11853897 (OP)
Linux creator himself has said that he doesn't care about video games.

>>11853903

>>11853897 (OP)
because the vast majority of the people playing on PC are casuals who also use their computer for browsing the internet, work, editing....
Windows dominates the PC market therefore it also dominates the PC gaming market
vidya developers are not going to appeal to the tiny market of Lunix fags when all the money is on Windows

Shared libraries. It really is that simple of an explanation. Linux is purposefully designed to be incompatible with proprietary software binaries.
>Error: You need libpng1.4.2.so, found incompatible libpng1.4.4.so
>OSS not detected, ALSA is not supported. Can not run without audio support.
>Required OpenGL extension "GL_EXT_texture_sRGB_decode" is not supported. Please update your OpenGL driver
And it's not like you can just download shit like OSS or libpng from their respective webpages and double-click to install.
You're gonna have to hope your particular distro has that package available in just the right version and compiled with the right flags, and that it is then placed in just the right directory. And of course every dependency is gonna have its own dependencies etc so at some point you're downgrading to a Linux 2.4.x kernel just to play a buggy shitty version of Serious Sam.
Then you finally get the game to actually start and the fucking thing doesn't like your particular window management system so fullscreen mode doesn't work, oh but there's new version of Xorg that fixes this but the version of fglrx drivers available for that newer Xorg don't support your particular graphics card on that at all and...
There's a good reason why native Linux gaming was, is and always will be dead. The recent rise in Linux gaming is purely due to it all being Windows emulation instead of native executables.

>>11853897 (OP)
Funnily enough, Linux WAS the de facto OS for "gaming" for me and possibly a whole lot of other people in my country. Back when I was in school there was a vaguely center-left party in government with a few quirky ideas. Making school kids technologically literate was one of them, because back then computers were for rich people only. The solution they found was Linux. Not only did they install a Linux distro on every public computer at my school, they also mass produced low-cost laptops in-house (I think?) that by default were dual-boot machines with a custom Linux distro and with WindowsXP/7. It was massively popular and almost everyone had one (the gypsies got theirs free from the government and then sold them at the flea markets). Consequently, almost everyone from my generation grew up playing SuperTux and stuff like that.

The idea was sadly abandoned years later. During the pandemic years they lent kids shitty Windows laptops with all kinds of restrictions and that was that. Nowadays they're all playing diarrhea games on their smartphones as far as I'm aware.

>>11853903
Most linuxfag in /g/ are like that, for some reason.

>>11853940
This sounds horrible.

>>11854049
Nowadays 99% of Linux gaming is as simple as turning on Proton in Steam and Bob's your uncle.

>>11854118
to at least get the game playable yeah, but when i tried linux even linux ports of games still had more problems than their windows versions. i could play pretty much any game i wanted to but everything was just worse in some way. mouse movement being off, audio and graphic issues, a game that ran on windows 7 would only work with the windows 10 version on linux for some reason, etc.

>linux
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KarAyP6OrPI
tldw: It wants to be a 1970s mainframe, not a gaming machine. But it's way better for games than it used to be, like >>11854118 says.

>>11853897 (OP)
>we suck more
>the penguin is actually the one sucking on windows
really gets the noggin joggin

>>11853940
meanwhile on Windows how did it work?

>>11853897 (OP)
GPU Drivers had terrible support and Linux even flipped off Nvidia over it. It didn't get good until recently thanks to AI. Wine was also pretty scuffed until Valve got involved.

>>11854185
>install directx
>install new-ish video driver
>game works

>>11853940
>Linux is purposefully designed to be incompatible with proprietary software binaries.
The entire internet is proprietary binaries running on Linux.

>>11854185
The libraries were designed to be used with Windows, so they expect Windows code. WINE essentially is an adapter between libraries made for Windows so they work with Linux.

didn't folx used to say Linux is better for emulating old consoles? was it ever?

>>11854389
It is. It's also the best option to play retro PC games too with wine.
OP is talking about at the time.

>>11854185
on windows you know that that everyone will generally have the same system instead of unlimited variety in nearly every part of the os fucking with the game's ability to work

>>11854435
So why does wine work on every linux system?

>>11854450
because wine was built from the start to work around those issues

Been using Linux as a daily driver for the last fifteen years, and as my only operating system for the last ten. It has come a long way in terms of gaming compatibility, steam definitely the biggest driving force behind that, but programs like Lutris (a wrapper around wine) also make ot easy to play non-steam stuff. For me it's at the point where everything just works, almost as well as it would on Windows, and if a small performance overhead is the price to not use Windows I'd pay it every day of the week. Plus games that I hear are difficult to get going on Windows, (Fallout 3, Gothic) just work on Linux.

>>11854402
>wine
>best for emulating games
Enjoy double-layer emulation with even more input lag with exactly 0 advantage over emulating on PC whatsoever.
>ackshually, wine isn't emulation, it's an application laye-
Cope.

>>11853940
I don't know what any of this can have to do with the question though, when hardly any ordinary gamer used Linux in the first place. OP, ordinary PC users didn't use Linux, so developers didn't even get far enough to begin dealing with the challenges of making games work on Linux for almost every hardware and software configuration. They simply refrained from developing games for the platform that their audience wasn't using, because they wanted to sell lots of copies instead of barely any. That's why it wasn't a competitor.

>>11854402
what if i'm playing with the fanciest shaders? isn't it better to have Windows GPU drivers?

>>11854573
I said wine was best for playing old PC games not running emulators. A ton of old PC games have bugs that pop up or wont even boot on modern Windows, but they run flawlessly on Wine. It isn't a silver bullet. Not all old games run on Wine. It's just on average old PC games run with way less issues on Wine than on modern Windows.

>>11854626
The GPU manufacturer makes the drivers not Windows. Nvidia has Linux GPU drivers. The problem is they're a pain in the ass to install if you aren't familiar with Linux and the default out of the box drivers are usually Nouveau which is dogshit. There was 1 saving grace with Nouveau in that I was able to make it output a signal that was compatible with my PVM, because for some reason they were more flexible than Nvidia's drivers. I had Thief and other PC games running on a PVM. It was pretty surreal.

If you're talking about those CRT emulator shaders IIRC a lot of them are on github and have Linux builds for stuff like retroarch.

>>11854635
>A ton of old PC games have bugs that pop up or wont even boot on modern Windows, but they run flawlessly on Wine.
Absolute 100% complete bullshit. I can't believe Linux faggots have become so deranged from years of loneliness and soibean addiction that they'll peddle lies as heinous as "dude Linux runs PC games better than PC LOL". You have got to be fucking kidding me.

Not many games and no practical reason to use it at home where you need ms office and other shit
>b-but foss alternatives!
Boss wanted excel and photoshop, and wasn't taking open office and gimp as an answer.

>>11853940
>Linux is purposefully designed to be incompatible with proprietary software binaries.
>There's a good reason why native Linux gaming was, is and always will be dead.
Zoom.

>>11854734
its true its kinda weird your trying do defend
windows so hard the same os thats full of ads and slow

>>11854757
I can't tell if you're satirizing indians or if you're legitimately as retarded as you sound

It basically took until Valve started developing Proton before playing "real games" on Linux was actually viable. These days you can very easily play a majority of games on Linux no real problem thanks to Proton.

>>11854734
NTA but that is kind of true. Basically every Renderware game that Rockstar worked on tends to have some form of issue that requires multiple fan patches to get running, they aren't Valve or even Running With Scissors where they preserve their games for the love of it or just because they can. Granted, I doubt Rockstar's PC ports run any better under Linux than they do on Windows.

>>11853897 (OP)
I think it is just what most were willing to tolerate until the breaking point where people will switch over. Microsoft just implements awful features, then waits out the backlash for people to just accept it as the norm and tolerable, like the boiling frog story but never actually going over the threshold. I was fine, even happy, with Windows from 3.0 to 3.11 to 98SE to 2000, but then they pissed off many with the need to call in to register XP but after the initial unhappiness most accepted the change, I even liked 7 until they started adding in telemetry and some ad for 10 which was dynamically changed which was my breaking point to finally really listen to the Linux snobs. I still don't know how to work Linux, but I am a lot happier with it on my most modern time machine even though it cannot compare to the nVidia/Intel builds Linux snobs tout today. However only now, when there's not as much big-budget production games dedicated to PC alone, has Linux gained some headway but still people like having advertisements in their OS is what keeps them on Windows.

>>11854573
Wine is not an emulator.

>>11853897 (OP)
because anyone making a directx alternative eventually thought that it's not worth it and then just gives up
very common for foss projects

>>11853897 (OP)
Steam's Proton changed the game forever.

>>11854976

first linux install I ever did was to play 'q3test' as it came out on linux before windows. ran like shit but that was probably a me issue (and I probably needed an upgrade).

>>11855278
It's just wine with some patches.
We had that decades before with Cedega.

>>11854756
It's easier to run old games like FAKK 2 under Wine than it is to try and get Loki's ports working under a modern Linux install. Stop pretending to know what you're talking about :)

>>11855387
all you need are the compat libs

Bill Gates was so scared of the possibility of something threatening windows that he greenlit the whole XBOX project so that developers would rely on DirectX. Why make something for Linux when you can develop for PC and XBOX on the same architecture?

>>11854976
>be midwit fag
>too dumb to fix anything you dislike about windows
>I know, I'll just using an even more annoying and unintuive operating system
>Yeah, I still don't know how the fuck it works, but I'm happier now

>>11855391
Those never worked for me, I got further by not using them for most of the games I tried.

>>11853897 (OP)
directx overtook opengl

I genuinely don't understand the intense arguments and shit flinging that happen in the Windows vs Linux debate. Both are just operating systems—use whatever you're comfortable with. I get that tribalism is an inherent trait in mammals but this is just stupid

>>11853897 (OP)
>"we suck more"
>tux is the one actually sucking
linuxbros...

>>11855460
Meanwhile OpenGL was pissing about trying to get pixel shaders to work when Direct3D managed to do it first and with better support.

>>11855403
>Those never worked for me
Sounds like a you problem. Try learning how to do it before you try.

>>11854185
On Windows you just installed DirectX which had all the core stuff games needed. Until one of your games overwrote a dx dll and then you needed to do a complete reinstall of Windows.

>>11855507
Auska and Rei are both "just" anime characters, but how many outspoken opinions, just on this site, do you think there have been about which is better?
We can call it tribalism, but I'd argue it's more simple passion. People like what they like, and they like to let other people know it. At the same time, being calm and rational all the time is boring - it's simply fun to argue once in a while.

>>11853897 (OP)
It's hard to compete with something that comes shipped with most PCs out of the box. Normies legitimately don't understand that an operating system is just a program their PC runs, that can be replaced by a different operating system. They see a PC as a monolithic appliance, where the operating system is an integral part.
>>11853903
Source on that?
>>11853940
Good explanation. Linux is designed with the expectation that your software is open source, and that you can recompile it or edit the source code to get it to run on your current setup. Windows is designed to run commercial, closed source software. Ironically, thanks to Wine, this makes Win32 one of the most stable APIs on Linux.
t. Linux user

>>11853897 (OP)
The short answer is Microshit has infinite money to force people to make stuff exclusively for them. It's the same reason Mac gaming was so shit, I find it funny that one of the few studios who made games for the Mac (Bungie) ended up being bought up by Microsoft. Linux is the same story but even worse because Linux has no big backer, it just is what it is and even if developers wanted to make a game for Linux it simply didn't make sense from any perspective. Valve unironically is the only reason gaming on Linux is getting semi-popular now.

>>11853965
What country? Finland? No, Hungary?

>>11853897 (OP)
when? It was hobbyware in the 90s and 2000s who the fuck wouoldd develop for it? Why the fuck would the likes of EA piss money away on a port to an OS that was used by less than a percent of people? Later on? It had shit APIs and library and driver support compared to win32 and DirectX Why wouuld anyone piss money away developing for a system that is used by people who don't pay for stuff? Even now its a tiny number of niche users and the communist party of China.Even now the things a pile of kernel exploits cheched into it by every shady governement on the planet, and every single major free application for it is the same. If you want to run Chinese spyware just use epic or buy a chinese phone.

>>11853989
>Most linuxfag in /g/ are like that, for some reason.
LOOK AT MUH KALI LINUX. YOU CAN ONLY PORT SNIFF IN MUH LINUX. LOOK MUM I'M 1337 HAX0R

>>11856992
i'll just use windows thanks

>>11858340
>The short answer is Microshit has infinite money to force people to make stuff exclusively for them.
That's bullshit. Consumers had zero interest in it becasue the games on their shelves were for win32. OENs had zero interest in it even though it was free. It was not even close to being a competitor to Windows at any point in its history,

>>11859479
don't forget North Korea

>>11853897 (OP)
linux has a ~3% market share right now.

back then it had probably less than 100,000 users and only like 10,000 would be using it for gaming.

>>11854976
get a tripcode already fucking obnoxious faggot

>>11859494
You're not wrong about it never being a viable competitor, but Microsoft most certainly did attempt to stop people from developing for Linux. I should specify it wasn't just Linux but they were generally just being insane against all tech companies that weren't them, the whole Java fiasco is probably the most glaring example. If you haven't seen them before I'd recommend looking into the "Halloween Documents" to get an idea of the shit they were doing that all lead up to the anti-trust lawsuit they received.

>>11853989
Because their 'game' is tinkering with their obscure distros.

>>11853940
Any game old enough to be discussed on /vr/ should have its source code released anyway, and that would solve the problem. Not being able to recompile games is a minor disaster for preservation even on Windows. Sure, you CAN get very old games mostly working, but it can be a lot of work for a still-somewhat-fucked experience. There's a reason that every remotely playable remaster is met with endless praise for its "quality-of-life" features that you could have gotten for free with a source port instead of buying the game again.

>>11854854
I had an easier time playing games on Wine before Valve got involved honestly.

>>11854734
You don't even play retro PC games. If you did you would know Windows breaks games from older versions of Windows. Wine doesn't try to be a specific version of Windows and has APIs for any version.

>>11863492
recompiling games leads to its own problems, tried it with one and it made things comedically broken

>>11863492
>should have its source code released anyway, and that would solve the problem
You're assuming a source release would actually lead to anything instead of everyone being excited about other people potentially doing the hard part of actually building a modernization project on it, only for it to result in nobody ever doing the hard part.

>>11854734
Can you tell me how to get gothic to run on wine?

>>11855383
They're pretty good patches though.

>>11863835
https://files.catbox.moe/v1aqxz.mp4

>>11863835
Then buy the remaster for $59.99 plus tax. I don't really care. A source code release is a hypothetical scenario for 99.9% of games anyway.
>>11863904
How many games have had source code releases that led to nothing, and how many games have source ports? Anyway, yes, it would be more accurate to say that games being open-source COULD solve the problem, rather than WOULD, because there's always a chance that nobody gives a shit about the game in question. The source code also isn't needed if people care enough to reverse-engineer the game, but I have to assume it's a lot easier with the source code.

>>11854734
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Vampire:_The_Masquerade_-_Redemption
> If the game seems overall too dark, and light sources like torches don't give off any real light, then that's a common bug. Choose one of the three following fixes.
This bug is absent on Linux because I have played vtmr on it. Cope + seethe, but Linux is just works with retro games while winblows, well, blows lmfao!

>>11853940
Bad example. Proprietary software can include their own shared libraries in the directory like they do on windows and use that. The only real issue is glibc.

>>11854734
>dude Linux runs PC games better than PC LOL
That is the absolute truth actually lmao
I was pretty shocked myself, but it played everything I threw at it. Colin Mcrae Rally, Umineko, this thing >>11864005 + Bloodlines, Gothic, unpatched Morrowind 1.0, and the list goes on. Funniest part? No tinkering required either. I have no idea how it works, it just does. Whereas on Windows these games present you with all kinds of problems ranging from resolution issues to CTDs.

>>11853897 (OP)
Most of the reasons people have given are wrong or ignore history.

We call it "PC Gaming" not Windows gaming, because it's been a thing since DOS/the original IBM 286 PC. In the 80s, there were many competing computing platforms with their own software/gaming ecosystems, DOS was one of if not the largest. The only thing really close to being as successful was Commodore with the Commodore 64 and Amiga, but DOS edged them out because it was popular for gaming and office software and the Commodore machines were really only popular for gaming/photo-editing/multi-media work. DOS persisted as a mainstream gaming platform all the way into 1996, when it was getting full 3D software rendered games like Quake and Daggerfall.

So Microsoft always had a head start in Computer Games, because "PC Gaming" doesn't really mean computer games, it means, "Games on a Microsoft Platform," because before the 90s we also had "Amiga gaming" etc. After Microsoft killed all their competitors on desktop circa 1995, Linux began to catch on in the tech industry entirely because you could set up what's called a LAMP stack (full server environment) without paying any license fees, or at worst paying them to Red Hat, who was cheaper than Unix/Microsoft. While this was going on, Microsoft correctly identified 3D as the next big thing in gaming and developed and heavily marketed DirectX as an alternative to OpenGL. In a few years, most games would ditch Software Rendering and require a dedicated Graphics Card and DirectX. So before DirectX/Direct3D games were tied to Microsoft via DOS, and after DirectX games were tied to Microsoft because they often only had a DirectX renderer. And all this DirectX stuff ran extremely low-level on your graphics hardware, meaning Microsoft needed a very close and direct relationship with companies like Nvidia and ATI. They used this relationship FOR DECADES to ensure the drivers on linux sucked shit until like 2016.

tl;dr Windows IS PC Gaming, sadly.

>>11853903
Real answer: Linux breaks API compatibility for pretty much every API that exists in Linux constantly, and most closed source software doesn't disclose what other software (and versions) it needs to run.

Your best bet to develop stable software on Linux is to use non-Linux APIs and ABIs, developed on your own. There is no software stability otherwise.

>>11865532
To follow up, there is a lot of fuckery among certain commercial Linux vendors (Canonical, Red Hat) and rather cult-like open source projects (Debian, Free Desktop, Gnome) that leads to software incompatibility for various reasons - some financial, others ideological or emotional.

>>11853897 (OP)
Linux is dogshit but it's open source dogshit, so troons and spackers love it.

Literally nothing wrong with XP or Windows 7. For 99% of tasks they'd be the right choice.

>>11864206
Third-party components like OSS couldn't be included with applications due to requiring support being built-in to the kernel
The OSS compatibility layer in ALSA was also unusably bad for a long time, though so was the rest of ALSA for the most part. Linux audio wasn't really a solved problem until the early 2010's.

>>11855460
>>11856748
OpenGL lagging for a few years at the onset of programmable pipeline is a good reason.

Also, 3DStudio was the preferred modelling and animation software at the time for video games and was Windows only. When Maya was more movie-oriented and Blender was awful at the time.

>>11866498
blender also wasn't publically available until 1998 and then just died for a while in 2002

>>11853903
This
Gabe Newell personally forced the Windows 1.0 kernel to be low latency for gaymen, and he had to spend ten years doing pissy Linux kernel politics to get its kernel to the state where gaymen was viable there too
>>11853940
Wine has existed for decades anon, but its performance was dogshit because Linux kernel developers didn’t care about graphics performance
Valve forced them to care

>>11853897 (OP)
Low market share.

>>11859494
>It was not even close to being a competitor to Windows at any point in its history,
Except in the server space, where it completely destroyed Windows Server

>>11853897 (OP)
>Why wasn’t Linux seen as a competitor to Windows in the gaming sphere, similar to the console wars during that time?
it;s always been a bit shit really and for the first decade of its existence it was very very shit. It was primarly a platform for students to complete C assignments at home in a unix like shell fir years (if it would even run on that particular pc)

>>11867683
>Except in the server space, where it completely destroyed Windows Server
Guess how I know you have never worked at any serious level in IT. MS serevrs run corporate America and Corporate Europe and 99% of all goverment stuff that is not oracle.. Why the fuck do children like you spout shit about spaces you know absolutely nothing about.

>>11867770
>Guess how I know you have never worked at any serious level in IT. MS serevrs run corporate America and Corporate Europe and 99% of all goverment stuff that is not oracle.. Why the fuck do children like you spout shit about spaces you know absolutely nothing about.

>>11867783
I'm not a fucking jeet you retarded moron. Don't spout shit about IT if you know fuck all about it.

>>11867793
yes saar please be doing the needful and installing the windows domain controller yis

yknow its sad that /g/-tier M$ shills plauge the internet
>>11853897 (OP)
>What stopped it from challenging Microsoft’s throne as the de facto OS for PC gaming?
are you for real?
Aside from totally false conspiracy theories about Microsoft being a CIA asset you have to look up just how fucking aggressive the company was back in the days (and today) to make sure windows was the ONLY OS in the whole world.
wherever Linux showed up bill showed up to suppress, bribe, dump and blackmail relevant parties to make sure that windows was the only option he even conquered china and russia.
In a better world every pc/laptop manufacturer would have their own linux distro based off of ubuntu or soemthing akin to how things are in android world. But we dont live a better world.
>>11853940
this is bullshit.
>>11854049
its actually a more efficient design and is the correct way to do these things.
>>11854185
they forced everyone to use whatever trash they developed
>>11858249
nothing stops and ever stopped linux from running prorietary garbage and nothing stops devs from just using open source software that linux provided in fact industry wants an open platform for development.
why do you think our browsers are so big and basically replace OSes nowadays?

>>11853965
This is amazing what country

In the us, all ththe laptop money would have been stolen by corrupt local govt. Sad

>>11867846
We've had laptops in schools in the US since 2000s. They were usually ibooks back then tho

>>11858380
>>11867846
Going off limited information my best guess would be Macedonia, I've heard a similar (although not exactly the same) story from a friend of mine from there. From how I remember it the government made a big push in the late 2000's with Ubuntu encouraging everyone to use it.

>>11867846
the us isn't THAT corrupt

>>11867839
>yknow its sad that /g/-tier M$ shills plauge the internet
I'd argue that you're acting like a "/g/-tier" Linux shill.
>nothing stops and ever stopped linux from running prorietary garbage
Try running modern versions of Office or Adobe's products on Wine. Yes, there's nothing preventing proprietary software vendors from shipping native Linux versions of their products, but in practice they usually don't, and proprietary applications for Windows won't always work.
>nothing stops devs from just using open source software that linux provided
Not true if you want to use proprietary libraries, APIs, technologies, etc. Sometimes there's no open source alternative, or at least no decent open source alternative.
>in fact industry wants an open platform for development
Perhaps that's what we're building towards, but things haven't always been that way.
>why do you think our browsers are so big and basically replace OSes nowadays?
See above.
In any case, we're on /vr/. Linux was different back in "retro" times. Computing was different. Linux didn't become viable as anything remotely resembling a mainstream gaming platform until a few years ago, when Valve launched Proton.

>>11854317
Unless the game is gothic.