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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

Reading your post brings this to mind: http://i.imgur.com/VAeA885.jpg

The terms gamer and gaming community are used by people to lump anyone who plays video games into a small digestible nugget. There is no single gaming community and the sheer size of each of the countless gaming communities dwarf most other hobby or enthusiast communities.

Most people promoting gaming on Linux are so out of touch that they think having Tux Racer playable makes a Linux desktop computer a first or even second class gaming platform. Having The Witcher 3 or Tomb Raider on Linux is a novelty or a way to win brownie points.

I'm not a serious gamer by any means, my highest played game only logs 403 hours of playtime, I've see people with ten times that. With that in mind, none of the games in my top 10 list in terms of hours (~1800 hours) played are available on Linux.

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I generally agree with this sentiment. The way I see it, if you have to make concessions for a platform, then that platform is not really a very viable option. If I want to play X, but X is not available for my platform, telling me "Well Y is supported, and it's also a AAA game!" That doesn't really help me any, because I don't want _Y_, I want _X_.

I feel like a large part of the group making who believe Linux is gaming ready doesn't understand that angle.

Making it more viable is a process, and it requires actually using it.

It's a chicken and egg problem. Gamers don't want to adopt a platform that will hinder them and studios don't want to support a platform no one is using.

It was in the past, but it's not stalled anymore, since you can observe the gradual growth. I.e. more games are coming out for Linux, which in turn makes more people use it, which in turn brings more games. So it's improving.

The two most played games on steam have a decent linux port.

At this moment they make up nearly 1.3 million concurrent players. The rest of the top 10 games that do not have a linux port accumulate close to 0.7 million concurrent players.

For a lot of players, CS:GO or Dota 2 are the only games they play regularly, so linux is a viable option for them.

For those who play CS:GO and Dota 2 competitively, Linux isn't a viable option because CEVO and ESEA don't have clients for Linux. That's ignoring all of the bugs and quirky behavior that come with the platform. ALSA has a 10-100ms delay and for a game like CS:GO that relies so heavily on audio feedback, that's inexcusable. There are also issues with mouse input, lag, and random frame drops on Linux that have lingered for years.

You'll see all kinds of posts showing Min/Max FPS and how Linux beats Windows at this game or that but you rarely see any mention of Average FPS because they're usually pretty awful.

What is this you say about audio delay, I have had no such problem with Pulseaudio or Alsa

Just because you don't experience an issue doesn't mean it's nonexistent. A quick google search reveals that it's quite prevalent.

https://www.google.com/search?q=CS%3AGO+audio+delay+linux&ie...

It's non existent in many cases, but not all. If you need real time sound, you'd use Jack, not PulseAudio.

I never said anything about PulseAudio, I said ALSA introduced delays. JACK uses ALSA the same as PulseAudio.

In any case, it's the game developer's choice and not mine. Yet another problem Linux has for developers is that there isn't always a clear choice and the flavor of the day may not be the best choice long term. That's why frameworks like Qt and Unity are so prevalent because they abstract a lot of the crap away.

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