The future of gaming

Pirates are now producing automated Linux ports faster than the publishers using the flatpack next-gen package format. Its exactly like when DOSbox first hit maturity back before Microsoft dropped their own DOS compatibility layer. How long will it take for publishers to catch up?

No one cares about Linux for gaming.

>Linux

Publishers don't give a shit.

Wow, that's actually pretty interesting

didn't even know this was a thing, how common is it?

2018 will be the first year of Linux

I wish I could share your optimism. I'd love to delete my Windows drive and never look back.

It has been the first year of Linux now for 15 years. Even Valve doesn't give a shit about their Linux offshoot any more.

Not sure how common it is yet, but the script they're using to produce them is open source so I won't be surprised to see a lot more.
I kind of wish they were producing AppImages instead of flatpacks though, but the flatpack is probably preferable due to package size.

Linux already has majority market share on every market except desktop PC. Servers, phones (what do you think Android is based on), routers, various internet-connected devices.

I really wish we had a working alternative to replace Windows as a desktop gaming platform by 2020 when W7 support expires, but I'm not holding my breath.

>Valve doesn't give a shit about their Linux offshoot any more
Then why are they still hiring high profile Linux developers and spending millions on it?
If you watch the development mailing lists for open source projects like Mesa you can routinely see developers on Valve's payroll submitting patches to increase performance in Linux games both announced and unannounced.

How is this different from running things inside a VM? Genuinly curious.

With a VM you're running an entire OS virtualized on top of another OS, depending on your setup this means wrapping all graphics calls to calls on the host, or setting up passthrough which still requires somewhat specialized hardware.

With this the game is sandboxed, only able to affect itself and a few specific external directories for save games, and only unsupported APIs need to be wrapped to native calls. Depending on the version of Wine used and your systems hardware and drivers D3D9 may have native support. So there is still some degree of needing specific hardware but its much less strict, basically you just need an AMD GCN graphics card instead of specific CPU, motherboard and multi GPU combo.

So to put it simply, this is potentially a really awesome solution that publishers could latch on to for easily producing ports of legacy win32 games the same way that they now use DOSbox.

So they can somehow easily port things this way and it has less overhead and shit than running in a VM? Sounds like magic to me but if it works I can only encourage it.

They're using Wine, which is a native implementation of the win32 API and code that handles other non-standard APIs.
Its actually very similar to what Windows 10 uses to run legacy (non-UWP) software (though slightly less mature for D3D11), or the Windows 10 Linux compatibility layer (though a lot more mature since Wine can run graphical applications).

The novel piece of this is that they're using a package format which contains everything, and makes it easy to run on any platform that supports flatpack. No setup or configuration required.

>linux
Have never seen a more divided, vitriolic, unhelpful and head-up-it's-own-ass community in my whole life
Just say NO to linux

it's not rocket science - Windows platform is on its deathbed, killed off by Microsoft's own hand.
It's only a matter of time when some fine-tuned freeware Linux platform with a solid GPU-passthrough solution for Windows/DirectX-compatibility will get released for ever so dwindling desktop gaming audience

*freeware Linux platform that will get unanimously accepted by the bigger part of userbase

GPU passthrough still requires you to have Windows and a specific hardware setup.
If you want to know how games will run on Linux in the future read up on Gallium Nine and then realize that Gallium is a mid to low level graphics API and that many of the same concepts easily port over to Vulkan.
There's already Vulkan Nine and Vulkan Eleven projects underway to allow for full speed native support for legacy D3D on any platform that supports Vulkan.

The days of slow wrapping of one high level API to another high level API are nearly at an end.

Yeah, nah.
Unless they miraculously decide to stop bitching for one distro or another and finally abandon the CLI in favor of a simple, intuitive, easy to use GUI (both OS AND programs, because GIMP is a exercise in masochism that makes the inferno of the divine comedy look like a walk in the park and that's just one example) they will never be anything more than something for people that prefer trying to make a pasta strainer hold water using nothing but a pair of scissors rather than play games or be productive

well, i'm not into details, but there's historical precedent of making old things, especially from popular platforms, run ez as pie on any modern hardware.
The question is - what would happen with AAA vidya on desktop PC? Will they happen to completely convert into fullHD free-to-play microtransaction marketplaces or they just die off?

>Unless they miraculously decide to stop bitching for one distro or another
Flatpack, Snap, AppImage, etc all the new package formats abstract away the distro specific issues, and to a lesser extent Valve does this with their Steam Platform libraries.

>abandon the CLI in favor of a simple, intuitive, easy to use GUI
I don't know why Windows users pretend that Linux doesn't have GUIs, we've had them for a couple of decades now and in Windows 10 Microsoft actively ripped off features that have been in them for ages. Gnome has settled into being a sane default with even Ubuntu dropping their crappy interface in favor of just configuring Gnome with some extensions by default.
As for abandoning the CLI, that's a really funny demand given that Microsoft has tried to launch next-gen powerful CLI interfaces for Windows a few times now and finally gave up and just decided to use Bash.

>guh nome
>sane
lolno

Complaining about Gnome removing features is like complaining that Firefox removed features. The whole point of it is that there's extensions that let you do just about anything you want. The base version is meant to be minimal.