Look at how proud Epic is of the Linux support

Why would he mention an irrelevant fringe (desktop) OS?

You can thank the "Linux community" for decades of snarky problem denial and telling users to use Windows. Users followed, and this is the consequence. Delivered as ordered.

@Fast-Nop If Valve can do it, Epic definitely can. They are just ignorant pieces of shit.

@lamka02sk Of course they could. But with the market share, maybe it's you. Just step outside your Linux bubble and do a reality check.

I'm kind of sick of this "PC vs. Mac" thing. It should be Windows vs. Mac.

Why would they bother with server OS?

Fortunately for my Windows install this kind of piece of shit still exists

@hitzoR

Solaris?

@Fast-Nop I agree with the user market share bit but consider that Linux is being used in creative dev workstations and most importantly rendering servers, that alone is a good reason for them to support Unreal on Linux.

This is why you see Linux support coming to DCC software for example, it's definitely not because of the user market share. I can imagine a server farm with Unreal as the rendering engine just chugging through animations like it's nothing.

I guess the game dev community hasn't caught up with the animation community in Linux support.

(And both Epic and Unity are promoting Unreal and Unity as filmmaking tools, so this is weird).

@RememberMe Good point, as usually. ^^

Frankly, it would be more relevant to the future of linux as a consumer platform to drop everything and push out a viable phone os than trying to make windows gaming work on Linux.

@bytewind That's how Android started, and it took Google billions of dollars to get it usable.

@Fast-Nop I know but... We're already in a world where for a lot of people their only computing device is a phone and it's going to accelerate. GNU Linux survival as a consumer product is nearing the end of its life. It would be a shame if the last 30 years would've been just to run apache in a back-end cave. Maybe I'm being a defeatist.

@bytewind I would not say defeatist, more like, you recognize that there is a problem, much like Fast-Nop is saying, and you are not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in great part due to the lack of community enlightenment.
I love Linux, run Linux on a lot of my own personal machines, but when I see that Linux is not a supported platform for <insert software product here> I don't go into a fit because I know that this is just no a good target platform due to its marketshare.

See? we are not defeatists :V we just know the community is gay, and not in the good way

Linux Desktop really screwed itself over by having this fragmented approach and its “I don’t like yours, I’ll make my own” philosophy

Before anybody jumps on my neck, I’ve been a Linux user since 1994.

I fully understand the strengths of Linux and how if you don’t like it you can shape things your own way, etc.

But I also fully understand how this was also it’s downfall desktop wise.

As a desktop, I abandoned Linux for Mac back in 2009 and I wouldn’t look back. I have all the power of Unix, with none of the drawbacks.

So to be honest, I don’t blame them, not, one, bit.

Please don’t come at me saying that these days things are different, I tried to use Linux as a desktop at my latest company and within a week I realized that it hasn’t really changed that much, just some superficial things.

@chrisalexthomas The ability to "make my own when I don't like yours" is pretty great, what really screws everything up is when this approach gets applied to core OS functionality.

Ability to choose a different DE or file explorer app is great. Publishing 20 packages for your software because each distro has a different package manager & service supervisor? Fuck that shit.

@hitko bingo! Exactly, I completely agree.

When you’ve got ten desktop managers, three user interface toolkits, five audio interfaces all with wildly different functionalities, unstable video interfaces, things start to go to shit pretty quickly

I honestly don’t understand why we have apt, apk, yum, rpm, and friends.

Are programming package managers that interesting that everybody needs their own?

They’re basically zip files with some scripts attached to events in the installation process.

It’s ridiculous that after 20 years, nobody has even bothered to clean up this so we only have one. Is very unprofessional and amateurish

@chrisalexthomas we're now in the middle of the next generation package manager wars... Appimage vs snap vs flatpaks. Appimage is dead-ish so it's between canonical(snap) vs everyone else (flat). In any case we're down to two and installing support for flats or snaps is trivial so we might be starting to see the end of the old school repos

@bytewind it’s just techies fighting over which image format will win. It’s these problems which doomed the Linux desktop. They’re just repeating the same mistakes a decade later

@bytewind the developers should be told to work together by the distros and make them come up with one format and stop this Balkanization of the distros and a repeat of the 00’s cause it’s ridiculous that we are just repeating history ad infinitum

@chrisalexthomas I agree, but that's where we are... And meanwhile Wayland and btrfs are on the horizon as well which will split even more as distros stay on current tech or migrate...

@bytewind oh great, more fragmentation and compatibility issues. No wonder why companies stay away from Linux itself and target android.

You take do need to understand that Linux is not only a minor market share, but also that is complex to support. In reality "Linux support" is closer to saying "computer support" really did to the sheer amount of OS's. Even valves software will only work in certain scenarios.

On top of that, if your distro wasn't supported, you'd just Complain anyway. It all just sounds so entitled when people whinge that their specific personal choice isn't catered for.

@stonestorm exactly, I remember when companies tried to support Linux and collapsed under the weight of everybody complaining that it didn’t work on their distro, with their libraries, the desktop, their toolkit version, version of alsa, and a particular graphics card with a binary blob graphics driver.

It was nuts to expect that companies could actually support that. So they stopped.

You made an excellent point

@chrisalexthomas sudo alsa force-reload.... Wait where am I? Sorry I get flashbacks when the Linux sound subsystem is mentioned

I mean we all know that post an adobe engineer made about ALSA back in 2007 about how crazy Linuxs audio system was “adobe alsa welcome to the jungle” on the internet archive for all those interested.

13 years later. Linux still has systemic problems and a lack of direction. No wonder the desktop, which is supposed to be an island of stability, failed.

@bytewind right me too! I remember having a problem with pulse audio where I found a solution on an obscure blog was to go into a configuration file and remove a ‘:0’ from the end of a device

Bingo, sound fixed! Until the next update broke it again

The Linux guys haven’t yet, even today, figured out that this shit isn’t acceptable. Nobody is gonna do what I did, I did it because I could and I needed to. Anybody else would just walk away.

But then the next question they’ll ask even if they accept that premise, is what toolkit should we use to write the user interface in and then I throw my hands up in despair because we all know that conversation will never end, Linux will never get fixed.

Somethings are just not meant to be. The Linux desktop is one of them.

@chrisalexthomas History has shown that at the beginning of a technology, there is a diversity explosion. The next phase is a contraction where those who can't make it die out. The winners aren't always the "best" from a nerd point of view, but things consolidate and just work.

With the Linux desktop, the consolidation phase never came because there is no winner, and that's because all of the options remain half-done shit.

Making it mature would require a lot of boring grunt work, and devs don't do that unless being told so by their bosses who also give clear roadmaps, which in turn requires the devs being paid employees for real money. Devs on their own just want to hack some alpha shit together and quit once that phase is done.

Real money is involved in server Linux, which is why it has taken over the world, but not in desktop Linux, which is why this has failed.

@Fast-Nop absolutely, what you said 100%.

I use Linux all the time, every day I work. On servers.

I gave up trying to cajole desktop Linux into something acceptable and left that to apple instead. Who has done an amazing job at getting what needs to be done right, done right.

Then with a terminal command. I can get whatever extra power I want.

Best of both worlds