Ubuntu Founder on Linux Gaming
Lifehacker: The readers have also commented that they arestaying away from Linux because it is missing big name softwarepackages—especially games. Is there a strategy to overcome this traditionallyunconquerable Linux roadblock?
Mark Shuttleworth: Games are a particularly difficult thing to address onLinux. Obviously that’s less of an issue in a corporate environment or amongstprofessional developers who may well have multiple computers and have a gamingmachine for their own personal use separate from their development machine. Itis not something we particularly want to address at this stage. That industryhas very specific economics that we can’t really influence.
August 30th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Games come from id, Valve and others. Not from Ubuntu.
August 31st, 2007 at 3:26 am
Obviously Ubuntu developers aren’t going to be writing commercial quality games themselves but it’s too bad he didn’t mention Click & Run which could go a long way in making it easier for users to find and install existing commercial Linux games.
August 31st, 2007 at 7:37 am
Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions don’t have to actually create games to promote gaming in Linux. They simply have to SUPPORT gaming in Linux by establishing Linux gaming Leagues, sponsor servers, sponsor clans, and the like. A little work in this area would go a long way towards establishing the fact the Linux IS a gaming platform.
August 31st, 2007 at 7:14 pm
While games may come from id, valve, epic, etc… It is the tie-in to the OS technology(DIRECTX) that is keeping them from being run large scale on Linux. So Ubuntu, RedHat, Novell, etc.. should indeed try to impact gaming development just as MS did when OpenGL was the prevalent standard and they decided to publish a set of libraries and an API so gaming devs would lock themselves into MS.
Cheers.
August 31st, 2007 at 11:35 pm
OpenGL has lots of support for any OS. Vista and DX10 is dead (when it comes to gaming).