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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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 Posted: Tue Feb 27, 2007 12:37 am |
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Actually, when it comes to gaming, Linux IS there. The problem is, good luck getting anything to work, because frontend support is HORRIBLE. Downright shit-tastic even. Most front-ends for things like emulators or games are years old, have little support, and no updates.
I tried to like Linux; no, that's wrong. I like Linux. I just hate the fact that I can't run anything in it because there are no good frontends.
*head* *bang* *keyboard*
Switched back to XP... things are back to normal; sort of.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Tue Feb 27, 2007 8:13 am |
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| Hot Stott Bot wrote: |
Guys, I really like how I roll.
I run XP with a fancily setup Cygwin install and have another computer running Linux that I just remain constantly SSHed into and stuff.
I would not really want to run Linux as my main desktop solution, personally, but pretty much anything I would want to run on Linux that doesn't have an equivelant in windows I can just install on my other machine and run over SSH... or often times I can compile it in Cygwin and run it locally, even!
I mean this wouldn't work that great for running big applications like web browsing or watching movies, but hey, firefox and vlc are damn fine windows software if you ask me. |
Point taken... but both VLC and Firefox work quite well in Linux.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 4:47 am |
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| BenoitRen wrote: |
| skonrad wrote: |
| I understand nVIDIA's reluctance |
Well, it wouldn't be a problem if they would make some good drivers themselves for Linux.
| Talbain wrote: |
| Actually, when it comes to gaming, Linux IS there. The problem is, good luck getting anything to work, because frontend support is HORRIBLE. |
Can you explain this in more detail, please? I want to know about this.
| Mister Toups wrote: |
| Granted if I had to do any sort of computer science like stuff I'd probably use linux. |
I don't use Linux on my laptop. Well, I tried the Puppy Linux LiveCD, but for some reason, our router doesn't want to give it an IP address. :( Anyway, what they want you to use at school on your laptop is mostly Windows stuff, so... And I don't dare trying to get my wireless network card to work in Linux, when I hear how much of a pain it is. |
I'm a guy who's been using Windows all my life. I likes my frontends. I like GUI, screw command prompts. Yet, for the past two days I've been racking my brain to learn all the little commands and things that I need to do just to get things to compile and install on Xubuntu. Granted, I could just use the auto-installing packages they provide, and it's useful if all you want to install are the little "packages" and not actual programs. The problem is, once you get to programs that are even moderately niche (games, for example), frontend support (GUI as opposed to command-line interface, or CLI) drops to almost nothing. There is gxmame, and that works great for MAME. The problem is there's nothing like this for Mednafen, which is arguably the best GBA/GBC/GB/WSC emulator available for Linux. Thus, you're stuck trying to figure things out through CLI, and it's just GRATING when you're used to using GUIs.
One good thing I will mention, is that with Cedega, I got Guxt to work! I wasn't so lucky with Cave Story though... in fact, in general, Cedega sucks; Wine's alright, but it's so much slower than native Windows programs that I'm surprised people praise it as much as they do.
I want to use ZSNES, but when I run ZSNES, I come to find out that its sound support is shit, and it runs like molasses. An SNES emulator that is low-end and yet I can't get it to even run at full speed (the sound skips a lot). Snes9X yields similar results.
Optimization is another huge problem. Almost every program that I've attempted to install has not had the dependencies needed right off the bat. I had to go hunting for some of them (such as the GTK libraries, which displays itself as a C++ compiler library error, rather than a GTK library error), and others were more accessible, but still vague. Searching for sdl-config... it doesn't exist, but libsdl does! and you're just supposed to know that it's the right library... how?
There is no Genesis emulator. None, nada, zip. Gens exists. Gens sucks however. Kega won't run in Wine. Nintendo 64 emulator? Again, not so much. PSX, well, there's ePSXe... if you can get it to run. Saturn? Again, good luck. PS2 - well, in theory PCSX2 should run, but I don't have a computer powerful enough to run it with Windows, so I doubt Linux would be better. Dreamcast? Nothing. I've also only touched upon how many Windows games just don't work very well in any programs are available. Seriously, if you're going to use Linux as your main OS; consider VMWare. Actually, don't consider it, get it, because you'll want it eventually.
Overall, it is not the OS that I have a problem with, but the access barriers to using the OS are so high that unless you're a programmer, I would still seriously not recommend using Xubuntu or Ubuntu... or any Linux distro really. I had to get help from a friend of mine who'd been using Linux for a long time just to get most of this stuff done too. What's worse, is that there's no tutorial to tell you stuff like the following.
This is how to "compile" source code.
tar zxpvf blah.tar.gz
OR
tar jxpvf blah.tar.bz2
OR
tar xpvf blah.tar
cd blah
./configure (options here, normally you don't need any)
make (or follow instructions given by ./configure, i.e. makedepend && make)
sudo make install
This may seem simple enough, but no one TOLD me how to do any of this from the beginning, a lot of it was trial and error and experimentation, as well as help from friends. Also, what's not here is that during this process, errors pop up; and they pop up often.
This is just something simple; I'll not even get into the more complex processes.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 7:14 am |
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No, I find it terribly interesting as well; it's just that Linux programs aren't really there when it comes to games, and that's primarily what I use my computer for (I've literally got thousands of games on it).
So, I now use Linux more as a place to learn more about the programming environment... but, I dunno. It's just not an everyday OS for me, considering how much writing I need to do and how ephemeral my ideas are; I need an OS that's a bit more accessible than Linux distros currently are. They may get there someday, but I think it'll be awhile unless the Microsoft monopoly dies.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 3:36 pm |
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Just don't upgrade to Vista. Shit stops working real fast. =/
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2007 12:32 am |
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| BenoitRen wrote: |
| Talbain wrote: |
| Overall, it is not the OS that I have a problem with, but the access barriers to using the OS are so high that unless you're a programmer, I would still seriously not recommend using Xubuntu or Ubuntu... or any Linux distro really. |
I understand the front-end thing. However, what I don't understand is why you have to compile stuff. Don't they offer binaries? As for the rest, I guess there should be more documentation.
The access barriers are only high if you want to run games, I would argue. Puppy Linux is really nice. I ended up installing it to the hard drive on the Linux box instead of continuing to toy around with other distros.
After reading all this, I have to ask: exactly how is Linux there for games then? |
They offer binaries; it's just that most of the time, said binaries are months, sometimes years, old.
As for where Linux is with games... nowhere near Windows.
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