2011 the year of Linux – thanks to Apple &am->
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Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Somehow, no matter how many “will 20xx be the year of Linux” articles get published every year, the moment never seems to arrive and why is that?
Ah gaming, that’s what has been missing from this whole desktop Linux equation, somewhere along the line it all went awry, the games dried up and somehow the great desktop revolution never happened.
OpenGL is the problem. From 1997 to 2003 OpenGL was going strong with annual releases bringing an ever more sophisticated API and support for new hardware functions, and the results spoke for themselves, top-tier developers like ID, Epic and Bioware all released native linux ports of their titles, but then OpenGL hit the development slow-lane.
Unsurprisingly games developers and publishers looked at a stagnant API with a fragmented feature set dependant on which GPU you had and thought “no thanks!” Likewise the GPU companies looked at the apathy evident in Linux games development and saw no market there to serve.
Apple and Valve are the answer. Fair dues must of course be given to Khronos Group who took over developmental control of OpenGL, however the real meat of this story is Apples desire that the OpenGL dependent Mac OSX should become a gaming platform, as well as Valves desire to become a big player in the Mac gaming market.
With a huge market like Mac OSX opening up ATI and nVidia will pour more effort in ensuring stability, speed, and features in their OSX drivers, and what is good for Mac drivers should be equally good Unix based Linux drivers. By the same token, an OpenGL game developed for distribution on Mac is going to be a hell of a lot cheaper to port to Linux than a native Windows/DirectX game ever would be.
If by the end of 2010 we have at least a couple of AAA titles released as native Linux versions, such as ID’s Rage, then other developers may look to follow their lead in 2011.
At that point we really will be talking about the year of desktop Linux as being upon us!"
Link to Original Source
Ah gaming, that’s what has been missing from this whole desktop Linux equation, somewhere along the line it all went awry, the games dried up and somehow the great desktop revolution never happened.
OpenGL is the problem. From 1997 to 2003 OpenGL was going strong with annual releases bringing an ever more sophisticated API and support for new hardware functions, and the results spoke for themselves, top-tier developers like ID, Epic and Bioware all released native linux ports of their titles, but then OpenGL hit the development slow-lane.
Unsurprisingly games developers and publishers looked at a stagnant API with a fragmented feature set dependant on which GPU you had and thought “no thanks!” Likewise the GPU companies looked at the apathy evident in Linux games development and saw no market there to serve.
Apple and Valve are the answer. Fair dues must of course be given to Khronos Group who took over developmental control of OpenGL, however the real meat of this story is Apples desire that the OpenGL dependent Mac OSX should become a gaming platform, as well as Valves desire to become a big player in the Mac gaming market.
With a huge market like Mac OSX opening up ATI and nVidia will pour more effort in ensuring stability, speed, and features in their OSX drivers, and what is good for Mac drivers should be equally good Unix based Linux drivers. By the same token, an OpenGL game developed for distribution on Mac is going to be a hell of a lot cheaper to port to Linux than a native Windows/DirectX game ever would be.
If by the end of 2010 we have at least a couple of AAA titles released as native Linux versions, such as ID’s Rage, then other developers may look to follow their lead in 2011.
At that point we really will be talking about the year of desktop Linux as being upon us!"
Link to Original Source