techlists wrote:
I really love the analogy of comparing wine to a crutch. Because that is exactly what it is. An as a crutch, we should not be trying to make the crutch better, rather work on healing the leg so that the crutch is not needed. In this case instead of making windows apps work under linux, we make linux apps that are better. And to those companies who will not port their products to linux, especially the games makers, we tell them you can shove your windows krap, we will use a native product, and even if the native one is not as good, I will still use it over you product, so you either develop for us or go bankrupt. If we continue on this "make linux able to run windows app" we give no insentive to companies to develop for linux.
That as was said before OS/2 fell for the same reason. No one developed for os/2, so win windows changed it's code and win-os/2 couldn't run the new apps......well we know what happened. os/2 was too far behind with it's native apps to catch up.
So use wine as a crutch if you wish, but never want it to be a full product, or we will lose in the marketplace.
Let's take the special case of games again. In this case, it's not a matter of making a better product for linux. If Blizzard came out with Diablo III for linux tomorrow, that wouldn't allow me to play Diablo I.
You're right about apps, though. If Microsoft Office won't work on linux, use OpenOffice. But games are not applications. They're entertainment. And a later version of a piece of entertainment does not supercede a previous piece. It's simply another piece.
Even if MS Office *did* worn on Linux, still use OpenOffice, Abiword, or *anything* else.
So how do we solve the problem of games under linux? There's a few possibilities:This is very true and it sucks.
1. They're permanently tied to Windows, and that's the way it will be. This forces gamers to have a second partition or computer running Windows for their games. Not the situation we want to be in.
2. Current games should be ported to Linux. This is possible, but not very easy at all. There's no source, so it takes an insider to do it, or some contractor. And the companies need to have an incentive to embark on this kind of project. Which means when these ports do happen, we need to spend our hard-earned cash on them.
I wholeheartedly agree. However, some games use crap like DirectX and other MS-Only technologies that makes porting as difficult than a complete rewrite.
3. Companies should start making their games Linux-compatible. Like above, there needs to be an incentive. And right now, I could buy Quake III for Linux for a whopping $45 or so from TuxGames. Or I could buy it for Windows for $5 on eBay. This type of pricing scheme will go nowhere.
To me, the incentive ought be there already. There are such a plethora of toolkits and game engines that already run on Linux, that there is no conceivable excuse I can see for any compnay *not* to develop cross-platform games, except that they probably get concessions or subsidies from MS to not go cross-platform.
Example, I am writing a computer simulation (not exactly a game, but it could very easily be extended to be a real-time strategy game) using wxWindows for a GUI toolkit and OpenGL for graphics. I could use SDL or CrystalSpace if I also needed sound, but that seemed like overkill for my project. Right off the bat my app compiles in Linux, Windows and FreeBSD with only minor tweaking involved.
4. Wine. The crutch this is absolutely right, but right now that's the only way to play Windows-only games on Linux. And the better it is, the better we are for it.I can agree with this.
By the way: want to support Linux gaming? Pre-order Doom 3 for linux!
I don't want Doom. I want a good castle-building strategy game. Or maybe something like Pharaoh. Enougn FPS's already.
-Roberto
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