Is there a chance for Gabe to port all games to Linux?
Hey! Do you think Gabe can influence current developers? Can they rewrite the game specifically for Linux? And, perhaps, under Linux after a while there will be exclusives from Valve and not only? Windows or Linux? Or will everything stay the same as Mac OS X?
I think Gabe already has no chance, one small Valve against Windows... The maximum that they can somehow influence smaller indie developers, although indie developers tend to go where there are most consumers, and this in this case is Windows.
All Valve games and the lion's share of indie games will still be released on Linux. But as for the games of other publishers - not all, far from all.
If there are exclusives, you will have to install the second axis. But I don't believe they would take that risk.
The prospects for Linux will appear only if windows 9-10 completely fail.
"Does Gabe have a chance to port all games to Linux?"
for a lot of money it is possible and not so, but who needs it?
Depends on Microsoft's future attitude towards the gaming world and consumers in general.
- I'm hinting ;)
Porting games to Linux is hampered by several problems.
one). There is no universal way to do this, the programmers of each company port their games to Linux, figuring it out on their own. Therefore, 80% of commercial games are ported by one person, Icculus. He ported almost every game in the Humble Bundle (about a hundred if you subtract Flash games).
2). In /usr/lib, different versions of the same Linux distribution partially or completely change the system libraries. More precisely, they do not change, but their names change. libgnutls.so.26 becomes libgnutls.so.35, libssl.so.0.9.8 becomes libssl.so.1.0.0, libpng14.so.14 becomes libpng17.so.17, and so on. Open source doesn't care, that's why it's open source. In the repositories of a Linux distribution, all 30,000 programs are compiled with all the changed libraries again when a new release is released. But the closed code from this is uncomfortable to use: nothing happens when you click the mouse, when you run it from the console, we see a list of missing libraries. And it would be nice if they were not in the system at all - no, they are, but updated.
Valve solved this problem like this: "we will only compile software for one Linux distribution, for example Ubuntu, because it is the most popular." But it turned out that there is no compatibility of binaries not only between different Linux distributions, but also between different versions of the same distribution! So they had to fence the Steam Runtime, which takes 150 MB and is downloaded again with every minor update ... Crooked, but still solved the problem.
New games will use the Steam Runtime, and that's fine too. How this problem was solved in old games, which Icculus ported a bunch of years ago, and which work quietly in new Linux. He took libraries from the LSB standard, and not the latest versions of these libraries, and what was not there, he put directly into the archive with the game. Thus, the game carries 15 MB of libraries with it instead of 150, like Steam. That is, it turns out that in different Linuxes there are still the same libraries, and this is called LSB. Open source code compiles with new system libraries, while proprietary code compiles only with standard ones. Why Valve didn't do this, I don't know. Maybe the 2007 standard is too old for them, and makes programming difficult for them? Maybe for them it's like IE6 for a web designer?
3). Well, okay, the libraries can be found on pkgs.org and substituted for the program if it doesn't start. There is another problem, GLIBC. LSB obliges to compile all programs with GLIBC 2.5, and then the program will work in all Linuxes of 2007 and newer. Steam compiled with GLIBC 2.15. That is, Steam requires GLIBC to be newer than 99% of the games under it. Epic. All other libraries, including C ++ (libstdc ++.so.6) can be carried in the archive with the game, as I said.
4). Sound! The bastard Lennart Pottering came and broke the sound in Linux. PulseAudio unnecessary unnecessary! If it weren't for Pottering and Red Hat pushing it through, then Steam would now support exactly one sound system: ALSA. Like the developers of all games. But no! Now the zoo.
5). Ati drivers are still buggy.
6). The engine of most games on Direct3D, and on Linux OpenGL. But if there is a port on Mac OS X or Android, then this problem is not worth it.
7). Almost all games use some kind of library that makes it easier to write a game. OpenAL for sound in 3D games, SDL for output and input. Well and so, SDL choen simplifies this business and consequently enjoys popularity. Does not support OpenGL 3 and 4 (analogues of Direct3D 10 and 11), multi-monitor configurations, Force Feedback for joysticks, and much more. Steam is using the beta version of SDL 2, where everything will be fixed.