Year of the Linux Desktop

It's closer than you think!

Microsoft has decided to turn into Apple, and will be moving towards closing their OS ecosystem and focusing on making their own hardware/software products:
http://www.infoworld.com/t/technology-business/microsoft-pc-and-tablet-makers-youre-not-our-future-195877

Valve is releasing Steam and Source Engine for Linux, allowing 3rd parties to release for Linux as well:
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/127475-valve-confirms-steam-and-source-for-linux-signals-low-confidence-for-windows-8

Valve is developing an open game system/common platform based on Linux and PC hardware:
http://www.develop-online.net/news/40592/Valve-confirms-console-and-mobile-hardware-plan

Wayland 1.0 release this summer, finally something to replace X11/X.org:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4MzQ
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA5OTY

Furthermore, the continued economic recession/depression will drive more and more businesses to adopt Linux, and this will increase spread to user's homes. As consumer's budgets become smaller, they will adopt Linux in increasing numbers as they become aware of it through the grape vine and wish to keep their old computer hardware running without relying on unsupported and out-of-date software.

Those with money will choose Apple over Microsoft.

Microsoft's business model is dead.

Every year is announced as Linux Desktop's year, and every year it isn't.

IABTEY

>>2
not seeing a pattern
not getting a joke
autismus retardatus
welcome to /prog/

>>2
2013 will be the year. Just you wait. Windows 8 is going live in July, and it will be ill-received. By Q2 2013, several months after Steam launched on Linux, more and more gamers and hardcore users will be making the switch to SteamBox, Linux Mint or Ubuntu. Ubuntu use is already at 5% of home PC desktop/laptop use, which was more than Mac OS 9 back in the 90s.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA5ODM

>>2
Except, this time, Microsoft is throwing in the towel. They don't care about the desktop anymore.

I expect Windows will own the majority share until 2015, but 2013 could be big for Linux adoption. It might be able to breach 10% of desktop/laptop use. And that would be a victory.

Linux has been the year of the desktop since 2006.

2038 YEAR OF LINUX ON THE DESKTOP

2012 YEAR OF THE JAVASCRIPT DESKTOP

>>6
It's been the year of the Linux desktop since 2004 for me.

What irks me is that Valve NEVER confirmed anything about Steam on Linux.

Michael Larabell is a fucking idiot who did the SAME FUCKING THING some 4 years ago, claiming that Steam is coming to Linux any minute now.

I wouldn't believe that water is wet if that idiot troll would say it and you people are taking it for omen of Year Of The Linux On Desktops...

check em

>>10
Yes. Phoronix is the Sankaku of free software.

UEFI will kill Linux on PC:
https://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/shuttleworth-on-ubuntu-linux-fedora-and-the-uefi-problem/11270

enjoy hacking your firmware to install a communist OS

Meanwhile popular game engine Unity 4 announced with Linux support.

Linux is doing great. One day it might even reach the functionality of Windows.

>>15
Who is going to use crippled Linux?

Free software developers can't into shader optimisation. NVIDIA will never support Wayland because professional CAD software will stick with X11. Wayland is shit.

No reason to develop for linux, freetards won't buy shit

>>18
what's wrong with developing to improve what you use everyday instead of for $$$$$$$

>>19
No reason, but other people don't want to sit around constantly working to improve someone elses' OS.

>>1 back to /g/ freetard.  Linux will always suck for desktop

>>21
In fact, it does not. Damn, my grandma uses Linux Mint on her computer.

gee is leaking

>>22
Linux is great for complete computer novices, and for advanced users.
What it's not great for is the borderline script kiddies in between who have learned a few Windows idioms and think that constitutes expertry, and who are confident enough in their abilities to break systems but not competent enough to fix them afterwards. It's these people most of the opposition to Linux is coming from, and /g/ is full of them.

>>24
It is a sad world...

>>24
Linux is great if all you do is browse the web (although even there it's not totally operational because of the lack of Silverlight and buggy Flash support).

If you need any professional software, or you want to play games, or if you just want things to work on the desktop with nearly ubiquitous support from hardware manufacturers, then Linux is worthless. Let's face facts here, kid.

>>26

Lol

Know I'm getting trolled but a lot of EE/CompE software runs on Linux.  Hell, the place I work now only runs Linux, not a windows pc in sight. I can't even imagine my work flow on a windows machine.

>>27
Care to give specifics?

>>26
browse the web
Silverlight and buggy Flash
web


professional software
play games
support from hardware manufacturers
If this is the biggest complaint there is, then there is no problem.

Why should anyone use Linux when the hours necessary to make it functional could have paid for Windows several times over?

>>30
Why should anyone use Windows when the hours necessary to make it functional could have been used doing other things?

My dog has no Linux on his desktop.

How does he perform everyday computing functions successfully?

Quite well, thank you!

Dubs, Check 'Em!

>>30
you don't like to configure shit? use Kubuntu
you want a secure, versatile operating system? use Debian
you want a backdoored, slow, badly-designed operating system? use Windows

>>34
you have the IQ of a thumbtack? use OS X
qft

If Linux in any of its flavors really is great, then why does it get such minimal use that (every) "next/this year" will be the year of its desktop and it isn't already happened? why the holdup? the lackluster?

Why does anyone even care what kind of desktop they use as long as it works to the degree that the applications that matter work?

>>34
We program here. Not circlejerk about useless freetard shit. Back to /g/.

>>36
loaded queries
No.

>>38
Windows is useless.

Meanwhile Cho Jong Weng from a town of Su-hong finally adopted linux.  Truly it is a year of linux on desktop!!

why Linux sucks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh-cnaJoGCw&feature=youtu.be
why it sill not be the year of the Linux desktop for anytime soon

I don't understand why game developers insist on using DirectX. OpenGL is a superset of Direct3D and has almost identical performance when doing the same thing on any decent implementation¹. DirectX is a bit more convenient because the hunt for entry points is easier and the helper libraries don't suck as much as GLU, but isn't portability more important?

<sub>__________________
1. All currently used drivers but Intel's for Windows.</sub>

Microsoft should have stuck with making mice.

>>43
Game programmer here. You are wrong. Direct3D11 is actually a superset of OpenGL 4.3, although they are almost at feature parity. OpenGL lacks support for building command buffers/display lists from other threads, where as D3D11 has deferred render contexts which can handle this. There are no OpenGL extensions from any vendor which solves this. Direct3D11 implements everything that OpenGL 4.3, plus vendor extensions, implements minus the deprecated stuff in OpenGL like the immediate mode functions and fixed-function pipeline.

Direct3D11, if you look beyond the fact that it uses COM and has that OOP feel to it, has a better object model than OpenGL that results in less call overhead when mutating render state. Render state changes are batched far better and the API has a better fit to how driver implementers do things internally.

John Carmack even admits this now.

That said, it doesn't matter what you use. Game programmers ultimately have to build code paths for whatever is best supported and has the best performance on each of the targeted platforms. There is no OpenGL support on the XBox 360. On the PS3, only OpenGL ES 2.0 is supported, so most developers just bypass the API and go right down to the metal and program the GPU via IO ports and memory mapping, and then offload a bunch of processing onto the Cell SPU cores on the CPU.

Which API has a better design doesn't matter at this point. Shipping code that can beat the competition and deliver a superior game and visual experience is what matters.

Furthermore, 3D graphics APIs are going to be almost irrelevant for this next console generation. Developers are moving back to pure software rendering that uses the GPU as just another general purpose processor cluster, and it looks like OpenCL will be the biggest player here. OpenGL is just used for the framebuffer. OpenCL has interop capabilities with both OpenGL and Direct3D as part of the specification, for resource sharing.

Even on the next XBox, where MS won't support OpenCL, because AMD is open sourcing their OpenCL stack and Clang/LLVM already compiles OpenCL Kernel C for Power and AMD's GPU ISA, it will probably only take a couple of man months to build your own OpenCL implementation for XBox. Spending two months getting OpenCL working on XBox Next is better than spending 10 man years building an entire DirectCompute + Direct3D render code path.

>>45
OpenGL lacks support for building command buffers/display lists from other threads, where as D3D11 has deferred render contexts which can handle this. There are no OpenGL extensions from any vendor which solves this.
What about the wiggle ShareLists function and the shareList parameter to GLX CreateContext? If I'm right OpenGL has been supporting this for years!

Direct3D11 implements everything that OpenGL 4.3, plus vendor extensions, implements minus the deprecated stuff in OpenGL like the immediate mode functions and fixed-function pipeline.
What about NVIDIA's bindless, GL_AMD_pinned_memory and the very new GL_AMD_sparse_texture (http://renderingpipeline.com/2012/03/partially-resident-textures-amd_sparse_texture/)?

>>45

I don't mean to be a an OpenGL fanboy or anything, but what would be a use case of multithreaded display list building? Why not have the threads submit requests for display lists to a master thread that uses the OpenGL API? If it all had to go over the bus anyways, I don't see the point of using threading other than convenience for the programmer, and convenience can always be obtained by abstraction within the application code. I could be off though.

Your post makes me want to get into the games industry.

>>47
YOU FANBOY

>>46
>What about the wiggle ShareLists function and the shareList parameter to GLX CreateContext?
Display lists were deprecated in OpenGL 3.1, and they don't work with vertex/index buffers anyway which is pretty much how all rendering is done these days. Display lists were meant for capturing immediate mode rendering calls only. They need to resurrect the display list idea and make it work for everything.

>NVIDIA's bindless, GL_AMD_pinned_memory
This is admittedly a problem, mostly because there's no work-around within shaders when the GPU does not support this, which is why you won't see it a part of the core API of either Direct3D or OpenGL. There's no standardized fused memory model across the various vendors yet, although AMD's FSA is good step in this direction. On the XBox 360, the memory model is already merged and there are proprietary extensions added to Direct3D9 to allow you to do this, but on the desktop, you are SOL.

>GL_AMD_sparse_texture
Direct3D 11.1 allows you to discard and page in mipmap levels through resource views, which can be used for sparse 1D, 2D, or 3D texture maps. It's equivalent to GL_AMD_sparse_texture.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh404616%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Final Verdict:

You: +1 Me: +2 Sussman: +∞

>>47
In games or simulations, when rendering large scenes, hidden surface removal is an important part of the rendering pipeline in order to make it perform adequately. The fastest polygons are the ones that are never drawn. Typically, you need to traverse some sort of spatial tree representing the world and cull geometry that isn't inside the view frustum or that is occluded by other geometry, and then build a final draw command list that you then sort based on certain criteria. On systems with enough spare CPU cores, you can farm out this work to multiple cores and buid a command list for each render stage.

>>49
Sorry for the sloppy quotations. I actually know how to properly quote
but I was lazy and didn't double check,

>>49
Display lists were deprecated in OpenGL 3.1, and they don't work with vertex/index buffers anyway which is pretty much how all rendering is done these days.
Implementers don't actually care about deprecation and display lists do capture client-side arrays.

but on the desktop, you are SOL.
Not with OpenGL.

>>47
You're absolutely right; Microsoft just went for building it into the API. Frankly I think it's fine, but it's by no means a new thing or a feature that's terribly important. For the most part, programmers who needed to, would implement this in their application code anyway.

bampu pantsu