← Back to team overview

ubuntu-gaming team mailing list archive

Re: Lets start rocking - idea of spawning ubuntu gaming distro?

 

Ingo Ruhnke wrote:
2009/5/24 sakuramboo <sakuramboo@xxxxxxxxx>:
It is the same as saying "FOSS games are crap and we realize that so we are
including Wine so you won't have to deal with the crap FOSS games."

Well, yeah, but as hard as it may sound, that is the reality of the
situation. FOSS gaming comes nowhere near to provide the quantity or
quality of proprietary games and that won't change for many years or
better decades to come. And there really is no way around that fact.
Gaming on Linux means in large part using Wine, Emulators and all that
other stuff that runs games that are non-FOSS.

I don't even see that as much of a philosophical dilemma, its not like
anybody is against the inclusion of video or music players in Ubuntu
because it would promote the watching of non-free movies or music.
With games its pretty much of the same thing, they are non-free forms
of entertainment, its just that their format (aka .exe) is quite a bit
more complex then your average mp3, luckily FOSS players do exist (aka
Wine).

Then why even use Linux? Why even put up with all that hassle of configuring Wine to MAYBE get a game to work? And even if you do get it to work, you will still be lacking in certain functionality (forced to play at lower resolutions, low frame rates, weird graphical artifacts or bugs, lack of network play, etc.). Just use Windows, then.

Instead of pushing Wine, if proprietary games are a must, then why not push those that actually support Linux? Screw Valve and Blizzard. Show support for Id and Epic.

Exe is not a format. It is how Windows determines if a file is an executable or not. It's the Windows library calls that need to get properly parsed. It's all the Direct3D API calls that need to get translated to OpenGL.




Follow ups

References