EDIT: I just realized that I should have posted this in Offtopic and not Open Discussion
Sorry about that, and if one of the mods has the time feel free to move this post.Windows or Linux
Windows or Linux
I know a lot of people recently have been switching from Windows over to Linux. The question is, how many people would I cut off from being able to use my project if I developed it for Windows and Windows alone. I ask that if you read this post that you take the time and vote, that way everyone will be able to see the Windows to Linux ratio in this community
EDIT: I just realized that I should have posted this in Offtopic and not Open Discussion Sorry about that, and if one of the mods has the time feel free to move this post.
EDIT: I just realized that I should have posted this in Offtopic and not Open Discussion
Sorry about that, and if one of the mods has the time feel free to move this post.
-
darkliquid
- Posts: 41
- Joined: Sun Nov 09, 2003 10:12 am
- Location: UK
- Contact:
I have used Linux for the past 4 maybe 5 years as my only operating system and before that I used it on and off wit
You should definately support linux, linux lacks in games which is the major reason people don't go over to it. The only reason people don't develop games for linux very ofte is that most don't see a large enough market, but there isn't a large market because few people make games for linux. Its a vicious circle. Write linux games! With Irrlichts crossplatform abilities, you have no excuse not to.
You should definately support linux, linux lacks in games which is the major reason people don't go over to it. The only reason people don't develop games for linux very ofte is that most don't see a large enough market, but there isn't a large market because few people make games for linux. Its a vicious circle. Write linux games! With Irrlichts crossplatform abilities, you have no excuse not to.
http://www.darkliquid.net - Blog, art, poetry
-
Serg Nechaeff
- Posts: 162
- Joined: Wed Nov 26, 2003 5:24 pm
- Location: Europe
a couple more worms and snakes and I'll switch to linux
http://www.javazing.com
P-III-950, WinXP, GeForce FX5600 128 MB ForceWare 52.16, DX9, Eclipse IDE, JRE 1.6
P-III-950, WinXP, GeForce FX5600 128 MB ForceWare 52.16, DX9, Eclipse IDE, JRE 1.6
I know this may be "controversial" but heres my 2 cents about why linux sucks:
Performance. Perhaps linux is favoured for server needs, largely due to its user management & heavily console based interface - but this is the only place it belongs. As a desktop machine you will see that it eats often twice as much RAM when running some applications (or more) as windows to perform the same task - and I am still able to figure out why it does this (Ex: Half Life dedicated server uses 60-80 meg ram on windows - on linux it's closer to 160 meg). The various GUI's avaliable for it may look pretty but I have found that they all turn out to be flawed & incomplete compared to windows.
Software. Windows has 99% of the desktop market and as such has an unimaginably huge amount of software avaliable for it; If you want something done then chances are theres already 10 windows programs to do it! As mentioned above - it can't run some of the most fundamental software for game developers such as 3DS, photoshop, PSP, macromedia products (though they're talking of making linux ports) and most importantly for me - visual c! I know theres c/c++ ide's out there for linux and ive tried a few; But none of them can even come close to comparing with the almighty power of visual c (+visual assist)!
In short, your choice of software in linux is usually very limited & with a lot of it being made for no profit you tend to find more bugs.
Security. Linux's only 3d api is openGL - which is sadly becoming both dated & hackable thanks to the new wave of openGL hook code. This is a serious consideration developers have to make nowadays.. do we allow users to render in openGL when we know full well that they can hook it to produce wallhacks, aimbots, lambert, esp and all the other lame cheating effects that are around today. Note that direct X is not hackable in this way!
Personally I find that trying to make code cross-platform is not worth the extra time & effort it takes, particularly when you know that under 1% of desktop users are on linux - and when they do get your game the first thing they'll do is code a hack for it :p
And for you people who like to rant about how insecure windows is - I've been using windows for close to 10 years now without once getting a virus / trojan / boogeyman, and without ever running any anit-virus software or firewalls! Shocking huh? Actually I lie - I was hit by the RPC worm a few months back.. so I scooted to the microsoft site, downloaded a small patch and was fixed in a couple of minutes with 0 damage to my computer. 1 incident in 10 years isnt bad going.. but of course the media had a field day with it, describing it as "the worst computer security attack in history"... Did anybody else notice that it didnt actually do anything?
Performance. Perhaps linux is favoured for server needs, largely due to its user management & heavily console based interface - but this is the only place it belongs. As a desktop machine you will see that it eats often twice as much RAM when running some applications (or more) as windows to perform the same task - and I am still able to figure out why it does this (Ex: Half Life dedicated server uses 60-80 meg ram on windows - on linux it's closer to 160 meg). The various GUI's avaliable for it may look pretty but I have found that they all turn out to be flawed & incomplete compared to windows.
Software. Windows has 99% of the desktop market and as such has an unimaginably huge amount of software avaliable for it; If you want something done then chances are theres already 10 windows programs to do it! As mentioned above - it can't run some of the most fundamental software for game developers such as 3DS, photoshop, PSP, macromedia products (though they're talking of making linux ports) and most importantly for me - visual c! I know theres c/c++ ide's out there for linux and ive tried a few; But none of them can even come close to comparing with the almighty power of visual c (+visual assist)!
In short, your choice of software in linux is usually very limited & with a lot of it being made for no profit you tend to find more bugs.
Security. Linux's only 3d api is openGL - which is sadly becoming both dated & hackable thanks to the new wave of openGL hook code. This is a serious consideration developers have to make nowadays.. do we allow users to render in openGL when we know full well that they can hook it to produce wallhacks, aimbots, lambert, esp and all the other lame cheating effects that are around today. Note that direct X is not hackable in this way!
Personally I find that trying to make code cross-platform is not worth the extra time & effort it takes, particularly when you know that under 1% of desktop users are on linux - and when they do get your game the first thing they'll do is code a hack for it :p
And for you people who like to rant about how insecure windows is - I've been using windows for close to 10 years now without once getting a virus / trojan / boogeyman, and without ever running any anit-virus software or firewalls! Shocking huh? Actually I lie - I was hit by the RPC worm a few months back.. so I scooted to the microsoft site, downloaded a small patch and was fixed in a couple of minutes with 0 damage to my computer. 1 incident in 10 years isnt bad going.. but of course the media had a field day with it, describing it as "the worst computer security attack in history"... Did anybody else notice that it didnt actually do anything?
.: http://www.mercior.com :.
Ah, the only time a worm affects me is the slowness of the Intraweb. But then again, I locked down my boxes and got a good hardware firewall.
The main problem I have with Windows is that it defaults to "Everything On". 75% of the stuff on will never be used by the user. They are making some amends with XP SP2 by turning off Messenger and a few other services. This wastes processing power and opens up major amounts of areas to exploit. I really like Server 2003 though, as it comes as "Everything Off" and you only turn on what you need.
The hurdle I have with Linux is getting the drivers installed properly. When I put on Mandrake 8, I got the nVidia drivers working. But I changed resolution and got stuck in a point where I couldn't see the screen. I tried using all the xconfig's but could never get the video set back to be able to launch X anymore. Setting up the VMWare driver isn't a problem in Mandrake 10 though, and I don't fear breaking it near as much.
The main problem I have with Windows is that it defaults to "Everything On". 75% of the stuff on will never be used by the user. They are making some amends with XP SP2 by turning off Messenger and a few other services. This wastes processing power and opens up major amounts of areas to exploit. I really like Server 2003 though, as it comes as "Everything Off" and you only turn on what you need.
The hurdle I have with Linux is getting the drivers installed properly. When I put on Mandrake 8, I got the nVidia drivers working. But I changed resolution and got stuck in a point where I couldn't see the screen. I tried using all the xconfig's but could never get the video set back to be able to launch X anymore. Setting up the VMWare driver isn't a problem in Mandrake 10 though, and I don't fear breaking it near as much.
Crud, how do I do this again?
flamebait...
welp ercior, i hope you havent made yourself into some serious flamebait!! though some of your points are indeed valid.
as a sysadmin, i use both, because they each have their strengths. for a server of any type, including a game server i would prefer linux, because it handles high loads better, has more efficient threading and memory management, and its FAR more stable. what mercior said about HL server needing twice as much mem in linux as in windows is prolly very true, becuase as opposed to windows, linux wil only swap things that really need to be swapped, it figures if the memory is there, USE it dammit. in windows you will commonly see things like i see right now on my windows box...i have 640 MB ram, and 324 mb is free, and yet i have 238 mb of pagefile used...why?? why not pu that crap in ram so that when i switch back to it it comes back faster rather than hitting the swap? that is how linux thinks about it...
as far as compiler and application support, windows rules supreme. now dont get me wrong, i use the gimp, even when im in windows i use the windows version of the gimp cuz its free, but photoshop is definitely better.(but i cant afford it!). 3dsmax like the guy says has a linux port in devel prolly but for now its windows only. although, many of these apps might run quite nicely in WINE...somebody should give it a shot.
as far as linux lacking directx, how is that a problem?? yeh sure directx9 has programmable shaders and some other goofy stuff like that, but OGL still has all the guts of what we need for 3d and it does it just fine on both windows and linux. id prefer OGL to directx any day of the week. i suppose shaders are cool, but i dont doubt we will see some much nicer, more standardized shaders in a future rev of OGL, so whats the diff.
bottom line for me is this, if carmack had the choice to either use directx or write his own shaders for doom 3, and he wrote his own, to me that is a powerful statement....
as for gui...i love kde, i like it better than windows, more customizable, faster, prettier, just better all around.
yeh you still have to know the console for some stuff, but hey, if you wanna ping somebody you still open a dos prompt right?? so what?
compilers...yeh visual is better. im trying to use devcpp on windows and im sorry i just dont like the interface. same kinda goes for kdevelope. the linking and include thing is still trying to use makefiles, which are just not how i wanna do it. sorry vc++ 6.0 is still my favorite.
i think people shy away from linux because of the learning curve, its seems steep. but so much of the way it works is just common sense, it gets easier quick.
if you wanna play games, or do desktop publishing or local graphics programming windows is easier, but not necessarily better. if you wanna use the web, do networked apps, or make a server for an app, use some flavor of unix, it will just work WAY better.
i think linux will catch up as far as games pretty quick if somebody can make a better IDE for linux, could be theres a great one out there i havent found yet, if so lemme know!!
-ted
as a sysadmin, i use both, because they each have their strengths. for a server of any type, including a game server i would prefer linux, because it handles high loads better, has more efficient threading and memory management, and its FAR more stable. what mercior said about HL server needing twice as much mem in linux as in windows is prolly very true, becuase as opposed to windows, linux wil only swap things that really need to be swapped, it figures if the memory is there, USE it dammit. in windows you will commonly see things like i see right now on my windows box...i have 640 MB ram, and 324 mb is free, and yet i have 238 mb of pagefile used...why?? why not pu that crap in ram so that when i switch back to it it comes back faster rather than hitting the swap? that is how linux thinks about it...
as far as compiler and application support, windows rules supreme. now dont get me wrong, i use the gimp, even when im in windows i use the windows version of the gimp cuz its free, but photoshop is definitely better.(but i cant afford it!). 3dsmax like the guy says has a linux port in devel prolly but for now its windows only. although, many of these apps might run quite nicely in WINE...somebody should give it a shot.
as far as linux lacking directx, how is that a problem?? yeh sure directx9 has programmable shaders and some other goofy stuff like that, but OGL still has all the guts of what we need for 3d and it does it just fine on both windows and linux. id prefer OGL to directx any day of the week. i suppose shaders are cool, but i dont doubt we will see some much nicer, more standardized shaders in a future rev of OGL, so whats the diff.
bottom line for me is this, if carmack had the choice to either use directx or write his own shaders for doom 3, and he wrote his own, to me that is a powerful statement....
as for gui...i love kde, i like it better than windows, more customizable, faster, prettier, just better all around.
yeh you still have to know the console for some stuff, but hey, if you wanna ping somebody you still open a dos prompt right?? so what?
compilers...yeh visual is better. im trying to use devcpp on windows and im sorry i just dont like the interface. same kinda goes for kdevelope. the linking and include thing is still trying to use makefiles, which are just not how i wanna do it. sorry vc++ 6.0 is still my favorite.
i think people shy away from linux because of the learning curve, its seems steep. but so much of the way it works is just common sense, it gets easier quick.
if you wanna play games, or do desktop publishing or local graphics programming windows is easier, but not necessarily better. if you wanna use the web, do networked apps, or make a server for an app, use some flavor of unix, it will just work WAY better.
i think linux will catch up as far as games pretty quick if somebody can make a better IDE for linux, could be theres a great one out there i havent found yet, if so lemme know!!
-ted
My irrlicht-based projects have gone underground for now, but if you want, check out my webcomic instead! http://brokenboomerang.net
-
Serg Nechaeff
- Posts: 162
- Joined: Wed Nov 26, 2003 5:24 pm
- Location: Europe
Re: flamebait...
Code: Select all
i think people shy away from linux because of the learning curve, its seems steep. but so much of the way it works is just common sense, it gets easier quick. http://www.javazing.com
P-III-950, WinXP, GeForce FX5600 128 MB ForceWare 52.16, DX9, Eclipse IDE, JRE 1.6
P-III-950, WinXP, GeForce FX5600 128 MB ForceWare 52.16, DX9, Eclipse IDE, JRE 1.6
I'm developing for windows only. It's rather simple to make that decision too, since I'm not on some holy quest tilting at windmills about OS choices.
The vast majority of anyone who'd look at my project uses windows, and if not as their primary OS, I bet they have a windows box handy anyways. Supporting users on a 2nd OS wouldn't be a good use of limited resources.
I also will be working with DirectX exclusively too, since it is much easier to support (less driver issues). DX just plain works better than ogl on windows.
Time will tell if I stick with irrlicht for both my professional projects and my home coding projects. If it starts sacrificing too many things to maintain full compatibility with non Visual Studio users, then I'll evaluate something else. I'm seriously considering just going with NebulaTwo, since it's being developed for a game, and is primarily being developed on Win32. If I get the contract deal that I demo'd using irrlicht, I'll likely send niko some cash, and some hardware, and a copy of VS.NET 2003 to 'encourage' working with up to date stuff.
(...and like Mercior, I'm hopelessly addicted to visual assist.. I can't imagine working without it anymore)
The vast majority of anyone who'd look at my project uses windows, and if not as their primary OS, I bet they have a windows box handy anyways. Supporting users on a 2nd OS wouldn't be a good use of limited resources.
I also will be working with DirectX exclusively too, since it is much easier to support (less driver issues). DX just plain works better than ogl on windows.
Time will tell if I stick with irrlicht for both my professional projects and my home coding projects. If it starts sacrificing too many things to maintain full compatibility with non Visual Studio users, then I'll evaluate something else. I'm seriously considering just going with NebulaTwo, since it's being developed for a game, and is primarily being developed on Win32. If I get the contract deal that I demo'd using irrlicht, I'll likely send niko some cash, and some hardware, and a copy of VS.NET 2003 to 'encourage' working with up to date stuff.
(...and like Mercior, I'm hopelessly addicted to visual assist.. I can't imagine working without it anymore)
-
thesmileman
- Posts: 360
- Joined: Tue Feb 10, 2004 2:20 am
- Location: Lubbock, TX
Don't forget us Die Hard Mac Users
I love Mac OS X and I love UNIX but I also love all of my games, Photoshop(I dont give a flying #*!**$*@! about GIMP), and my beloved VS 2003.Net with Visual Assist X!
I can't live without my Mac and I program twenty times better and faster with VS 2003.
Also if you havent played Unreal T 2004 don't start cause you will not stop!
I can't live without my Mac and I program twenty times better and faster with VS 2003.
Also if you havent played Unreal T 2004 don't start cause you will not stop!
what is this visual assist thing??
i have stuck with VS 6.0 cuz its all ive got a copy of, but people keep raving about this visual assist thing in VS 2003?? what is it, what does it do that's so great?? is it worth it to buy vs2003 for that feature?? thanks
-Ted
-Ted
My irrlicht-based projects have gone underground for now, but if you want, check out my webcomic instead! http://brokenboomerang.net
Visual assist is simply an enhanced intellisense: http://www.wholetomato.com/
About Linux vs. Windows: Definitely Windows for me. More applications, it is faster, easier to adminsitrate and use. And it runs on all hardware (especially my notebooks), were Linux doesn't. Ah,yes: And if I need new software, I don't have to download 600 MB of bugfixes and patches to get it running, on Windows.
But because Linux is interesting too, I am using dualboot.
About Linux vs. Windows: Definitely Windows for me. More applications, it is faster, easier to adminsitrate and use. And it runs on all hardware (especially my notebooks), were Linux doesn't. Ah,yes: And if I need new software, I don't have to download 600 MB of bugfixes and patches to get it running, on Windows.
But because Linux is interesting too, I am using dualboot.