Comment by threethirtytwo
20 hours ago
The irony is that gaming on linux got better but the instigator was not the OSS community. All of it was funded by closed source software competing with other close source software. The OSS community by itself did not have the conviction to climb over this bulwark.
It's not so much conviction, as it is coordination and resources.
Conventional companies just have a lot more money, and it's easier for them to internally 'coordinate' when they want something to get done.
That said, yes, there are certain things that the broader/volunteer FOSS community simply isn't any good at.
But when Steam started to develop Proton, WINE was 90% there! Valve only had to provide the remaining 90%.
The strength of Linux and Free software in general is not in that it's completely built by unpaid labor. It's built by a lot of paid, full-time labor. But the results are shared with everyone. The strength of Free software is that it fosters and enforces cooperation of all interested parties, and provides a guarantee that defection is an unprofitable move.
This is one of the reasons you see Linux everywhere, and *BSD, rarely.
> This is one of the reasons you see Linux everywhere, and *BSD, rarely.
I doubt it's a large reason. I'd put more weight on eg Linus being a great project lead and he happens to work on Linux. And a lot of other historical contingencies.
BSD does a few things right, hence it's used by Netflix (who share back some of their work), userland of macOS (because Apple don't like GPL, I assume), PS4 and PS5 (IDK if anything seeps back upstream from there).
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It isn’t about conviction. Gaming takes tremendous resources and they were not there. But if this starts shifting the tides there is a possible future where game developers start building for Linux as a primary target and to run games on Windows or Mac you would use emulation. In fact this seems like a better overall approach given that there are no hidden APIs with Linux.
Money and resources suddenly materialized once someone realized that there was profit in it is pretty much the expected way this goes. OpenTofu happened not because of some OSS force of will but because a group of companies needed it to exist for their business.
This flow is basically the bread and butter for the OSS community and the only way high effort projects get done.