Today something very exciting happened. Half-Life 2 and its episodes are now available for Linux.
This year has been great for Linux gaming, and I’m managing to move further and further away from Windows as my primary OS.
My laptop dual boots Windows 8 and Xubuntu 13.04, and my desktop dual boots Windows 7 and Arch Linux.
On my laptop, I never boot Windows at all any more. I bought it as a lightweight gaming machine that I could use when I travel for work, and I’ve found that most of the games I’m playing at the moment have Linux releases (Kerbal Space Program is currently my most played).
My desktop I’m currently playing Far Cry 3 on, so obviously that needs Windows, but now that I’ve got Left 4 Dead 2 and Counter-Strike Source, and with Garry’s Mod on the way too, my reasons for staying in Windows are shrinking.
I announced my pleasure to a “community” of people I hang out with on Skype quite often, and there I faced the usual amount of disdain and apathy.
But I also encountered an arguement against Linux that I’ve not actually come across before, and while it is indeed born of stupidity (and demonstrably wrong in some cases), it nonetheless intrigued me.
It went like this:
There is no killer app for linux
That’s not what they said, but that’s what they meant. They argued that there was no incentive for them to actually use Linux because every tool they might use on Linux already had a windows version.
What?
That’s a seriously weird thing to argue. Generally, you want to reach as wide an audience as possible with your software. Locking yourself to a particular platform, unless you are the platform vendor, is going to be suicide.
Unless you are a particularly niche product, or you are building bespoke software for a client that is running a particular OS, why would you want to lock yourself to a platform? Cross platform development has never been easier, and more and more software companies are starting to bring out versions of their software for more than just Windows.
Leaving linux out of it for a moment, I’d consider that most consumer software these days as being multi platform. Good grief, even Microsoft release Office for Mac.
Apple release iTunes for Windows! Why on earth would they do this? Wouldn’t releasing it for Mac only make more people use Macs?
No. Because while a lot of people can afford an overpriced undersexed mp3 player, they can’t also afford a brand new computer just to use the damn thing. And Apple know this, hence the release of iTunes for Windows.
So that aside, very few people are going to switch to linux because of a particular program they need that has been released for linux and no other platform. At least, most average computer users.
His next argument said “well, I don’t think linux is ready yet. No one distributes it on new computers”.
And the concept is not new. Dell have been doing this for a few years now.
The next arguement was “Well only computer geeks and nerds will use it”.
I think he seriously underestimated how many geeks & nerds exist on the planet. There are millions of us!
Do we not deserve to choose? If your average consumer can choose between Windows and Mac, can’t we choose something different?
If you go by the numbers in the Steam Hardware and Software survey, at the moment there at around 1.3% of Steam users on Linux.
Steam users peak at around 5.3 million a day.
That’s nearly 70’000 people using steam on linux (at the time of the last hardware survey). The actual numbers may differ.
Valve obviously thinks its worth releasing games for us. If you look at the average price breakdown by OS for the humble bundle, you can see that Linux users might be a minority, but they’re a minority that pays well for games:
The arguement that only nerds will use it….well. My girlfriend prefers Linux over Windows for a lot of things, and only really stays on Windows for some academic software and iTunes.
My sister used Ubuntu, but only until she immersed her laptop in tea. She got on with it.
My parents use it.
My brother uses it. He’s the first to admit he’s not technically minded.
A lightweight distro works extremely well for people who only use their laptop as a facebook machine.
Come to think of it, the guy was probably trolling me. He succeeded.
Anyway, this post gave me something to do while waiting for Half-Life 2 to download.
