
After suggesting a developer drop Linux support, Vivox have released a statement - dejaime
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/after-suggesting-a-developer-drop-linux-support-vivox-have-released-a-statement.14046
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CoolGuySteve
At least for high performance C++, the Linux toolchain improves code quality
by so much. Between valgrind/cachegrind, asan, efence, always having the
latest clang and clang_analyzer, and Dockerfiles for continuous integration
environments, programming on Windows feels like I have a hand tied behind my
back.

Even something basic like replacing malloc with your own instrumentation to
track errant allocations is basically impossible since every DLL in Windows
loads its own allocator.

I know Windows has similar tools but wrangling Visual Studio, especially
remotely or across multiple developers, is significantly more painful in my
experience.

Even if you don't ship on Linux, programming on Linux is worth it imo. I mean,
Carmack wrote Quake on a NeXT and shipped on Windows, so if he was doing it
back in the day, how wrong can it be?

~~~
grandinj
Really? I regularly manage to get most of the linux toolchain to bork, and
have particular "fun" getting the profiling tools to work properly.

And never mind getting a nice IDE environment like Visual Studio up and
running.

So it may just be a matter of familiarity and/or the particulars of the
projects you work on.

~~~
Vogtinator
Here getting a nice IDE installed is just a single "zypper install qt-
creator".

~~~
Asooka
You need a license for qt-creator if you want to work on commercial software
(or that was the case last time we checked about a year or two ago). There
might be exceptions for your case, do check, because it is a nice product.
Other paid IDE alternatives are CLion, which I hear is excellent, as well as
SlickEdit, which is closer to an editor than a full IDE, but does offer
building, debugging, completion.

Free alternatives would be Visual Studio Code, which is pretty ok even for
C++, or KDevelop, which almost kind of works, or SpaceVim / SpacEmacs and
about a week of learning how to use it. I'm in the final camp, since basically
every serious C/C++ dev on Linux has a Vim or Emacs setup they've built
themselves that does about 90% of what Visual Studio gives you out of the box,
with some things better and others worse. It can work pretty well, but you
have to understand it's not VS and it works in its own way.

If you have the money, you can buy a good IDE for Linux. Otherwise, learning
to make your own out of high-level building blocks is also a useful skill, but
takes a little bit of time. Personally the first time I had to write C for
Linux out of college it did take me about a week before I was up to speed with
it (but I was already sort of familiar with vim as a pure editor).

~~~
Avery3R
VS code is more of a text editor, not an ide.

~~~
meko
Those lines have become increasingly blurred.

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TallGuyShort
I don't see the big deal. They don't think Linux support is worth it. So a
developer chasing Linux support won't use them. Salesman says what he needs to
trying to close the deal. Kind of a dumb thing to say, but... Us Linux users
are used to being second class citizens in the consumer software world. Vivox
just won't get our money either. Eh.

~~~
Yver
That's because the developer's OS support is outside of Vivox's prerogative.
They tried to change the developer's plans because they couldn't fit in them.
If their reply had been something along the lines of _" We don't support Linux
and can't help you with that"_ I'm certain most people would be fine with it.

Their original reply makes me think of a hotel that can't accommodate a family
of four so they suggest you leave the kids to the grandparents and go on
vacation alone. It solves _their_ problem, not yours.

~~~
TallGuyShort
>> They tried to change the developer's plans

They _suggested_ the developer change plans. I agree it was a bit of a dick
move to suggest that and I think an apology and training is in order, but...
I'm surprised there's a need to "issue a statement".

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alphaharris
I saw the post on Reddit, and I was a little shocked. When I switched to Linux
on my primary computer, it was like Steam automatically filtered out the games
I didn't like. I immediately spent some money on other games with Linux
support.

So, there's a market, and it _seems_ to be getting larger over time. What's
troubling to me is that the Vivox employee seemed to think the developer just
didn't know that Linux was a smaller market, or hadn't bothered to make a
rational decision.

Then again, I also play things like Adventure, and the odd round of Lemmings.

~~~
Callmenorm
Proton on Steam makes so many windows games work on Linux. For now, its THE
main reason I will not leave Steam. No other platform has given as much love
for linux.

~~~
tracker1
I think that Valve/Steam has given more love, earlier and more consistently
for Gaming period than anyone else. Yes, they make money. They also work with
larger communities to improve the experience for users and gamers. I'm not
really a gamer though. I play for a few hours here and there a handful of
times a year.

Serious question, as I haven't looked... Does proton work on MacOS? In any
case, planning on switching my desktop to Linux in a few months when I put
together my next desktop (Yay, Zen 2).

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someexgamedev
Middleware company is right. Supporting the platform is not worth the trouble.
Data shows again and again that Linux gamers will be a fraction of a percent
of your customers but generate an outsized amount of support tickets. Most of
these support tickets will require holding their hand through basic Linux box
administration.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
I've always felt that choosing Linux implies some sort of technical
proficiency, or at least willingness to learn. Are those days over?

~~~
Jasper_
Linux implies a level of user arrogance and heavily implied it's the
developer's fault and inability to understand how things the way they are. We
can only test on so many configurations, and users will complain when their
distro, or sound server, or preferred desktop environment isn't supported. If
you don't think that last one matters, what happens when a certain obscure
floating WM doesn't focus the window in an ICCCM-compliant way (WM_TAKE_FOCUS)
and as a result, no keystrokes are delivered to the window. I had to fix that,
for one user who was very loud on Twitter about how we clearly don't care
about Linux. The total number of Linux sales was less than 0.1%, but cost us
way too many support tickets and weeks of developer time.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
That's pretty silly. If you have enough technical knowledge to use a non-
default window manager, I feel like you should have enough self-awareness to
know that you shouldn't necessarily be catered to by devs. I primarily use
Linux on servers, though. Maybe I don't get the mentality of a Linux Desktop
user.

~~~
eitland
Sounds silly, yes.

OTOH I've never met one of those users, so unless more devs chime in to tell
me this is fact ir someone can point to a number of mailing list post, issues
or other verifiable artifacts I'll be tempted to assume it is a strawman.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
Sounds more like an anecdote than a strawman.

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shmerl
The original response was of course stupid. Developers should just use Mumble
instead anyway. It's open source and not locked into any specific platform.

~~~
zanny
While I as much as anyone else would love to promote Mumble, the project is
certainly languishing nowadays. Last stable release was two years ago and its
not like they have nothing to improve on - the stable release is still Qt4
based and the Qt5 version has been in git for over a year now.

I'm positive if you polled developers today Mumble would be missing critical
features or performance characteristics that Teamspeak / Vivox are working on
to improve while Mumble is stalled out because the money isn't there to keep
up healthy maintainership in the long run.

~~~
shmerl
Yes, that can be a problem. But if developers who need it would invest money
in Mumble instead of all these blob middlewares, it could progress faster.

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TheGRS
This is a very whistleblow-y article. Sensible commenters here correctly point
out that a 3rd party vendor shouldn't be sending messages like that, it was
unprofessional and ultimately pointless. But the point of the article and
subsequent community backlash is the same old self-servicing trope that linux
gamers seem to love: "We're here, we're important, we spend money, you are
stupid to ignore us!"

It's the same thing every time and it's getting old.

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mmastrac
Alternative title: "Company release PR statement saying the same thing less
antagonistically without actually changing their mind".

~~~
craftyguy
That's not at all what the article shows.

~~~
shrimp_emoji
It's exactly what it shows.

A zealous Tuxist, slighted by the insolence toward their beliefs but bitterly
satisfied by the backpeddling was quoted as saying,

>Basically yea, but it's nice to know they'll keep their opinions to
themselves from now on.

I use Arch (Manjaro _cough_ ) btw. I practically use Linux exclusively. But
stuff like this is kind of funny. We live in a strange (dark?) time with
respect to the OS ecosystem. This is an artifact of it.

The main OS is a bloated, closed, insecure, arguably hostile one, while the
open, free one enjoys a kind of ethereal salience (both pragmatic and
ideological) in the hearts, minds, and practice of technologists. That gives
the open one a political protection completely disproportionate with its tiny
consumer base and economic relevance to consumer-facing capitalists (who drive
the entire technology sector).

~~~
mruts
I don't think the real problem is about Windows tools not working on Linux,
but about Linux tools not working on Unix. Stuff like Systemd and Wayland
don't even care about anything besides Linux.

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Animats
That affects Second Life, too.

The best solution is to drop Vivox, which is kind of dated and crashes and
restarts frequently.

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tracker1
Considering the huge push from Valve to improve gaming on linux, which
includes improving Wine etc... The fact that Google's new platform is entirely
Linux backed, and AFAIK Sony's next gen is probably Linux as well. It is
inevitable that Linux will become a huge platform for gaming.

~~~
dtech
Unlikely, Valve has been trying to push SteamOS/Linux for years. So far
without much success.

~~~
tracker1
The recent uptick in Linux and Wine support may counter that... it feels like
there's been more effort in the last 8-12 months than in the 2 years prior to
that.

Just the uptick on Gaming on Linux youtube content from previously windows-
centric sources would indicate demand is climbing.

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kazinator
I don't understand how you can develop some voice chat middleware that doesn't
work on almost anything that has a C compiler.

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bitwize
Dropping Linux support is a perfectly sensible thing to suggest. When it comes
to computer gaming, all of the tooling, ecosystem, and cash is on Windows.

~~~
tracker1
Even in light of the work of Steam/Valve on Proton and general Linux support.
The fact that Google's gaming platform is entirely linux, and a lot of other
toolchains for gaming platforms are linux based?

That's a pretty short sighted point of view.

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spork12
This should surprise no one. Linux gamers are a very vocal minority, but also
a very tiny portion of the market.

I gave up on the linux gaming years ago, after suffering with WINE.

Why would companies pour hundreds of thousands in resources to support a
platform that has almost no serious gamers?

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mruts
Why do people care about Linux gaming? Is it that hard to just boot into
Windows? Or even, a VM with a pass-through graphics card? It's hard enough to
make games as it is. It seems unfair to complain about something when it's
clearly not in the developer's interest to waste a bunch of time on something
nobody will use.

~~~
cbdumas
I can tell you why I personally care about it. I recently upgraded my gaming
PC and I wanted to reinstall Windows on my new SDD. Only I forgot where I put
my Windows 7 product key all those years ago and could not for the life of me
pull it off of the existing Windows 10 install I had. I spent hours tracking
down my key and did eventually find it, which luckily saved me from buying
another expensive Windows license. All for what? I don't _want_ Windows, I
just want to play the games I've already paid for. If my games and hardware
worked reliably on Linux I wouldn't even have to think about it, just download
a fresh .iso and I'm off.

Video games being locked into Windows is a huge drag.

