uglyDwarf

Hello Ben, the list is quite overwhelming, however I'm pretty sure lots of the libraries mentioned in it are not a direct dependency of Gizmo... If I may suggest an alternative (as mentioned in the ldd's man page): objdump -p name_of_the_file | grep NEEDED This command will print out only the direct dependences, the rest should be handled by the distro's packaging system... Kind regards, Michal

Hello Goran, if that post seem pointless to you, I'm sorry... Let me be clear then: Ben created a poll thread, asking what aspect of Gizmo would people prefer to concentrate on. He put there a "Linux support" possibility, knowing that Linux users are only minority; then he changed the thread title to "Linux sucks" to attract more Linux users... Looking at the results now, Linux support gathered more than 50% of all votes, yet it was said already in the beginning that the Linux support is not going to happen... So my point is, that this whole thread was pointless right from the start... Yes, and then you find things like "I don't want to spend 1 second longer in Ubuntu's horrible window manager than I have to." http://forums.x-pilot.com/topic/1235-gizmo-linux-port/#entry13465 As far as I can tell, this kind of posts is much more common... It would be productive, if the discussion was constructive... You described some of the problems you experienced, I offered you to help with them. Can't do much more than that... Kind regards, Michal

Of course you don't have any obligations to the Linux community... But then again, what exactly was the point of this thread?

ad 1) You mean like http://forums.x-pilot.com/topic/5707-linux-is-the-future-of-gaming/ , or just the title of this post? Avid is not the word I'd use... But I'm willing to be corrected if I'm wrong... ad 2) The discussion was pointless from the begining - the numbers were known for a very long time, so the only point of this whole thread is to make an excuse for not supporting Linux. ad 3) There are many people in the world and only tiny fraction of them are X-Plane users. But given te size of the X-Plane community, I'd say that the percentage of people actively contributing is actually quite high... Don't forget - there are many ways to contribute; good bug report from an average Joe user might make all the difference in the world...

Actually no, I hate platforms that get in my way when I want to do something... And I'd really like to hear at least some answers, because so far there were only broad general claims how bad Linux is, but when you look closely, the exact same issues exist on other OSes too... For example the issue Ben was pointing to - the solution was to use older glew library; but what was the culprit? Only minor library change, maybe a feature was added (or regression), and suddenly the app runs very slow. Did anybody actually tried to find out what the problem was? Was it really Linux, problem with the new version or just wrong programmer's assumption? You jump to a conclusion without even trying to find out the real problem... Yes it would take a bit of time to find out, but I bet that if it is a problem in your code and next time you bump the library version on other platforms you get exactly the same result. There are quite some things about Linux I really hate, but I like many more. And in the end, I'm able to comfortably work on any reasonable system (no, I don't count Windows as a reasonable system anymore).

Well, the numbers will be hugely different depending on whether the error is absolute or relative - but that discussion is diverging from the original topic, so lets leave it... As to your remark about having to distribute the source code, the company I work for uses loads of Linux software from many vendors - Mentor graphics, Cadence, Mathworks, Agilent, Synopsys and many more and guess what - none of that comes as a source code... How comes? I know you can link the libraries staticaly on Windows, the question is, what makes you guys think you can't do the same on Linux? Or i case you don't want to do it that way, you can distribute the needed libs with your application... And speaking of dodgy graphics drivers - windows get its own share of that too (for example http://developer.x-plane.com/2014/02/driver-update-amd-drivers-fixed/ ). Why is it support nightmare only on Linux? Your Ubuntu autoupdated itself to 14.04? That is strange - as far as I know, it asks you if you want to upgrade (it did ask me) and you can say no... Could you please be more specific - what problems did you see exactly? Just for the parity - when Windows 8.1 upgrade was released, people reported many problems too - ranging from wifi or sound not working to system not booting anymore... So your mileage may vary on each and every system, not just Linux. Kind regards, Michal

No doubt about it, Linux has smallest market share. But as with all statistics, I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself Funny thing - looking at two different statistics on OS usage (netmarketshare and statcounter) - they both have Linux at about 1%, but the Windows values differ quite a lot (26.29% vs 17.16% for XP, ...)... So if there is such a big difference in those values, who knows what the real usage of Linux is...

No, my question was related to Windows development - MSVC stands for Microsoft Visual C and missing particular version of msvc runtime did cause quite some problems too. The point here is that Linux is not the only system where dynamic libraries cause problems (dll hell, ...).

I do respect Ben's opinion, I was merely presenting another point of view... Nothing less, nothing more.

Hello Goran, as far as I can tell, my post didn't touch gizmo at all... I got the message that Ben is not going to invest his time into it, so I don't bother to bother him concerning that matter. I was merely pointing to the fact, that most problems with development for Linux have the people, who aren't developing for it... Don't you find it interesting? I don't think I'm stirring anything, my only point is, that no platform is perfect - all of them have their own strengths and weaknesses. The topic says that developing for Linux sucks - all I did was to provide an counterexample. Kind regards, Michal PS. Ben, the XKCD rocks as always. On the other hand, it is just yet another general argument that illustrates state of things years ago - if you'd look closer, the comic is from 2008...

Funny... You've never seen plugin not working due to latest msvc runtime missing? Be it as it may, most of these problems come from programmers cutting corners instead of doing things the right way. And this is where working on several different platforms help... However in my case, working on Windows is the worse by far - no C99 in msvc? It is almost 15 years old now... And concerning the platform fragmentation, how comes that the guy who does the porting (Icculus) says that it in not that big problem at all (google SteamDevDays2014-LinuxPorting.pdf, page 7)? As someone clever said: If you really want to do something, you'll find a way. If you don't, you'll find an excuse. Kind regards, Michal

That is what I call an argument... If you'd read the response in the linked post, you'd find, that DVD playback is not a techical problem, but legal one... User not being added to the audio group sounds like a glitch in this particular distro - don't you think there would be much more uproar, if it was a common Linux problem? And with that HDMI issue - there are no details like which GPU, what drivers, etc. - then it is hard to judge what exactly was the problem here... Just to be fair - windows has its own share of problems... Yesterday I spent some quality time trying to get a printer working - for some reason, the driver shipped with windows was sure the printer is only black/white, while it is a color printer and it also failed to recoginze the duplexer unit (even when enabled in the advanced options dialogue). After an hour spent by going through the diferent printer preferences dialogues I found that I had to download new driver from manufacturers site... The point is - your mileage may vary, no matter what system you use... Kind regards, Michal

I know - I looked at their numbers too... The problem is, that these numbers are just numbers and it is hard to judge how accurate they are...

Well, lots of games are being played on Android devices, so I'd say that it is kind of relevant to this thread... And as for the Linux desktop numbers/stats, do you know how did they come up with them? Are they USA only, or worldwide? How come that numbers from different companies differ so much? Statcounter reports XP around 19%, while Netmarketshare around 29% (January). I'd say it means that the numbers are very imprecise, so that reported 1.6% might be much more... As Winston Churchill said - I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself

I didn't say it is going to be dominant, or did I? All I'm saying is, that Linux is here to stay, like it or not... And gaming is part of it already...