Linux Gaming Part 1

I promised that on my next post I would discuss about accessing shared folders from Windows to Linux. Unfortunately, I would have to satisfy that promise on some future post.

In the meantime, Let me begin a series on another important topic that concerns Linux. That is the efforts to make Linux a serious gaming platform.

There are two kinds of movement to make Linux a serious gaming platform.

The first push is to develop games that are native to Linux. an example of this is Planeshift3D although it also runs on Windows and Mac OSx.

The other effort is to make Windows native games run on Linux through software translation. Examples of these efforts are Wine and Cedega.

Lets discuss about the first kind of effort. Linux gamers would always be left out by Game Publishers. There would always be a huge discrepancy between games published for Windows and those that are also published for Linux.

Linux thrives as a server OS but at the moment there are simply too few customers using Linux as desktop that the game publishers are not investing effort to make their titles available for Linux.

These may change in the future when more people have Linux for their desktop.

Perhaps the current trend of moving productivity softwares to web based will also help change this fact.

When most applications become web based it would not matter anymore to people whether they are using Linux or Windows for their everyday tasks.

This would help accelerate their shift to Linux since Linux is freely downloadable and comes with no license cost.

When this day comes game publishers would have to anticipate where their users would be coming from. And they would have to support all platforms.

But it remains to be seen.

Perhaps three years more before we see this happening.