Todd Wasson

Here's a random sample from March 2009 which is about as far back as I can go on my current host:

Windows 84.2%
Macintosh 3.2%
Linux 2.7%

So yes, the others are gaining on Windows like you seem to be suggesting, but they're not coming very quickly. In 6 years Windows has only lost around 10 or 12 percentage points. I don't know for sure, but I suspect the spike in Mac statistics is more due to the iPhone, not people actually running Macs. Linux for sure appears to have grown quite a lot, but again it's only 7 or 8 percentage points in a 6 year period. I'm 40 years old, at that rate i'll be long gone by the time they even hit 50%, which may not ever happen because Mac's share is growing even faster than Linux's.

Todd Wasson

Regarding the "do everything on your phone" idea of replacing PC's completely, I doubt this will happen. I could be wrong, but something tells me a dedicated graphics card will be able to outperform phones potentially forever. There's more room to keep adding memory banks and processors.

Streaming games via video: Yes, this idea has been around for a long time now. For some games that might work well, especially turn based games and that kind of thing, but not for all of them. With our VRC Pro game for example, there is just no way this would work satisfactorily if there is any latency in the system at all. If frame rates even drop below 150, people start complaining that the steering servos on the cars are too slow. So even that tiny bit of latency ruins the experience for everyone. Sounds good in theory, but in practice I think it will not be very good for a lot of games including shooters and so on unless the speed of light is changed.

Maybe you know something I don't, but I have a difficult time imagining a case where streaming latency can be brought low enough to make this work. I can virtually guarantee that if you tried to drive the VRC simulator (or my boat sim for that matter) by having your controller input sent to some server somewhere, then wait for it to render, then send the image back, you wouldn't be able to even complete a lap, much less enjoy it much. You'll feel very detached from the system with virtually any latency. So for some games the streaming stuff might work very well, but I don't see it working for simulations like racing games, flight sims and so forth just due to the latency. The only way I see that working is to get darn close to 0 latency.

If you want a hard number: In our case with VRC Pro, it'd have to be better than 1/150th of a second latency for the whole round trip, the rendering, the display, everything. I'm not holding my breath on that one. For FarmVille or something though it'd probably be great where a small amount of latency doesn't matter, so I'd say there's still a market for it, I just don't think it'll outright replace the PC or gaming consoles or all of this stuff. VRC Pro would completely suck with anything more than about 6ms latency on the entire round trip. If you can beat that you'll have a winner. Until then I'll be ignoring it.

Regarding ARM: This may be coming from ignorance on the subject, so feel free to set me straight on this one, but I'll share the thought anyway: From my perspective as a programmer using a language like C# at the moment, the architecture doesn't really matter all that much to me. The compiler is what is figuring out what to do on its way to turning it all into machine code for that particular board. I still write a loop the same way, declare an array the same way, etc.. At most all I would probably do is change data types from floats to doubles to go from 32 to 64 bit. When programming for the GPU the very different architecture matters a lot especially in regards to taking advantage of the super fast shared memory, but on the CPU I can't think of a time where I changed my code due to an architecture change.

I know nothing about ARM though, is it really that different and revolutionary? If these are essentially the Rasberry Pi class of boards and similar, I think we'll be waiting a very long time to see them evolve to anything like the performance of today's PC's. What has mattered most in my world for quite some time are the graphics cards and memory speeds, not so much how many cycles the CPU can crank through.

Anyway, I don't see how this would change anything I'm doing in Unity or C#. If I want to build a 64 bit version or a 32 bit, I just click a checkbox and Unity builds it with different libraries. Probably ARM will be similar? I've got an Arduiono and have programmed that before, but don't have a Pi. My experience is that it's almost like using a computer from 1960. Code is C and very simple compared to C++/C# and so forth. There is no horsepower there at all. I doubt the Rasberry Pi and similar boards are that much out of that league or will be any time soon. When you can bolt in a graphics card that's bigger than the entire Pi or whatever ARM board, it's tough for me to see it ever outperforming the dedicated hardware which is continuing to evolve in parallel to the ARM.

I don't really know for sure, but something tells me this is a race that ARM will never win. It has its place in robotics and so on, but as a replacement for the PC it would probably just have to become an actual PC.

On the supercomputers: My understanding was that this is all moving to GPU based hardware. The latest supercomputers are just farms of super fast GPU's using CUDA or DirectCompute. Anytime I've written GPU code it was using DirectCompute/HLSL which I thought could only be done on Windows. Am I mistaken? If so, could you send a link of any examples where people are using DirectCompute or CUDA on Linux?

Let's also keep in mind that I'm not trying to create a product here that doesn't get released for 20 years if and when ARM and Steam console have taken over the world. As of today, Windows is still the safest bet. Like I said before though, if Unity's got an option to build it for Linux at the press of a button without adding more than 10% extra work, I'd consider it. Until then, Linux and all this other stuff in my view has a long way to go before I would go through the trouble to support it. In the meantime, I'm much more interested in the Oculus Rift than ARM or Linux.

I have a hard time believing there are hundreds of millions of Linux developers. Maybe you were just being loose and fast to make a point about relative team size? Bigger isn't always better though. If it was, those usage numbers on my web page would be reversed. I've been hearing the Linux crowd screaming "down with Micro$oft" for as long as I can remember, saying they'll beat them one day for many of the same reasons you've given. In my view it hasn't happened yet though. Maybe you'll be one of the people to change all that some day, I don't know. Until then, I'm sticking with Windows.

Some day none of this will matter anyway when quantum computers hit the market. It's just a matter of how far into the future you want to aim for on your product's initial release, I suppose. I won't be starting work on a quantum computer version of the game anytime soon because the market is currently too small, regardless of what the distant future may bring.

SinOjos

I have been aware of some of the graphics engines that have come about, while there are so many now, that I have not delved into them enough to know all the details. 30 years ago I was interested in doing the gaming stuff, but not now. Only care to play once in awhile, not code games. If they are providing features that allows you to export the game for other platforms, they are clearly aware of the needs of the developers along with what the end user needs may be. I am happy to hear that.

Not always, but some times when I see people working on something and they are using only M$ products, I do let them know, that M$ is not the only and end all product. I have been self employed the majority of my working life, with all the ups and downs. I fully understand your points, and agree they are all valid. Which is why I brought up some of the current and future changes that are coming about. No body wants to spend a couple or few years coding, to find out that they now need to spend an additional two years to cover other bases. Using an existing graphics engine is certainly a great tool for getting to market in the least amount of time, which can make or break a project, whether it be the individual developer or even the biggest multi million dollar operation. Of course the downside is you are at the mercy of those developers, who may not include the features you want, you seem to be ok with that, so it's all good.

I understand your need to target your market. Yet, with the growth in online multi player, with racing being very popular, there is no reason to miss out on a segment of a market that might bring some substantial numbers to the cash register, due to platform differences. Currently there are simply more players that are using platforms other than M$, as you mentioned, the consoles. I personally do not use gaming consoles, and know a lot of older players who will never play via a console. All the games that were PC only, are now porting to consoles, which has been one of the big gripes as the PC segment has been getting remodeled or resources transferred to the porting process, affecting bug fixes and enhancements. Since Unity does allow for exporting for different platforms. Everything I pointed out is a moot point. Never the less it provides people on the forum with a bit more information concerning were things are going, from a development stand point, rather than a marketing stand point.

I have played games online since the mid 1990's, predominately flight simulations, Air Warrier, Aces High which has pt boats, Targetware, IL2, and of course some of the car racing like Live for Speed, and many of the FPS's. Personally I prefer the massive multi player, as there is nothing like having 500-1000 like minded people thrashing about raising hell blowing stuff up! Online multi player for offshore boat racing would be a blast. Perhaps an offshore smuggling scenario could add some fun!

I have seen all the numbers that show what percentages are using what platform. I am suspect though. I experienced some serious health problems a number of years ago, while recuperating and continuing ongoing treatment. I decided to go back to school a couple of years ago. I was totally blown over by the intro computer course I had to take. I have long been aware of the grip M$ and Apple has had on the education system, but did not realize how tight and to what extent. I had never taken a computer class in my life, I have done everything from actually doing it and interacting with the actual developers themselves (one of the great benefits of open source), rather than through a third party like a text book or teacher.

I was floored by the history they claimed. It was far different than what I lived. Linux and virtually everything but M$ and Apple was trivialized. While some of the claims of invention, or bringing to market first, were flat out not true. Despite, in the reviewers list of the text book, there were 3 phd's, 5 masters, and a crap load of bachelor's in computer science. There were many instances were the original creators were not even mentioned at all. Like Risc OS. Which was developed by the same people that designed and developed the Risc architecture and processor, better known now as the Arm. Their desktop was the first to bring forth many features that are now common to all graphical desktops, yet not one mention of this in that text book. All credit was given either to M$ or Apple, which is not true, as Risc OS was first released in 1987 long before windoze. Risc OS runs great even on the older 256mb of ram Raspberry PI, its snappy! The Linux professor I had was retired from Bell Labs, and was on the team that developed the C language in the late 1960's. My conversations with him, convinced me that there was no reason to pay 170K to get a certificate that says I know what I already know. The majority of my time would be spent memorizing the agenda. Most of the computer classes were about how to use M$, Apple and Adobe products, with very little on actual development until reaching the undergraduate level. The M$, Apple and Adobe products simply made no sense to me, as everything they do can be done with open source products, while in many cases much better. M$ spreadsheet I found in the early 2000's did not go out as many decimal points, as OpenOffice, subsequently it was unable to do accurate amortization tables.

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS

M$ is simply aware that controlling the education system, is paramount to maintaining a monopoly, or perceived monopoly. What does a recent graduate do when asked at their new job to complete a task, they use the tools that they were taught in school. M$ contributes a lot of financial support to cash strapped school systems, for obvious results. M$ purchased NBC. M$ spends lots of marketing dollars.

While Linux in itself does not hold the kind of financial equity that M$ does, it does hold expertise and software equity. Though many of the components that comprise of Linux, do have substantial financial equity. Linux does not advertise, does not own news conglomerates, does not spend billions in advertising in conjunction with it's business partners like Intel. The system of belief is going to be swayed by not just who holds the gold, but who controls the flow of gold.

In 2000 I opened my own retail mortgage lending office, as part of a larger operation out of California. Everything they used was M$, that lasted nearly 30 days in my office. I put Linux on all the workstations and ran the one processing software program that was M$ only, needed to interpolate with fannie mae and freddie mac, virtualized via Vmware. My maintenance dropped 90% over night. I also helped them bring automated underwriting from the secondary market down to the retail level. They were doing so well in the secondary market, they decided to close the retail operation, fewer individual state regulations to deal with. I moved to a local operation, and had the best up time in both companies. While cost was reduced substantially, no licensing fee's and 90% less maintenance. Do to my success with Linux in a production environment, I started advising other companies on moving to Linux, then the SCO drama started.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%..._controversies

Which did exactly what M$ wanted. Many of the biggest corporations were coming up on renewal of licensing with M$. M$ did not want to lose their customers, Linux had been coming on strong. A number of the largest corporations were already using Linux, some are listed in the above wikipedia page. Read through the whole thing, but the short is, M$ financed through shades to bring forth litigation to scare corporations from moving to Linux by inducing fear of unknown future costs due to licensing litigation.

The end result was, SCO lost, and M$ was found out to have been a party to the whole thing. It did achieve its primary goal though, many business's did not move to Linux.

M$ has been convicted of criminal offenses in numerous countries around the world, including the US. Ask Snowden why most of the sanctions against M$ were waived. The US Justice system for the past 8 years has been deciding what to do about M$ and Intels part in stopping computer manufactures from putting Amd 64 bit computers on the shelf with Linux, a year before Intel and M$ even had a 64 bit system. US justice system placed sanctions against both M$ and Apple for their anti open source activities. Most people perceive Jobs and Gates as competitors, yet in actuality they were close friends, and business partners, owning a news media conglomerate does have it's benefits.

Fact is a lot more companies use Linux than is perceived, just as their are a lot more people using Linux than perceived. M$ has time and time again, been able to manipulate, the education system, corporate entities, the criminal justice system, along with the media.

My own time working with Linux for the past 20 years has shown me that a lot more people use it than what the numbers claim. Postal and Postal2, the game, was developed here in Tucson, available on Linux, one of my friends sons was the lead graphics guy, they sold a lot of Linux versions and is still one of the most poplar Linux games on Steam.

SinOjos

In many cases, people are not even aware they are using Linux. For instance their router, or as many commonly know it as their modem, they all run on Linux, all the wireless routers run on Linux. Simply go to any of the hundreds of Linux flavors websites, there are just as many posts, as there are on windows forums. The number of non-English speaking or English speaking as a second language is higher than native English speakers, in some cases. What's the US population about 5% of the worlds total population, I think Americans sometimes forget, there is a big world out there besides the US. Germany is one of the biggest users of Linux, Brazil and many other Latin American countries are using Linux. China, is probably now the biggest user of Linux, their government is also no longer going to use M$, while they are producing their own flavors of Linux for their people. Android the most used smart phone OS is Linux. The US Army has allocated billions of dollars to switch over to Linux, they are currently in the process, as they found they could do anything they wanted with Linux, with out having to deal with and be controlled by companies like M$. Not to mention those nasty licensing fees and security issues that can only be plugged with access to the source code. National security cannot be risked due to a corporate structure that decides what bugs and or security holes get closed once a month, when bug fixes and security fixes are a daily thing with Linux. What about SELinux which is one of a number choices that can be used with Hardened Linux. Devised by the NSA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

People keep saying Linux is not happening, but it might be happening in the future, if you listen to the paid for information pushed in front of your nose. Same tactics as the SCO drama, circulate doubt. Fact is, it has already happened, while M$ is doing everything it can, legally and extra-legally, to convince the consumer base that they are still the only game in town. Gaming is one of the last foot holds M$ and Intel have, they fight to keep it no holds barred. Every single gaming forum you will hear only Intel for gaming, you will read people asking if Amd is really as bad as they have heard. Which is preposterous as Amd developed 64 bit long before Intel. I personally get better or just as good FPS with Amd, though I do run a much cleaner system than most. During the early 2000's, every forum was flooded with some very well written anti Linux material. There were hundreds if not thousands or people claiming to be experts posting the same exact material, in nearly every single forum on the net, even the Linux ones. M$ and Intel paid for anti Linux and anti Amd forum posting has been well known by the Linux community, and developers, some of which have been around just as long or longer than Gates. Many of which have actually written their own code, rather than adopting someone else's. Many of the so called windoze and apple features, originally came from open source projects. But unless you were there when they first came out 20 years ago, you believe it was M$ that came out with it 10 years ago and was a totally original idea! Not unlike what Thomas Edison did to Nicoli Tesla and so many others that developed things long before Edison instructed his engineers to do it.

Either personal experience or research debunks the great majority of so called common knowledge. Unfortunately perception is a hard driver of sales rather than facts. Read some of the long posts on offshoreonly concerning some of the shady business operations and or people in the boating business. Some of the posts people posted about features that should be added to your game, suggest including the shady business practices for more realism!

My experience is that M$ is the shadiest of the bunch. They are not going to go away, there will always be users that for what ever reason will keep using them. But do not discount the footprint that Linux has placed, through actual presence, rather than paid for claims of presence. Many of the top university phd heads of computer science, have stated twenty years ago, the propriety software will take the market in the beginning, due to the advantages of cash flow, but in time, open source will eventually be the market for the most common users. There will always be the need for propriety software, the majority of the open source projects are financed by the sale of corporate versions of the open source product available for free to the common user. Bill Gates is not stupid, he knows were it is going, that's the reason they do everything they can to slow the progress of open source, to give them time to evaluate the market, make adjustments, and enter markets that are profitable that they had nothing to do with in the past. Since they have to make up for lost ground to stay profitable.

Fact is, Linux is here to stay, demand has grown for Linux administrators, US educational entities have now incorporated Linux into the curriculum. Just as the educational system served M$ well in maintaining it's dominance in the desktop market, it will now assist Linux in it's growth with the user base. M$ tactics have had their run, I do not believe the average American realizes, the current state of things. I have extensive experience in Mexico and some in other Latin American countries. Due to the past 50 years of US policy (42 of which I have witnessed in Mexico, i'm 52) and interfering with politics and other matters, combined with the new revelations about spying and invasive methods. Displeasure with the US is at its highest. Why would any country want to use a US OS were the source code is not available for review?

Todd Wasson

My experience with Linux was very brief, I don't know much about it compared to you. Another programmer had it installed on his machine and gave me a copy somewhere around 2003 or 2004, I think. My experience, while similar to yours, was somewhat the opposite: I installed it and saw nothing I could do with it that I couldn't do on Windows whether it was software created by Microsoft or not. Most software running on Windows is not created by Microsoft, after all, so targeting Microsoft is perhaps also targeting the majority of software developers worldwide that have never worked for Microsoft, including me. People should be careful who they hurt out there, it may not be who they intended.

I played with Linux for a few minutes and it just reminded me of where Windows was in the earliest days, even in the DOS days. In many ways it would have been like starting over. At the time it seemed that you had to write your own drivers for everything on Linux which is something Microsoft had really taken care of in later versions of Windows. They did it all themselves or helped the manufacturers do it. With Linux you were on your own. I don't know if Linux is like that today, but when I tried it it really wasn't. Most of the development was much more difficult because you had to deal with low level issues you don't have to worry about with Windows, much like you had to do with DOS back when I started programming as a kid. If you're writing firmware for hardware or routers or whatever like you said, you have to do that anyway, so Linux might be just the thing especially if financially it makes sense too. Linux definitely has its place in the world, I just don't see it replacing Windows or Apple ever. The impression I was left with was that people were just trying to turn Linux into Windows.

Granted, had someone like you been there to show me what I was missing, perhaps my view of Linux would have been more favorable. In any case, I uninstalled Linux and never gave it another look. I had no reason to. We sure as heck wouldn't have been able to survive as a video game company selling only Linux games even had we all taken the time to learn it. There's just no way, and the same goes for most software companies that sell primarily or totally to Windows users such as myself. Without Microsoft doing what they've done, most of those software companies wouldn't exist. Unity would not exist, VRC and VRC Pro would not exist, this boat game wouldn't exist, and on and on. We wouldn't even be having this conversation and I wouldn't be a programmer. So I hope you'll pardon me for not sharing your anti-Microsoft sentiment.

Running Linux software for a non-software business to replace Office and the expense of Windows and so forth is understandable though if your own risk-benefit analysis indicates its the best choice for your business. It's great for servers and really high performance applications where Windows multitasking isn't grabbing time slices away from your process. That's probably where it will remain because it makes sense there.

I use Open Office too, by the way. It's just as free on Windows as it is on Linux.

It sounds to me like you've got a huge chip on your shoulder regarding Microsoft in general for a lot of reasons you've covered, including what appears to be some level of anti-American sentiment in general. That's not how I'd personally choose an operating system or any software for that matter, but we all make our choices differently and should be free to do precisely that.

There's an air of conspiracy there in your posts that does raise my eyebrows a bit, assigning willful intent where there perhaps isn't any that I don't really care to get into a debate over. This is an area where people can point at various facts, connect whatever dots they want to and make up about any story that sounds good to them, so there's not much point in getting into all that. I've had this kind of thing directed at me personally working for a game company, the sinister plots people accuse you of is downright laughable at times, as though they think they know what you're thinking having never spoken to you personally in their lives. I've seen it from that side so don't take it very seriously. I can only imagine how much more nuts it is at the government level after seeing it in what amounts to little more than a silly game company.

If you sell software that can be used in schools, you'll try to sell it to the schools. Microsoft would and I bet you would too. I'd sell my boat sim to schools if they'd buy it. Why not? That doesn't mean you're manipulating the educational system or doing some evil mustache twisting in a dark, smoke filled room. At some point that kind of thinking comes across as paranoid to me. If computer students are one day going to graduate into a world that is 80% Windows software, whether it's created by Microsoft, me, you, or anyone else, what would you expect to find in the schools? 80% of the time spent discussing Linux? I wouldn't go to that school unless I wanted to write Linux software.

Let's not pretend that Microsoft has forced anyone to use Windows. They're not really a monopoly where the government gives them special rules that don't apply to the rest of us. Hell no, the government is probably their worst enemy with all the anti-trust lawsuits and so forth getting thrown at them for what amounts to a lot of BS in my view. They're the number one operating system in my book for a wide number of reasons and is why I choose to use them. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be using Linux though. If it makes sense to you to use and you like it, by all means do so. I just wouldn't base my decision on that on national politics and that kind of thing. Let's remember that I'm just trying to make a speedboat simulator, after all.

Back to the schools: Schools and students get special deals, usually. I get all of Microsoft's software packages including Visual Studio Ultimate for free for a number of years through their Bizspark program which is available to all startups. All you really need is a company name, I think. So my software even direct from Microsoft has been just as free as Linux's. I haven't paid Microsoft for anything but Windows itself. I don't remember what it cost. $100-$150? Big deal.

I suppose if one wanted to they could see a conspiracy there too. We'll get Todd to use our products by giving them to him for free, knowing full well that in a few years if his software company is successful enough and he's satisfied with the products, he'll have to start paying for them. I don't see some evil villain there, just smart business by giving away the software for some time, like a demo that lasts for several years. In this case it's quite helpful because I don't have to shell out thousands of dollars as a startup.

I've run into this anti-Microsoft stuff before and it usually seems like some sort of anti-capitalist sentiment is behind it all. I'm not saying that's the case with you, although I can't help but notice you refer to it as M$ with the dollar sign. I don't know how accurate this is, but from where I stand it seems to be mostly young people trying to stick it to the man and fight the establishment, that being Microsoft in this case because they're thinking about software. I'm quite thankful for everything Microsoft has done and would much rather live in a software universe with one OS having a clear dominance in the market than having it be split evenly between a bunch of them. My life would be a lot harder if there were five operating systems split evenly over my market, all requiring me to write different versions of whatever software for them. The fact is I simply wouldn't be in business and neither would a lot of other people. So I'm happy for it.

Like it or not, Microsoft is dominate because they're the best, have attracted the most people by far, and have therefore kicked everyone else's butts in the OS area. A lot of people hate success, as though market dominance implies a monopoly when it in fact doesn't. I imagine you won't agree with that one, but that's how I see it.

In the end, the fact remains that nobody put a gun to my head and forced me to buy Windows or my neighbor to buy an iPhone or Mac for that matter, or for my other buddy to use Linux in his server software. We make our own choices in life whether it's about a web browser or OS or video game or whatever. Let's not pretend it's any other way, that there are some other sinister forces at work.

AMD versus Intel: I have no bone to pick either way with that one. From where I stand it looks like AMD is ahead one year with their latest processor, then Intel the next. To me they're just two race horses trading spots from time to time. Same goes for the graphics card manufacturers and everybody else. Competition does that, it's a good thing for all of us because the technology progresses more quickly. Right now I run an Intel i7 processor, but if next year AMD has an i7 killer with 4 more cores on it, I'll switch to AMD, then switch back a couple years later if i7 puts out something with more cores than that year's best AMD. Right now to me it's just about price and the number of cores on the CPU, while years ago it was about Ghz.

I don't care who makes my CPU, what country they're located in, or what that country's current political dramas are about. I want the best product. Whoever makes the best will be rewarded with my business. Regardless of the company, I don't know any of the people making it. To me, they're all just smart groups of folks making processors. I don't care what the sign on the front of the building says.

SinOjos

Yes I agree there are some games that simply will necessitate a dedicated graphics card. One reason why Steam went with providing dedicated gaming machines rather than going only the console route. Never the less the integrated GPU's being incorporated into the arm singleboards are getting better, and will continue to do so.

Yes the latency associated with streaming games, has always been the first thing that comes to mind. I do not care for more than 100ms fortunately I usually have 35-60 ms due to paying for a better than average connection. I will not play on anything more that 150ms.

Yes you are correct about C or any other language for that matter. In many cases standard CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS for particular cpu types can benefit, but is more important for the gpu when it comes to gaming. Here is one of the issues currently with some of the arm flags, its a quick one page with the basics without having to link ten different pages. Currently most people are using binary Linux releases due to not wanting to spend time compiling. Though if the person who compiled everything used a generic CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, utilizing O2, good for any Arm7 Cortex, with gpu's that have neon capability, will not get full visualization. See the Vectorizing floating-point operations section. O3 level needs to used as well as some more specific flags specifically for the gpu. In most cases even the Linux flavors that are compilation flavors, suggest O2, as O3 can cause compilation failures with some packages or versions of GCC.

Do keep in mind, that this is all moving so fast there is little or no written details in forums or wikis, only the guys who are delving in to the manufacturers docs and doing actual testing have the little details. With the shuffle for market share, with so many products coming out, it is going to be a mad house for some time. With a lot of confusion over proper compilation flags, for the various GPU's.

http://community.arm.com/groups/tool...-command-lines

Actually Arm is not new. It kinda got forgotten for quite awhile as a desktop, but was very popular back in the latter 80's and early 90's as desktops. While embedded devices are predominately arm, wired routers, switches, wireless routers, refrigerators etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS
https://www.riscosopen.org/content

Yes the cpu is not as important as many people think, in my experience. Reason why I think with so many arm singleboards coming out. If they get the gpu's and ram up, they could be a viable cheap solution for many gaming needs. Since all of the current boards are specifically targeting multi-media and gaming, may be the writing on the wall. Clearly there will be some things like professional stuff with needs for lots of encoding and some of the bleeding edge games will always need a dedicated graphics card.

The current small arm singleboard with dual or quad processors with 1-2gb of ddr3 ram, run a full desktop just fine. Your talking $40-150 for a machine that will do everything most people do, write letters, print letters, listen to music, watch videos, play simple games, browse the internet. There is supposedly some small laptops that are coming out that will be Arm.

I have a couple of Banana Pi with a dual core 1ghz and 1gb of ram. I have a number of wm and or desktops installed and run fine. enlightenment, xfce4, wdm, qtile. The key is getting the compile flags set correctly to get full use of the gpu, which is the mali400mp2. XBMC now KODI will run fine, though not quite as good as the raspberry pi.
banana pi

Matrix Mini PC really hums along with a quad core 1ghz (freescale imx6) and 2gb of ram. I have just started compiling on it, as the board designer and the company handling sales do not supply much details so I set it aside for awhile. But I have Gentoo on it now, and it is compiling fast enough I do not really need to set it up for distcc cross compiling with my other boxes. Though I am compiling directly in ram, as I have the tmp folder for compiling mounted to ram with 1.5gb available, so as long as I do not compile anything that will need more space, will not have to go to compiling off the disk. I have 41 cores available in my home office that I usually use for distcc cross compiling. : )

Matrix Mini PC

I have used a banana pi and beaglebone black, for running Unifi for a small business, it is management software based on java for controlling wireless access points from Ubiquity. No reason for to have a big x86 for a few access points, or like in one case they didn't want to run an Amazon AWS server, they wanted to be able to turn their desktops off to save on bills and heat, as they take long weekend regularly, but wanted the wireless management software running which can be accessed anytime. Nice cheap solution, that uses little power, takes little space, looks cool, and unless changing settings or checking status's, it is rarely accessed. I have run my home wireless Unifi on the beaglebone black, a little slow, but keeps chugging along.
https://www.ubnt.com/

Amazon AWS offers CUDA here is a link to one of their doc pages. I know people have been using CUDA clusters to crack encryption, the US Gov. uses them also, amazon won the big gov. contract.
: ) They are Linux instances

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/la...computing.html

Yes follow what you have in mind, that is your best bet to get up and running. Then consider other architectures other stuff as time permits and things develop.

People really do not realize how many people are involved with Linux. Perhaps tens of millions may be a little over board. But take into consideration.

My kernel config file has 3,219 lines of code, kernel version 3.18.7-gentoo, there is a space and a group name between groups. That provides for nearly 3,000 drivers for various hardware and or software settings. Different flavors add additional patches that add additional features, or additional features for hardened kernels. There are some that do not submit upstream to the kernel maintenance team, they provide kernel patches for those that use their hardware which can be patched to any kernel. Keep in mind this stuff is at the developer level, while rarely does the average user patch their kernel themselves, though nothing is stopping them. They simply use a kernel that has already been patched and prepared by the kernel team on their respective Linux flavor.

Each and every hardware manufacture provides drivers to be included in the kernel, they may have multiple people on the driver writing team. Some of course do not provide drivers for inclusion, then some individual or group with the need takes it upon themselves to contribute. In some cases, some manufacturers want to keep stuff propriety, and will only allow certain entities to have access to their drivers.

All the Arm board manufactures have any number of people in software development. Keep in mind, they build boards for various industries, a lot of manufacturing, robotics, medical, aviation, engine controller units for automobiles, every wired router made, every wireless router made, and a lot more all on Linux. I have heard there is a windoze router, but have never seen one! Take every hardware manufacture ever, and apply as many software personal you want to all their products from all over the world. IBM does not do M$, as well as a number of others, add printer manufactures into the fray along with cameras, mp3 players, nearly every small device that runs software. How about every hosting company, Amazon AWS has multiple locations on numerous continents, with massive server farms. Even if they provide M$ virtually, it is Linux that is really running things. What about google, not only all their Linux based products, but there server farms are all Linux. They employ a lot of people contributing in one way or another to Linux. What abut all the intrusion software hardware devices, they are predominately Linux, they also contribute to Linux. Even if it is simply a bug report and or patch that they file to upstream.

There are in excess of 35,000 open source packages (applications) available in many of the Linux flavor repositories, some have fewer simply because no one has taken upon the job of maintaining that package for that specific flavor. Any package can be installed even if it is not provided for in the flavors repository. There is an estimated number of another approx. 70,000 packages, more obscure, that are not added to common repositories, but can be downloaded and compiled by anyone. Each one of those packages have any where from one to hundreds of coders working on the project. Some have have been sold for more than 1 billion dollars. Many are used by M$, Mac, BSD, Linux, Unix and a number of other derivatives of the Unix, BSD Linux family. Google Play Store has 1.3 million Android apps.

SinOjos

There are hundreds of Linux flavors and forks, as anyone with the gumption can start one. Have any were from one, to thousands of people maintaining packages and patches for their respective flavor.

Users themselves, due to a myriad of setting options, provide bug reports and in some cases a fix. Most Linux flavors are of the binary type, which means people install the binary that someone else with that flavor has compiled for them. Binary distributions use flag settings that will work best in almost all cases. But of course does not provide for best compilation flag settings as they must run on any same architecture processor, and also not have flags set that are in conflict with other package flags.

Flavors like Gentoo allow for for setting the compilation flags specific to your processor, and any specific package flags. One can certainly do the same with a binary distribution, but the binary package managers do not allow for such settings, so each and every package must be handled independently outside of the package manager.

The best way to learn Linux is do LFShttp://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

LFS does not provide a package manager, it is only instructions. I did it 20 years ago, the best learning experience you can have concerning Linux. Each and every package must be downloaded from each individual package developer/maintainers website. To do updates, you need to check each and every package website, or get on the mailing list for notifications. Since a Linux installation consists of hundreds of packages, that becomes a nearly impossible tedious en-devour. Hence the advent of Linux flavors that have a package management system, with hundreds to thousands of maintainers. Gentoo makes compiling each and every package with desired compilation flags easy. Primary reason it is so popular with developers and the likes of NASA.

https://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/2...newsletter.xml
https://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/2...newsletter.xml
http://people.nas.nasa.gov/~bgreen/
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/bryan-green/15/113/97a

Maintainers are from all over the world, and generally donate their time and effort to the cause. Flavors like RedHat and SuSe, employ individuals as they provide for commercial support. I am sure I have missed many, as well of all the companies in all the countries I am simply not aware of.

Current world population is 7,302,116,000 and climbing. 2.7% is 197,157,132 there may not be that many people using Linux, as everyone does not have a computer, but lets cut that by 90% that still leaves 19,715,713.2. We can play the numbers game all day. But still, no matter what number you want to apply. When you add up all the hardware and software manufactures from all over the world, then all the sub companies that use their hardware and software, then include all the users who occasionally contribute, even if is is a simple bug report. There is a lot more people involved with Linux than is typically considered.

I know a lot of software guys that at work they make their money using M$, because that is what they are forced to use by management, for what ever reason. But at home, they use Linux, they also teach their children, as it is ignored so much at school. There was an 11 year old a number of years ago, that built a TargetWare server based off of slackware, it was awesome, he already knew more about computer OS's, GCC, Compiling and such, than most of the so called experts I have met. Propriety software simply does not allow access to the source code, they want you to learn their application, not how to code. While open source encourages access to the source code and forking to build upon and enhance existing work.

Yes that is contrary to the standard business practice of protect your stuff at all costs. Yet some open source projects have exceeded a billion dollars in value, while producing many forks. In January 2008, Sun Microsystems bought MySQL for $1 billion. Like the saying goes, its only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Time and time again, open source has shown it is a viable business platform. There is a very good reason why the likes of M$ and Apple are scared. Free thinking and uncontrolled expression has always been the most feared by any controlling group, cant have people thinking on their own, they must be stamped out at all costs.

Todd Wasson

Good stuff to learn, thanks. I think I had installed Red Hat in 2003 or whenever it was, and seem to recall doing it with a CD image. I imagine things have progressed since the red hat days, although from your description there it still sounds like roughly the same amount of pain to get stuff up and running with all the packages and so on. I'm sure it's gotten easier and will continue to do so, but it still sounds like a turn off. I need a good reason to use Linux to go to that much trouble to install it.

Regarding numbers: Like you said, we could play numbers games all day. I don't really care what the numbers are, just the percentage market share on PCs. My web site statistics still say 9% which means no more than 9% of my visitors and potential customers are using it on their computers. It's probably less than that if server bots and crawlers and so forth are written in Linux. I don't really care what their router software and so forth runs. I'm not in that business. All that matters to me is the percentage of PC users running it. So in my situation I still see no reason to run it, personally.

I see open source versus non-open source as being separate from Linux versus Windows. Those are just operating systems, after all. The decision to open source a project or not is made by every developer, whether they're running Linux or Windows, so I hope we wouldn't pretend this is an invention of the Linux community. My grandfather in the 1980's used to send me code before there was such a thing as Windows or Linux, so I might as well say my grandfather invented open source. That's silly, people have been doing that since the beginning, just not on operating systems in particular. I bet if we looked we'd find more open source Windows projects than Linux ones just because of the shear number of Windows developers out there.

As for open sourcing operating systems in particular, I really would not want Microsoft to open source Windows and follow Linux's approach on that one. The last thing I need is a million different versions of Windows running out there that I need to make my software compatible with. It sounds like a support nightmare. One has to wonder if this could have anything to do with Linux being pretty much in last place.

What I'm reminded of is a racing sim for Windows that was being developed as an open source project many years ago. The idea was that racing sim fans would all band together and create some awesome racing sim of their own to blow away the competition. They had a forum that I used to keep an eye on. The social dynamic was interesting at least. I seem to recall at one point there just being chatter about what their logo was going to be that seemed to go on for about three months.

If I recall correctly, there were something like 90 people that had signed up to work on it. In the end, about three or four guys were doing all the coding themselves, primarily led by a 19 year old using the Ogre engine. So what started out as open source remained such, but it never really got anywhere. I'd done better than that on my own without even using some prewritten engine. So it's not how many people are involved, it's *which* people. Some can kick ass and take names and others are just useless, so some go on to be MySQL and others just sit around for a decade before somebody finally shuts down the forum for them.

Anyway, this has been interesting and I appreciate the dialog. if I ever do decide to take another look at Linux, I'll come back and send you a message to point me in the right direction just in case things have changed again in the meantime, which they surely will.

By the way, what programming language do you use for writing the OS? C++?

Todd Wasson

Sorry, I missed your first reply.

"Yes the latency associated with streaming games, has always been the first thing that comes to mind. I do not care for more than 100ms fortunately I usually have 35-60 ms due to paying for a better than average connection. I will not play on anything more that 150ms."

Yes, that's about the same tolerance for me too. What's different here though, something you might not have experienced yet, is what it'd be like to play a game where the display itself is lagged that much. It's one thing to have the network latency at 35-60 or 150ms, it's quite another to have the display itself be like that which is what would be the case in a streaming game (actually probably double because there's a round trip involved). When you play a multiplayer game, usually all of that latency is virtually at 0 regardless of the network latency you see in the lobby and so on. Your player movements are usually done locally even in shooters, and most certainly for a racing game, so when you move the mouse you see the results immediately. Add the 35-150 ms (maybe double for the round trip involved) lag in there and it'd be totally unplayable. So there's no lag in movement in the non-streaming case, you just get the latency in terms of response time for the messages sent to the server when you've shot an enemy and that kind of thing. It's a really different ballgame there so I don't have much hope for streaming games of that sort where you need quick response times.

In all seriousness that number would have to drop to 6ms for VRC Pro, maybe even half that because there's a round trip involved. A lot of our players can perceive a difference in response between 300 and 400 fps, so those guys would probably need 2 or 3 ms to feel like it's the same as playing it locally. I'm not as perceptive as the younger guys that are pro racers, I top out at about 150.

Anyway, in the streaming case your mouse movement has to get sent to the server, the server has to process the physics, move you, render it, then send the current frame back. I wrote a lot of the multiplayer code for VRC and VRC Pro and had to really think a lot about that type of stuff. So I really mean it when I say it's got to be probably 3-6ms to even be playable with the server doing all the work like that model would need. I just don't see that ever happening, unfortunately.

That's interesting info on Linux, thanks for sharing. Unity does compile to Android, by the way. The first thing I did with Unity was create this mobile app for it:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...ions.SASMobile

From my perspective it's just working with some GUI system. I don't know what it's doing under the hood there, if it's DirectX or OpenGL or what. I assume it can't be DirectX since it's Android? I don't know much about mobiles, really, just enough to make the app and operate my phone.

Todd Wasson

There is one application somebody has suggested to me that would be a perfect fit for Linux and one of the ARM boards. This would be a hardware system. Don't get the wrong idea, I'm not against Linux, it's just a matter of choosing the right tools for the job. In this case I'd prefer Linux just to get around the Windows licensing fee which then might cost a substantial percentage of the device. But then again, I think I read somewhere that Microsoft is making a version of Windows 10 for free for those types of devices, probably for exactly that reason. Linux might have its work cut out for it with a free version of Windows out there to compete with on those devices.

There's no denying Linux has its place, is widely used, and is valuable. I never meant to deny that. My main point has been simply that from a game programmer perspective, I only really care about PC users. It's the percentage that guides my decision making there, and the fact is that it's sitting at around 9% right now so dedicating any more than 9% extra time to making a Linux version of a game isn't a smart decision in my eyes. What people are using for routers or NASA ship control systems and so forth is irrelevant to me in my situation. If you're writing server software or something, then sure, Linux is probably the way to go. I'm not though.

It's best to use whatever tools are best for the job. Sometimes that'll be Linux, Unix, Windows, something custom, ARM, a PC, a console, Steam's new device, or whatever. In my situation with my goals, Windows and a standard PC is the way to go.