Breezy will make you famous

[AsteriskNix]

...or more famous than you already are. It is without a doubt, the best linux desktop distro period.

With that said, when all the reviews come in, and more and more people realize, wow, ohmygosh, my grandma COULD use this instead of windows...I sure could relax not playing spyware tech support for my family...

...could you entertain using this fame to open dialogue with gaming publishers and major windows applications to do some NATIVE software for Ubuntu?

We all know gaming is why a boatload of linux users still keep a windows partition for mmorpgs and certain titles. I for one, hate emulators since I am a performance junkie, so I'm holding out for more native apps.

I've been using linux on and off since Redhat 5.0 ( Hurricane ) in 1997 so please don't respond with "dude, just use Cedega, or Man, Gimp does all that" I know. I know. Believe me. I use these things. Drake, however has a chance to make a Really Big Splash in the community, and not just open source.

I'm asking for people to post their Drake wishlist of Software We All Need Now.

S.W.A.N.N ?? lol Anyway..on with the list.

Wishlist

Any major upcoming mmorpg, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and good standards, UO, WoW, SWG, DAoC

Adobe Titles ( you got em to get Acrobat and flash, lets get more! )
Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator

Internet Explorer! ( ok just kidding, seeing if you are still paying attention :rolleyes: )

Macintosh Software, it's Bsd right?

iLife, Garageband specifically, better ipod support, gtkpod is good but how about iTunes?

Web2.0 Applications

Flock browser

Anyway, this is just a start I'd love to see DirectX die and more OpenGL, Vista is going to be the competition and whatever flavor of OSX is out in Oct '06 and if you really want to stand up to these guys, you gotta get the eyecandy and toys in the distro and make them accessible and easy to use.

It's a tall order, I know, but Marketing, Sales staff, PR people get the meetings, get the conversations, you already have HP on your side, use the muscle.

With Microsoft forcing hardware upgrades and even more copy protection into their OS (in video?? ) they are helping us out by shooting themselves in the foot.

THANK YOU from this rabid Ubuntu supporter.

ps. ( yes, I've donated money to the boards )

[asimon]

Any major upcoming mmorpg, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and good standards, UO, WoW, SWG, DAoC

He he, I remember the last time I buyed a D&D RPCG with Linux support their Linux support looked like this:
1. Buy a Windows License
2. Install the game on Windows
3. Install the game on Linux and during this procedure it copies the files from windows.
Okay later they added the option to download those files, thus you don't need to install the game you want to play under Linux on Windows first. Know what? I never got a dowload speed faster than 10 bytes/second or so (yes, no kbytes, bytes). And this for 2 GB of data ...

I sweared I never buy a game from that company again, ever. You may already guessed, it's Bioware (or what's left nowadays from a once great company).

[Lovechild]

He he, I remember the last time I buyed a D&D RPCG with Linux support their Linux support looked like this:
1. Buy a Windows License
2. Install the game on Windows
3. Install the game on Linux and during this procedure it copies the files from windows.
Okay later they added the option to download those files, thus you don't need to install the game you want to play under Linux on Windows first. Know what? I never got a dowload speed faster than 10 bytes/second or so (yes, no kbytes, bytes). And this for 2 GB of data ...

I sweared I never buy a game from that company again, ever. You may already guessed, it's Bioware (or what's left nowadays from a once great company).

I got Neverwinter Nights cheap like a year ago, yesterday I finally got around to trying it - the Loki based Linux native installer worked beautifully and while for some reason I can only make the game run as root, it to works perfectly under Linux, without any kind of Windows install in sight.

[AsteriskNix]

I got Neverwinter Nights cheap like a year ago, yesterday I finally got around to trying it - the Loki based Linux native installer worked beautifully and while for some reason I can only make the game run as root, it to works perfectly under Linux, without any kind of Windows install in sight.


Good point on Neverwinter Nights...so, it IS possible. Doom and other standalone games too, but how about an MMORPG? I don't know what's holding us back, network code? doubtful...graphics libraries? probably, but if you can do standalone....is it that huge a leap to go massive?

What are some of your wishlists you would like to see added to 6?

[Sonobana]

Mayby you guys should try this
http://www.happypenguin.org/show?PlaneShift

[erikpiper]

I think good looking firefox icons by default would be an easy and sweet feature :)

I can't wait till semi stable :)

Seriously though:

Photoshop
Garageband
Better working firefox/OOO: AKA As ood as on windows.
Better realplayer. (Closer to the windows version)

Gimpshop?

[| MM |]

You are right about games, if HL2 had native support, and a few other apps that i cant think of right at this moment had native support for Linux. I would do away with windows forever.

Also, does anybody else think windows has much richer sound play back than Ubuntu ?? Im talking mp3, UT2k4, et al.

I wish Opera looked sexier in Gnome, because seriously it blows Firefox out of the sky in Windows.


Espiecially with this 6month dev cycle for Ubuntu, im loving Ubuntu.

[erikpiper]

Oh yeah- more.
(Stars are for bullet points)


:KS I have an almost useless Sony MD-player. I want to use it on ubuntu- I wouldn't even care about replacing firmware if it was even possible. (Sony-Ha!) I am going to try wine.
( My MD player- http://www.bizrate.com/marketplace/search/search__cat_id--11640000,prod_id--327497306.html)

:KS ITunes would get a TON of windows users interested. It is the #1 question they ask me about ubuntu.

:KS Someone needs to port the best free space sim ever: Orbiter.

[andrewpmk]

A good, unbloated alternative to OpenOffice.org (AbiWord is missing essential features and KOffice is buggy)
Eyecandy for high-end computers (KDE 4) but good performance for low-end computers (my Celeron 1.3 GHz comes to mind)
Better SVG support
Better video support
Better gaming
A nice alternative to Ubuntu Brown for GNOME, installed by default
Support for more proprietary devices
Better iPod support
Easy transfer of documents and settings from Windows and Mac OS

[apoclypse]

I think that if maybe a spinoff of ubuntu just targeting games like the other side projects of ubuntu (kubuntu, edubuntu, etc), targeting PC game developers and gamers this will help. I'm a pc gamer and so far I have seen fewer and fewer games releases for the pc. This last summer there was hardly anything except for a few gems. Most game companies are now realizing that most computer users who really play games already have consoles, so most companies are just going for broke and releasing console games left and right. I think that linux (and thus ubuntu) can benefit from helpin young upstart companies that are only looking for that one chance they need to make it big. A gaming distro that will sort out all the kinks ( for example playing and installing games on linux should be more console like. Perhaps an itunes like program to install, load and configure games. Have all developers of games for this distro adhere to some sort of standard, freedesktopgaming.org anyone? The standards will only be for how the games interact with hardware, microsoft is succesful because of this. Perhaps an opengl based api that also has gaming hardware protocols among other things. SDL?) The problem I see so far with gaming in linux is mot hardware support ( if the games are there and people are playing it, I'm sure Nvidia and ATI will step it up) right now there are only a handful of games that take advantage of any signifucant hardware acceleration.

My .2 cents anyway.

[int]

instend you 802.11x, you can make a vpn to server, and you only have to install pptp, and use pon to make VPN...

[graigsmith]

I want world of warcraft. or pretty much any fun MMORPG.

Plane shift doesn't count because it is not even finished. i want something that i can play and have *fun* with now... I'll probably give plane shift a try sooner or later once again.

i don't have windows anymore, i ditched it when hoary came out.. so right now i get my gaming fix via Neverwinter Nights. And i also play some emulators. I been playing ultima underworld on dosbox lately, that has been pretty cool. I also play some enemy territory every once in a while. Played vendetta for about a couple months before i got bored.

blizzard just needs to port world of warcraft.

[rikai]

well, the one port i'd like would be the MMORPG giant, Ragnarok Online, other than that, i'm content with the way ubuntu is developing, though that's always subject to change.

[dolson]

The BEST solution to this problem is to buy what's already out there. Show companies that Linux users are willing to spend their dollars on it. There are enough games for Linux that I just gave away all of my Windows games (which haven't even been played since 2001).

For what I lack on Linux, I have a couple consoles. And really, I don't use my PC for gaming much these days because it's just so much better on consoles. Everyone has the same specs, controllers are comfortable, and things works without driver issues, sound issues, etc. etc.

But seriously... Check out what's out there already, and support the little guys. Some great stuff I've got from small companies are: Mutant Storm, Marble Blast, Professor Fizzwhizzle, and Lugaru. Not to mention most of the stuff available at TuxGames.com. I have a collection of well over 50 Linux games. But then again, I'm happy with playing what's available, and not just what seems to be the current trend of the month.

And Blizzard maybe would've released the Linux port they did of World of Warcraft if Linux users didn't send shitloads of hatemail to them earlier regarding Starcraft (and likely also about WOW). Yes, you read that right, WOW was ported, and never released.

I got Neverwinter Nights cheap like a year ago, yesterday I finally got around to trying it - the Loki based Linux native installer worked beautifully and while for some reason I can only make the game run as root, it to works perfectly under Linux, without any kind of Windows install in sight.

I had a script that I wrote and put in the NWN Linux FAQ that I wrote back in the beta days that worked around that issue. I'm sure a google search would turn it up. I don't recommend running things as root..

[Lovechild]

I have used Linux as my sole OS for more than 6½ years - I do know that running as root is bad.

However for software like this, I try it for discovering permission imperfections.

[dolson]

I have used Linux as my sole OS for more than 6½ years - I do know that running as root is bad.

However for software like this, I try it for discovering permission imperfections.

#!/bin/sh

clear
echo
echo This script will make a new directory called ~/.nwnbeta/ and
echo will put symlinks from a system install of NWN into it.
echo It will allow for per-user configuration, and saved games.
echo
echo This script assumes you've installed NWN into /usr/local/games/nwn/
echo
echo If you need help, you can ask in #openknights on irc.feenode.net
echo
echo Press CTRL+C to exit, or ENTER to continue.
read JUNK

cd
mkdir .nwnbeta
cd .nwnbeta
lndir /usr/local/games/nwn/
rm -rf saves temp tempclient localvault servervault dmvault logs *.ini *.log nwn uninstall
mkdir saves temp tempclient localvault servervault dmvault logs
cp /usr/local/games/nwn/*.ini /usr/local/games/nwn/nwn ./

echo
echo
echo
echo
echo
echo You will have to edit your ~/.nwnbeta/nwn script to remove any
echo directory changes that you may have added to it.
echo
echo Also, as root, run these commands:
echo
echo " rm /usr/local/bin/nwn"
echo " echo \#\!/bin/sh > /usr/local/bin/nwn"
echo " echo cd \~/.nwnbeta/ >> /usr/local/bin/nwn"
echo " echo ./nwn >> /usr/local/bin/nwn"
echo " chmod +x /usr/local/bin/nwn"
echo
echo And that\'s it.

That is the original script I wrote. You should be able to just read that and see what it does. This allows you to work around the permissions issue, and works for multiple users. The only bad thing is you need to run this once per user. And modify it if you like, to point where you installed it, and whatnot. woulda been nice if BioWare did an actual Linux port and not this half-assed job they did (no video playback, here read a text file, wtf??). But anyhow, I'm still grateful for having it anyhow (even thought I bought it on release day and had to wait 8 months to play it).

[lost.sync]

audio, audio, audio!

ubuntu made me drop every aspect of windows usage except one: writing music. i don't need anything super awesome. no, audour isn't enough (MIDI...?) and no i can't get MusE to run. i write music and run a small mixing/mastering house and if i could do the things under linux that i can do in windows, i'd be so stoked. these are the applications i'd most like to see ported:

Steinberg's Cubase & Wavelab
Waves' mastering VST plugins
Ableton Live
Reason 3
FLStudio
Recycle

all with full ReWire support. and i'd like to see an implementation of the VST plugin architecture, even if it has to be forked from WINE. i realize DirectX plugins aren't happening, and don't care, because it's a crap architecture anyway. but there's no reason VST can't work in *nix. it works on OS X. as someone else said, it's BSD, init? so what gives? and honestly, why can't we have support for the AU architecture if that already works in OS X, too? and what about RTAS?

vendor-supplied drivers for popular audio gear would be nice, too.

and i second the iTunes idea. my iPod doesn't like not using iTunes. and i don't like making it.

[commercial] developers need to get on the ball with this. they aren't acknowleging a very powerful platform and in doing so are forcing people to stick with an inferior OS.

Vista might flop, guys, and XP is dying of malwareitis. audio isn't the only big gap in the linux vs windows world, but it's one that, if filled, would make a lot of people switch. if Vista doesn't take off, it's between linux and OS X. while i love apple boxes, i'd still way rather see linux start emerging as the premier OS for nonproprietary hardware. and i thunk Ubuntu makes a great poster child for such a campaign.

[magomago]

You are right about games, if HL2 had native support, and a few other apps that i cant think of right at this moment had native support for Linux. I would do away with windows forever.

Also, does anybody else think windows has much richer sound play back than Ubuntu ?? Im talking mp3, UT2k4, et al.

I wish Opera looked sexier in Gnome, because seriously it blows Firefox out of the sky in Windows.


Espiecially with this 6month dev cycle for Ubuntu, im loving Ubuntu.
This is very true. Music sounds infinitely better in Windows, and I've been harping on this part for YEARS. However, the problem is a lack of DRIVERS, not a lack of bad Linux implementation. It is better today for sure. I remember during Mandrake 7.0 it sounded pitiful...ironically enough I thought Redhat 8.0/9.0 sounded a little worse!

The main thing is the community needs documentation. Like I have onbaord nforce2 soundstorm sound...yet i'm using the i810 module...I don't want to say too much because I'm not a Computer Engineer or Electrical Engineer but there is a good post on anandtech that summed it up




No way. My music, as much as I hate saying it, sounds a thousand times better in Windows than in Ubuntu. Whatever the widnwos driver software for the nforce2 does, it does it well because it sounds very nice, even for 128kmp3s. On linux, don't even bother with it. Heck even if I play some High Quality music I can't turn the volume over 1/2 in the Gnome Taskbar because of the distortion I start getting (I leave my speakers on 25% Monsoon MH505s)

I always figured it was immaturity in the Linux OSS/ALSA (or that is what Drag told me long long ago when I asked this)



It's your driver for that card. The nforce2 stuff is the nvidia's sound card and they keep things closed. Nvidia is notoriously private with things like that. Very irrational behavior.

The alsa probably would work better if people wanted it to bad enough, but there are nice sound cards for cheap and there are only actually 2-3 guys that do almost all the sound driver work for Linux systems. So they have their priorities.

With the nvidia sound card your using it in a sort of compatability mode with the Intel 8xx drivers, so your going to miss out on most of the features you have in Windows. In all actuallity I'd bet most of the sound card only realy exists in Window's drivers. Like a Winmodem.

My guess with what is happenning is that the Linux driver is feeding the sound card a sound format that it doesn't handle very well. With software mixing (dmix plugin) you can take any sound and remix it to something that the sound card can eat without getting a stomach ache. I had to do this with my Ibook so that I'd get smooth DVD playback.

This should be less of a issue of late since dmix is enabled by default for newer versions of alsa's drivers. I think with 2.6.14 kernels is the cut off point.

Either that or it may be the software program your using.

For instance with Amarok I've noticed that it has considurably less sound quality in certain conditions. For isntance if it's configured to use KDE's arts media system it's pretty easy to get nasty sounding distortion. It has its own software mixing stuff and if you have the volume turned up in that then it's easy to get distortion.

And with Gnome's ESD sound deamon it's even worse. Much worse.

The simple way to find out if this is the problem is to use a simple command line player like mpg321 and go like this:
mpg321 -d alsa09 random.mp3

Sometimes that helps. Then you can reconfigure the application to use alsa directly or disable kde/gnome's sound system.. Things like that.

[aamukahvi]

I bought Quake 4 about 3 months ago, haven't gotten around to trying it yet... There was a period of Compiz'ing so I didn't think any games were really doable. I got rid of Xgl, so now I might give it a whirl.

[trent dillman]

Here's one:

Flash.

And I don't mean the one-release-behind-mac-and-windows browser plugin. I'm talking DEVELOPMENT. Flash MX Professional. Yeah, I could use Crossover for a buggy version 6, but I'd like to have 8 dagnabbit!

That, and I second the audio processing software.

[jobezone]

This is very true. Music sounds infinitely better in Windows, and I've been harping on this part for YEARS. However, the problem is a lack of DRIVERS, not a lack of bad Linux implementation. It is better today for sure. I remember during Mandrake 7.0 it sounded pitiful...ironically enough I thought Redhat 8.0/9.0 sounded a little worse!

The main thing is the community needs documentation. Like I have onbaord nforce2 soundstorm sound...yet i'm using the i810 module...I don't want to say too much because I'm not a Computer Engineer or Electrical Engineer but there is a good post on anandtech that summed it up
Maybe it's totally unrelated, but do you keep the "PCM" volume to the max? I find it that if I do, it heavily distorts sound!

[stoffe]

Good point on Neverwinter Nights...so, it IS possible. Doom and other standalone games too, but how about an MMORPG? I don't know what's holding us back, network code? doubtful...graphics libraries? probably, but if you can do standalone....is it that huge a leap to go massive?
Actually, nothing is technically holding it back, by which I mean that there is no part of a Windows game that couldn't be done equally well on Linux or for both. Neither graphics, nor networking or sound or anything like that is a problem (well maybe some advanced peripherials like some joysticks). Doing cross platform development is not much harder than doing for one platform, if choosing technologies properly and taking some care to code to standards. Actually, it may produce better results faster as there are less dirty hacks involved - if done right from the start.

However:
* Many companies does DirectX development for various reasons, ranging from "MS told us to" to "we like the Visual Studio integration".
* Companies don't care about fringe markets - they don't care about the Macs either. (And Linux users are notoriously bad at paying for stuff actually. Garagegames for instance sells many games for all three platforms, Mac users are 65-70% of their revenue with Linux at 5%... go figure!)
* Companies doesn't want to do Linux support. Understandably.
* Any thought of secondary markets come as an afterthought and will not produce a good result. Probably what happened in the above example.
* Gamers and game makers alike usually run Windows. The geekier ones have interest in Linux, but don't run it themselves. So they don't actually know what it's about.
* Gamers and game makers are also generally extremely pragmatic - at least when it comes to games. If it works on Windows, they will use Windows and couldn't care less about any freedoms or choice. Such is the power of Evercrack and its derivates. ;)

The list could go on - but in short it's a combination of little or no knowledge, little
or no interest and little or no money to be made. The technologies are all there (although not as well put together as in DirectX, even though people usually confuse that with Direct3D).

What needs to be done (IMO) as a first step is to make sure that any cross platform libs and technologies are best of breed. If they are, game makers will start using them, and suddenly have the ability to port. That must be the first start. After that, they need to be able to deploy products without terrible hacks - it needs to just work. Also, there needs to be a viable market - I think the potential market is big enough, but it has to start buying. At least, those points would be a good start, and what I see as necessary for it to be possible at all. After that, we can take the debate on what tools are needed... :)

[pnoewbe]

True, because printers work in breezy, not in dapper.

You can hand somebody a breezy install and live demo cd's/dvd. Linux will not get a bad name, because printers work in breezy, not in dapper. Don't hand out dapper cds or dapper will make you famous when the printer fails to work--you would become the butt of endless jokes, Bill's best friend, etc.

[pnoewbe]

I turn up the software volume to 100% and use a hardware puck for volume and mute to nice speakers and sub-woofer.

I think sound is as good and printing is far better in linux than windows. Sample rate issues might be involved, are you sure the recording is the same quality? Burning cd's I've never made a coaster on linux, but many in windows. Also in linux there is total audio recording quality control(sample rate, variable or constant bit rate). The only good thing about windows is click install, no thinking, but then you pay when six viruses a day mess up registry and you can't click that away. Support, sure, they hang up or give a stupid answer like,"Delete reg.dat(registry), re-install printer driver(re-install windows and printer driver!!!), and call me back(sure, NEXT tech)".

[pnoewbe]

Games began to be popular in dos, then windows. Early windows was running on dos. Some non-game apps were written in machine language in dos, and assembler programs worked equally well in windows, essentially all games were taking over the hardware from the operating system. The cpu-specific accelerating api's are exposed in linux as well as windows, so then we might have to consider market share as next hurdle if the libs exist.

Games have always used hardware before other software. That applies to video card, cpu, special cpu api's, audio.

If AMD actually used(uses) Transmeta to virtualize and design its cpu, gamers could develop on Transmeta for similar reasons of flexibility. They could virtualize the dedicated game platforms and pc cpu's, ideally developing one library at the game developer level, except for machine specific hacks. That would put game developers on one conceptual plane for developing the game itself. To some extent linux kernel is moving in the same direction, able to run on different machines including game boxes, but not making that one lib, one api, for different machines, which might best be done for Transmeta chips.

At one point Sony simply bought the best playstation virtualizer and prevented that set of developers from developing the next generation of ps virtualizer. Do we know how game developers are being either bought or punished? That would be impossible if there was one open lib for different cpu's, including game boxes, running on Transmeta, so that games were developed in one language. I see another problem, and that is that if we think of developing all the games in X11, duh, next problem is that X is incomprehensible. Graphical, yes, easy, no, just the opposite. And the api's that make X programming easy do not deal at all with the low-level graphics api's accessing high-level graphics functions, as far as I know. But high-level graphics api's do exist and are developed in linux, it's just a matter of developing an easy high-level language that would run on all hardware, perhaps via Transmeta as development platform, with the open-ness to drill down into the lower level or component languages/api's to optimize code, if compilers couldn't do that, or to move beyond conceptual game developers at prototype level to hackey game implementers.