SteamOS (unified gaming Linux), OpenGL-next and better graphics drivers are coming, so the state of gaming in Linux is rapidly changing soon.

ET3D is right.
When comparing two states we need to take into account other changes at the same time.

In general the PC market share is shrinking when it comes to gaming and day to day use. Tablets, Smartphones, Netbooks, etc... are taking over which is actually no surprise.
Consoles are strong, too when it comes to gaming .

And no, I'm not saying that the PC is dead but cross platform development has become more and more important. So engines which are aiming at as many as platforms as possible are gaining market share.
This will help Linux, too.

On the other hand Windows will always dominate desktop PCs and thus remain as the most important OS when it comes to PC gaming. On the other hand we should get used to the idea that the market becomes more and more diverse (PS4: BSD, Xbox 360: Windows, iPhone/iPad: iOS, Macs: MacOS, PCs: Windows (mostly), Android is using OpenGL and based on Linux).

So, it's really all about cross platform engines or developers will just focus on the 1-2 most important platforms and be done with it.

That's why directX (hopefully) has no bright future.

Having seen the video now: No, I think he is an idiot with silly arguments.

"Why doesn't the latest NVidia drivers work in Linux, like the earlier versions did? Linux sucks!"

Errr, right, as if I didn't have massive problems with broken NVidia drivers on Windows 7 awhile back, them crashing constantly etc. Windows sucks, right? Or rather, NVidia sucks?

"Windows 7 on Charlie's, Mark's and Pete's PCs look and feel the same. Not so on Linux, because they may have different desktop environments.".

How about Jürgen who is using Windows XP, Stefan who is using Windows 8, or Mohammad who is using Windows 8.1? Or all the people who will use Windows 10? The differences between those are far bigger than different desktop environments used in Linux.

If you are unable to use Linux XFCE because at home you used KDE, then you will have even bigger problems moving from Windows 7 to 8.

I don't see VALVe having a success selling the Steam Machines once they get released for sale after GDC 2015. GDC 2015 is in March.
DirectX will always have a bright future, DirectX 12 is to fully be released by holidays 2015.

AMD's Mantle has no bright future at all.

OpenGL has a more bright future than AMD's Mantle.

Actually dosbox is a good example of how you could use virtualbox to run exe. Anyway yes I get the point of extracting game data from games like Quake, but those installers don't work anymore. The GOG installer does meaning there's no reason to extract the game data in that method. But this conversation should be be on the other thread.

As for addressing your point on the changes in the Linux UI vs that is windows all I have to say is EXACTLY one of the many reason people hate Windows 8 is because of those changes. It wouldn't be so bad if you could revert back to the old look. I don't even like XP but I think it would be a great idea if there was an option to go back to that look. I'm also upset that I can't change the windows colours or how thick the slider bars are. If people are getting annoyed at how inconsistent the Linux UI is, then the the changes in the Windows UI would be driving them crazy which it is.

but a friend of mine tells me she can't use Win 8 because she has epilepsy and it causes seizures. Considering the flat look of it that wouldn't surprise me at all. I haven't experience any seizures but it does give me a headache.

Two problems I see suggesting that one could always install Windows in a virtual machine:

- Windows costs money, and in case you'd like to use a bit older Windows (like XP), it isn't necessarily even sold anymore. So piracy may be your only option, but then you might not get all the updates for it, it may have some unwanted additions (even malware) by the author, etc.

DOSBox, on the other hand, is fully free and easily available.

- From my experience, currently virtualized Windows XP or 98SE work rather poorly for gaming, especially 3D games. I've tried VMWare mostly; with VirtualBox I couldn't get XP properly to run, not sure what was the issue.

Here's hoping for WinBox, but unfortunately it would probably be illegal, so it couldn't be as easily distributed and endorsed as DOSBox.

I think you'll find that if you watch his other videos that he knows what he's talking about when it comes to Linux, and as I said no ones likes Windows 8/8.1 because of the stupid UI. 7 and XP are close enough to get used to.

As for Nvidia, I have never had problem with them ever. There was one incident when a driver caused over heating issues I never experienced this personally, but it was all over the web and I haven't heard anything from it since. If you're having problems with Nvidia drivers on your Windows PC then sorry but you must be doing something wrong. I have used so many cards and so many boards for over a decade. Making good drivers is a two way street were both Linux and Nvidia have to pull their weight.

Linux simply doesn't ingratiate drivers very well, I can't even get Bodhi and other distors to even install on my system at all. Ever since Linus Torvalds gave Nvidia the figure and said "Nvidia fuck you" Nvidia has made the drivers while the Linux community is content at blaming all their problems on company that makes GPU's for gaming. Something that's never been Linux's strong point.

Personally I say "Linus, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."

When comparing DX to OpenGL, you should be comparing Direct3D/2D to OpenGL. DX is much more than a graphics API stack, it provides APIs for handling inputs, audio, GPU computing, desktop UI, and more, yet OpenGL is built around a graphics API stack only.

So you have to use a bunch of other APIs as well to get to the level of functionality that DX provides. OpenAL (which is next to dead), OpenCL...

It becomes harder and harder to buy a new PC with Windows 7 (or older), so naturally over time the newest Windows version will become more and more common. Especially when Microsoft starts ramping down the support for older Windows versions (e.g. no more support for XP, and 7 is put to life-support mode).

The shittiness of the new Windows version may only slow down its acceptance, like in the case of Windows 8. In the best case, also give a boost to non-Windows projects, like SteamOS, Wine, CrossOver Linux etc.

I wasn't alone. Read e.g. this (over) a year old discussion:

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/damn_you_geforce_drivers_again/page1

My contribution: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/damn_you_geforce_drivers_again/post22

Lately the drivers have been ok as far as I can tell. At some point there were also them breaking backwards compatibility with many games (even GOG adding remarks to some game(s) that you should use older driver versions), I haven't checked that status yet.

Oh yeah that's a good point. Direct X is not one thing but a package of API's. That's a very good point. Make your game work for Direct X and it works for everything else.

This is because it is hard to buy a pre-built computer without windows.

I've often wondered how the OS usage numbers are generated?
The funny thing about this is that I've had way more problems with the Quadro drivers in Windows on my work box, than I've had with the nVidia drivers on my laptop - and my laptop is the complicated intel/nvidia hybrid running bumblebee. Using Arch, I've never had a problem with nvidia card in this laptop in the 14 months I've owned it. Ditto for my previous laptop.

The only nvidia card I've ever had trouble with driver-wise in Linux was an old Toshiba laptop with some red-headed baster child GeForce Go 5200 card that was basically a one-off, and I had the same problems with it in Windows. There was pretty much one version of the nvidia driver that worked - anything else would fail.

When Quake 3 was released, windows 98 was the dominant OS. What's John Carmac done for OpenGL in the last 15 years?

That completely depends on who's publishing said numbers.

If they're from Valve, they're most likely taken from Steam's hardware survey.

Basically, the OpenGL API still has too much overhead because it's still essentially a runtime interpreter for a high-level language.

Switching from fixed-function to shader-based granted lower-level control over part of the GPU's functionality and extensions like ARB_array_of_arrays help to push data to the GPU more efficiently, but there are still a lot of parts of the API that are locked into the old communication modality and it doesn't help that there are tons of ancient docs which give outdated advice.

The point of things like Mantle and OpenGL-next (and DirectX 11, IIRC) is to provide an API that more closely matches the bare metal so engine developers have more freedom to performance-tune and optimize and so there are fewer places in the driver's abstraction where an unexpected stall can hide.

(For example, it could standardize some kind of bytecode-like portable intermediate representation for GLSL so games can use precompiled shaders, sort of like how Google Chrome apps can use PNaCl instead of JavaScript if they want.)