History is exactly what some of us base our assumptions on. Linux has been around ~25 years and despite the fact that it's free and that we are approaching the second crap Windows release in a row. Linux still has no perceivable increase in market share.

Unfortunately Linux seems to exists simply to massage ego's, which is the reason why we have 500 distro's(with duplicated goals) and so many trolls that spout the party line at every opportunity.

A solution to the Windows problem would be great but sadly Linux has great features but it also has far to many flaws of which nobody ever mentions because it's not allowed. All this denial is holding things back. Attacking a platform that others use isn't going to help you much is it?

It's nothing to do with competition from Linux, it's to do with furthering their mobile aspirations and therefore profits. The more they get people dipping into that Windows store the more dev's will embrace it and the more devices they will sell.

Personally I hope they fall flat on their asses with it but I guess we'll just have to wait 'n' see.
They sell games here.

Did anyone apply anti-trust law properly to prevent manufacturers from selling computers with mandatory Windows and no choice of other OSes? No. That's the reason why this MS junk still persists. Monopoly feeds itself. I'm not making this up, it's MS own view on how they preserve their market share. Here is a few very good historic sources:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/11/28/ms_its_nearly_illegal
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1016_3-5262600.html

It has nothing to do with Windows being any better than competition. Monopolists like MS should be dealt with using the law, but the legal system is too broken to tackle this.

so this. i wonder how redhat is doing or any of the more commercial distros that get more support... well ,tech support?

hmmm... still don't look like they give a damn about games though.
http://www.linuxcentral.com/catalog/?cat%5B%5D=dist&id=C1C0AFxAXAxCX
oh fucking shit. you said STEAM! i hope you're only pretending to be retarded!

Valve is one major driver of Linux adoption now, whether you like it or not. Sure they do it for advancing Steam, but it benefits all Linux at large. They aren't altruists, it just happens that Linux suits their needs well. Good for us Linux users. Valve has a lot of muscle to move things forward and they do it. Ranging from really pushing Vulkan ahead and creating high quality graphics debuggers to actually pushing manufacturers like Alienware to sell gaming computers with Linux preinstalled and also pushing developers to actually release games for Linux. Kudos to Valve for that effort. I don't like their DRM attitude and don't use Steam because of that, but they deserve credit where it's due.

I bet without Valve we'd never seen any interest from CD Projekt Red and others to port their games to Linux. Probably even GOG would have never gotten Linux support if Steam didn't get it first.

As much as I respect GOG and CDPR, if you compare them with Valve - they are in a different league. Come on, Valve work on graphics APIs, drivers and debuggers. GOG is nowhere near that yet.

yeah, except tech support for linux is like steam techsupport. it's a fucking joke.

and 4 years is more like what Apple has been doing all along. with MS it is more like 10 years/++ since they've always tried to be backward compatible with programs made for the previous OS.

but go ahead and call me a DRM fanboy unironically anyway. it won't change history though.
yeah.... trying my best to ignore you now... ye gawds... alienware? c'mon , alienware? ack. you're not winning more supporters this way.

Well neither of us know what the OS usage percentages are for people who build there own PCs. so neither of us can say for sure how much of an impact that really has.

So after all you have been saying you DO support closed source?

There was no need to create a cross-platform API when the goal of that API was to make their operating system better and more attractive and that's just what you can expect from any company. And it's not like the graphics accelerator companies or soundcard manufacturers had worked out a common standard and created cross-platform APIs and then DirectX came along and destroyed all that. If DirectX hadn't come along there would have been as many proprietary APIs as there were manufacturers (like it was with Glide, EAX and many APIs you don't even know because the manufacturers were unsuccessful), eventually several companies would have taken the lead (as they did) and there would have been several proprietary APIs to choose from, none of which would have been supported by all games, and which would have been bound to hardware rather than an operating system and some manufacturers would have only supported the MS OSes anyway because of the overwhelming market share of Windows. Seriously, it's just companies being companies. Creating your own proprietary APIs for your own proprietary OSes or hardware is just how companies operated back then and mostly continue to operate to this day (PhysX, anyone?). And again, DirectX didn't shut anyone out, if a developer wanted to support a different OS, they could, if a hardware manufacturer wanted to use ther own API, they could, DirectX or not (like it was in case of Voodoo who during the Direct3D era had their own API which was cross-platform - and tell me, why had they not gone for an open API that anyone could use? why is only MS the bad guy in this?). There was just no need to create a cross-platform API for MS other than some abstract ideological causes nobody gave a rat's ass about back then. But for the consumer, game developers and in some sense even the hardware manufacturers DirectX was actually beneficial, cross-platform or not. If DirectX hadn't appearend and enforced a standard the success of the different hardware and APIs would have been almost completely based on who could make the better deals rather than the quality of the product, and that would have been absolutely awful.

Yes they have, nobody's denying that, but that they have done a lot of shit doesn't mean that anything the company has ever done falls into this pattern by default. Whether it's people or companies, you can't just always presume that everything they have done was entirely driven by bad intentions just because that had happened before.

Whatever it is, we know that percentage of those who don't build their own PCs (and don't ever install any OS on them) is way way higher. That's the core of the issue.

sorry, i promise i wont use it anymore :(

Both Vulkan and Glave are open source for your reference. As far as I know driver for Valve's controller is also open.

No, that's just bunk. Their point wasn't just to make it attractive, but to prevent developers from switching by creating artificial barriers. I already linked this above, read again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock-in

And no, that's not what is expected, unless we are dealing with a crook.

The Valve client clearly isn't.

No, it's not. And I'm not using it either. As I said, they deserve credit where it's due (their Linux and open source efforts).

I just looked back on your post, I missed that point... Sorry. :)

Sure, that was their overall strategy but it doesn't really apply to the nature of DirectX. The switching costs in case of graphics and audio APIs for games were actually very low back then, that's also one of the reasons why many games could easily support Direct3D, OpenGL and Glide on top of that at the same time in the late 90's, even ones with a limited budget.