Really informative article and one that I hope will draw attention from other distro users to give Solus a go.
Come on in the waters lovely 😀

A good ol natter indeed. Nice to see the roadmap for Solus too. Doing great stuff 🙂.

The evolution of Linux in terms of gaming over the last decade or so has been remarkable to see. As an OS it's, by and large, ready to go. It would be great to see more developers take it into account. That's the biggest hurdle.

Hopefully the Deck sparks something off too. If it at least gets more devs testing against proton then that would be great. Native ports would be ideal but i think we would need to see better stats for that to happen. Hopefully many Deck users give SteamOS 3.0 a shot instead of just dumping it and putting Windows on it.

    Neumie Nice to see the roadmap for Solus too.

    No roadmap (that would imply timeframes IMO), just stuff that is on the agenda. We've talked about this stuff for a while now too 😛

    Regardless, I completely agree that progress on gaming under Linux has been remarkable over the last decade. Really excited to see what the future brings, hopefully we will see developers be incentivized to ship native ports once they see how attractive Linux is as a platform rather than saying "eh, my game runs fine enough on Proton, clearly don't need to do any work personally".

        brent What are your plans for the future of Solus?

        Recommended for someone who has zero interest in "gaming"?

            "Not to toot my own horn, but.....toot, toot!" - Josh Strobl, 2021 😛
            Awesome interview man! Good read for sure and thanks for posting. I actually say this on Reddit first, but thats cuz I prob spend too much time on there lol

            JoshStrobl Yea, only a couple of the interview questions are directly related to gaming.

            Thanks for clearing that up. I enjoyed reading it very much.

            My son is telling me that ARM is the best new thing, and is apparently the future of Apple. According to him, x86 has just about reached end-of-life. Any hope that Solus may someday support ARM, or is that out of the question for the foreseeable future?

                WetGeek It isn't entirely out of the realm of possibility for some point in the future. Lots of stuff to do before that though.

                  WetGeek Apple controls their entire ecosystem, top to bottom. They decide what hardware to build, what software to write, and what libraries everyone else has to use when developing for their products. This allows them to change to whatever hardware platform they want and still provide a path forward for compatibility.

                  Apple can do this. PC makers can't.

                  ARM isn't new, it's old. It's been around since the 80's. It's more or less kept up the same level of progress as x86, but does so with a completely different design emphasis. ARM is optimized for low-power operation. It wasn't until the multicore software side of things caught up (which you can really thank AMD for more than Intel), that their processors started being competitive on the desktop/server side of things. And even that is still a very long way away from becoming mainstream.

                  ARM suffers from a fragmented ecosystem, where every vendor has their own custom peripherals and very few partners choose to integrate ARM's in-house designs with high performance products. It also has significant issues to sort out on communicating an ARM-powered system's capabilities to the OS. X86 has ACPI which has been around in one form or another for decades. ARM mostly relies on DeviceTree which has been around for awhile now, but isn't provided by some firmware on the ARM system like ACPI which is actually part of BIOS and UEFI for x86. This extra hurdle has limited the adoption of ARM to large vendors which can afford the time and resources to deal with the intricacies of these systems. So much so, that RISC-V has tried to go straight for UEFI out of the gate to dodge the issue entirely.

                  Unfortunately, the issue of DeviceTree very much affects any plans a distro has in supporting ARM hardware. With the notable exception of embedded-focused distributions like Yocto or ARMbian, most Linux distros that do support ARM do so for very specific hardware platforms, most notably the Raspberry Pi. They can do this this because those boards have well-known hardware configurations they can use with DeviceTree out of the box. DeviceTrees that the RPi Foundation maintains and provides for distros to use. Other vendors rarely do this. Imagine if a distro had to ship a different DeviceTree for every single model (and hardware configuration) of laptop or desktop made by every single vendor that use ARM for their systems. It's simply too much work for anyone. Until ARM systems with UEFI are mainstream, this won't change.

                      DataDrake Until ARM systems with UEFI are mainstream, this won't change.

                      Thanks! You've increased my understanding of ARM by quite a multiple. I bought Raspberry Pis 1.2.and 3, but never did any programming for them at a level lower than Python, and not much of that. Curiosity, y'know. These days my interest in raspberries is strictly limited to putting them on breakfast cereal

                      As I mentioned, Apple considers it a great idea for going forward. Apparently on high-level hardware, ARM absolutely flies. I wouldn't be surprised if the big boys, like HP and Dell, won't follow suit someday, if it indeed provides a serious competitive performance advantage ... someday.

                      I predict a renewed interest in dhrytstones. I, for one, just bought a feisty new Dell desktop, and don't expect to replace it (with ARM or otherwise) for quite a few years to come.

                        I'm overestimating, or will the nvidia drivers 470 update really be pivotal in Linux to face?

                        You can live your life in the world of academia, theorizing how something might work, but no plan survives contact with reality. Applications, games, and operating systems can be exceedingly complex and a decision made might not make sense until you encounter the possibly obscure scenario where it applies, one which you would only come across when engaging in the first place. Nobody starts out as an expert and you will find the best way of learning is to just start doing. Don't be afraid to ask questions and don't be afraid of failure. Do not pay any mind to the nay-sayers telling you to not to build your own application or game just because something else might already exist that does something similar.

                        I especially liked this part.

                        DataDrake this is a great explanation, thank you!

                          JoshStrobl Maybe a winding trail then instead of a roadmap 😄 .

                          In fairness to the games industry I think they will do more native ports if the interest (i.e. money) is there. In its defence, quite a few big publishers like Square did give it a punt when valve initially released steam for linux and after the surprise humble bundle sale. They did perk up. Some ports were very rough (and linux was also far rougher as a gaming OS back then too) but they gave it a shot at least.
                          I think we will have to go through a period of "Tested against proton X.x" first though. Hopefully the deck can spark off an uptake again that gets us to a point where more devs will at least test their windows build against proton. if it can spark it off to a point where a lot more people can feel confident buying and playing games on linux then who know...