Before the fundamentalists stop breaking the Linux kernel between all the releases there won’t be real interest in all-out supporting of Linux. It’s simply too much of work keeping fixing everything that breaks. The kernel needs stable apis for display adapter driver stuff – without that everything is just pointless hippie dreaming

this is just one advantage of kernel development – the don’t keep old cruft around just for the sake of api, because almost all api is updated accordingly. result is smaller, faster and safer kernel.

that advantage, indeed turns to a disadvantage sometimes, as is the case with 3d drivers.

Does that mean that the people who maintain these drivers:

http://dri.freedesktop.org/snapshots/

Are _really_ good developers, that can keep fixing everything that breaks even if Linux has no stable apis?

The animation firms render their animations with the GPU?

Are you sure?-)

(otherwise a great entry!)

Well, some actually do. But they are likely to use a Linux/nvidia solution running Gelato. I can hardly imagine any serious animation-shop to “try” things on a Linux/ati combo. All this only applies to folks going the “render on GPU”-path. Aside from that, nobody of us on the outside can really tell what these animation-studios use in their in-house tools. But even in these scenarios I would rather expect to see Linux/nvidia setups.

I wonder how the AMD-ATI-merge will turn out for the driver-quality for ATI-hardware under Linux.

It’s all risk, little gain to them.

(still hoping against better judgement for a perfect GuildWars port)

Basically, the only way this is going to change is if someone goes first – one of the vendors has to do it because they want to drive up their market share, and if one does, the others will inevitably follow.

[conspiracy_theory]
* The deal with Microsoft (Xbox 360/Vista) is so that they are making sure they poorly support Linux, and making it harder for people to run Linux on the Xbox 360 (whent it’s cracked)

* They rally don’t care about the Linux market, even when they say they support it due to the higher-end graphics solutions and visualization requirements (not necessarily movie studios).
[/conspiracy_theory]

I think that game studios do not want to mess with Linux and port games to the paltform, as it could even represent (on an official note) to deploy support teams and be ready to deal with a number of issues they do not know about, and that would represent further expense as they would have to train/contract new personnel to deal with the new platform.

As it was mentioned above, the Linux market is too risky to officially support it, there’s way too much uncetainty, plus there’s an inherent heterogeny to the platform (several concurrent kernel/glibc/gcc/GUI toolkits/etc versions “in the wild”…

About the “stable Vs unstable kernel API” issue and third party drivers, if you know how the nVidia and ATi kernel modules are really made, I think that they could even open source their kernel-side code and use that as the stable API they would need for their drivers. Opening their kernel-side code, would also mean that it could be kept in sync with the kernel (living even at kernel.org’s tree) and that it wouldn’t “break” with each new kernel release, use that as the stable API and let the userspace X driver actually do the magic. I am very aware that in order to speed some things up, these should be implemented at kernel level, which makes this a tad too complex to simply through a “what if…” gaming and 3D enthusiast solution at them, however this approximation, having an open source kernel-side module acting as the stable API for a company to implement their drivers in userspace, would actually be (IMO) the way to go… It could even be documented how this could be done and maybe we’d start to see more consumer hardware be supported.