Ventures of an ex indie game developer

Gnu...

My graphics card crashed, took it as an excuse for switching over to using Linux. My thinking was that the package management and the maturity of OpenGL implementations should have made Ubuntu with just about any shitty display manager fairly equal to Windows these days.

Gnu still lags behind ~10 years in everything graphics. From small things, that I didn't even know I cared about (such as default font rendering), to bigger things like supporting multiple high-resolution displays, installing printer drivers and a totally fragmented community where Gnome2, Gnome3, KDE, Unity, LightDM, Kompiz and more are competing for the n00b's attention and where solutions become broken in a couple of years. Code do rust in Gnu.

There doesn't even seem to be a good IDE around. It takes months and years to configure Emacs into doing what you want. People do roll their own stuff. Dinky toys. IDE-wise JetBrain's CLion is probably the best thing out there, maybe even better than Microsoft's Visual C++, but too expensive.

That got me thinking about writing my own, proper IDE. Possibly in Python. A text editor is really simple. A syntax-highlighted one is not that hard either, but then I probably want to go OpenGL to be portable. (File) searching with regexp replace are more or less one-liners in Python, but then I have to build my first dialog. Doable, but it's not as comfy any more. Then there's completion. Ahmahgawd. Building is fairly easy as long as you stick with auto-detecting llvm, gcc or msvc. But you probably want to have some build exceptions and what not, so you need to support a build format. MSVC is what I have, it's fairly easy but who doesn't hate XML? Then of course there's debugging and some parsing to auto-show some debug variables. Then there'd be git and refactoring support. Noughty idea! Down, boy, down! Down the fucking drain you piece of shit idea.


Clunky, ugly Code::Blocks it izz... They still run SVN internally. Who does that 2016?

Anyway, I figured a platform which has Quake Live can't be all bad, right! Turns out Bethesda (id's Quake Live publisher it seems) pulled the Mac and Linux plug six months ago. Sure, I get them, only 2% of the user base was on those platforms. What the hell have I done to myself? Not even a decent game in sight!

I tried downloading Open Arena, a Quake clone. And oh was it by any chance the ugliest thing I've ever set eyes on? Hell yeah!


I'll try endure this shit a little bit longer, but if there is still more to come, it would be utter madness to try to continue. If so I'll switch back to Windows for desktop and never think twice about it.

The most amazing part of this Gnu experience is that it still has exactly the same problems as when I tried it the last time. To summarize:
  • It's hard to configure. Easy to install will only get you vanilla, it doesn't tell you anything really. I want a 144 Hz display, took me a day to install!
  • Nothing to do with graphics work. I couldn't even run the amazingly shitty Open Arena in fullscreen - 2016!
  • There are no games for the desktop. The Steam Machine is dead, and it did nothing for the Linux desktop. I was wrong, dead wrong in my vain hopes.
  • The Emacs folk are practically on a lower aesthetics level as me! That's like impossible!
Linux/Gnu desktop will remain in this utterly poor state until they get themselves a BDFL á là Guido or Linus. Someone smart with drive, who knows what's important, who cares and who kills all the horribly bad ideas and developers before they do any damage. Trial and epic fail for both the Linux desktop and myself.

About the author

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Gothenburg, Sweden