07.10.06
Suse Is Getting There
Just read a great review of Suse Enterprise Desktop 10 (Yes, it is very different from Suse Linux). It looks just fantastic. I agree with the article in saying it’s now at a point you could mass market it. Still not a Windows replacement for me until it fully supports 3D hardware and DirectX. But for workstations and basic home PCs, I think it would work grand. Ultimately I would like Mac OS X to be put on PCs legitimately. Still no gaming love there though. I really hope that changes soon. I don’t like have only one choice for PC gaming.
Melfyk said,
July 10, 2006 at 4:21 pm
I don’t think DirectX is something that will ever be supported in linux. There are solutions like wineX but umm.. I take that back, I wouldn’t really call it a “solution”. It is an alternative that, if you are lucky, it may work with some of these newer games [without pixel shaders]. There is cedega but I do not like the idea of paying a monthly fee to make your previously purchased games work, and it doesn’t guarantee the game to work.
Putting the games on the shelf really made it easy for me to switch. But there are still a few (native) games that I do get to enjoy under linux like, well anything released by id software really. Ok. so that is it. And frozen bubble!! Blizzard games seem work under linux with wine because their opengl support. I havn’t tried WoW but War3 runs like a dream.
Melfyk said,
July 10, 2006 at 7:52 pm
Just a another comment regarding the actual point of the post. In that article I was supprised to see that they are shipping it with mp3 support. It is easy to setup your distro to play mp3’s but I think that is a great way to get new users and keep them [a little longer
]. I can imagine how frustrating it might be trying a new OS and it not being able to play mp3’s or DVD’s without some setup to get it to work. I wonder how soon some of these other distros will beable to jump over the legal hoops to get that feature out of the box, even in free downloadable versions. I don’t prefer SuSE but they are doing a good job and raising the bar for the other distros. It actually makes me excited for FC6. 
Soabirw said,
July 12, 2006 at 9:34 am
I think eventually something will happen with gaming as the other OSes gain popularity and seem perfect for everything but gaming. Once gaming is all they really lack, then the focus could shift in that direction. Then again, I’m sure Microsoft will cause a huge fuss over anybody even requesting to add DirectX support. Most likely that is still years from now, unfortunately. But it will happen some day.