Second Life Running on Linux?

Acording to a comment he posted on Boing Boing, this week Cory Linden is going to be at the Chaos Computer ClubCon (ah ok, so now it is upscale and is called the Chaos Communication Congress) in Berlin. Plus he promises to be giving a public demo of the SL client running on Linux. That would be pretty cool, but it is more interesting to speculate about the long term impact of this.

Comments

[Tsutomu Yamabushi]

Wow! A linux client would be sooo great, cause SL is the only reason (well,besides the MMORPG Guild Wars) for me to boot windows!

[TrannyPet Barmy]

WINE will run most things if you fiddle enough with it ;)

TrannyPet Barmy
The REAL ONE

[Jade Lily]

I was able to get Second Life running under WINE on Ubuntu with no tweaking whatsoever.

[Sleet Rockwell]

And now for the ultimate fantasy: SL running on Linux, running on a shiny new Zaurus, over Wi-Fi, on the bus to work ^_^

[Mack Echegary]

I did a bit of work on making SL run on Wine a year or so ago - back then the problem was the installer wouldn't start. Good to hear the remaining issues were fixed later on. It'll be interesting to see if this is a native port or not.

[booger]

The reality is that having a Linux client, while somewhat "newsworthy", won't make a cintilla of difference in the long term. Linux's penetration is miniscule worldwide as far as personal use goes - regardless of arguments about its alleged "technical superiority". This will ultimately act as yet another drain and distraction of LL resources on what is apparently an over-taxed, underproducing programming and technical staff that promises more than it ever really delivers.

[TrannyPet Barmy]

Didn't say you had to for SL Jade, simply saying that WINE is extremely flexible and will run almost any windows app, even if *SOME* will require some fiddling to get them to work.

To be honest though, if you had to do no tweaking at all, that must be a relatively recent copy of WINE your running, with many Windows system DLLs precompiled and installed with it. Previous versions of WINE at least required you to copy accross any Windows system DLLs that the apps you wanted to run were dependant on.

Thing thats totally bugging me though, is why so many people want to run Linux as their primary desktop operating system. I personally & professionally don't think you'll beat Linux as an operating system to run server applications on(with the exception of Solaris 10 perhaps, and that is looking DAMN GOOD), however, as a desktop operating system, i think it sucks, largely because of its dependancy on X to produce it's graphical output. It's leads to slightly delayed/lagged desktop update rate compared to Windows, and can be rather ugly looking at times due to it's generic output form.

Sure it's great to be feeling like you are out there on the cutting edge of computing if you like, feeling you are doing something before the neighbour gets to it, but ultimately, whats the point especially when Windows is so much better at it ? Windows is definately my choice of desktop operating system(win2k in my case)

I'm sure many will try to respond with the usual "stability, uptime, performance and price" arguement for using Linux as a desktop OS, but let me just address those for you before you bother.

Stability & Uptime first ............ I dont seem to have any stability/uptime problems with Windows. In reality how long do you ever really want to run a desktop session ? A day ? Maybe 2 days ? Maybe a week at most ................ I run my Win2k box for a week or so at a time, and it seems to suffer no performance loss, blue screens or lock ups at all, i also do the same at work, with no problems. So from that aspect i see there is no real issue with uptime/stability with Windows for use as a desktop OS. It works for as long as i want to keep a desktop session open and running. Having said that, even as a server based OS, Win2k isnt that bad, i have a Win2k server machine here that has been up well over 6 months running both MySQL and Oracle RDBMS servers.

Next lets look at performance .............. no denying it, Linux is fast and efficient. Not surprising really as it doesn't run any resource hungry GUI desktop whilst no one is logged in. Now log an X session in at the console, or remotely for that matter, and see how fast/efficient it is. As soon as you start running a GUI desktop on it after logging in, the perfomance is greatly lessened. This being 1/2 the reason i rarely ever log into a *NIX box using anything other than telnet or ssh, the other 1/2 being i dont see the point when i can do everything from a command shell any way. So yes, Linux has the edge over Windows in performance, until you log in and start running an X session, and comparing like with like, ie; both OS's running a GUI. That's why i say Linux is the preferred choice for server applications, simply because it's not running un-nessecary processes(desktop gui window managers) which are hogging cpu time and memory. But, that desktop GUI is a nessecary for desktop use, so it totally destroys this performance arguement as far as desktop use goes !!!

Finally, price .............. this is a simply one. I'm sure many would say "but Linux is free, why use an OS that you have to pay for, when you can get a perfectly good one for free ?" Well there's two answers for this. First one being that when you purchase Windows, you actually purchase support for this product to. With the 'free' distros of Linux, you have no formal support what so ever, of course there are plenty of forums full of 'guessers' though, if thats suffice for you. If you want the same level of support that MS would supply you with Windows, you'd have to PURCHASE Linux, something like Red Hat Enterprise, where you would then have some form of formal support available to you. Now, guess what ? That purchase would cost you a shit lot more than a liscenced version of Windows !!! The second answer to this question is very simple. You may well say that Linux is free, and why buy a copy of Windows when you can have your OS for free ............ be honest, how many of you have actually paid for Windows ?????

OOOOOPS there i go ranting on about these people shouting "linux" .......... yeah it does kind of get me irate, specially since when you get right down to the facts, Linux isn't all that great at all as a desktop operating system. It's different, and it's just about usable as such, and it may give the user some feel of doing something new/cutting edge, but when it comes right down to it, the main arguements for Linux usage are really only applicable in the server application domain, as soon as you compare like with like and look at the facts regarding cost etc ........... at this point in time Windows is the way to go for desktop usage.

cheers

TrannyPet Barmy
The REAL ONE

[Maxis]

You talk a lot and seem into yourself.

[TrannyPet Barmy]

and you quite obviously have nothing at all to say :)

TrannyPet Barmy
The REAL ONE

[Cory Linden]

Linux demo went well, comments over at. . . . . . .. . . . .. . . . . . . . .
http://secondlife.blogs.com/prompt/

[Stealthmode Spyker]

Admittedly tranny is right about a few things, vista is definitely easier on the eyes from a sharpness point of view, and as a desktop linux never did it for me, alot of googling to get stuff done. Then i heard somebody mention that Secondlife runs better on Linux because of MS issues with OpenGL . So after over a year of mostly laggy sl despite building a new machine, I try Mint 7 and install the Snowglobe sl viewer. (15mins later >) Regardless of anything else, I have never in my life seen Secondlife run so amazing, I doubt I will ever log in through windows again. Oh and what do you know linux isn't so bad on the eye and actually does some stuff I wish so much I could take back to windows next time I visit, take care of windows while i'm......gone whooshhhhh ding ding (AMD 7750BE 2.7 OC TO 3.2 ASUS MOBO ONBOARD GRX 4GB CORSAIR CHEAP & NASTY PSU VISTA MINT7 SL SNOWGLOBE FOR LINUX)