The 'Best' OS For Game Development

I talk about the best operating system to make games for (not necessarily the best one to work in or even the best one overall).

I reference my OS abstraction libraries, which I discuss here:

[NamelessVoice]

Windows does actually support hardlinks (one file in two locations), as well as symbolic links and junctions, but the feature is well-hidden. You can create them in the command line though, or use the really handy "Link Shell Extension" (a free utility) to add them to the context and context-drag menus.

[rojovision]

While I have a lot of gripes with modern Windows (forced updates, for example), Microsoft deserves a lot of credit for their backward compatibility so far. There's an old game called Fury3 (Fury Cubed?) that I played a ton of on Windows 95 as a kid. The CD installer doesn't work on modern Windows, but if you just copy the game files onto your PC, the game itself still runs with no issues. That's pretty impressive.

[Lonit-be]

I see that apple mentality is so annoying, I encounter it often in other places as wall

[Raspredval]

As much as I'd like to have every game ever working on *nix, Шindows did indeed won. However, it's starting to change, a little. Like, 10-15 years back it would be a miracle to have something working on linux\bsd, that isn't native. Nowdays, it's easier to list stuff that doesn't work that what does. It's kinda a renaissance for *nix and that's great.

[phist]

From my experience at the computer science university where I go to, Linux is most commonly used by system programmers, low-level C/C++ programmers, system administrators, and data scientists, while if you look at software engineers, C# devs, and indeed game developers, they mostly use Windows (macs are occasionally used in most places too, but they are more of an exception). I haven't confirmed this rigorously, but I believe these patterns result from people taking the path of least resistance, which would agree with Tim's perspective.

[Novous]

I like Visual Studio's GUI debugger, the ease of just slapping a point down a breakpoint or watch variables. But other than that, I've loved Linux for gamedev. It's so easy to dump text logs, grep them, or pipe them to a syntax highlighter (Python Pygments), use head or tail to get the top or bottom of the log, etc. You don't realize how much power you're missing in Windows until you spend a couple weeks in Linux and go back.

[JoeJohnston-taskboy]

I am eating a lot of popcorn watching this. I am 52. I feel your OS pain, Tim!

[Paul]

Apple fanaticism is a subject that should be studied (and fought against) in schools.

[wesss]

Hey uncle Tim,
I'd like to know about dlc.
How much smaller is the team?
Is there less of a crunch because the game is already out in the wild?
When is the dlc thought up?
If the game makes a bunch of money or another metric?
Should cut content also be included with the dlc pack?

[deltaghostprofessionalgame]

Every video is better than the previous one keep the history told.

[evanmeany]

Another entertaining video Tim. Love learning about your experiences and opinions

[nathandanner]

We had a Texas 99/4A when I was a kid and I had these magazines that taught you how to write out programs in BASIC(you basically copied the programs) then I had to save them onto Cassette tape because we didn't have a floppy disk drive(I think they were still over $1, 000 at this time). I wish I would have learned more about programming back then. I think I would have liked making games.

[Pedone_Rosso]

I'd say what is told in the video also supports
the attitude to get proficiency in any language or system you get in contact with.
Beside the explicit "windows won", I mean...

(BTW, I have only some experience from 20 years ago with Matlab and Labview:
the 1st one is amazing with huge amounts of data when things are put in matrices,
and the 2nd one is like playing Lego, super fun)

Thanks for your videos!

[Main]

12:52 It hasn't changed much at all. You either do it Apple's way, or you don't do it at all. Texture formats, graphics API, etc. They recently fully deprecated their signing tool so if you wanted to keep building for Mac you had to upgrade to their latest XCode. Having too old of a machine that can't run the new XCode because of OS requirements meant buying a new machine just to keep going. It gets pretty crummy pretty quickly when dealing with Apple.

[fmorejon]

Tim! Thank you for doing all of these videos, your answers and opinions help me a lot to understand what I want in the coding/programming world. Specially now, that I'm learning about this in a professional way. thank you so much, keep going

[PointReflex]

Windows (since 1995) retro compatibility is its main strength and came to solve a very old problem, software not running correctly or at all in previous versions which gave it an insane chunk of the market. Even if at some point Microsoft starts to remove things that made such compatibility work (like erasing D3D9 stuff for no reason, or even worse destroying Direct Draw for good) there are way to restore them in some capacity (old Direct Draw can be reactivated thru the registry).

Plus a lot of the old stuff considered way useless for two decades is still inside the main files and working all the time without anyone noticing, for example if anyone remember Windows 3.11 you had an icon in the left corner of the window that once you click it twice it closes such window. Well even under Windows 10 you can double click the small icon in the upper left and it will produce the same result.

While Windows itself has its sheer amount of problems and handicaps, there is no way to look away from the insane amount of work that was done to make it compatible with software produced from the late 80's to the current day, that's almost 40 years of compatibility in some capacity. Which is on pair to what Graphic Cards keep doing to this day, the old EGA/CGA/VGA stuff is still present in modern GPUs to the point that you can even run Windows 3.11 with the native VGA emulation in those cards (results WILL vary).

[Tetramir]

Microsoft making sure things are retro-compatible is their greatest strength. This leads to some weird behaviors because change one thing would break how some printers worked in 1994. But no one else cares about this like they do. I just wish they would open source their old stuff so we can be sure that is one day they stop caring, other can take care of it.

I find it crazy that it is easier to emulate windows on linux (what steam deck is doing) than it is to make games for linux.

[player_fanatic]

It's not just Windows, but DirectX itself that made things so much easier on Windows.
No more need to create those custom libraries that Tim made earlier in his career.

[bobfunk]

You are 100% right about Mac users, the lack of cut and paste in finder is the most ridiculous example!

[muzboz]

I went to Apple for a while, when iOS devices became the craze, so I could make games for iPhones and iPads. And I actually loved using my Macbook Pro back on OSX 10.7 Lion. But I found the app store ecosystem to be fairly repellent for the sorts of games I want to make, and I hate how on App Store and Play Store you've got to regularly update you apps just to remain "current" even if there's absolutely nothing wrong with your app. It's the opposite of Windows, where it's open enough that people are always making old games playable thru emulation or backwards compatibility. In general, I always choose open platforms like Windows and Android, as their values are more in that direction. :)