4 ms·

Can someone please do an ELI5 for Linux namespaces and why this is important for a better Linux Steam client?

• mikekchar 7y ago
  I don't know the answer, but a sibling post confirmed by suspicion: It allows you to run games in a container without having to set it up yourself. If you want to run Windows games using Steam on Linux, you have to have a bunch of libraries available which you will almost certainly not use in your normal day to day activities. Having the software in a container means that all those libraries are bundled into the game distribution and you don't need to maintain them yourself.
• habitue 7y ago
  This isolates steam games from the rest of the things running on the machine, which dramatically reduces the number of variables Valve has to consider for supporting a Linux game. This means they can support more games with fewer resources, or give better support to more games. With namespaces and cgroups and chroot and bind mounts you can cobble together an isolated linux distro running on the same kernel as yours. So for example, Steam can target having a game run on Ubuntu 16.04, and ensure that it runs well there, while you can go ahead and use Arch, or Fedora 31 or whatever. It's like virtualization except that it doesn't translate every instruction, it only adds some overhead to certain syscalls.