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I published my first Steam game on Linux as well as Windows and MacOS, but I don't think I'll do it again because for a single person developer (as indie as it

I published my first Steam game on Linux as well as Windows and MacOS, but I don't think I'll do it again because for a single person developer (as indie as it gets) the time spent supporting Linux doesn't pay off. Within days of publishing my game I had support request emails that said "so I'm on this specific Red Hat version, with this oddball graphics driver and three monitors and full-screen doesn't work with your game properly". As I only officially supported Ubuntu I couldn't really help each exotic (to me) setup that came into my email inbox, and there was more than a few. Which I still think is a shame. But that was five years ago. I'm pretty sure Photon supports my Windows builds on Linux better than I was ever able to do with the native executables, and at least there's that.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Yeah, I think it says a lot about desktop Linux that running the Windows version under Wine is often a better experience than the native version.
- eloisant 5y ago
  It's only a better experience because developers spend all their efforts on the Windows build and the Linux build is just an afterthought.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    The Linux build isn't an afterthought, it's deliberately ignored because the costs of supporting Linux vastly exceeds the returns from Linux gamers. If you want to sell your game, the smart money is in putting all your resources into the Windows version.
  - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
    I haven't seriously tried to game on Linux in a number of years so this may have changed, but every time I've tried I get some kind of horrid tearing or stutter or low frame cap across a number of games that seems to be caused by inferior graphics drivers. If by "developers" you mean the ones working on the unity engine or Nvidia proprietary graphics drivers then you're right, but in my experience there are a number of problems and pitfalls further down the stack which game developers can't reasonably be expected to mitigate.
    - arp242 5y ago
      I've been running Linux exclusively for years, and never had any problems. For the most part, everything Just Works™. My previous laptop had just integrated Intel graphics, which worked well enough. My current is a Ryzen integrated graphics, which also works well enough. The only problem I ever had was in Wasteland 2 where the second part of the game there was some bug with the fog on the world map with Intel drivers. Setting some obscure environment variable fixed that.
    - vbezhenar 5y ago
      I recently installed Fedora on laptop with Intel GPU, I'm playing Factorio and it just works, smooth and nice.
      - slezyr 5y ago
        Well, no surprise. It's not resource hungry and there is a hard 60 FPS lock for everyone, so no tearing as well. There is a 60-80 FPS difference for me in CS:GO between Linux and Windows with AMD graphics.
        account42 5y ago
        > and there is a hard 60 FPS lock for everyone, so no tearing as well That's not how tearing works.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    Also because people (justifiably) don't want to distribute their games as source, so they can't be packaged sanely.
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    It is also because on Linux developers above the kernel have very little concern in keeping their APIs and ABIs stable and improving (it isn't just keeping some 29839283 year old library around that never receives any updates, you need to keep stuff up to date - imagine, e.g. SDL1.2 without support for HiDPI - though sadly most of the time not even that keeping around happens with distros dropping older libs left and right). Notable exception being Xorg, so of course the CADT model ensured that it has to be abandoned in favor of Wayland which while being barely usable has already managed to break compatibility with itself.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Back in the Loki days I used to believe, even lost a good opportunity at SCEE for being stupidly focused into FOSS game development. Nowadays I don't care, Windows, macOS and mobile OSes FTW.
    - zxzax 5y ago
      I wish people would not use the phrase "CADT" like this, it's not relevant, and it's insulting and ableist. Nobody wants to maintain legacy software for free in their spare time. That's all it is. It has nothing to do with the age of the person or the status being "attention deficit," which is a real condition that people actually have and suffer from. If you disagree, you're welcome to spend your spare time working on it. I support you doing that. I really doubt anybody will though, because outside of servers and Android, there is very little interest in doing anything on Linux. If you're willing to listen, I could describe to you the technical reasons why Xorg was abandoned. But I also doubt the answer will please you, because the reality is that the reason it's perceived as being "stable" is because it's not being improved anymore -- if people were still hacking on Xorg instead of Wayland, then your Xorg would be breaking left and right too.
      - badsectoracula 5y ago
        > I wish people would not use the phrase "CADT" like this, it's not relevant, and it's insulting Yes, that's the point of an insult. > Nobody wants to maintain legacy software for free in their spare time. That's all it is. This is 100% false, a lot of people do. In fact a language (Free Pascal) and framework (LCL) i am using has a very good track record for preserving backwards compatibility while at the same time continuously improving. I have code i wrote two decades ago that work fine with it and will automatically get the new features introduced just with a recompile. The same can't be said for, e.g. Gtk: Gtk2 apps not only wont get any new features from Gtk3, but they wont even compile. Same with Gtk4, because making the mistake twice wasn't enough. > If you're willing to listen, I could describe to you the technical reasons why Xorg was abandoned. There are no technical reasons, Xorg is code, code can be modified. It is all political reasons at best and people wanting to rewrite stuff they'd rather not bother learning about. As JWZ writes in his CADT page: <<Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again.>> > the reason it's perceived as being "stable" is because it's not being improved anymore -- if people were still hacking on Xorg instead of Wayland, then your Xorg would be breaking left and right too. Xorg improved all the time over the years going back to the XFree86 days, adding new features consistently without breaking existing code and applications. If it suddenly started breaking now it wouldn't be because it is impossible to not break but because the developers somehow started breaking it.
- darthrupert 5y ago
  Windows is essentially the primary gaming API which has a pretty damned good secondary cross-platform implementation in Wine/Proton.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  There’s as many variations of linux as there are people running it. There’s only a few authoritative versions of OSX and Windows. I don’t think it’s too susprising.
  - account42 5y ago
    This is a ridiculous statement. Every Windows install is unique as well in suble ways, as is the hardware it runs on. The differences between Linux distributions don't really matter that much if you bundle your dependencies or use the Steam Linux Runtime to do that for you.
felipemnoa 5y ago
Link to game
OhSoHumble 5y ago
I've always wondered how feasible it would be if an indie developer (or maybe even a big studio) could just put out a Linux build of their game and just say "we're not going to support this outside of these very specific constraints - or even at all - we'll fix issues with our Linux build if we can reproduce those issues in the environment we developed the game in... but that's it." Then the Linux community gets another game. Does it not work on K.I.S.S Linux running sowm as a window manager and an entire custom userspace? Probably not. Does it work using the latest Ubuntu version? Probably. But the notion that developers have to support every possible Linux configuration out there just seems toxic to the Linux game development effort as a whole.
- DizzyDoo 5y ago
  I suppose I can only speak for myself but I don't see that as an attractive option, and what you're describing is mostly what I did do for the game release I mentioned. If I sell on Windows (I do) and Mac (I do) then I have to support a certain range of OS versions and ongoing OS releases - even if that means (for example) I have to figure out how to 'notarise' a Mac executable so that a user doesn't have a big scary Security Warning pop-up. Not ideal, but fine. The challenge with Linux is that I would have to communicate against expectations - that I would have to make it clear that when I 'support Linux' it looks different to the support for Windows or Mac. I do genuinely think that 99% of Linux people get this, it's just the 1% that's maybe less forgiving of different standards. For me, just personally and selfishly, passing the buck to Photon or Wine is an easier sell for my business.
  - stavros 5y ago
    Could you say "supports Ubuntu" instead?
    - DizzyDoo 5y ago
      Not only did I say that but I also gave the specific Ubuntu version as well!
listic 5y ago
What's Photon?
- jszymborski 5y ago
  I believe GP is talking about Proton. It's a Linux/Windows compatibility layer from Steam. It's pretty great! A lot of the incompatability between Linux/Windows in my experience has actually been from the Anti-Cheat systems. Apex Legends and Intruder being examples that come to mind. https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/
  - godshatter 5y ago
    Proton has been a game changer. Once they get the anti-cheat systems working (and they are making progress), linux will be much more of a valid choice for gaming than it has ever been. I used to do what gaming I couldn't do without on a Windows laptop, but now I do it all on my main linux desktop and haven't booted the laptop for months. Even some of the mod makers are making tools for linux now. It's a completely different world than it was even a few years ago. There are still games that have problems, but Valve and the wine devs and others are knocking those down one by one. So those 15 people that wanted to switch to linux but couldn't because it couldn't run their games can now do so :)
    - jszymborski 5y ago
      Similar experience on my end. The only time I find myself booting into my Windows partition is when I play a game with Easy Anti-Cheat.
      - Aeolun 5y ago
        I have just given up on games with EAC. Much better than constantly switching back and forth, and they’re the exception rather than the rule now.
        Cloudef 5y ago
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
For reference Eric Barone, Stardew Valley dev, he made it exclusively for Windows with C#. When he was approached by Chucklefish, they said they'd handle porting it to other OS's and console for a cut.
UnpossibleJim 5y ago
I hate to say it (as I type this comment on a Linux box), but you're almost better off pushing a 2D game in a browser if you want to support Linux =( The variations in Linux distros just get a little too varied
bachmeier 5y ago
> As I only officially supported Ubuntu Why not just tell them that? Is it really better to give up those dollars because someone is using a setup you don't support?
- DizzyDoo 5y ago
  I did? Both on the store page and in my email replies. Most people were understanding though some weren't. However, those dollars you seem anxious I don't give up still didn't really cover the time investment of dealing with Linux - not just the support requests, but getting the build environment setup and performing the testing and all of that. For reference, the game in question did ~75% of units sold on Windows, ~25% on Mac, and some fraction of a percent on Linux. If I hadn't of released on Ubuntu I would have probably lost less $1000, gross.
  - z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
    Considering forum text messages have no emotion, you are the one projecting your anxiety by your accusal, not the other way around. If you told them, why are YOU so anxious about support for Linux enough to complain about it here? "I don't support your distribution", case closed.
gentleman11 5y ago
You spend so much time worrying that you will sell enough copies to break even. Linux support time could be spent fixing a bug, marketing, polishing a feature. Plus, negative reviews can hurt you a lot so you can’t really support Linux half heartedly. Needs to work as well as the other versions. The average serious indie game makes $14k (edit: 16k). Steam changed their recommendation algorithms to promote aaa and top sellers
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  > The average serious indie game makes $14k. Source?
  - DizzyDoo 5y ago
    If the parent's main point is that indie game developers, on average, don't make tons of money, he's right: https://twitter.com/GreyAlien/status/1227557601786912769 https://twitter.com/GreyAlien/status/1227557601786912769
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      I was hoping for something more descriptive I guess. Steam used to be much pickier about which games were allowed on the platform. Now it's anything goes, and there's a lot more lower quality games on it, that sell for under $5,have no marketing budget, and just kind of look bad. The indie games I've played all seem to have little news posts about 1 million copies sold. So... what's the return on an indie game of 2012 indie game quality?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    Might actually be 16k. Research is from mike Rose, an indie publisher https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W6lZir97bUU0KdvIGNIVWG0O-_A3QrdN/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W6lZir97bUU0KdvIGNIVWG0O-_A...
stingraycharles 5y ago
As a Linux gamer, I’d say: just make sure the Proton version works, focus on fixing glitches there, don’t bother spending time on porting any code otherwise. Pretty much all games I play are through Steam’s compatibility layer anyway, and nowadays it’s a very smooth experience.
- darthrupert 5y ago
  > Make sure the Proton version works On which distro and graphics hardware? ;)
  - stingraycharles 5y ago
    Good one. I’d say, take either Steam or Lutris or something like that, so that the distro is abstracted away as much as possible. I’m not a game dev so I don’t know how much you still actually notice of the distro / hardware once you’re running in Proton or Wine.
    - darthrupert 5y ago
      You do. You totally do.
    - Cloudef 5y ago
      Flatpak version of steam would be good candidate as anyone can install it on any distro (even non-glibc based ones)
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  I agree. The few times I can't run it via Proton ( Fallout 4, FF11 come to mind ) I jump on Windows VM anyway. It is absolutely bananas how powerful hardware is these days.
  - Cloudef 5y ago
    FF11 works fine with proton for me
smoldesu 5y ago
Honestly, developers will probably have a better time maintaining Proton versions than writing native Linux ones. As long as your game has silver or higher on ProtonDB, you can have my money.
sandworm101 5y ago
My advice would be that if you cannot give full support to linux, at least be open about your software. The linux community is very good at getting things working. They can figure most problems out for themselves, but only if they have some information to work with. Toss them some documentation, anything, and 99% of the time they will come up with a solution on their own. Except DRM. Attach DRM or anti-cheat to your project, software that actively doesn't want to run on anything but a specific OS, and the linux community will turn on you.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Multiplayer games without any anti-cheat are really not much fun. What is the solution there for Linux?
  - madpata 5y ago
    Don't play multiplayer games on Linux.
  - x4e 5y ago
    You can make a pretty good experience server side anti cheat and authoritative networking. Trust factor systems like CSGO has also work well (as long as you prevent abuse which is basically what went wrong with CSGOs implementation). You can also design your game in a way where cheating just isn’t effective (e.g. rocket league). Ultimately the best way to have fair games is to promote finding players through avenues other than official matchmaking: friends or even just random people on something like discord.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - cortesoft 5y ago
      How is rocket league designed to make cheating not effective?
      - 5y ago
forrestthewoods 5y ago
Linux just isn’t worth supporting financially. At best you do slightly better then break even. But the opportunity cost is so high that time is almost always better spent making the game better for the 99% dor non-Linux players. If you say this publicly then angry anime avatars will yell at you on Twitter.
freedomben 5y ago
As a linux user, thank you for at least trying. Also I don't know if this is applicable but don't let a few rude users color your perspective too much. There are lots of people like me who are thrilled if you just support "Ubuntu". That at least makes it possible for me to get it working.
Arnavion 5y ago
It depends on the game. SNKRX is popular right now. It's written entirely in cross-platform Lua, uses the cross-platform Love2D engine which is packaged by Linux distros already, and is open-source on GitHub. So it was very easy to make it run on Linux. I just had to fix a crash because my distro's Love2D uses LuaJIT which only supports Lua 5.1, but the game's source contains a bit that requires Lua 5.4. But it was an easy patch (which unfortunately cannot be upstreamed because upstream doesn't want PRs). For other games, as long as the game provides an Ubuntu version, it'd work for me. I run an Ubuntu Docker container for Steam and other "first-party software" (binary packages directly from the software manufacturer as opposed to distro repos), because when such software says "it supports Linux" it almost always means "it supports Ubuntu".
steeleduncan 5y ago
Steam has the "Steam Linux Runtime" these days[1]. It runs games inside a container with a fixed set of libraries. As long as it runs in there you don't need to worry about the host distribution. [1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  You're still using the system specific X/Wayland, Pulseaudio, and the system video drivers. I would bet that a majority of game bugs come out of one of those.
  - m45t3r 5y ago
    Both PulseAudio and X.org are in general stable, don't know about Wayland but I don't think many games target it yet. The major issue is OpenGL drivers, they can be a pain on Linux (specially proprietary ones like NVIDIA).
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      As far as I know, X has many issues with things like multiple monitors, full-screen programs, low-latency input etc. Not sure if Pulseaudio similarly has issues with things like surround-sound systems that a game uses more in-depth.
      - account42 5y ago
        X is only a problem if you use Xlib direcly. Instead use SDL [0] which will handle pretty much all window manager peculiarities for you. [0] http://libsdl.org/ http://libsdl.org/
        tsimionescu 5y ago
        How does libsdl help if your players are complaining their monitors are flickering when your game is in full-screen mode?
gambiting 5y ago
I do remember reading an analysis by a bigger studio here recently who basically said the same thing - the Linux userbase was less than 5% of all users, but over 90% of their support requests were for Linux. It was just unfeasible to support long term, the support was costing them more money than those users could ever bring.
- ksec 5y ago
  And it they were beaten to death on HN. So I was kind of surprised to see OP being the top voted comment.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  It was >0.1% of users and 20% of automated bug reports. There isn't any data on how many Linux users report bugs.
slim 5y ago
You should give the linux version for free without support and encourage linux users to support you through donations
Yuioup 5y ago
That is exactly why I have been saying for quite some time now that Proton has killed native Linux games. Developers would be crazy to publish a native Linux game right now. Sure middleware like Godot helps but even then it's still probably not worth it. Witb Proton you can publish a game and deny all reponsibily for Linux support. “Sorry we don't support Linux but we hear it runs great on Proton!”
- vngzs 5y ago
  It wouldn't be unreasonable to officially target Proton support. Hell, I'd like that almost as much as native support. And we can give back to a community that is bringing a massive catalog of Windows software to Linux by sending our patches to the compatibility layer instead of just our proprietary source tree.
  - ThatPlayer 5y ago
    I think that runs into issues with anti-cheat though. Neither the very popular Easy Anti Cheat or even Valve's own Valve Anti Cheat work through Proton. While Linux native versions of both work fine.
- npteljes 5y ago
  I mean, you could deny Linux support without Proton too. I think that's a separate issue. Now, supporting Linux via Proton, that's where Proton can kill native Linux builds. But I'm not sure how common that is, or will be.
- ari__ 5y ago
  I'm unsure how I feel about classifying an entire game engine as middleware. For most engines (Godot included!) building your code for a different platform is as easy as changing your target in a dropdown menu. I'm also deeply curious as to exactly how many indie game developers are writing code that interfaces directly with these low level systems and graphics APIs. In my experience, building cross platform games (I've shipped from Unity, Unreal, Godot, and XNA/MonoGame) is trivial and the framework handles 100% of the complexity of porting. From the sounds of this comment thread, everybody is writing their game in raw shader language and then having to port that to Vulkan or OpenGL.
zxzax 5y ago
That has nothing to do with Linux at all, you can just as easily get some weird requests from people trying to run your game at 640x480 on Windows 98 or some other strange thing like that. The usual response here (from any vendor, not just an independent game developer) is to say you only support the latest LTS version of Ubuntu/SteamOS with the officially supported drivers there and that's it. You're absolutely right to do that. If you want obscure distros to be able to run your program, you can open source it and let them deal with the packaging/testing/maintenance. The fact that all the OS packages are open source is the only reason all the random distros are even able to exist, so you're already making it difficult for them when you don't do this. No reason to dance around that.
- alphachloride 5y ago
  "just as easily"?
  - zxzax 5y ago
    What is the confusion? People on Windows 98 are able to send emails too.
    - username90 5y ago
      People on windows 98 doesn't expect modern games to work for them. Many people on strange linux setups do expect games working on some linux distro to work for them as well and complains when it doesn't. Those people are the reason linux versions gets so many more support requests.
      - zxzax 5y ago
        That's just about managing expectations, and it falls on you to be clear in your marketing. If you said "we support all versions of Windows" then you could expect someone to misinterpret that, the same way they would misinterpret "we support all versions of Linux." So really to make it clear, you might consider only saying "we support Ubuntu Focal" or something like that. Most products I see now make it pretty obvious that they only test on some combination of Windows 7/8/10 and above, so just do the same for whatever Linux distribution.
jancsika 5y ago
> "so I'm on this specific Red Hat version, with this oddball graphics driver and three monitors and full-screen doesn't work with your game properly" It simply isn't possible that there exists a technophile out there patient enough to set up such a non-Ubuntu rig, yet cave-dwelling enough not to thank their deity for the simple fact that any graphics-hungry software turns out to run at all without crashing. Barring a copy of the original email and video testimony from the sender, it's more reasonable to believe this was someone trolling you (or perhaps even a team of someones if you received more than one such email). Edit: clarification
somnic 5y ago
I do find it rude that people would go to the devs for issues like that. It's one thing if it's not working on a system that's supposed to have support, but otherwise you should really be figuring it out yourself, or going to the community. Maybe actually clarifying where the community lives, like WineHQ and ProtonDB do for running Windows games on Linux, would be a good start to help reduce devs having to deal with this sort of thing.
Cloudef 5y ago
Targeting proton/wine is fine. Windows could be considered as a application layer for games already. Most of the native linux ports are actually worse than running through proton/wine.
ari__ 5y ago
Proton does an excellent job! Something to consider is that many people (myself included) will offer consulting services to help get your game running natively on Linux with as little effort from you as possible. I personally offer that free to indie developers because I love seeing more native Linux support, but this kind of thing is often not very difficult for someone familiar with the target OS. I'm curious as to what kind of game engine you're using where targeting Linux isn't as simple as choosing it in a dropdown menu as well, most modern engines support that very well.
heavyset_go 5y ago
If you develop against WINE you'll get cross platform support on macOS, Linux and Windows.
aufhebung 5y ago
>I'm pretty sure Photon supports my Windows builds on Linux better than I was ever able to do with the native executable The native Linux version of War Thunder crashes on launch for me, but the Windows version through Proton runs perfectly.
z3t4 5y ago
A tip for the open source / Linux community is to make your customers help each other (setup a forum/msg board or what not), as the ratio of knowledge power users is very high compared to for example Windows and Mac.
robertlagrant 5y ago
Could you have open sourced the game to allow Linux-motivated developers to fix own bugs? Or too risky for you?
piokoch 5y ago
It is a problem not only for indie developer. I have witnessed same problem with Borland Kylix (Borland Delphi for Linux). In general it was a great idea, IDE was good, creating Linux apps easily using RAD tool was really tempting. Having ability to use all the Delphi plugins people created for years was also a big advantage. Yet... The problem was that Kylix required very specific kernel version (I think it also required some kernel module), so it mostly did not work out of the box and people got discouraged. The fact that Borland failed to advertise it correctly and never put more effort into making this tool better is another story. Those were times of Borland identity change from RAD tool vendor to super-enterprise corpo Inprise with some crazily expensive ALM tools that were competing with the likes like Telelogic Doors (now IBM brand), etc.
Blaiz0r 5y ago
I don't see why getting support tickets is a problem, surely you triage and prioritize them anyway, and if fixing that problem is for a small percentage of customers then it's not going to be a high priority. I think it's unreasonable for any software developer to release a product and expect no bug reports to come back at them, but it still doesn't mean they have to tackle everything.
account42 5y ago
I think your mistake was that you failed to account for the cultural differences between Windows and Linux users. For most Linux users and Developers a bug report is a positive thing rather than just a cost. Linux users are used to being more involved in the bug reporting process, and that includes reporting issues early and with more details - often even things they already figured out how to fix for themselves. If you are being overwhelmed by bug reports from Linux users the Solution is to let those users triage, categorize and maybe even fix issues amongst themselves by having a publicly acessible tracker. Just like with forums for your game, you might even find people that will moderate those bug trackers for you. Valve realized this early in the Steam for Linux beta and have been using GitHub issues [0] for all of their Linux ports. As for the differences between Linux distributions, I think the concerns are greatly overblown. The biggest difference between Desktop Linux distributions boils down in the versions of various libraries that they ship. For most of those you don't need to care at all and should ship your own version (or use the Steam Linux Runtime [1]). Base system libraries (glibc, OpenGL, Vulkan, audio) that you can't ship (because they contain hardware specific code that needs to get updates even after your game is EOL, or for other reasons) tend to provide strong backwards compatibility so you only need to target an old enough version to cover all the Linux distributions you want to support. A complicated one is the C++ standard library since some graphics drivers will depend on that - I recomment statically linkingyour own version and not exporting/importing any C++ symbols in your program. I agree with others here that it is fine to only guarantee support for a limited set of Linux distributions (e.g. current Ubuntu LTS). However you should not consider reports from other distributions as a nuisance but rather as an early warning system or "linter" that will let you know about potential problems that users on your supported distribution (or even your users on other operating systems) may encounter in the future. Next you can have various windowing systems, window managers and audio systems (even on one Distribution). Just ignore those: Don't interface directly with Xlib or pulseaudio but instead use a proven abstraction that takes care of the different quirks for you: SDL. That is, assuming you are not already using an engine with mature Linux support. Even if there is a quirk not handled in SDL, your users now are empowered to debug SDL themselves and fix the issue there, benefitting everyone. SDL will also make it easier to support future systems: if you never talk to Xlib and GLX directly, SDL can give you Wayland support for free. Finally you have drivers. This isn't really much different than under Windows. Like with Linux distributions, issues with one driver often point towards things that just happen to work correctly in another vendor's driver but could break in the future. Having testing on more drivers is a good thing. Compared to Windows however, there is one big advantage: With the exception of Nvidia (and the proprietary AMD driver, but no need to care about that one) you (and savy users) have full source access to those which makes debugging some issues a lot more feasible. But further than that, they are also developed in the open with a public bug tracker [3] which gives you direct access to the developers. You can even chat with them on IRC if you like - just make sure that you are not wasting their time any more than you consider your users are wasting your time by reporting bugs. I have also seen many concerns in this thread that bad reviews from Linux users will tarnish their score. First, realize that Steam reviews are always relative compared to expectations. If you manage those expectations, you can limit negative reviews - that goes for Linux users just as for anyone else. But Linux users can also help your game by recommending it to others. While the same is true for Windows users, those initial Linux users are easier to reach because there is less market saturation (especially in some genres). Using just the raw Linux sales percentage does not necessarily give you a full view of what sales you have gained by releasing a Linux port. To be fair, there will also be Linux customers that would have bought the Windows version, but either way % sales and revenue impact is not a 1:1 relation. In conclusion, I think the main problem Windows developers face when targetting Linux are not technical issues (which there are of course) but one of cultural differences. Once you overcome those and learn how the Linux ecosystem works, you can use it to your advantage. [0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues [1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime [2] http://libsdl.org/ http://libsdl.org/ [3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/groups/mesa/-/issues https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/groups/mesa/-/issues
nspattak 5y ago
i guess most studios are thinking like this. And (unfortunately) they are absolutely correct. It is a pity though because I suspect that the vast majority of these requests that you had shouldn't have been directed at you but to others, ie linux distributions or specific projects (mesa/etc) but there is no one to triage and direct support requests.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

Yeah, I think it says a lot about desktop Linux that running the Windows version under Wine is often a better experience than the native version.

eloisant 5y ago
It's only a better experience because developers spend all their efforts on the Windows build and the Linux build is just an afterthought.
- bitwize 5y ago
  The Linux build isn't an afterthought, it's deliberately ignored because the costs of supporting Linux vastly exceeds the returns from Linux gamers. If you want to sell your game, the smart money is in putting all your resources into the Windows version.
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  I haven't seriously tried to game on Linux in a number of years so this may have changed, but every time I've tried I get some kind of horrid tearing or stutter or low frame cap across a number of games that seems to be caused by inferior graphics drivers. If by "developers" you mean the ones working on the unity engine or Nvidia proprietary graphics drivers then you're right, but in my experience there are a number of problems and pitfalls further down the stack which game developers can't reasonably be expected to mitigate.
  - arp242 5y ago
    I've been running Linux exclusively for years, and never had any problems. For the most part, everything Just Works™. My previous laptop had just integrated Intel graphics, which worked well enough. My current is a Ryzen integrated graphics, which also works well enough. The only problem I ever had was in Wasteland 2 where the second part of the game there was some bug with the fog on the world map with Intel drivers. Setting some obscure environment variable fixed that.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    I recently installed Fedora on laptop with Intel GPU, I'm playing Factorio and it just works, smooth and nice.
    - slezyr 5y ago
      Well, no surprise. It's not resource hungry and there is a hard 60 FPS lock for everyone, so no tearing as well. There is a 60-80 FPS difference for me in CS:GO between Linux and Windows with AMD graphics.
      - account42 5y ago
        > and there is a hard 60 FPS lock for everyone, so no tearing as well That's not how tearing works.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  Also because people (justifiably) don't want to distribute their games as source, so they can't be packaged sanely.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  It is also because on Linux developers above the kernel have very little concern in keeping their APIs and ABIs stable and improving (it isn't just keeping some 29839283 year old library around that never receives any updates, you need to keep stuff up to date - imagine, e.g. SDL1.2 without support for HiDPI - though sadly most of the time not even that keeping around happens with distros dropping older libs left and right). Notable exception being Xorg, so of course the CADT model ensured that it has to be abandoned in favor of Wayland which while being barely usable has already managed to break compatibility with itself.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Back in the Loki days I used to believe, even lost a good opportunity at SCEE for being stupidly focused into FOSS game development. Nowadays I don't care, Windows, macOS and mobile OSes FTW.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    I wish people would not use the phrase "CADT" like this, it's not relevant, and it's insulting and ableist. Nobody wants to maintain legacy software for free in their spare time. That's all it is. It has nothing to do with the age of the person or the status being "attention deficit," which is a real condition that people actually have and suffer from. If you disagree, you're welcome to spend your spare time working on it. I support you doing that. I really doubt anybody will though, because outside of servers and Android, there is very little interest in doing anything on Linux. If you're willing to listen, I could describe to you the technical reasons why Xorg was abandoned. But I also doubt the answer will please you, because the reality is that the reason it's perceived as being "stable" is because it's not being improved anymore -- if people were still hacking on Xorg instead of Wayland, then your Xorg would be breaking left and right too.
    - badsectoracula 5y ago
      > I wish people would not use the phrase "CADT" like this, it's not relevant, and it's insulting Yes, that's the point of an insult. > Nobody wants to maintain legacy software for free in their spare time. That's all it is. This is 100% false, a lot of people do. In fact a language (Free Pascal) and framework (LCL) i am using has a very good track record for preserving backwards compatibility while at the same time continuously improving. I have code i wrote two decades ago that work fine with it and will automatically get the new features introduced just with a recompile. The same can't be said for, e.g. Gtk: Gtk2 apps not only wont get any new features from Gtk3, but they wont even compile. Same with Gtk4, because making the mistake twice wasn't enough. > If you're willing to listen, I could describe to you the technical reasons why Xorg was abandoned. There are no technical reasons, Xorg is code, code can be modified. It is all political reasons at best and people wanting to rewrite stuff they'd rather not bother learning about. As JWZ writes in his CADT page: <<Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again.>> > the reason it's perceived as being "stable" is because it's not being improved anymore -- if people were still hacking on Xorg instead of Wayland, then your Xorg would be breaking left and right too. Xorg improved all the time over the years going back to the XFree86 days, adding new features consistently without breaking existing code and applications. If it suddenly started breaking now it wouldn't be because it is impossible to not break but because the developers somehow started breaking it.
darthrupert 5y ago
Windows is essentially the primary gaming API which has a pretty damned good secondary cross-platform implementation in Wine/Proton.
Aeolun 5y ago
There’s as many variations of linux as there are people running it. There’s only a few authoritative versions of OSX and Windows. I don’t think it’s too susprising.
- account42 5y ago
  This is a ridiculous statement. Every Windows install is unique as well in suble ways, as is the hardware it runs on. The differences between Linux distributions don't really matter that much if you bundle your dependencies or use the Steam Linux Runtime to do that for you.

felipemnoa 5y ago

Link to game

OhSoHumble 5y ago

I've always wondered how feasible it would be if an indie developer (or maybe even a big studio) could just put out a Linux build of their game and just say "we're not going to support this outside of these very specific constraints - or even at all - we'll fix issues with our Linux build if we can reproduce those issues in the environment we developed the game in... but that's it." Then the Linux community gets another game. Does it not work on K.I.S.S Linux running sowm as a window manager and an entire custom userspace? Probably not. Does it work using the latest Ubuntu version? Probably. But the notion that developers have to support every possible Linux configuration out there just seems toxic to the Linux game development effort as a whole.

DizzyDoo 5y ago
I suppose I can only speak for myself but I don't see that as an attractive option, and what you're describing is mostly what I did do for the game release I mentioned. If I sell on Windows (I do) and Mac (I do) then I have to support a certain range of OS versions and ongoing OS releases - even if that means (for example) I have to figure out how to 'notarise' a Mac executable so that a user doesn't have a big scary Security Warning pop-up. Not ideal, but fine. The challenge with Linux is that I would have to communicate against expectations - that I would have to make it clear that when I 'support Linux' it looks different to the support for Windows or Mac. I do genuinely think that 99% of Linux people get this, it's just the 1% that's maybe less forgiving of different standards. For me, just personally and selfishly, passing the buck to Photon or Wine is an easier sell for my business.
- stavros 5y ago
  Could you say "supports Ubuntu" instead?
  - DizzyDoo 5y ago
    Not only did I say that but I also gave the specific Ubuntu version as well!

listic 5y ago

What's Photon?

jszymborski 5y ago
I believe GP is talking about Proton. It's a Linux/Windows compatibility layer from Steam. It's pretty great! A lot of the incompatability between Linux/Windows in my experience has actually been from the Anti-Cheat systems. Apex Legends and Intruder being examples that come to mind. https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/
- godshatter 5y ago
  Proton has been a game changer. Once they get the anti-cheat systems working (and they are making progress), linux will be much more of a valid choice for gaming than it has ever been. I used to do what gaming I couldn't do without on a Windows laptop, but now I do it all on my main linux desktop and haven't booted the laptop for months. Even some of the mod makers are making tools for linux now. It's a completely different world than it was even a few years ago. There are still games that have problems, but Valve and the wine devs and others are knocking those down one by one. So those 15 people that wanted to switch to linux but couldn't because it couldn't run their games can now do so :)
  - jszymborski 5y ago
    Similar experience on my end. The only time I find myself booting into my Windows partition is when I play a game with Easy Anti-Cheat.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      I have just given up on games with EAC. Much better than constantly switching back and forth, and they’re the exception rather than the rule now.
      - Cloudef 5y ago

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

For reference Eric Barone, Stardew Valley dev, he made it exclusively for Windows with C#. When he was approached by Chucklefish, they said they'd handle porting it to other OS's and console for a cut.

UnpossibleJim 5y ago

I hate to say it (as I type this comment on a Linux box), but you're almost better off pushing a 2D game in a browser if you want to support Linux =( The variations in Linux distros just get a little too varied

bachmeier 5y ago

> As I only officially supported Ubuntu Why not just tell them that? Is it really better to give up those dollars because someone is using a setup you don't support?

DizzyDoo 5y ago
I did? Both on the store page and in my email replies. Most people were understanding though some weren't. However, those dollars you seem anxious I don't give up still didn't really cover the time investment of dealing with Linux - not just the support requests, but getting the build environment setup and performing the testing and all of that. For reference, the game in question did ~75% of units sold on Windows, ~25% on Mac, and some fraction of a percent on Linux. If I hadn't of released on Ubuntu I would have probably lost less $1000, gross.
- z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
  Considering forum text messages have no emotion, you are the one projecting your anxiety by your accusal, not the other way around. If you told them, why are YOU so anxious about support for Linux enough to complain about it here? "I don't support your distribution", case closed.

gentleman11 5y ago

You spend so much time worrying that you will sell enough copies to break even. Linux support time could be spent fixing a bug, marketing, polishing a feature. Plus, negative reviews can hurt you a lot so you can’t really support Linux half heartedly. Needs to work as well as the other versions. The average serious indie game makes $14k (edit: 16k). Steam changed their recommendation algorithms to promote aaa and top sellers

spywaregorilla 5y ago
> The average serious indie game makes $14k. Source?
- DizzyDoo 5y ago
  If the parent's main point is that indie game developers, on average, don't make tons of money, he's right: https://twitter.com/GreyAlien/status/1227557601786912769 https://twitter.com/GreyAlien/status/1227557601786912769
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    I was hoping for something more descriptive I guess. Steam used to be much pickier about which games were allowed on the platform. Now it's anything goes, and there's a lot more lower quality games on it, that sell for under $5,have no marketing budget, and just kind of look bad. The indie games I've played all seem to have little news posts about 1 million copies sold. So... what's the return on an indie game of 2012 indie game quality?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gentleman11 5y ago
  Might actually be 16k. Research is from mike Rose, an indie publisher https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W6lZir97bUU0KdvIGNIVWG0O-_A3QrdN/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W6lZir97bUU0KdvIGNIVWG0O-_A...

stingraycharles 5y ago

As a Linux gamer, I’d say: just make sure the Proton version works, focus on fixing glitches there, don’t bother spending time on porting any code otherwise. Pretty much all games I play are through Steam’s compatibility layer anyway, and nowadays it’s a very smooth experience.

darthrupert 5y ago
> Make sure the Proton version works On which distro and graphics hardware? ;)
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  Good one. I’d say, take either Steam or Lutris or something like that, so that the distro is abstracted away as much as possible. I’m not a game dev so I don’t know how much you still actually notice of the distro / hardware once you’re running in Proton or Wine.
  - darthrupert 5y ago
    You do. You totally do.
  - Cloudef 5y ago
    Flatpak version of steam would be good candidate as anyone can install it on any distro (even non-glibc based ones)
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
I agree. The few times I can't run it via Proton ( Fallout 4, FF11 come to mind ) I jump on Windows VM anyway. It is absolutely bananas how powerful hardware is these days.
- Cloudef 5y ago
  FF11 works fine with proton for me

smoldesu 5y ago

Honestly, developers will probably have a better time maintaining Proton versions than writing native Linux ones. As long as your game has silver or higher on ProtonDB, you can have my money.

sandworm101 5y ago

My advice would be that if you cannot give full support to linux, at least be open about your software. The linux community is very good at getting things working. They can figure most problems out for themselves, but only if they have some information to work with. Toss them some documentation, anything, and 99% of the time they will come up with a solution on their own. Except DRM. Attach DRM or anti-cheat to your project, software that actively doesn't want to run on anything but a specific OS, and the linux community will turn on you.

cortesoft 5y ago
Multiplayer games without any anti-cheat are really not much fun. What is the solution there for Linux?
- madpata 5y ago
  Don't play multiplayer games on Linux.
- x4e 5y ago
  You can make a pretty good experience server side anti cheat and authoritative networking. Trust factor systems like CSGO has also work well (as long as you prevent abuse which is basically what went wrong with CSGOs implementation). You can also design your game in a way where cheating just isn’t effective (e.g. rocket league). Ultimately the best way to have fair games is to promote finding players through avenues other than official matchmaking: friends or even just random people on something like discord.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    How is rocket league designed to make cheating not effective?
    - 5y ago

forrestthewoods 5y ago

Linux just isn’t worth supporting financially. At best you do slightly better then break even. But the opportunity cost is so high that time is almost always better spent making the game better for the 99% dor non-Linux players. If you say this publicly then angry anime avatars will yell at you on Twitter.

freedomben 5y ago

As a linux user, thank you for at least trying. Also I don't know if this is applicable but don't let a few rude users color your perspective too much. There are lots of people like me who are thrilled if you just support "Ubuntu". That at least makes it possible for me to get it working.

Arnavion 5y ago

It depends on the game. SNKRX is popular right now. It's written entirely in cross-platform Lua, uses the cross-platform Love2D engine which is packaged by Linux distros already, and is open-source on GitHub. So it was very easy to make it run on Linux. I just had to fix a crash because my distro's Love2D uses LuaJIT which only supports Lua 5.1, but the game's source contains a bit that requires Lua 5.4. But it was an easy patch (which unfortunately cannot be upstreamed because upstream doesn't want PRs). For other games, as long as the game provides an Ubuntu version, it'd work for me. I run an Ubuntu Docker container for Steam and other "first-party software" (binary packages directly from the software manufacturer as opposed to distro repos), because when such software says "it supports Linux" it almost always means "it supports Ubuntu".

steeleduncan 5y ago

Steam has the "Steam Linux Runtime" these days[1]. It runs games inside a container with a fixed set of libraries. As long as it runs in there you don't need to worry about the host distribution. [1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime

tsimionescu 5y ago
You're still using the system specific X/Wayland, Pulseaudio, and the system video drivers. I would bet that a majority of game bugs come out of one of those.
- m45t3r 5y ago
  Both PulseAudio and X.org are in general stable, don't know about Wayland but I don't think many games target it yet. The major issue is OpenGL drivers, they can be a pain on Linux (specially proprietary ones like NVIDIA).
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    As far as I know, X has many issues with things like multiple monitors, full-screen programs, low-latency input etc. Not sure if Pulseaudio similarly has issues with things like surround-sound systems that a game uses more in-depth.
    - account42 5y ago
      X is only a problem if you use Xlib direcly. Instead use SDL [0] which will handle pretty much all window manager peculiarities for you. [0] http://libsdl.org/ http://libsdl.org/
      - tsimionescu 5y ago
        How does libsdl help if your players are complaining their monitors are flickering when your game is in full-screen mode?

gambiting 5y ago

I do remember reading an analysis by a bigger studio here recently who basically said the same thing - the Linux userbase was less than 5% of all users, but over 90% of their support requests were for Linux. It was just unfeasible to support long term, the support was costing them more money than those users could ever bring.

ksec 5y ago
And it they were beaten to death on HN. So I was kind of surprised to see OP being the top voted comment.
phendrenad2 5y ago
It was >0.1% of users and 20% of automated bug reports. There isn't any data on how many Linux users report bugs.

slim 5y ago

You should give the linux version for free without support and encourage linux users to support you through donations

Yuioup 5y ago

That is exactly why I have been saying for quite some time now that Proton has killed native Linux games. Developers would be crazy to publish a native Linux game right now. Sure middleware like Godot helps but even then it's still probably not worth it. Witb Proton you can publish a game and deny all reponsibily for Linux support. “Sorry we don't support Linux but we hear it runs great on Proton!”

vngzs 5y ago
It wouldn't be unreasonable to officially target Proton support. Hell, I'd like that almost as much as native support. And we can give back to a community that is bringing a massive catalog of Windows software to Linux by sending our patches to the compatibility layer instead of just our proprietary source tree.
- ThatPlayer 5y ago
  I think that runs into issues with anti-cheat though. Neither the very popular Easy Anti Cheat or even Valve's own Valve Anti Cheat work through Proton. While Linux native versions of both work fine.
npteljes 5y ago
I mean, you could deny Linux support without Proton too. I think that's a separate issue. Now, supporting Linux via Proton, that's where Proton can kill native Linux builds. But I'm not sure how common that is, or will be.
ari__ 5y ago
I'm unsure how I feel about classifying an entire game engine as middleware. For most engines (Godot included!) building your code for a different platform is as easy as changing your target in a dropdown menu. I'm also deeply curious as to exactly how many indie game developers are writing code that interfaces directly with these low level systems and graphics APIs. In my experience, building cross platform games (I've shipped from Unity, Unreal, Godot, and XNA/MonoGame) is trivial and the framework handles 100% of the complexity of porting. From the sounds of this comment thread, everybody is writing their game in raw shader language and then having to port that to Vulkan or OpenGL.

zxzax 5y ago

That has nothing to do with Linux at all, you can just as easily get some weird requests from people trying to run your game at 640x480 on Windows 98 or some other strange thing like that. The usual response here (from any vendor, not just an independent game developer) is to say you only support the latest LTS version of Ubuntu/SteamOS with the officially supported drivers there and that's it. You're absolutely right to do that. If you want obscure distros to be able to run your program, you can open source it and let them deal with the packaging/testing/maintenance. The fact that all the OS packages are open source is the only reason all the random distros are even able to exist, so you're already making it difficult for them when you don't do this. No reason to dance around that.

alphachloride 5y ago
"just as easily"?
- zxzax 5y ago
  What is the confusion? People on Windows 98 are able to send emails too.
  - username90 5y ago
    People on windows 98 doesn't expect modern games to work for them. Many people on strange linux setups do expect games working on some linux distro to work for them as well and complains when it doesn't. Those people are the reason linux versions gets so many more support requests.
    - zxzax 5y ago
      That's just about managing expectations, and it falls on you to be clear in your marketing. If you said "we support all versions of Windows" then you could expect someone to misinterpret that, the same way they would misinterpret "we support all versions of Linux." So really to make it clear, you might consider only saying "we support Ubuntu Focal" or something like that. Most products I see now make it pretty obvious that they only test on some combination of Windows 7/8/10 and above, so just do the same for whatever Linux distribution.

jancsika 5y ago

> "so I'm on this specific Red Hat version, with this oddball graphics driver and three monitors and full-screen doesn't work with your game properly" It simply isn't possible that there exists a technophile out there patient enough to set up such a non-Ubuntu rig, yet cave-dwelling enough not to thank their deity for the simple fact that any graphics-hungry software turns out to run at all without crashing. Barring a copy of the original email and video testimony from the sender, it's more reasonable to believe this was someone trolling you (or perhaps even a team of someones if you received more than one such email). Edit: clarification

somnic 5y ago

I do find it rude that people would go to the devs for issues like that. It's one thing if it's not working on a system that's supposed to have support, but otherwise you should really be figuring it out yourself, or going to the community. Maybe actually clarifying where the community lives, like WineHQ and ProtonDB do for running Windows games on Linux, would be a good start to help reduce devs having to deal with this sort of thing.

Cloudef 5y ago

Targeting proton/wine is fine. Windows could be considered as a application layer for games already. Most of the native linux ports are actually worse than running through proton/wine.

ari__ 5y ago

Proton does an excellent job! Something to consider is that many people (myself included) will offer consulting services to help get your game running natively on Linux with as little effort from you as possible. I personally offer that free to indie developers because I love seeing more native Linux support, but this kind of thing is often not very difficult for someone familiar with the target OS. I'm curious as to what kind of game engine you're using where targeting Linux isn't as simple as choosing it in a dropdown menu as well, most modern engines support that very well.

heavyset_go 5y ago

If you develop against WINE you'll get cross platform support on macOS, Linux and Windows.

aufhebung 5y ago

>I'm pretty sure Photon supports my Windows builds on Linux better than I was ever able to do with the native executable The native Linux version of War Thunder crashes on launch for me, but the Windows version through Proton runs perfectly.

z3t4 5y ago

A tip for the open source / Linux community is to make your customers help each other (setup a forum/msg board or what not), as the ratio of knowledge power users is very high compared to for example Windows and Mac.

robertlagrant 5y ago

Could you have open sourced the game to allow Linux-motivated developers to fix own bugs? Or too risky for you?

piokoch 5y ago

It is a problem not only for indie developer. I have witnessed same problem with Borland Kylix (Borland Delphi for Linux). In general it was a great idea, IDE was good, creating Linux apps easily using RAD tool was really tempting. Having ability to use all the Delphi plugins people created for years was also a big advantage. Yet... The problem was that Kylix required very specific kernel version (I think it also required some kernel module), so it mostly did not work out of the box and people got discouraged. The fact that Borland failed to advertise it correctly and never put more effort into making this tool better is another story. Those were times of Borland identity change from RAD tool vendor to super-enterprise corpo Inprise with some crazily expensive ALM tools that were competing with the likes like Telelogic Doors (now IBM brand), etc.

Blaiz0r 5y ago

I don't see why getting support tickets is a problem, surely you triage and prioritize them anyway, and if fixing that problem is for a small percentage of customers then it's not going to be a high priority. I think it's unreasonable for any software developer to release a product and expect no bug reports to come back at them, but it still doesn't mean they have to tackle everything.

account42 5y ago

I think your mistake was that you failed to account for the cultural differences between Windows and Linux users. For most Linux users and Developers a bug report is a positive thing rather than just a cost. Linux users are used to being more involved in the bug reporting process, and that includes reporting issues early and with more details - often even things they already figured out how to fix for themselves. If you are being overwhelmed by bug reports from Linux users the Solution is to let those users triage, categorize and maybe even fix issues amongst themselves by having a publicly acessible tracker. Just like with forums for your game, you might even find people that will moderate those bug trackers for you. Valve realized this early in the Steam for Linux beta and have been using GitHub issues [0] for all of their Linux ports. As for the differences between Linux distributions, I think the concerns are greatly overblown. The biggest difference between Desktop Linux distributions boils down in the versions of various libraries that they ship. For most of those you don't need to care at all and should ship your own version (or use the Steam Linux Runtime [1]). Base system libraries (glibc, OpenGL, Vulkan, audio) that you can't ship (because they contain hardware specific code that needs to get updates even after your game is EOL, or for other reasons) tend to provide strong backwards compatibility so you only need to target an old enough version to cover all the Linux distributions you want to support. A complicated one is the C++ standard library since some graphics drivers will depend on that - I recomment statically linkingyour own version and not exporting/importing any C++ symbols in your program. I agree with others here that it is fine to only guarantee support for a limited set of Linux distributions (e.g. current Ubuntu LTS). However you should not consider reports from other distributions as a nuisance but rather as an early warning system or "linter" that will let you know about potential problems that users on your supported distribution (or even your users on other operating systems) may encounter in the future. Next you can have various windowing systems, window managers and audio systems (even on one Distribution). Just ignore those: Don't interface directly with Xlib or pulseaudio but instead use a proven abstraction that takes care of the different quirks for you: SDL. That is, assuming you are not already using an engine with mature Linux support. Even if there is a quirk not handled in SDL, your users now are empowered to debug SDL themselves and fix the issue there, benefitting everyone. SDL will also make it easier to support future systems: if you never talk to Xlib and GLX directly, SDL can give you Wayland support for free. Finally you have drivers. This isn't really much different than under Windows. Like with Linux distributions, issues with one driver often point towards things that just happen to work correctly in another vendor's driver but could break in the future. Having testing on more drivers is a good thing. Compared to Windows however, there is one big advantage: With the exception of Nvidia (and the proprietary AMD driver, but no need to care about that one) you (and savy users) have full source access to those which makes debugging some issues a lot more feasible. But further than that, they are also developed in the open with a public bug tracker [3] which gives you direct access to the developers. You can even chat with them on IRC if you like - just make sure that you are not wasting their time any more than you consider your users are wasting your time by reporting bugs. I have also seen many concerns in this thread that bad reviews from Linux users will tarnish their score. First, realize that Steam reviews are always relative compared to expectations. If you manage those expectations, you can limit negative reviews - that goes for Linux users just as for anyone else. But Linux users can also help your game by recommending it to others. While the same is true for Windows users, those initial Linux users are easier to reach because there is less market saturation (especially in some genres). Using just the raw Linux sales percentage does not necessarily give you a full view of what sales you have gained by releasing a Linux port. To be fair, there will also be Linux customers that would have bought the Windows version, but either way % sales and revenue impact is not a 1:1 relation. In conclusion, I think the main problem Windows developers face when targetting Linux are not technical issues (which there are of course) but one of cultural differences. Once you overcome those and learn how the Linux ecosystem works, you can use it to your advantage. [0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues [1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime [2] http://libsdl.org/ http://libsdl.org/ [3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/groups/mesa/-/issues https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/groups/mesa/-/issues

nspattak 5y ago

i guess most studios are thinking like this. And (unfortunately) they are absolutely correct. It is a pity though because I suspect that the vast majority of these requests that you had shouldn't have been directed at you but to others, ie linux distributions or specific projects (mesa/etc) but there is no one to triage and direct support requests.