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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

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!
    - stavros 5y ago
      That's too bad :( As a Linux user, I love it when game studios support Linux and make a point to buy their games more often.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - mdoms 5y ago
    Steam for example has a "SteamOS + Linux" filter so exposing your game as Linux compatible means exposing it to all Linux users.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      Almost everything that works on steam works everywhere. Letting the dev specify a supported distro would be a huge misfeature not unlike websites that used check user agens and refuse to work outside of Internet explorer. People would start pretending to be Ubuntu to install games.
  - cjohansson 5y ago
    Yes it seems better to whitelist specific explicit Linux-configurations (version, window-manager, sound-setup, etc). Like we officially support this, if you are using something else use the forums to discuss with other users but we will not investigate your issue.
- frozenport 5y ago
  The emails are likely bug reports?
  - bscphil 5y ago
    This is unfairly downvoted IMO, because I think you're actually hitting on a very important point. Linux users tend to be enthusiasts, people who love software, and also primarily interact with a community where the "developer/user" is the most important figure, the one whom everything is designed around. In the Linux community, at least unless a project has a toxic developer (there are a few), bug reports are Always Good. They're how we make the software WE use better on the systems that WE use it on. Even if a report isn't fully actionable (e.g. it's a problem with graphics drivers), the report is often helpful because the bug tracker is probably public and we can try to find workarounds, or at least flag the issue for others. For closed source commercial software, especially cases where a tiny number of developers are working on the code, bug reports are Always Bad. They represent more work, work that you don't want to have to do, because at the end of the day these are people who already bought the game. You've gotten as much out of them as you're going to get out of them. If they're more trouble than they're worth (someone else in this thread claimed 90% of bug reports out of 1% of purchases), then it's obvious you should just ignore them or not port your game to their platform at all. You'd think this attitude would be different for issues that affect a lot of people: a good bug report can help you fix widespread problems that are hurting your players, but actually even this is rare. See the story of this guy fixing a bug causing 6 minute startup times that affected at least thousands of people using reverse engineering, when the developer ignored the problem for years: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/ https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... So I think you're right, these are mostly people enthusiastic about a piece of computer software instinctively trying to collaboratively improve it for everyone. But because development is so limited (there's only one person reading bug reports and working on the code), those reports are experienced as frustrating rather than helpful. Worse still, because the software is commercial there may be an unspoken feeling that support is owed for the software because the user paid for it.
    - godelski 5y ago
- vetinari 5y ago
  I wonder - what's wrong with supporting just the Steam runtime and that's it? Why deferring to Photon/Wine at all?
  - DizzyDoo 5y ago
    Do you mean just support SteamOS? The biggest problem is, as a few other commenters have mentioned, there's no further break-down in categories other than "SteamOS + Linux" (and the url is .../linux). So you can't tell the Steam Store "I only support distro x, y and not z". I can't hide it for those who I am not actually supporting, Steam will advertise it to them regardless.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      But Steam only really supports the latest stable Ubuntu. It works on most distros because package maintainers put a bit of work into make it but it isn’t officially supported on them,
      - RussianCow 5y ago
        That doesn't stop people from making support requests, though, which is the entire problem OP is talking about.
        godelski 5y ago
        TBF isn't this going to happen no matter what? As a linux user I have absolutely no problem with the OP saying "we don't support that distro, sorry" and closing the ticket.
        RussianCow 5y ago
        I don't think so. If Linux isn't natively supported, even if it runs fine via Proton, you're much less likely to receive bug reports directly, because there's less of an expectation that things work without issues. And closing tickets doesn't help with negative reviews—in fact, some users may use that as a reason to give you a "thumbs down" on Steam.
- fragileone 5y ago
  You're looking for the Steam Runtime, not Ubuntu for future projects - it bundles the dependencies into a container similarly to Docker so that no matter what distribution a user is running it'll work for them.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  its Proton, not Photon.
newobj 5y ago
yes and then the vocal minority of linux users roast you on steam and tank your rating. chef's kiss
atum47 5y ago
I think you can support only debian distros like ubuntu. Then you would reach the common linux users that install things with the package manager. More advanced linux users would know how to get things running under gentoo or arch, I guess.
- danudey 5y ago
  As others have said, if you want to distribute on Steam, you have to support "SteamOS and Linux", and can't just say "Supports SteamOS and Ubuntu" or "Partial Linux support" or something like that. If you support any Linux at all, Steam tells every Linux user that your game will work for them.
  - account42 5y ago
    Steam itself only oficially supports Ubuntu LTS. In practice most distributions work, same as for most games.
- toastal 5y ago
  I would disagree. As another comment noted, it would be better to compile static where possible and query for directories. I had a game not launch because of a shebang /bin/bash not found even though the common shebang practice is /usr/bin/env bash. No one is expecting perfection, but there are some common best practices out there like following XDG. The more you couple things to hard-coded paths and have them work with just one system, the more you limit accessibility and things "just work"ing on other distros.
insraq 5y ago
I recently did exactly this for my game (Industry Idle) on Steam. I added Linux build but pinned a post that says "Linux and Mac support are considered experimental and are supported on best effort basis" (https://steamcommunity.com/app/1574000/discussions/0/3122659822750442398/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/1574000/discussions/0/3122659...) Most people are very helpful and quite understanding that as a sole indie developer, it would be hard to support all the configurations. But occasionally I get angry emails and negative reviews about game not running on Linux. Given the sales (Linux is 1% of the total sales, Mac is 3%), I would say for an indie developer, it makes more sense to put Linux support on a low priority. It is unfortunate for Linux gaming community but it is what it is. Also even though Proton has come a long way and has become relatively stable - occassionally there are some strange issues (like Steam Cloud sync fails, etc) here and there. But overall the effort is much lower compared to maintain a separate Linux build.
- kevincox 5y ago
  This is partly the fault of Steam. They simple have a single "supported" boolean. It would be nice if you could provide a warning or "partial support" label so that people had these expectations when buying the game. Right now the flow for the user is 1. See store page 2. Buy 3. Play 4. Hit bug. This is the moment when they find out that they bought a game that was not in fact supported. That is super frustrating (and possibly legally requires a fix or a refund). If there was a 1.5 step of "This game offers no support for Linux" or "This game offers no support for any distribution except Ubuntu 21.04" then it is much more acceptable, because I accept that detail before purchasing.
  - RussianCow 5y ago
    I don't disagree that this would be beneficial, but I also don't think it would do anything to prevent the additional support burden and negative reviews in aggregate. If you need proof of this, see the amount of negative reviews on some Early Access games that are very up front about the lack of polish in their current state.
  - infogulch 5y ago
danudey 5y ago
> Does it work using the latest Ubuntu version? Probably. KDE doesn't even work on the latest Ubuntu version - on my hardware, at least. I have an Ubuntu system with an Intel graphics card, and my system won't boot into KDE unless I remove the old Intel driver that it defaults to, so that it then tries the new Intel driver which actually works. Gnome, Enlightenment, and whatever Ubuntu defaults to, they all work fine regardless, but KDE doesn't. Note that this is after removing the 'Intel' driver for xorg, which had tons of screen tearing issues, in favor of the apparently "correct" modesetting driver, which is the preferred option for newish Intel cards. Except that at some point I was installing something else which explicitly depended on the Intel driver package... And then we all ended up working from home and now I don't have to deal with any of that crap. Now I just use xorgxrdp from my Windows machine and it just works. I can't imagine the gigantic hassle that would be trying to game on Linux in that kind of environment, where the "supported" and "default" options are the wrong choice and you have to manually uninstall things if you want stuff to work properly. No thanks. I love Linux (way, WAY more than Windows), but I'm not going to waste time and energy trying to play games on it.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  It is absurdly easy to game on Linux now that Steam has proton. I do it literally every single day.
aidenn0 5y ago
From my point of view, one person telling all their friends that your game sucks can completely offset the nearly zero sales of native linux games. On the other hand most linux gamers know how to run games under wine, so I really don't see any advantage for a developer to make a native linux version.
- bscphil 5y ago
  > On the other hand most linux gamers know how to run games under wine, so I really don't see any advantage for a developer to make a native linux version. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I've never bought a game because it could theoretically run under Wine, while I've bought quite a few games that run on Linux. Very rarely do I buy a game that does not natively run on Linux. Wine seems like kind of an ugly hack even in the best case scenario. You don't know what performance is going to be like with your hardware, and you usually don't have anyone who's tested the program on your hardware to make sure it runs correctly and doesn't crash, and obviously games are extremely sensitive to these kinds of hardware dependent things. Installing Wine can be gross too, you have to install a bunch of 32 bit libraries on an otherwise clean 64 bit system. I'd say the appeal of making a native Linux game is that it gets you access to the market of people who will buy a native Linux game. It's true that you already had the market of people who are technically running Linux and playing Windows games via Wine, but presumably there are many people who aren't going to go to that much trouble. (Obviously, there are many cases where supporting Linux isn't financially viable anyway, Wine or native.)
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    I have more than once bought a native linux game, gave up getting it to work, and run the windows version under wine. At this point I just buy windows games, and if they don't work under wine, I run them in a VM.
arp242 5y ago
Personally I'd just respond to stuff like that with "Sorry, but that's a very obscure combination, and as a single indie dev I unfortunately don't have the bandwidth to support that, I can send you a refund if you want". As long as you're nice about it and don't turn it in to a bland cookie-cutter "corporate" response most people will understand. As someone who just runs Linux, and occasionally runs some games on it, I'm always a bit annoyed when people report these kind of very specific bugs with old/weird drivers/distros that aren't in the supported platforms list. It turns developers off for completely understandable reasons. It's a shame, because for most people it does usually work. I run Void Linux, it almost always works, but I'd never report these kind of bugs without testing Ubuntu (or whatever is supported) first.
kgwxd 5y ago
Steam is pretty limited in official support, isn't it? Even if a game targeted a less popular distro, say one optimized for gaming, I'd have no issue dual booting into a different Linux distro just to play it, since it's free anyway and would likely be familiar enough to maintain. Edit: Though the game would have to have pretty good replay value, I'm not installing another OS for a 10 hour game.
gwmnxnp_516a 5y ago
It is possible to support a wide range of Linux distributions if one takes proper care such as: use CMake and never use GNU autotools or GNU Make as CMake has the best IDE support among C++ building systems; static link as much as possible avoiding reliance on the package manager for getting dependencies; set RPATH as relative path to executable in CMake building system for dependencies that cannot be statically linked; locate resource files using the relative path to the executable instead of relying on fixed path such as /usr/local, /usr/share, /etc/, ...; distributed the executable and the shared libraries in a zip or tar.gz archive with .desktop file containing an icon, so that the user can launch the application just clicking on it. Most MacOSX applications are already distributed in this way in the app-bundle format a, directory ending with suffix .app, containing, a p-list xml metadata, shared libraries and data. The app bundles can be installed just by dragging and dropping without worrying about dependency hell, enabling root permission and so on. The Linux fragmentation could decrease if Linux distros adopted a MacOSX-like standardized app-bundle format. The last point of failure is the GlibC (GNU C library), a Linux application, even if fully statically linked against all dependencies or packaged with all shared libraries, may fail to run in another Linux distribution if it is using an older version of the GlibC than the one that the executable was linked against. Therefore, in order to ensure that the application can work in the broadest range of distributions, it is necessary to static link the application against the oldest possible version of GlibC or build the application on the LTS (Long Term Support) version of the supported distribution. If one does not have enough resources to support Linux, an alternative approach, assuming that is OpenGL is used, may be building the executable for Windows and Wine using MinGW compiler either on Windows or by cross-compiling on Linux using Dockercross-mingw (https://github.com/dockcross/dockcross https://github.com/dockcross/dockcross). At least with Wine, one will not have to deal with Glib-C compatibility issues.
- vgel 5y ago
  > The Linux fragmentation could decrease if Linux distros adopted a MacOSX-like standardized app-bundle format. Everyone decided this so we got 3 different "standard" formats... (Snap, Flatpak, and AppImage). See: that XKCD about standards.
  - 5y ago
opan 5y ago
Is it actually common to have distro-specific issues like that? I'm skeptical. There are people playing CS:GO with Arch + i3wm just fine. I would think just having the right versions of things packaged is enough, and maybe that distros with fresher packages will be better off. Alternatively, if more games were free (as in freedom) software, a large community could better sort out some of these issues.

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!
  - stavros 5y ago
    That's too bad :( As a Linux user, I love it when game studios support Linux and make a point to buy their games more often.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- mdoms 5y ago
  Steam for example has a "SteamOS + Linux" filter so exposing your game as Linux compatible means exposing it to all Linux users.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Almost everything that works on steam works everywhere. Letting the dev specify a supported distro would be a huge misfeature not unlike websites that used check user agens and refuse to work outside of Internet explorer. People would start pretending to be Ubuntu to install games.
- cjohansson 5y ago
  Yes it seems better to whitelist specific explicit Linux-configurations (version, window-manager, sound-setup, etc). Like we officially support this, if you are using something else use the forums to discuss with other users but we will not investigate your issue.
frozenport 5y ago
The emails are likely bug reports?
- bscphil 5y ago
  This is unfairly downvoted IMO, because I think you're actually hitting on a very important point. Linux users tend to be enthusiasts, people who love software, and also primarily interact with a community where the "developer/user" is the most important figure, the one whom everything is designed around. In the Linux community, at least unless a project has a toxic developer (there are a few), bug reports are Always Good. They're how we make the software WE use better on the systems that WE use it on. Even if a report isn't fully actionable (e.g. it's a problem with graphics drivers), the report is often helpful because the bug tracker is probably public and we can try to find workarounds, or at least flag the issue for others. For closed source commercial software, especially cases where a tiny number of developers are working on the code, bug reports are Always Bad. They represent more work, work that you don't want to have to do, because at the end of the day these are people who already bought the game. You've gotten as much out of them as you're going to get out of them. If they're more trouble than they're worth (someone else in this thread claimed 90% of bug reports out of 1% of purchases), then it's obvious you should just ignore them or not port your game to their platform at all. You'd think this attitude would be different for issues that affect a lot of people: a good bug report can help you fix widespread problems that are hurting your players, but actually even this is rare. See the story of this guy fixing a bug causing 6 minute startup times that affected at least thousands of people using reverse engineering, when the developer ignored the problem for years: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/ https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... So I think you're right, these are mostly people enthusiastic about a piece of computer software instinctively trying to collaboratively improve it for everyone. But because development is so limited (there's only one person reading bug reports and working on the code), those reports are experienced as frustrating rather than helpful. Worse still, because the software is commercial there may be an unspoken feeling that support is owed for the software because the user paid for it.
  - godelski 5y ago
vetinari 5y ago
I wonder - what's wrong with supporting just the Steam runtime and that's it? Why deferring to Photon/Wine at all?
- DizzyDoo 5y ago
  Do you mean just support SteamOS? The biggest problem is, as a few other commenters have mentioned, there's no further break-down in categories other than "SteamOS + Linux" (and the url is .../linux). So you can't tell the Steam Store "I only support distro x, y and not z". I can't hide it for those who I am not actually supporting, Steam will advertise it to them regardless.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    But Steam only really supports the latest stable Ubuntu. It works on most distros because package maintainers put a bit of work into make it but it isn’t officially supported on them,
    - RussianCow 5y ago
      That doesn't stop people from making support requests, though, which is the entire problem OP is talking about.
      - godelski 5y ago
        TBF isn't this going to happen no matter what? As a linux user I have absolutely no problem with the OP saying "we don't support that distro, sorry" and closing the ticket.
        RussianCow 5y ago
        I don't think so. If Linux isn't natively supported, even if it runs fine via Proton, you're much less likely to receive bug reports directly, because there's less of an expectation that things work without issues. And closing tickets doesn't help with negative reviews—in fact, some users may use that as a reason to give you a "thumbs down" on Steam.
fragileone 5y ago
You're looking for the Steam Runtime, not Ubuntu for future projects - it bundles the dependencies into a container similarly to Docker so that no matter what distribution a user is running it'll work for them.
ekianjo 5y ago
its Proton, not Photon.

newobj 5y ago

yes and then the vocal minority of linux users roast you on steam and tank your rating. chef's kiss

atum47 5y ago

I think you can support only debian distros like ubuntu. Then you would reach the common linux users that install things with the package manager. More advanced linux users would know how to get things running under gentoo or arch, I guess.

danudey 5y ago
As others have said, if you want to distribute on Steam, you have to support "SteamOS and Linux", and can't just say "Supports SteamOS and Ubuntu" or "Partial Linux support" or something like that. If you support any Linux at all, Steam tells every Linux user that your game will work for them.
- account42 5y ago
  Steam itself only oficially supports Ubuntu LTS. In practice most distributions work, same as for most games.
toastal 5y ago
I would disagree. As another comment noted, it would be better to compile static where possible and query for directories. I had a game not launch because of a shebang /bin/bash not found even though the common shebang practice is /usr/bin/env bash. No one is expecting perfection, but there are some common best practices out there like following XDG. The more you couple things to hard-coded paths and have them work with just one system, the more you limit accessibility and things "just work"ing on other distros.

insraq 5y ago

I recently did exactly this for my game (Industry Idle) on Steam. I added Linux build but pinned a post that says "Linux and Mac support are considered experimental and are supported on best effort basis" (https://steamcommunity.com/app/1574000/discussions/0/3122659822750442398/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/1574000/discussions/0/3122659...) Most people are very helpful and quite understanding that as a sole indie developer, it would be hard to support all the configurations. But occasionally I get angry emails and negative reviews about game not running on Linux. Given the sales (Linux is 1% of the total sales, Mac is 3%), I would say for an indie developer, it makes more sense to put Linux support on a low priority. It is unfortunate for Linux gaming community but it is what it is. Also even though Proton has come a long way and has become relatively stable - occassionally there are some strange issues (like Steam Cloud sync fails, etc) here and there. But overall the effort is much lower compared to maintain a separate Linux build.

kevincox 5y ago
This is partly the fault of Steam. They simple have a single "supported" boolean. It would be nice if you could provide a warning or "partial support" label so that people had these expectations when buying the game. Right now the flow for the user is 1. See store page 2. Buy 3. Play 4. Hit bug. This is the moment when they find out that they bought a game that was not in fact supported. That is super frustrating (and possibly legally requires a fix or a refund). If there was a 1.5 step of "This game offers no support for Linux" or "This game offers no support for any distribution except Ubuntu 21.04" then it is much more acceptable, because I accept that detail before purchasing.
- RussianCow 5y ago
  I don't disagree that this would be beneficial, but I also don't think it would do anything to prevent the additional support burden and negative reviews in aggregate. If you need proof of this, see the amount of negative reviews on some Early Access games that are very up front about the lack of polish in their current state.
- infogulch 5y ago

danudey 5y ago

> Does it work using the latest Ubuntu version? Probably. KDE doesn't even work on the latest Ubuntu version - on my hardware, at least. I have an Ubuntu system with an Intel graphics card, and my system won't boot into KDE unless I remove the old Intel driver that it defaults to, so that it then tries the new Intel driver which actually works. Gnome, Enlightenment, and whatever Ubuntu defaults to, they all work fine regardless, but KDE doesn't. Note that this is after removing the 'Intel' driver for xorg, which had tons of screen tearing issues, in favor of the apparently "correct" modesetting driver, which is the preferred option for newish Intel cards. Except that at some point I was installing something else which explicitly depended on the Intel driver package... And then we all ended up working from home and now I don't have to deal with any of that crap. Now I just use xorgxrdp from my Windows machine and it just works. I can't imagine the gigantic hassle that would be trying to game on Linux in that kind of environment, where the "supported" and "default" options are the wrong choice and you have to manually uninstall things if you want stuff to work properly. No thanks. I love Linux (way, WAY more than Windows), but I'm not going to waste time and energy trying to play games on it.

fartcannon 5y ago
It is absurdly easy to game on Linux now that Steam has proton. I do it literally every single day.

aidenn0 5y ago

From my point of view, one person telling all their friends that your game sucks can completely offset the nearly zero sales of native linux games. On the other hand most linux gamers know how to run games under wine, so I really don't see any advantage for a developer to make a native linux version.

bscphil 5y ago
> On the other hand most linux gamers know how to run games under wine, so I really don't see any advantage for a developer to make a native linux version. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I've never bought a game because it could theoretically run under Wine, while I've bought quite a few games that run on Linux. Very rarely do I buy a game that does not natively run on Linux. Wine seems like kind of an ugly hack even in the best case scenario. You don't know what performance is going to be like with your hardware, and you usually don't have anyone who's tested the program on your hardware to make sure it runs correctly and doesn't crash, and obviously games are extremely sensitive to these kinds of hardware dependent things. Installing Wine can be gross too, you have to install a bunch of 32 bit libraries on an otherwise clean 64 bit system. I'd say the appeal of making a native Linux game is that it gets you access to the market of people who will buy a native Linux game. It's true that you already had the market of people who are technically running Linux and playing Windows games via Wine, but presumably there are many people who aren't going to go to that much trouble. (Obviously, there are many cases where supporting Linux isn't financially viable anyway, Wine or native.)
- aidenn0 5y ago
  I have more than once bought a native linux game, gave up getting it to work, and run the windows version under wine. At this point I just buy windows games, and if they don't work under wine, I run them in a VM.

arp242 5y ago

Personally I'd just respond to stuff like that with "Sorry, but that's a very obscure combination, and as a single indie dev I unfortunately don't have the bandwidth to support that, I can send you a refund if you want". As long as you're nice about it and don't turn it in to a bland cookie-cutter "corporate" response most people will understand. As someone who just runs Linux, and occasionally runs some games on it, I'm always a bit annoyed when people report these kind of very specific bugs with old/weird drivers/distros that aren't in the supported platforms list. It turns developers off for completely understandable reasons. It's a shame, because for most people it does usually work. I run Void Linux, it almost always works, but I'd never report these kind of bugs without testing Ubuntu (or whatever is supported) first.

kgwxd 5y ago

Steam is pretty limited in official support, isn't it? Even if a game targeted a less popular distro, say one optimized for gaming, I'd have no issue dual booting into a different Linux distro just to play it, since it's free anyway and would likely be familiar enough to maintain. Edit: Though the game would have to have pretty good replay value, I'm not installing another OS for a 10 hour game.

gwmnxnp_516a 5y ago

It is possible to support a wide range of Linux distributions if one takes proper care such as: use CMake and never use GNU autotools or GNU Make as CMake has the best IDE support among C++ building systems; static link as much as possible avoiding reliance on the package manager for getting dependencies; set RPATH as relative path to executable in CMake building system for dependencies that cannot be statically linked; locate resource files using the relative path to the executable instead of relying on fixed path such as /usr/local, /usr/share, /etc/, ...; distributed the executable and the shared libraries in a zip or tar.gz archive with .desktop file containing an icon, so that the user can launch the application just clicking on it. Most MacOSX applications are already distributed in this way in the app-bundle format a, directory ending with suffix .app, containing, a p-list xml metadata, shared libraries and data. The app bundles can be installed just by dragging and dropping without worrying about dependency hell, enabling root permission and so on. The Linux fragmentation could decrease if Linux distros adopted a MacOSX-like standardized app-bundle format. The last point of failure is the GlibC (GNU C library), a Linux application, even if fully statically linked against all dependencies or packaged with all shared libraries, may fail to run in another Linux distribution if it is using an older version of the GlibC than the one that the executable was linked against. Therefore, in order to ensure that the application can work in the broadest range of distributions, it is necessary to static link the application against the oldest possible version of GlibC or build the application on the LTS (Long Term Support) version of the supported distribution. If one does not have enough resources to support Linux, an alternative approach, assuming that is OpenGL is used, may be building the executable for Windows and Wine using MinGW compiler either on Windows or by cross-compiling on Linux using Dockercross-mingw (https://github.com/dockcross/dockcross https://github.com/dockcross/dockcross). At least with Wine, one will not have to deal with Glib-C compatibility issues.

vgel 5y ago
> The Linux fragmentation could decrease if Linux distros adopted a MacOSX-like standardized app-bundle format. Everyone decided this so we got 3 different "standard" formats... (Snap, Flatpak, and AppImage). See: that XKCD about standards.
- 5y ago

opan 5y ago

Is it actually common to have distro-specific issues like that? I'm skeptical. There are people playing CS:GO with Arch + i3wm just fine. I would think just having the right versions of things packaged is enough, and maybe that distros with fresher packages will be better off. Alternatively, if more games were free (as in freedom) software, a large community could better sort out some of these issues.