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> How much progress could we make if Steam deprecated their runtimes, abandoned containerization for new games, and let all new games just use the native system
by faho 5y ago
> How much progress could we make if Steam deprecated their runtimes, abandoned containerization for new games, and let all new games just use the native system libraries? How loudly do you think gamers would complain if a distribution upgrade broke their favourite game?
If the steam runtime didn't exist, most gamedevs would only target the most popular distro - probably the current Ubuntu LTS, and you would have to recreate the runtime on your distro of choice.
And once there's a new Ubuntu release you would also have to recreate it there (or the game updates and now you'll have to recreate it on the now-old version).
The choice isn't between steam runtime and a utopia, the choice is between the steam runtime and something much worse. Linux libraries simply aren't stable enough in API and ABI.
- dxuh 5y agoAnd realistically if they could only target a single distro, they would likely not bother making Linux builds at all.
- southerntofu 5y agoYet the steam runtime could be maintained/distributed using a more robust and explicit mechanism such as guix or nix, don't you think?
- bogwog 5y agoGuix is a great solution to this problem. It's a shame that there aren't any distributions based on it (afaik) besides the official GNU one, which is not very practical outside of a VM due to their aversion to anything proprietary.