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>Steam recommended they drop their Linux port, saying that just relying on Proton would be better performing & a better use of time. I'm very curious how widesp

>Steam recommended they drop their Linux port, saying that just relying on Proton would be better performing & a better use of time. I'm very curious how widespread this advice is. It's a little sad & ironic to me if Proton is now entrenching Windows as the only target platform. Very. Win32 ABI is the most stable and rock solid compared to the messy moving target of the Linux world, so recommending it is not entrenching Windows, just very good advice to save time and resources to target a platform that's alredy known and stable, and since the target is fixed and well known, it makes it also very easy to emulate on their end for Linux. As much as FOSS-Linux evangelists hate it, Win32 emulated on Linux is better for everyone, than tryin to port games natively on Linux, and makes the most business sense of you want the same games on Linux.

mistrial9 3y ago
do you have first-hand knowledge of the structure of the code base that ports to both Linux and Windows for this particular game?
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Valve and others have explained it already why in general terms that apply to all games on the native vs emulated situation, no need to go into the pedantic details of one specific game.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    as a framework author and C++ coder, the code base structure is not "excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning." -- certainly not for you in any case, by your own statement
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      No need to be snarky and flash your coding street cred to make yourself big and make me look dumb. I'm not the smartest tool in the shed, but I was not trying to be snarky and undermine your superiority or downplay your question, I was just saying it doesn't matter as the end goal is to get Windows games playable on Linux, and for that Proton emulation is the way that makes sense financially and practically for both developers and gamers, so no need to dive into the codebases and compare them, just to prove a point that's moot from the get-go.
extraduder_ire 3y ago
Is it still called win32 nowadays? Because that name has existed for a very long time now, and early win32 stuff doesn't even run on windows without sysWOW64 stuff. I'm sure some versioning more granular than windows version names exists, but the extent of my windows knowledge is occasionally reading newoldthing.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  I don't know what the modern ABI is called, I only quoted what was in the back of my head so I could be wrong on the name but my point still stands.
- runjake 3y ago
  IIRC, it's called the Windows API now, with Win64 being the active variant on modern Windows. It is essentially Win32 with 64-bit additions. The Win32/low-level Windows programmers I know still just refer to it as "Win32", though.
jhbadger 3y ago
It will be interesting to see if the Win32 ABI survives as a standard into the future beyond the point that Windows itself will continue to run it in in the same sense that commodity PCs are still based on the IBM PC architecture even years after IBM itself stopped making PCs.
memefrog 3y ago
>Win32 ABI is the most stable and rock solid compared to the messy moving target of the Linux world, Blatant lie bordering on disinformation. The only reason it is a "stable ABI" is that every dev of every windows program bundles every library with their program. You could do the same thing on Linux and the stability "story" would be exactly the same, or in fact even better on Linux because Win32 isnt actually stable and the Linux system call ABI is.
- kcb 3y ago
  Plenty of games require VC++ redistributable to be installed. I have all of them from 2008 to 2022 installed right now without issue.
  - memefrog 3y ago
    That is meant to be distributed with the game (hence the name).
- becurious 3y ago
  No, they don’t. They may bundle additional DLLs but all those DLLs call the win32 APIs.
  - memefrog 3y ago
    And? All of the shared objects you bundle on Linux will eventually call system calls to do anything. What does "no they don't" mean? People absolutely do bundle all their dependencies on Windows that aren't part of the stable platform guaranteed to be around forever. On Linux the part of the stable platform guaranteed to be around forever the system call ABI.
    - becurious 3y ago
      You’re confusing a distribution with an ABI. They are not the same thing. Totally different philosophy.
seabrookmx 3y ago
The other technical solution to this problem is flatpak (and the others in this space). They vendor the libs (including libc) so you avoid the linking issues. In the gaming world where steam installs apps itself and you need the Windows version for commercial viability anyways, it does make sense to push them to win32. Outside of gaming though, I don't really see this being the case. You random desktop apps are better off with flatpak and distros like Fedora are already moving everything that direction. Flathub also has the benefit of allowing devs to push to one repo and support multiple distros (again, like Steam).
- sph 3y ago
  Proton btw uses the same technology as flatpak for its sandboxing capabilities. And Flatpak Steam has been working great for a while. It's all Linux containers/namespaces after all.
mariusor 3y ago
> the messy moving target of the Linux world, That's bullshit, for game developers there shouldn't be any "messy moving target" outside of the Steam Linux Runtime[1], which is pretty much rock solid. [1] https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steamrt/scout/README.md https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steamrt/...

mistrial9 3y ago

do you have first-hand knowledge of the structure of the code base that ports to both Linux and Windows for this particular game?

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Valve and others have explained it already why in general terms that apply to all games on the native vs emulated situation, no need to go into the pedantic details of one specific game.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  as a framework author and C++ coder, the code base structure is not "excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning." -- certainly not for you in any case, by your own statement
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    No need to be snarky and flash your coding street cred to make yourself big and make me look dumb. I'm not the smartest tool in the shed, but I was not trying to be snarky and undermine your superiority or downplay your question, I was just saying it doesn't matter as the end goal is to get Windows games playable on Linux, and for that Proton emulation is the way that makes sense financially and practically for both developers and gamers, so no need to dive into the codebases and compare them, just to prove a point that's moot from the get-go.

extraduder_ire 3y ago

Is it still called win32 nowadays? Because that name has existed for a very long time now, and early win32 stuff doesn't even run on windows without sysWOW64 stuff. I'm sure some versioning more granular than windows version names exists, but the extent of my windows knowledge is occasionally reading newoldthing.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
I don't know what the modern ABI is called, I only quoted what was in the back of my head so I could be wrong on the name but my point still stands.
runjake 3y ago
IIRC, it's called the Windows API now, with Win64 being the active variant on modern Windows. It is essentially Win32 with 64-bit additions. The Win32/low-level Windows programmers I know still just refer to it as "Win32", though.

jhbadger 3y ago

It will be interesting to see if the Win32 ABI survives as a standard into the future beyond the point that Windows itself will continue to run it in in the same sense that commodity PCs are still based on the IBM PC architecture even years after IBM itself stopped making PCs.

memefrog 3y ago

>Win32 ABI is the most stable and rock solid compared to the messy moving target of the Linux world, Blatant lie bordering on disinformation. The only reason it is a "stable ABI" is that every dev of every windows program bundles every library with their program. You could do the same thing on Linux and the stability "story" would be exactly the same, or in fact even better on Linux because Win32 isnt actually stable and the Linux system call ABI is.

kcb 3y ago
Plenty of games require VC++ redistributable to be installed. I have all of them from 2008 to 2022 installed right now without issue.
- memefrog 3y ago
  That is meant to be distributed with the game (hence the name).
becurious 3y ago
No, they don’t. They may bundle additional DLLs but all those DLLs call the win32 APIs.
- memefrog 3y ago
  And? All of the shared objects you bundle on Linux will eventually call system calls to do anything. What does "no they don't" mean? People absolutely do bundle all their dependencies on Windows that aren't part of the stable platform guaranteed to be around forever. On Linux the part of the stable platform guaranteed to be around forever the system call ABI.
  - becurious 3y ago
    You’re confusing a distribution with an ABI. They are not the same thing. Totally different philosophy.

seabrookmx 3y ago

The other technical solution to this problem is flatpak (and the others in this space). They vendor the libs (including libc) so you avoid the linking issues. In the gaming world where steam installs apps itself and you need the Windows version for commercial viability anyways, it does make sense to push them to win32. Outside of gaming though, I don't really see this being the case. You random desktop apps are better off with flatpak and distros like Fedora are already moving everything that direction. Flathub also has the benefit of allowing devs to push to one repo and support multiple distros (again, like Steam).

sph 3y ago
Proton btw uses the same technology as flatpak for its sandboxing capabilities. And Flatpak Steam has been working great for a while. It's all Linux containers/namespaces after all.

mariusor 3y ago

> the messy moving target of the Linux world, That's bullshit, for game developers there shouldn't be any "messy moving target" outside of the Steam Linux Runtime[1], which is pretty much rock solid. [1] https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steamrt/scout/README.md https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steamrt/...