For a long time, an overwhelmingly popular view among game developers and publishers has been that offering Linux builds would involve too much work, because they had either tried it briefly or heard from other devs who had tried it, and found that their problem reports massively increased. Their conclusion was often that Linux causes too many bugs to be supportable. As a gamer, I was of course disappointed every time I read this.
More importantly, as a developer, I couldn’t help noticing ways in which this reasoning seemed flawed. I always felt that it was either poorly informed or not completely honest.
So, when this refreshingly different perspective from a game developer surfaced on social media, it warmed my heart. I thought the rest of you might find it interesting.
That was a few years ago. I imagine the influx of gamers using Linux since then (since it’s easier now) might mean a smaller portion of our group has the technical skills described in that post, but I think it still applies. I hope it also gives us something to aspire to when interacting with the people who make the games we play.
Well, the old way of Linux development was actually more work for developers of proprietary applications, especially games, regardless of that specific post having been shortsighted. Whereas enterprisey applications could just target RHEL and call it a day, end user stuff like games did suffer from a broader and ever evolving set of systems.
It’s very different now. Linux-native games just need to target whatever the latest Steam Linux Runtime is at that point (it’s basically a stripped down Debian Stable container, SLR 3 is based on Debian 11, SLR will probably be based on Debian 13).
With the exception of NVidia, all GPU vendors build their drivers on Mesa, so they are more homogeneous than Windows.
So just AMD and Intel?
I think the big Linux-supporting ARM vendors as well but I did not check. Apple does not support Linux, so they don’t factor in.
… sort of.
The old model was definitely hell and there is a reason basically no studios supported Linux builds.
These days? Yes, you can go a long way with targeting the SLR. A buddy who does game dev for his day job describes it as “targeting 3/4 of a platform” or being like targeting two generations of the same console. In theory, your middleware handles everything. In practice, you have another platform for your testers to evaluate RCs on and you still find weird corner case weirdness.
But the issue is also… that lets you target the Steam Linux Runtime. What about other storefronts? And the people who tend to care the most about actually making Linux builds are the same ones who aren’t fully comfortable with the idea that “SteamOS == Linux” as it were.
So it becomes that discussion of whether the added testing and development burden is actually worth… still not actually being all that great ideologically.
Which other storefronts? Flatpaks can target whatever the closest runtime is there. The Steam Linux Runtimes are just as FOSS as Debian.
Steam Linux Runtimes are NOT SteamOS. SteamOS is Arch-based, the runtimes are based on Debian Stable.
At that point they arent fucking even using a premade engine if they are that uncomfortable with the idea.
Which means if they are building everything from scratch it doesn’t matter anyways.
This sentence is written in some form of alien language that looks like human writing but clearly isn’t.
Alternately, it may or may not be a particularly playful segment of Alice in Wonderland.