Why should they change the way they develop games for 0.1% of their sales? So that they'd get kudo "clean code" points from people on HN? Most for-profit software cares very little about that, and for good reasons.

Gaming on Linux sucks because Linux is not popular for gaming. Linux is not popular for gaming because gaming on Linux sucks. That's the root of the issue.

I think the details matter because they're relevant to how we as a developer / customer community move forward.

If the GP is correct, then the pain felt by these particular devs might not be a sign that targeting Linux is in general a bad idea. For example, we might help future projects be successful simply by spreading awareness of techniques known to make it easier to target Linux / SteamOS.

Regarding the 0.1% of sales issue, perhaps some of that number's smallness comes from a bootstrapping problem. I.e., there's a vicious cycle of: (bad drivers) --> (game is crashy) --> (poor sales) --> (gfx card vendors not motivated to improve drivers) --> (bad drivers) --> ...

I don't think there's much an individual game dev shop can do to break that cycle, but perhaps it's still useful to understand the problem.

I've been playing Skyrim, Witcher 3, Dark Souls 3, Castle Crashers, Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, etc all of which are Windows-only but now WINE is so good it runs like it's native.

Linux gaming doesn't suck anymore and it's coming to eat Windows lunch. Check out ProtonDB to see compatibility with your favourite games and the Linux gaming subreddit for more news.

You could also think that, because of WINE, Windows is first class and then they check Linux with Wine.

Depends on the perspective.

PS. Yes, steam detects Wine

By making Linux compatible with Windows games it gets rid of that objection "I'd move to Linux if it weren't for my games" which was the remaining objection for a LOT of people.

Because Steam tracks WINE that's a very good thing, so they can detect players who bought their games to play it on Linux.

This helps encourage Linux native gaming growth, because developers can see the chunk of Linux players rising as more get rid of Windows because they no longer have that remaining obstacle.

So, yeah... maybe that means most devs will just say "my Linux support is just it runs on Proton probably, good luck!" but the thing is... there are games on Linux now. Lots of them. Lots of good ones. I was playing The Witness last night by just pushing play on Steam. No winecfg or winetools or separate DriveC Steam installation. No messing with drivers. I pressed play, the game loaded, I played it. I've repeated this loop in the last few months with most of the games in my library. Endless Legend is back in my rotation again. All of the dumb anime Japanese games where they don't even know Linux is a thing that exists suddenly work. It's glorious.

Wine/Proton may be the lazy way to develop for Linux and might not give people the coveted title of Linux exclusive gamer, but it's working really well if all you care about is playing games and not installing Windows.

Also the "no tux no bucks" philosophy many Linux users take in avoiding paying for non-native games.

Contrary to FOSS folks, professional game studios aren't religious about APIs, as long as there is money to be made.

Whilst this is cool I think it may also, sadly, be commercially irrelevant. Why bother worrying about Linux compatibility when only a tiny (i.e., somewhere between 0% and 1%) number of players/purchasers will run your game on Linux?

Try instead coming at the question from the perspective of someone who already has a Linux workstation (e.g. for work) and wants to do as little as possible in order to play a few games—maybe the ones their friends are trying to get them to play as a member of a team. Windows isn’t worth it here: you wouldn’t use it for anything else (so every time you boot into it, you probably have to spend two hours installing updates), and booting into Windows would also prevent you from multitasking to the Linux apps you rely on. Compatibility shims, if decent, are far more interesting to this audience.

Heck, I’d bet money that the Linux casual gaming crowd you described is also heavily outnumbered by people who have a dedicated Windows gaming PC (e.g. me, Mac user otherwise).

Sometimes, in fact, it only takes one or two developers. I can’t think of a good Linux example here, but I know of a good few projects (Dolphin, for example) where the macOS target is supported entirely by the one or two developers on the team who use macOS.

Put me in the skeptical camp, I've been hearing the same line with wine support for nearly 2 decades and never found it to be remotely true.

I've had enough trouble getting the actual linux supported games to work. Some work with gnome+wayland, others only work in gnome+xorg, some silently fail, some just freeze, open source AMD drivers still crash the whole machine, etc.

That is especially true if you are forced to use professionally maintained Linux without root access.

You almost convinced me so I checked out ProtonDB, and found out you're overstating things.

Only 50% of games are rated "gold+", and most of those are native Linux versions. Most Windows-only games have issues.

https://www.protondb.com/

Developing for any platform requires a degree of competence and research. The fact that lots of engines are themselves cross platform doesn't in fact mean that linux support is a box you can tick with no further effort it means that it is a lot less effort.

I think the take away is that their life sucked because they were ill prepared and not just ill prepared to develop for Linux by all accounts. We could do well to maintain comprehensive and evolving info on the current best practices of developing on this platform and importantly pro mote them so as many as possible are educated.

Incidentally honestly I don't think gaming on linux sucks. There are an absolute ton of games available. I tend to buy humble bundles and steam sales and I presently have about 10 I haven't even played yet. Maybe I would feel differently if games were the primary use of my computer. I don't need every possible game to be ported to gave a good gaming experience on Linux. I just need there to be more games than I can possibly play.

Yes but then the question is, why did they even bother? If GP is right that they picked a middleware that is known to only work properly on Windows, that pretty much means they decided to fuck themselves right from the start. I agree that generally, properly targeting Linux is harder for multiple reasons, but if you want to go multiplatform, make sure you build on a solid foundation.

If you fail to use their runtime properly, you're doomed to suffer from Linux fragmentation problems.

It does matter unless you just want linux to perfectly emulate windows APIs you will always have to do work to port to a different platform. Choosing the wrong tools for the job and then blaming the platform is just bad engineering.

I don't bitch about how hard it is to assembly my desk because it requires a socket wrench when my last piece of furniture only required a screwdriver and that's all I own.

Your last paragraph provides the most important reason.

By changing the way they develop, they will increase their customer base.

Have you seen how tight the gaming market has become? You need a niche to get any attention. Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity. It would be on the front page here a lone, a site with an enormous audience at minimum once a quarter. It would appear in countless tech related subreddits, twitter hacker-verse would take off. The “maker culture” would adopt it as its son or daughter.

Sounds like a tremendous opportunity.

We are not representative of the culture but we are hackers and developers and eventually one spark is all you need to start a fire. I have the perception that gamers are dying to get off of Windows, but I could be wrong, I certainly was when I was a gamer.

When supporting a platform can mean debugging and submitting patches for a users graphics drivers in exchange for a shockingly low conversion rate, it's an easy no for me.

PS I built and maintain an Enterprise AWS GPU app on Ubuntu and the platform is great. But it was very non trivial to get working.

PPS if you spend less than $150/yr combined on all software purchases (including mobile/console) please don't make a case for Linux gaming. TuxRacer is your apotheosis.

I have absolutely no affinity for linux. My times spent twiddling with settings, packages, and getting drivers to work are long behind me. I have been exclusively Mac for almost a decade now, so I am in no way shape or form a "linux gaming homer" I could care less, but I am an opportunist, and I do see an opportunity now (and not 15 years ago)

> I've been in games and game middleware (including in many cases with Linux support) for fifteen years and I have never once seen this happen.

Yes, 15 years ago, Windows 10, with all it's privacy intrusions basically being a spyware OS didn't exist. A Steve Job-less Apple, doubling down on it's disdain for OpenGL and gaming in general at Apple didn't exist (see relevant John Carmack posts). And forgive me, but I would be willing to bet we didn't hear about it your game because I was specific when saying "first class citizen" meaning the game worked just as well on Linux as it did Windows. If you achieved that and still got no publicity I would be shocked. All you would need is one popular twitch streamer streaming Fornite (which also didn't exist 15 years ago, and wasn't pervasive until recently) on Linux or some similar big title and you would have a spark.

It's easy to think that a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would make a lot of stir. But I used to play Heroes of Newerth years ago when Linux support were way worse than today. I also read HN then.

I never saw any special treatment for that even tho I loved the game and it worked really, really good on linux.

Searching on algolia just proves my point: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=heroes%20of%20newerth&sort=byP...

I simply do not buy the story that just because you release it on Linux, have good linux support etc it will spread like wildfire.

S2Games, which made HoN, made a superior MOBA imo but none of my friends play it anymore. They play Dota2 tho. I think the reality of the situation is that no one cares about if a game run on linux or not except extreme nerds that would never use Windows and go through the daily struggle that is desktop Linux.

I used to be one of them, nowadays I only use Windows.

lol what year is this? 1999?

but I agree with the rest of your points

Maybe that's yet another reason people don't switch to Linux: the evangelists are annoying and untrustworthy.

Did someone call me? Jokes aside, as a person using Linux (95% of the time, for ~15 years or so), I can honestly tell that Linux has its fair share of problems. However, for some time, the problems I experience are not more frequent than Macs that I have or the Windows PCs of my family members.

Is Linux perfect? No way. Did it improve over the years? Yes, tremendously. Also, I can say that advanced desktops like KDE can do very nice things for automation and productivity. I'm currently happy about the state of Linux, but it doesn't mean its perfect or the very very best.

But there are a lot of reasons that Linux's particular brand of issues are actually still a deal breaker for people, and refusing to acknowledge that will never attract anyone to the platform.

I for one do photo post-processing and development on Linux mainly, and have no problems while doing what I want to do.

> ...Linux's particular brand of issues...

Can you please elaborate? I'm interested. Since I'm using Linux heavily and for a very long time, I might be blind to that problems.

I'm reluctant to go into detail about my own personal blockers because every time I do I end up in a multi-page argument with some evangelists who insist that everything I want to do is completely wrong and I should just change my entire workflow to match theirs.

I personally found out that professional class hardware (Dell XPS, HP EliteBook, Lenovo ThinkPad) has the best Linux support out there. I have a EliteBook 850G2 at the office, and except the fingerprint reader (which I don't use), everything is working without any problems. Battery life is also great (~7 hours). However, works for me is not a valid excuse, esp. with hardware.

If you want to discuss further, you can reach me via my profile page.

Misunderstand me right, it's still mostly on laptops I have experienced issues. On a stationary computer you just get a performance drop, at least for most graphics cards.

I think it's great that it has improved so much and I hope it will continue to improve so that sometime in the future I can return to the promised land.

If you google computer model linux. If the result is 17 pages of results about how it didn't work you may want to try a different model.

Generally how well your machine is supported is a function of how hostile your oem is towards openness, how different from existing hardware your machine is, how common it is, and how much time people have had to add support.

Current macs aren't well supported. Supporting all hardware under the sun is a Sisyphean task and ultimately an unimportant one. For Linux to be useful it doesn't have to support all possible machines just a good range of hardware.

Well there's your problem. The companies that make the custom hardware that Apple uses in their laptops refuse to release driver support for Linux for basically the same reasons as the writer of this Tweet. Whether the fault for this is on Apple or the manufacturers is up for debate, but driver compatibility with Apple's laptops and anything but macOS has always been a crapshoot and only became decent for Windows in the last few years.

Note: This is coming from an Apple fan who has been wanting to try out dual booting a Linux distro or one of the BSDs but has watched support tickets get answered with "testing MBP drivers on Linux isn't worth our time" from multiple OEMs.

When it came time to replace my old macbook air, I got a dell xps 13 and linux works great on that. All of the hardware works out of the box without having to do anything with drivers.

Sad to say, but some Macbook models work great, and others are fucking terrible. I have two models - my older model where the only thing that has ever consistently worked is bluetooth, and a slightly newer one where nothing has ever broken.

Then things should be pretty sweet for quite a while. Unless your hardware is really poplar, things will bitrot away eventually, but expect a 5-10 year sweet spot where everything should just work out of the box.

Linux needs a driver compatibility story this strong to even start.

Meanwhile, I "fondly" remember having to have a USB stick on hand for Windows 7 installs because the default install didn't include wired (let alone wireless) NIC drivers for 90% of the laptops and desktops on which I installed it. Thankfully Windows 10 is better about this (at least on the wired front; wireless drivers are still hit or miss), but still.

I worked in an IT support shop at the time windows 7 was released, and I imaged and installed hundreds of copies of windows 7 over the time I worked there. While you're right about wireless drivers being a crapshoot, I can not remember a single instance of missing wired NIC drivers on install. I'm not doubting that some were missing (there is lots of hardware, lots of manufacturers out there), but it was definitely not as huge a problem. The biggest issue was usually SD card readers and trackpads which required downloading from the manufacturer.

I've done a few linux desktop installs (same job) and the situation was definitely more painful. Issues with sleep/wake, webcams, network drivers (usually wireless), multiple displays were basically guaranteed, and the help process was usually "You're using the wrong hardware", which isn't really helpful.

Were you pre-installing NIC drivers with your images? That'd be a good reason for the high success rate.

It might also have to do with specific manufacturers/vendors. Most of my installations were on Dells; it's possible HP or Lenovo stuck with chipsets that Windows properly supported out-of-the-box. Linux worked fine in all cases.

It does not. Take a look at the Steam games supporting Linux. There's thousands of them, it's not special.

That would not buy food on the table. Most money comes from Windows and what games should be optimized for.

See r/choosingbeggars for more entertaining stories on the "value" of "publicity".

Really a big difference.

This particular game (Planetary Annihilation) was designed with Linux support in mind from the very beginning; as the person who wrote the tweets notes, he and numerous others within the company were huge proponents of supporting Linux. As events proved, it didn't work out for them.

Heck, I'm mostly on Linux but boot into Windows for gaming... I'd probably continue to do so, even if the games were released for Linux just for that extra performance and significantly less chance too run into an obscure issue with my setup.

the thing is microsoft really painted themselves into a corner. ya see windows was made for all sorts of skullduggery to occur , this was supposed to be a boon for MS but they punched so many holes in W32 that it was secure as a sieve, I know this first hand as i have spent a major amount of time decompiling and snooping through the binaries. the file structures in a windows OS has big voids of zeros for padding, leaves lots of room to insert malcode and fix the file headers, Thread Local Storage is neat, a thread can move data packets through its kernel objects to other objects or static files on swap. And the alternate data paging that win executable files may have is just mindblowing. a file {any W32/W64 file} that every one expects to do one thing can be trojaned by the system as a feature using alternate data streams in a file! IT GOES ON AND ON this and win10 is why i left windows and gave linux a serious try and never looked back. Linux runs games and keeps getting better at it with no cat and mouse game of you modding system files so things work and having MS updates demodd them and then prevent you from making thing workable without major klugeing around.

If you ported your game to the Atari ST or the Amiga you'd get more press and probably more sales.

Developer kits like Unreal and Unity have helped a lot here, but those are far from flawless. Even those struggle with Linux because there's just way too many distributions and way too few standards.

Now, statistically, I realize we don't exist. But at absolute levels, we do.

In practical terms nobody plays games on Linux unless they're using something like SteamOS or, technically, Android.

Given how ridiculously hard it is to get a simple application to run across all the various distributions of Linux that exist, expecting something as complicated as a game to run at all is asking way too much.

Windows is ridiculously hard to support, but at least it has sales volume to justify the work necessary to get a game launched. Linux doesn't.

There's no need for adventure for me. I prefer to code on Linux and not need to reboot into Windows. Playing games on Linux IS the convenient way for me.

I see this time and time again. Game developer runs into one of the difficult subjects in computer science/programming. Dismisses the difficulty. Gets themselves into trouble. Blames the library/product/platform.

The last time I was at a game jam, I found myself explaining generational garbage collection to a game dev. He then proceeded to "solve" all of his problems by writing a 5 minute hack to ensure all of his objects would be collected as quickly as possible. Which didn't work, because the lifespan of his objects is dependent on gameplay, so he can't ensure all of his objects will die in Eden. I kept trying to explain that he should actually hold onto his objects (especially bullets in his bullet hell game) and recycle them as much as possible, so that he would reduce memory pressure and have those objects promoted to old space, so they are looked at less often.

I see this sort of thing time and time again.

Members of this particular team worked on the highly acclaimed Total Annihilation (1997) and Supreme Commander (2007) so inexperience or lack of technical expertise seems unlikely to be the cause here.

- In a 16-player game, each player can operate thousands of units across multiple planets orbiting a star, and afterwards, you can replay the match exactly within your own copy of the game.

- The planets themselves were mobile battlefields which could be destroyed, moved, and weaponized.

- The path-finding for those thousands of units crashing into an opposing army of thousands of units is smooth and there isn't total chaos on the field.

But the team also made some really questionable bets that ultimately doomed the title.

- Then, for some reason, they used an out-of-proc UI compositor to draw the 2D elements that would fork one process per layer IIRC and drop interaction events, and broke the tool that the players use to interact with the wonderful simulation.

- Then, for some worse reason, they launched it like this, and reaped the terrible early reviews that doomed the title. Even after patches resolved the issues, the long-term damage was done.

If there were pauses causing significant gameplay issues, it's doubtful GC was the specific cause. There was probably something very wrong being done - my guess would be instantiation of a managed resource like a texture or 3d model.

I doubt generational GC came in to it, and feel like the OP is prematurely celebrating his own insight in to what was causing the issue.

(Then again, maybe it was a VR game and pauseless 120hz was the goal.)

The dev team struggled to get Coherent UI working on Windows, to say nothing of Linux. They switched to Coherent UI late in the development cycle and the beta/launch was constantly glitched out. The problem with trying to run an out-of-proc UI renderer within a game loop were so numerous -- the game would frequently lock up in full screen with multiple instances of the Coherent UI render process running if you managed to escape.

... in Windows, not in Linux.

For fans of TA and SupCom, early PA was terrible. Later, the team worked through a lot of the issues, but the damages to their finances (and reviews) were done and PA never got the e-sports league it deserved.

> He points out that a very large percentage of the crashes were graphics driver related

This was still largely related to the Coherent UI middleware and the strange way it was being used, as other posts have noted.

> "We eventually laid out a guide with known good versions of Linux and graphics drivers, but it didn't matter. Part of the allure of Linux is the customizability, so few actually stuck to it, and generally wanted to run the game on older hardware we didn't support."

It seems that it's because Linux users are unwilling to upgrade their hardware. From a philosophical standpoint, I agree with them, we shouldn't need to buy a new computer every 3-5 years, it's very wasteful and I am very against planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence. That said, I can see the benefits of writing code to work on the machine you have in front of you, and not doubling your QA work by testing it on older machines that no longer even receive OS upgrades.

They should not be expected to support systems that could only kind of handle the previous game anyway

If developers need to get this, that and the other thing right specifically for Linux, but it's still only 0.1% of sales, then it's just not worth doing - even if there aren't any bugs.

source: - am a business person - am a developer - am a linux users - am a linux gamer

I love the idea of being able to game and work/dev on the same machine. But its not the current reality and its not the reality of the near future. Ive recently settled for macos because even though it doesn't offer optimal solutions for anything, it offers the really nice solutions for everything.

I tried linux gaming for years, and Steam really really gave it a strong push. But the truth is, gaming on linux is complicated and doesn't offer the same experience as on Windows or even macos. I'd rather my favorite studios and developers dedicate its linux resources to customers that pay instead.

Linux for "real work"

Windows for gaming (no-frills setup) and music production (much easier and less clunky low latency setup, way more availability of free synths etc)

I absolutely adore Linux for everything it has done to my career but I cannot drop my Windows system yet.

I have to say that even on Windows, driver stability leaves much to be desired (for Nvidia in my case).

I agree. That is why I tend to leave my Windows box really bare. It has Steam with some 4-5 games on it and my Music Production Software. Every other endeavor is tackled in Linux.

For what it's worth, I used to have that, and I am happy I don't anymore. Having two separate computers for gaming and work has been very positive to both my work and gaming experiences. I recommend this to anyone who can afford it.. even if you work on Windows.

It normally isn't just 0.1% of sales when developers do get everything right, although whether or not the usual 1-5% of sales is worth it depends on the particular game, budget, and sales numbers. Linux support clearly wasn't worth it for Planetary Annihilation due to its low sales numbers, but a game with (1) high sales and (2) easy porting process would be leaving money on the table not to support Linux.