Not only that, but the community would figure out a way to package the binaries with the appropriate libs. When Steam was released it was only officially released for Ubuntu. Yet it worked on Fedora, SUSE, Arch pretty damn quickly.

People always say this, but then post support comments saying stuff like "nobody uses Ubuntu, everybody uses insert distro here". It's a big mess to support.

I have never seen such a support comment. (And I say this as someone who doesn't use Ubuntu and has never used Ubuntu.)

As other people have commented, the usual trend for Linux support appears to be that the developer needs to support the most recent version of Ubuntu (or maybe LTS), and anyone not using that version does the legwork necessary to make it work on their setup. And for consumer versions of Linux, Ubuntu is likely to be by far the most popular distribution.

I'm still not sure.why game developers are aiming to support distros rather than library versions. That tends to be the biggest problem with linux is the huge number of versions of libraries each distro could have or not have and the location of said libraries on the system. That's the issue crossplatform developers should be aiming to tackle rather than trying to cater.to every single linux distro. That's like trying to shoot at minnows in the ocean with a BB gun.

Also last I checked, if it works on Ubuntu, someone usually will make it work on other distros of roughly the same generation, often within a week. If the core is available, the linux gaming community is quite amazing.

Or...they could just ignore having to target library versions entirely and just target Windows, which represents >99% of the market.

Game developers could do lots of things to support Linux, but many prior attempts to support Linux gaming have shown game developers that it's generally not worth it from a resources perspective unless the engine you're using already supports Linux and you don't need to do additional work to get your gaming running on Linux.

> you don't need to do additional work to get your gaming running on Linux.

Ideally this is how it would be. Develop the game targeting Windows, and simply don’t do the things that unportably tie it to Windows. If you develop it from the start as cross platform, then it shouldn’t be some gargantuan effort to port it. It shouldn’t take that much longer to use platform-neutral APIs than the Windows-only equivalents.

Then just fling off a “totally unsupported Linux build”, stick it on an FTP server, ignore support tickets mentioning Linux, and let the Linux people figure out how to get it working—they will! Let them figure out their driver problems or which distributions ship the right library dependencies. A totally unsupported build is at least better for Linux users than abandoning the platform entirely.

I think a lot of games fail to work on Linux not because of the support costs or the platform fragmentation, but because the developers just don’t care or they choose engines and technologies that are not cross platform. It just never crosses their mind to do it differently.

D3D11 is much easier to use and more reliable than OpenGL etc, using OpenGL would increase the cost to finish the game and no meaningful gain since Linux is essentially irrelevant.

Also most game devs don't have Linux machines to build or test the game on in the first place.

I thought about it once, tried installing Ubuntu-- it wasn't as simple as I'd like, but eventually worked.. except it didn't seem to be aware of the GPU and was running at 640x480 or some shit.. deleted it.

They could do that, but then people who can't get the game to work will give negative reviews. It's better to just not give them the opportunity at all.

On the other hand, I just recently asked for support on a linux version of a game for a bug that affected only the linux version of the game, the support staff was extremely quick and responsive, the problem was an easy fix when I found out what it was, I didn't ask for a refund because of this and because of my interactions with their support team I wouldn't hesitate to buy another game from them in the future.

Now, same thing happened with one of the worms games, Team17 was dismissive and rude. I ended up just getting a refund. I've been a fan of the series since the very first one, i've bought a bunch of their games over various systems, I own a copy of worms 3d on both GameCube and ps2, but I don't plan on buying another worms game or anything else they put out any more.

I don't even understand why anyone bothers with targeting dynamic libraries. Why not statically compile everything? The system calls aren't changing are they?

Even if you could statically link everything else you would still to dynamically link to the system's native user-mode graphics drivers, which in practice means that you also need to dynamically link to other libraries used by your application and the drivers (like glibc & libllvm) in order to maintain compatibility. Static linking against glibc isn't really recommended in any case.

Nothing prevents you from providing your own preferred versions of most of the dynamic libraries along with the application, however. It should be possible to limit external dependencies to libraries that actually care about maintaining compatibility.

Dynamic linking is usually for packages maintained by the distro, but many proprietary software actually use statically linked libraries.

This way they have one binary that runs on all the modern distributions, then packaging is only to integrate with the package system, menus and stuff (and is optional).

There's also this: https://appimage.org/

So honestly, people complaining about Linux fragmentation haven't done enough research.

That does not match my view for hanging out in Linux gamer forums. Most games just support Ubuntu and everyone is happy with that because if Ubuntu is supported then it is easy to make it work on other distros. I have never heard anyone complain.

Officially Steam only supports Ubuntu, and other distros do the work to make it run on them. The same could probably be done for games.

I hope somewhere in the next iteration of Xboxes, Microsoft comes up with a version that is essentially a Windows desktop, with support for whatever controllers a normal pc supports, but a trimmed down OS dedicated solely to gaming (supporting at least 1080p at 144 hz), with things like Steam and other game launchers.

For me, that would honestly be the best solution to the OS decision. I could just connect it to my same monitor on the second input, and use the usb switch to just switch peripherals.

That's literally what the current-gen Xbox is. It runs a very slimmed down Windows core and most WinRT and .Net applications can be made to run on Xbox without much effort. It not being able to run Steam or other launchers is purely a business decision, not a technical one.

Yeah but I think Microsoft is moving towards all platform adoption. The Halo collection is available on Steam for example.

A lot of people don't want to buy two computers for their desktop.

It will essentially be a console, which many people already have.

It already is a console, though. You're suggesting a way to make it less like a console, but still requiring you to pay a premium to game at your desk.

And it loses one of the big advantages of convenient couch gaming.