With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

Re:With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work o... by invokestatic on Monday December 07, 2020 @01:07PM (#25334958)

I would imagine a large part is segmentation. You can’t even guarantee that X is installed on the system. This is a hard problem since most games are proprietary.

Edit: commenters make good counterpoints

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Re:With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work o... by Spivak on Monday December 07, 2020 @01:15PM (#25335081)

I mean for games you are allowed to have dependencies. If you require X or XWayland I don’t think you’ll find anyone complaining.

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Re:With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work o... by throwaway2048 on Monday December 07, 2020 @01:16PM (#25335103)

This is really not an issue, Steam has a standard runtime for instance, and bundling dependencies is always possible.

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Re:With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work o... by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday December 07, 2020 @01:36PM (#25335398)

Steam has a standard runtime because it's such an issue.

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Re:With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work o... by throwaway2048 on Monday December 07, 2020 @01:57PM (#25335698)

Thus, a widely used, useful, solutions to the problem exists.

Its not like any game developer seriously worries that X is installed.

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Re:With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work o... by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday December 07, 2020 @01:59PM (#25335725)

One of the differences between Windows developers and Linux developers is that Windows developers generally do worry about what dependencies the user has installed. They specifically do not want to make dependencies the user's problem. Linux developers historically make dependencies someone else's problem.

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Re:With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work o... by throwaway2048 on Monday December 07, 2020 @02:03PM (#25335779)

And windows developers solve this problem in precisely the same way, by bundling dependencies.

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Re:With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work o... by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday December 07, 2020 @02:27PM (#25336056)

Sure, but a Windows developer only has to bundle things that can't be relied on in the base OS. In Linux almost everything in user space fits in that category.

The vast majority of Linux developers don't ever do anything with dependencies and just rely on packagers to do it for them. I hardly ever use closed source Linux software, but it has been my experience that they support at most 2 precise distro versions.

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