[timlatim]

Apologies if I'm misreading your intention, but are you suggesting that Valve's work on Wine is somehow worse than asking game developers to target Linux/other OSes natively? As a Linux desktop enthusiast, I much prefer the Valve's approach: the library of existing Windows-only games that are unlikely to be ever ported is too vast, and the benefits of targeting a disjointed[1] platform with <2% market share[2] for new games are not at all clear. It's only thanks to Valve that I (and hopefully many other Linux users) do not need to maintain a second Windows system for fun, as the majority of games run perfectly fine on Linux and require nothing more than clicking Install then Play in the Steam client.

[1] Case in point: glibc's compatibility guarantees are weaker than what you get on Windows. (For instance, your system's glibc cannot be older than what a game is built against, which may present problems for devs using Fedora/Arch and players on Debian/LTS Ubuntu, something I've experienced first-hand for my apps.) The X11 to Wayland migration is also still underway. (Though things are getting better, the attitudes of some Wayland maintainers are a bit concerning: "I don't [care] what you think is normal behavior for games. You get certain guarantees with wayland. Deal with it. If clients decide to do exactly what they do on windows or X11 they won't work correctly." [3] I'm not sure game developers would enjoy such reception.)

[2] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/18...

[Cloudef]

That mesa issue reminded me of wayland issue thats been open for 3 years now where apps crash if theres even a slight stall due to the wayland socket becoming full. Instead of providing quick fix for actual app devs and users who are affected most, they have been designing this perfect solution for apps and compositor to agree on the socket size for 3 years now. Its similar crap with the server size decorations where they finally had to admit people want them and merged the protocol but don't implement it in gnome compositor :) I'd say wayland really was barebones when it was being pushed and major contributions to actually get it usable on desktop was from outsiders.

I'd say win32/flatpak/libretro are the only sane way for games to target linux right now. The fact that linux doesn't have real "runtime" and major components required by games link against libc is what makes linux really unstable for anything that needs to open window, draw stuff using GPU and play audio. It's possible to create static binaries for linux that work for eternity, thanks to kernel being actually stable. But link against something in /usr/lib and it all goes to hell. If the GPU drivers and libs that provided basic window / audio did not depend on libc and were standalone, the situation would be much better. Here's good video about this problem space btw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq1XqP4-qOo

[pjmlp]

Yes I am, everyone worshiping Valve for that, has skipped classes on OS/2 history lesson.

Porting games from Android/NDK into GNU/Linux is relatively a child's play.

Playstation OS is also POSIX friendly.

Finally every serious middleware engine supports GNU/Linux.

Still the amount of studios that care about GNU/Linux is almost zero.

With Valve, there are no reasons to bother at all as a studio, target Windows/DirectX, let Valve do the work, collect the money with zero additional effort.

Now with Windows based handhelds, Valve will learn what happened to netbooks.

[kbolino]

GNU/Linux means Linux plus bash, coreutils, glibc, etc.

What do I need to make a video game? Input, sound, graphics. What use is a shell, a userland, or even a C library (if I'm not writing in C) for making a video game?

Android is _not_ GNU/Linux. It doesn't need to provide a shell or userland as part of the platform, and its C library is bionic not glibc. It also provides a lot of things GNU doesn't*, like input, sound, and graphics. It's also not designed to run on a desktop, and the differences between mobile and desktop are non-trivial and slowly growing.

Windows and macOS are full graphical operating systems. Linux is just a kernel. GNU/Linux is just a command-line operating system. Great for servers, terrible for video games.

Moreover, commercial video games are distributed in binary format, not source. Even if input, sound, and graphics were solved on Linux in a consistent way, the developers** can't help but break ABI compatibility every couple of years. Many apps from Windows 3.1 days can still run on Windows 11. What binary from Linux's early days can still run today, never mind with graphics or sound?

* = You could include GLib/GTK+/GNOME but then you're targeting a specific desktop environment and not simply "Linux" or even "GNU/Linux" anymore

** = Except for the kernel developers, upon whom Linus forces "never break userspace" as a hard rule

[pjc50]

"GNU/Linux" doesn't have a stable binary graphics API. Someone rather controversially pointed out that if you want to make a binary that runs for the longest possible time across the widest set of linux distributions, you should make a Win32/DirectX binary and tell people to install WINE/Proton.

[badsectoracula]

> has skipped classes on OS/2 history lesson.

The comparison with OS/2 only applies at a very surface level - and isn't even the whole reason why OS/2 failed when it had to compete with Windows. Among other things:

1. OS/2 could only run 16bit Windows applications at a time when Windows was switching to 32bit. Even the 16bit Windows applications were not 100% compatible and that is despite using Microsoft's code.

2. OS/2 had much worse hardware support than Windows as everyone was targeting Windows. On the other hand IBM as a whole never put much effort towards OS/2.

3. OS/2 Windows support had applications either run inside an isolated environment or they looked "alien" next to OS/2 applications at a time when GUIs were still trying to look consistent. While this is also the case with Wine/Proton, the focus on games makes this point moot (and people do not seem to care as much about GUI consistency these days).

> Now with Windows based handhelds, Valve will learn what happened to netbooks.

So far every single Windows handheld review i've seen that compares it to Steam Deck mentions both how the UX is worse than Steam Deck and games are -ironically- more likely to have issues on the Windows-based one. The only two saving graces for Windows handhelds is that they tend to be faster (but only when running at full throttle which limits their battery lifetime - Steam Deck runs faster at lower watts for better battery lifetime) and that anticheat rootkits work on the Windows handhelds whereas they do not work on Steam.

And you also forget that Valve did try to get game developers target Linux and put a lot of effort in the ecosystem for literally years before making Proton, yet developers largely ignored that.

[blibble]

indeed

Windows is going to end up as the 2030s version of dosbox

edit: as in Windows ends up with the same fate as MS-DOS: replaced with a piece of software analogous to dosbox

[pjmlp]

Which runs MS-DOS games, not GNU/Linux.