Tbh, I don’t recommend beginners to try out multiple distros in the beginning. Realistically, if you don’t have in depth Linux knowledge already, all you’ll be able to differentiate is the look of the DE and the wallpaper.
I find, too much choice tends to confuse beginners more than it helps them.
So I’d rather recommend something simple like Ubuntu and let them try out the flavours with the different DEs.
Choice is better for later when people actually understand what they are looking for.
I said: Code changes are easy, all the other things in regards to supporting playing on Linux (anticheat, support requests, testing, …) is hard.
You said: But code changes are easy because steam has libraries to unify distribution.
Do you see the problem here?
What are you going to tell me next? That code changes are easy?
And the FOSS system seems to be collapsing right now for the same reason that anarcho-communism only works short-term until someone sees commercial value in it and abuses the system to the limit.
The old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook is everywhere.
And so it’s no surprise that many well-known FOSS developers are advocating for some kind of post-FOSS system that forces commercial users to pay for their usage of the software.
Considering how borderline impossible it is for some software developer to successfully sue a company to comply with GPL, I can’t really see such a post-FOSS system work well.
This ladies and gentlemen is an example of people using ai to make kid books. It’s a big thing right now and easy money but could have consequence if kids start reading
thesethey at a young age.
FTFY
It sucks a lot when people are so deep in their petty trench fights over brands that they think there is only “Me for this, You for that, You simp”.
I don’t care about Epic and neither do I care for Steam. I buy my games where I get them the cheapest: Key resellers. And I don’t care on which online store the cheapest price lands.
If I was still developing games, I’d deploy them on both or on the one who pays me the most for an exclusivity deal.
With that out of the way: I am only explaining simple backgrounds to people interested to listen.
But sadly so many people fight over an online shop as if it was politics.
Do you fight like that for your favourite online retailer? Or your favourite supermarket chain?
What Steam and Epic do is business. They are no charities. They do stuff that makes them money. So any sane user should see it as a business transaction and buy where the price is best for what you get.
If all other executives would earn as much as the guys from Wikipedia, the world would be a better place.
There’s a difference though.
If the game doesn’t work for (some or all) Linux users, that’s not a big problem from Epic’s POV. They’ll lose a couple users that wouldn’t have been able to play the game without Linux support anyway.
But if the Anticheat faills on Linux, that is a completely different story. Then cheaters would all dual boot over to Linux to cheat all they want. That’s now a problem for the whole game’s user base and consequently for the publisher as well.
Something as low-level as an Anticheat would have to be rewritten almost from scratch to work on Linux and this one really needs to be tested with every possible permutation of installed relevant software. Because if one combination is found where it doesn’t work, you can be sure that the day after every cheater will be running this config.
(Just to check, do you have a background in game development and/or low-level Windows/Linux programming? I got all of that and I can tell you, nothing that looks easy from the outside is actually easy. I think you are vastly underestimating how much work goes into something until it “just works as expected”)
Companies just because they have money doesn’t mean they know what they are doing. And sometimes even less than random people.
Well, if half a million people are guessing on a choice of two options, some are going to get it right. But that’s not due to the insight of the people, but due to numbers.
Every time someone makes the business argument all I can think of Microsoft flopping with Windows Phone despite all their money. Google failing with Stadia and losing opportunity they had with hangouts to imessage. LG bowing out of smartphones. Blackberry and Nokia too late to enter smartphones despite prior dominance. Epic was so late into trying their hand at digital distribution until 2018 when doing it earlier over the past decade would have made entry easier.
These examples really don’t apply here.
Also, there are some other factors in play that you didn’t consider.
Smartphones exploded between 2007 and 2010. It went from nothing to almost everything in just a few years, and those who got lucky and where ready at the right time managed to take the new market. Windows Mobile proves that it’s not enough to be super early. You need the right timing in both directions.
There is no indication that Linux will have >50% market share among gamers within the next 3 years. Yes, it nudged Linux over the 3% mark but at that rate it’s going to take a long while. Also, contrary to smartphones vs feature phones, the steam deck is an additional gaming PC for on the go. It doesn’t replace desktop gaming.
Also, when it comes to mobile gaming, the Steam Deck is a distant fourth between Android, iOS and the Switch.
And even if you limit the scope to x86 mobile gaming, they are by far not the only competitor. There are lots of others, many of them using Windows, who do the same.
And the biggest edge the Steam Deck is it’s value, because Steam subsidizes the Deck with their Store sales. Most people don’t care whether it runs Linux or not.
Did you read the second line of my post?
The code changes aren’t the issue.
Lone indie devs don’t have to care about giving support to players, testing or cheaters.
So sure, if you completely ignore the difficult/expensive parts, the rest is super easy.
Apparently, their cost calculation is different. Also, Fortnite has about 50x active users compared to Apex Legends. That also changes a lot.
Sweeny said it doesn’t make business sense for them and if it will make sense in the future, they will support Linux.
I’m pretty sure that someone who does know their business figures and frequently has to justify them to shareholders has a better overview about what makes business sense for them than anyone of us.
Yeah, pretty much all answers are “You are wrong, the code change is easy”.
Kinda sad that people don’t make it even to the first line.
Seems like you didn’t read my first comment that you replied to before.
But still, your view is totally fine for a little indie studio, but that doesn’t work for a game with >200 mio players.
Proton with what? Stable or experimental? DXVK or Wine3D? X11 or Wayland? Nvidia closed source or open source?
That’s just what I came up with. There are probably a few more of these questions. Even Proton alone is not an easy target.
Especially if you want some low-level anticheat. And you know, if they have one platform that is easier to cheat, cheaters will all use that platform.
I don’t know about you, but playing with tons of cheaters doesn’t seem like a lot of fun to me.
I think, people here look at it from the wrong side.
The code changes required for Linux support aren’t the issue.
But if they support Linux, they have to support Linux. This is not some student’s first indie game, but instead a massive game with up to 290 million monthly active users. That’s 3.7% of the whole world’s population! (And it’s also more than the number of total Linux users.)
So supporting Linux means they need to test on at least all currently maintained versions of maybe the top 20 or so distros on all sorts of hardware configurations. That would increase their testing costs by around a factor of 20.
They also need to support customers if they have problems. Considering the variability of Linux configurations, chances are high that this comparatively small segment of players will consume an aproportional amount of difficult support requests.
And lastly, if the Linux version of the game has some serious bugs on some setup, it might likely be that all these Linux users think the game is shit and start talking badly about it.
So it’s just a simple cost calculation: Does Linux support increase or decrease the total profit?
And if the variables change, the calculation changes with it. Exactly as Sweeny said in his post. People like Sweeny don’t care about ideals or about which OS they prefer. They only care about money.
And the revelation that a CEO likes money and dislikes risk isn’t exactly hard to figure out.
I’m not saying that it’s good, but top capitalists tend to be capitalists.
And in the end, I’m pretty sure someone who has all the business figures and frequently has to defend those in front of the shareholders probably knows much better what makes business sense than any of us. Someone like him goes where the money flows.
To be fair, you don’t look at the whole picture.
Yes, generating a Linux build wouldn’t require a lot of changes to the code.
But if they support Linux, they have to support Linux. This is not some student’s first indie game, but instead a massive game with up to 290 million monthly active users. That’s 3.7% of the whole world’s population! (And it’s also more than the number of total Linux users.)
So supporting Linux means they need to test on at least all currently maintained versions of maybe the top 20 or so distros on all sorts of hardware configurations. That would increase their testing costs by around a factor of 20.
They also need to support customers if they have problems. Considering the variability of Linux configurations, chances are high that this comparatively small segment of players will consume an aproportional amount of difficult support requests.
And lastly, if the Linux version of the game has some serious bugs on some setup, it might likely be that all these Linux users think the game is shit and start talking badly about it.
So it’s just a simple cost calculation: Does Linux support increase or decrease the total profit?
And if the variables change, the calculation changes with it. Exactly as Sweeny said in his post. People like Sweeny don’t care about ideals or about which OS they prefer. They only care about money.
And the revelation that a CEO likes money and dislikes risk isn’t exactly hard to figure out.
Thanks, that’s a really cool hint!
I’ll try whether that works in the locked-up state
Yeah, heared that a lot.
But I didn’t specifically buy my laptop for Linux, 5 years ago. And the purpose that would really urge me over to Linux is that this laptop has a 7th gen Intel CPU which just about doesn’t qualify for Win11.
So buying a new device to use Linux kinda defeats the point.
But yes, I’ll buy AMD next time.
I tried something very similar, but if I set my Nvidia Prime profile to on-demand (use the Nvidia GPU for games, use the Intel GPU for everything else), whenever I start a game where Proton uses DXVK, after a few minutes of playing the whole system freezes. Can’t even get to the console anymore and even shortly pressing the power button does nothing. I have to reset the whole laptop.
If I set it to use the Nvidia GPU always it works, but then battery life is nothing.
I spent ~10h so far trying to debug that issue, but it seems to be a bug that was reported in 2017 that floods the syslog with assembler stack traces so hard that the whole system has no resources left to do anything else than logging. All the bug log entries I found said there is no workaround.
So it can go either way, especially if your device uses Nvidia.
Most people I helped getting Linux to work are actually not techy at all and they haven’t touched the CLI at all so far…
I guess it differs if you use Linux because you are interested in the technology or if you use it because Windows 11 doesn’t run on your PC.