GNOME devs making a bad decision!? Never! /S

Also separate from my long response, thanks for sharing that link. Very interesting read and the GNOME window decoration issue is rediculous.

For me, I’m sorry to say, GNOME is the epitome of asshole design. This one of many examples of its rigid design philosophy having negative consequences for users and devs. And devs are protecting GNOME from its own users bad experiences because the user blames the game for not conforming, not the DE for being rediculous.

This is the exact thing I was telling people when proton came out. Sure it’s great that we can pay Windows games on Linux now but it’s just creating a new problem where developers literally have NO REASON to create native Linux ports. Plus, while proton is great, it’s not perfect. If a game doesn’t work correctly through proton the developer aren’t likely to care that much so fixing it will fall to Valve or the community. I’ve also heard of games getting updates which break or degrade proton compatibility. The developer isn’t likely to care about that situation either.

It’s very difficult to justify the additional effort of implementing a platform that serves exclusively the playerbase with a ~3% market share

And yet there are many games that have a native Mac port and no native Linux port, such as the recently released Ball Pit: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2062430/BALL_x_PIT/

How is it to justify that a platform with an even smaller install base gets the native port? Two ports, actually, because ARM and Intel are both natively supported. Why aren’t Mac users expected to use Whisky to play Windows games but Linux users are expected to rely on Proton’s battery munching API translation? Apple is even worse in breaking compatibility, so game developer cannot even expect their Mac games to still run in five years.

The problem isn’t “the playerbase with a ~3% market share” because 3% is still millions upon millions users in absolute numbers given the massive PC install base. According to https://www.theverge.com/pc-gaming/618709/steam-deck-3-year-anniversary-handheld-gaming-shipments-idc there were 6 million Steam Decks sold last February and Linux is still rising in Steam’s Hardware Survey. According to a bit of googling, Steam hat 1.5% Linux users that month, a third of that using SteamOS.

I’m too lazy right now to extrapolate even a rough ballpark of the overall Linux user base on Steam but even if we assume that a big number of Steam Deck buyers doesn’t use their device, I don’t think a user base north of 10 million is too far fetched.

So the problem isn’t the 3% number, it’s the developer’s / publisher’s attitude to expect that Proton just works without any QA and that Mac users are somehow valuable while the Linux peasants are not.

Worth saying the 3% market share is very new, and previously the share has been way way below this. At 3% that is millions of users but even that is hard to justify a linux release; many games dont even get MacOS versions even now and it has higher desktop share.

The other problem for linux is version control - libraries are different across distros of different ages, and also constantly update. If you build software on a dependency and it changes in a few years, your game may break. As bad as windows is, when games are distributed a lot of the dependencies are distributed with the game as DLLs and installers for Microsoft tools. But for linux you previously could not guarentee the same version of the same dependency will be available on two distros still actively supported.

It can be surprisingly hard to get old Linux software to run on new Linux distros. People are not generally aware of this as generally its old windows and dos games that people try to get working (so wine or dosbox are used), not old Linux software like Open Office from 2005 or an old version of Firefox. Most linux software continually evolves or its niche and just stops working (unless youre willing to go back and compile from source, and that can get nightmarish if it doesnt compile)

Proton is part of the solution but developing “for” proton is not efficient long term. It is great for enabling windows games to work on linux, but linux native games would be more optimal. We’re just lucky we’re now in a time where there is a lot of CPU and GPU resource available to support the overhead and windows is also so bloated making linux + proton comparatively better.

I suspect Flatpak may be another part of the solution - Flatpak can essentially be a way of ensuring a game can have a fixed set of dependencies which install on any Linux and should just work. Its not that far off the windows model of packaging DLLs, but is much cleaner and contained.

Nix is another potential approach to this.

But developing for Linux wouldn’t take off until the market share is substantially higher. The SteamDeck and tge rumours Steam console may help with that, but for now I think devs relying on Proton makes sense.

It takes a lot of effort for little money.

The effort is not that high if the engine used already supports Linux and was written with cross-platform compatibility in mind (which is every modern engine because of consoles).

Good question. It means to me that developers thought that Linux as a platform was worth targeting. One could conclude, the more Linux ports we see, then more people must be using Linux. It’s my dream for us not to be treated as second class citizens where computer operating systems are concerned.

It can be beneficial in terms of performance if done right. The native Linux build of Baldur’s Gate 3 runs considerably better than the Windows version via Proton, even though the Proton version already runs better than it runs on Windows natively.

On paper, a Linux version of a game would perform slightly better, because they wouldn’t have to use Windows system calls for synchronization and disk I/O.

This seems to be true for the games in my Steam library that have good Linux versions, though I can’t comment on the performance of bad ones because obviously I play those through Proton.

Main Linux target for UE is Red Hat Enterprise Linux for movie CGI. The “we want open platforms” company don’t care about Linux gaming.

That hasn’t been my experience. I’ve played most of their horror games. I haven’t played The Medium yet but I will soon. Their games generally run pretty well for me. I will admit, I am a fan boy though. They are one of my favorite game developers.

Leave a bad review then.

Linux just barely broke 3% share. As a company, whose goal is to make money, would you focus on what 97% of your base uses, or the 3%?

If your game is mobile friendly, treating Steam Deck not as an afterthought may be beneficial. Proton is not perfect. It has bugs, it loads a whole fake Windows environment into memory and API translation costs CPU and battery.

Further more, the company needs to spend QC resources for 1-2 versions of Windows, vs the multitude of Linux distros

That’s completely wrong. For games, the developer only needs to target whatever the latest Steam Linux Runtime is. It’s 100% identical across all distributions where the Linux version of Steam runs. That’s its entire point. Steam Linux Runtime is a more stable target than playing catch up with yearly Proton releases.

Ya, and with Proton working so well, I’d rather focus on Windows, then at most work with Valve on making sure the game runs well with Proton. Way less work.

A lot of the “native ports” are done by a third party studio, and they don’t maintain it. Because of this, many games perform better through proton than natively.

Also save data is not shared between the versions, so if you’ve already sunk a lot of time into playing the buggy native port, switching to proton requires you to start over.