Our post starts off with OP sharing their hypothesis on why very few games are developed for GNU/Linux - not because of low market share, but because of 'backroom licensing and exclusivity deals'.
The post is relatively well received and generates some interesting discussion, but the slapfights begin when OP starts replying to every comment that disagrees with their assertion.
Some comments trimmed for brevity, click the links for the full text. I've linked a few nuggets but OP is all over the comments.
Is Game Pass the same thing as Windows exclusivity?
OP:
It's money from Microsoft which often implies exclusivity. [...]
Commenter:
OP:
Making vague and accusatory statements does not prove anything.
You're only trying to discredit my idea by insulting me. It's a last ditch effort of someone that lacks arguments of his own.
Do game developers have the facts? Or are their bosses lying to them?
OP:
Indie game devs never get exclusivity deals because of how small their potential sales are.
And if you're working for a big game dev company as a developer then you sure as heck aren't privileged to the reasoning behind your boss's decisions.
All you get is pretenses and platitudes just like any other employee.
Another commenter jumps in and the thread eventually ends with:
I don't usually block people here but you've crossed a line I cannot tolerate.
I really hope you seek professional help. You are a deeply disturbed individual.
Another game developer adds their take
I've tried to ask for Linux and macOS support at some of the places I've worked at (because using a different compiler helps flush out bugs) but it is very hard to argue against the data to management AND publishers. [...]
OP:
You disagree because your boss told you something else and you believe him?
Dude...
Commenter:
The Steam Hardware Survey shows the same ~1% data.
You are in complete denial over the facts.
The book club joins the fray
TLDR big word budget, rambling confused conspiratorial nonsense
OP:
Commenter:
Some commenters just go for the jugular
It's absolutely low market share. It's not that deep and you're not that smart.
OP:
and
why is this theard still up? why isnt this absolute low iq moron banned yet?
OP:
All this and more in the full comments, sorted by Q&A for your viewing pleasure. You'll have to expand to view most of OP's comments since they've been downmarseyd.
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It's also genuinely a pita to program a graphical application on linux comparatively. For wayland, you're probably relying on wl_roots, which is a notoriously shit library*, writing your own version of the protocol (90k loc, subject to change every month or so), or using sdl. You're then probably using vulkan, which is extremely powerful when it's up and running, but then it's so much easier to get that wrong than d3d11 (haven't tried d3d12), takes approx all year to initialise sometimes (I've had 1+ second waits for the vkCreateInstance function) compared to maybe 10 ms to get a window open on windows, and then a good 20 users are waiting at the other side.
With windows, it's a win32 app which has somewhat okay documentation but a good 30+ years of knowledge floating around that reasonably easy to get access to (lolzy bugs though)** and probably 95% of the market. Also, with proton, you're close to 100% of the market in practice. Also graphical debuggers are just amazing on comparison, though when the rad debugger is finished this is less of an issue.
linux nerds don't understand that just because the operating system is nice for writing c in a posix style, and just because neovim etc have clearly been written to acommodate them, that windows is just the superior target. Even if all of the internals of linux are probably superior, it just doesn't matter if it's so fricking hard to get something up and running. Epoll is better and faster than io_cp, but io_cp is such a superior interface to target that io_uring is basically a copy of it. Also, on that note, a readiness vs complete system for non blocking events is r-slurred.
!codecels
*excellent drama article waiting to be written about the author
** try making a swap chain in the main function
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Also modern engines are slow, bloated pieces of crap to develop with that normies see fun videos of and think it's the bees knees. Nanite comes at a cost; you've now abstracted your main game loop to be an endless loop of callbacks, probably edited the version of unreal that you have, and possibly haven't saved that much time. Also all the lightning from game engines looks the same
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Most game developers don't write their own game engines so there's some truth to how easy it is to generate a Linux build.
But what OP really misses is that just generating the build is only the first step. They still have to play test on every platform and there are gonna be bugs that show up in the Linux build and not the windows build, so it's just not worth it for the extra effort.
I've also never had issues with epoll but it's pretty rare for me to use it directly, asio is far more common (and arguably can be quite annoying to use).
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lol i asked a dev once why he didn't export a linux build of his game (i use arch btw) and he said there was less bugs and higher frametate in proton so he couldn't be assed to figure out why
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Isn't proton linux?
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yes, so everyone should use proton instead of asking him to export a linux build and figure out why there was a bug in it
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If I recall, a lot of bugs that show up in the loonix build tend to show up in windows, too, but windows tends to compensate for the fact in different ways, or something.
Though again - if you just want to release actual software 'correctness' probably isn't that high on your list of priorities compared to the 'selling to the largest audience' part of the biz.
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Especially for vidya tbh, of all the software "sub-industries" vidya is one where bugs don't matter at all unless they significantly impact gameplay.
I will say that I think this is in part because vidya devs are some of the worst software devs, primarily because they get paid the worst so for the most part competent software devs go do something else.
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I haven't used boost asio all that much or looked into the internals so I'm not 100% sure but I imagine it's probably effectively a completion based run time. Epoll is annoying as soon as you start doing async stuff where ready doesn't mean complete, eg an async file write/ read marks the file ready immediately rather than once it's done.
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Daily reminder the Gnome team refuses to support server-side decorations despite (Mac, Windows, and KDE doing so) which fricks over games like Factorio:
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1cmsuen/a_linux_support_dev_from_a_very_popular_game/
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I fricking hate gnome so much it's unreal
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Always cool to hear from an actual programmer.
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I can't even imagine how many things would have to go wrong in my life for me to choose to write a gui app in linux
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this is a post I made of a linux issue I had this morning
I'm sure it's some weird permissions issues or something but it such an annoying issue to deal with and trouble shoot considering it's supposed to be "the year of the linux desktop"
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Sounds like a skill issue honestly.
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bash sucks but also sounds like ur doing something r-slurred tbh
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Ironic because the Linux permissions model is so much simpler than the windows one lol
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I absolutely hate how terrible scripting ACLs is under Windows
Yeah it goes a little deeper than Linux, but shit sucks so bad
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Slow as dogshit too. God help you if you're making changes on a laptop with a HDD.
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I dunno. I'd rather deal with bash scripts on linux then batch/cmd/powershell bullshit on windows. I've got this script on winderps that sets the backup file to "current date" + time. It worked flawlessly for two months, but now it fricks up and won't complete. The syntax for the time-date command no longer works. It's frickin r-slurred.
I've dealt with powershell for years, and it's such a pain in the butt because it doesn't like outputting stuff as simple text or something like a table so I can copy-paste it as a .csv. It's some kind of "object" with "properties" that have to divined in order to then convert into something useful like text. It's infuriatingly r-slurred.
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Most file managers you can open up properties of the file and check the "Allow running this file as a program"
aka
chmod +x filename
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oh, it's also a linux version without a UI, it's got OMV installed on top of it.
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there was also some weird ownership stuff going on with it
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Snappy worthy
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!fosschads, we have soundly defeated the Applestrags.
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There are a ton of games on linux nowadays and Proton can sometimes actually do a decent job. smh zoomers don't know how good they have it. I remember when the only linux games were World of Goo and SuperTuxKart, and if you were lucky wine wouldn't completely lock up your system
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BSD cucks still don't have games unlike us !linuxchads
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Ahem, the Playst–Oh my God you're right. The PS5 still has no games!
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for years I only played lincity, supertuxcart, and flash games
Until Minecraft, which had native linux support from day one
I remember when the proto-version of minetest came out and hit the repos. That was a good day. Every MC update made MC slower, but every MT update made MT faster. There was always a cool mod coming out.
one time I fired up MC and it literally melted my computer, RIP
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Was this ever worth playing? I remember starting it up once but it felt like a weird techdemo version of minecraft even with whatever the newest 'minecraft clone' modpack was at the time.
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Whatever newstrag, try some battle for wesnoth
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Making a linux build is trivially easy now. Most major engines just have a "build for linux" button or flag then you could fire up a VM for testing. Unless you are using a crazy amount of windows specific system calls (idk why you would if you are already using an abstraction layer like an engine). The only tricky thing is anti cheat. Still with wine/proton getting better most devs cant even be arsed to click "build for linux" in an engine. Considering the average intelligence of modern devs (esp indie devs) they prob don't even know how to spin up a vm.
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I think the main problem is that if you offer it as an option, then you are obligated to make sure it works. Which is a whole lot more effort than just clicking build.
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Exactly. People already don't understand the reason things are poorly optimized these days is because there are so many different permutations of PC hardware, devs don't have time to test every possible configuration.
Now add Billy the Script Kiddy's rare linux distro to the mix and you have even more variables. Just not worth it.
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Because everyone uses a third party engine and doesn't know or care to optimize it?
On top of that, there's only so much optimizing you can do if the engine is a clunky piece of mess (like Unreal)
And on top of that, pretty much every programmer on AAA titles are mid at best (good programmers are neurodivergent and never make it past HR screening) and their understanding of programming is on par with a dog's understanding of planes, so when you ask them to optimize their code, they force a few code patterns in and call it a day
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I don't doubt that laziness is a factor but there's a reason sometimes games come out beautifully optimized for PS5/Xbox but run like dog piss on PC and that's because the devs were given console dev kits and consumer hardware has the same specs.
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Unreal is just overused by studios who don't know how to optimize it. There are plenty of UE games that run well.
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did you ever open any game engine ever?
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I don't think this' really the case since half the time a dev makes a linux build it's kind of granted that you'll 'figure it out'.
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Like others said, you have to test on every main distro of Linux. Each one crashes and throws vague errors and takes weeks to debug.
For what? The like 15 people that use that distro and might (probably won't) buy it?
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No you don't.
When you release a game then you say that it only supports Ubuntu, just like many games only support Windows.
You're r-slurred.
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It doesn't matter what you say because of two factors.
1. R-slurs will do it anyways and leave you a negative review when it doesn't work
2. Linux customization goes a little too deep that you can't count on people not having created some weird conflict because they copy pasted commands from online two years ago that ended up breaking it. Then they leave you a negative review when it doesn't work.
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It does matter under what conditions you release your product due to legal responsibility and repercussions.
Again you're 24 and r-slurred.
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Have you been drinking? That's totally unrelated to the headache I'm talking about
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Which only the Windowsstrags of Linuxstrags use (so like 3%)
You're no true linuxcels unless your distro has 100 installs tops and runs on libraries no older than 2015.
EDIT: Downmarsey me cause I'm right, BYATCH!
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More like cause you're
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Ubuntu is the "I wanna brag that I use Linux but I don't have to use Linux" of Linux distros.
You'd know that if you used Linux for anything other than warming up your cold, secluded server room where you have been banished.
Everyone worth something emulates Windows on Linux or God forbid sideloads his machine with a filthy non-Linux OS.
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Debian chads know to only use libraries from before 2015
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Most of these guys who ship linux builds just test on Ubuntu and it just werks on my fedora machine
. Unless ur doing so crazy butt shit alot of this stuff is generalized in engines.
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It's because Linux is gay and they don't want the dreaded LGBT tag on steam.
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Do game engines not compile to Linux?
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They often do, but game devs don't find the effort of testing and fixing the resulting build worthwhile. There's a lot of work in supporting a target platform beyond building for it.
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Steam and valve made a huge leap for Linux when they made Steamdecks, writing the emulator and a lot of code from scratch.
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Do you know what WINE, the name of the Windows compatibility layer, means?
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Motherlover, do you understand that WINE literally stands for "WINE is not an emulator"?
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Whatever
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Proton is not an emulator and was not built from scratch.
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You know how games are compatible with one or two versions of Windows?
There are dozens of mainstream distributions of Linux. Nobody wants to test that
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Just static link maxx.
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What lunix users can't port the game them selves ?
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It's because before companies like Framework and System76, everyone (even brands that sold laptops with Linux preinstalled) had atrocious Linux support. Now that someone can buy a Linux machine that just works (that's what Chromebooks are) Linux usershare has predictably increased.
Google has also made changes to make Android more like mainline Linux. Assuming the company doesn't implode within the next 15 years, I could easily see Android using the mainline kernel.
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NO NEIGHBOR NONONO YOU WERE SO CLOSE BUT SO FAR. THE INNOVATION OF CHROMEBOOKS WAS NOT "JUST WORKING" IT WAS GETTING THEM INTO SCHOOLS ON GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS. NOT ONLY IS THAT MUCHO BEAUCOUP MONEY BUT IT ALSO FORCES MILLIONS OF KIDS TO USE THEM. THERE ARE NOW MILLIONS OF ZOOMERS THAT HAVE NEVER TOUCHED WINDOWS AND SEE IT AS THE WEIRD G*MER OS.
AND NO BOOMER, GETTING IT INTO SCHOOLS IS NO LONGER JUST THE LIBRARY AND COMPUTER LAB. EACH ZOOMER GETS HIS OWN PERSONAL ZOOMER TOP THAT THEY HAVE TO COMPLETE ALL THEIR ASSIGNMENTS AND EXAMS ON. THIS IS WHY CHROMEBOOKS WON. THIS IS HOW YOU WIN.
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The biggest issue with Linux
gayming 
I've had were the eyerape 
settings in Highfleet not working. Other than that it's fine, it may be fiddly from time to time but I'm ancient 
enough to know how to use a computer.
That OP sounds like a massive
cute twink 
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I'm happy I deal with c#® so I stay in bill gates' ecosystem forever
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Cute twink
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Like Microsoft gives a frick about pc gaming lol
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space skyrim didn't work on my winder install
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Lmfao he made an account when someone blocked him called /u/you-cant-block-me
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Can you imagine trying to get a Bethesda game running on Linux?
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Micro$oft straight up assassinated member of my dev team when we announced Linux support
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Doesn't hurt that stuff like wine/proton and windows emulators are pretty good (from what I can tell)
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There are only two kinds of programming languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses
Snapshots:
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1guv49z/why_game_devs_do_not_support_linux_and_why_valve/:
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game pass isn't windows.:
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It's money from Microsoft which often implies exclusivity.:
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Another Linux gaming thread where the poster has revealed how much they don't know. And how much they hate the thing they know nothing about.:
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Making vague and accusatory statements does not prove anything.:
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Game developer here. It's not a conspiracy—it really does come down to the number of potential users.:
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Indie game devs never get exclusivity deals because of how small their potential sales are.:
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You are not providing constructive criticism. Instead, you have insulted me on multiple occasions and you are now personally attacking me with your every reply.:
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As a professional game dev I disagree 100%.:
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You disagree because your boss told you something else and you believe him?:
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On one game that we supported Windows and macOS on I looked at the telemetry data first hand on what Operating Systems people were using. macOS was a rounding error. Talking with other game devs the story is ALWAYS the same whether it is it is Linux or macOS.:
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TLDR big word budget, rambling confused conspiratorial nonsense:
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If that's a "big word budget" that you didn't read then I'm not going to ask you what was the last book you've read.:
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If I recall the actual reason's just that most game devs are sub-sexy Indian dude tier codecels on average and don't know how or it terrifies them.
(Though there are benefits to deploying on linux albeit - bugs show up more often in linux that point to issues that affect all OSes.)
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Just let Proton handle everything lmao
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