Fair. I’ll take a working Windows build with proton over a janky Linux port any day of the week
As a cross platform developer I consider this incompetence.
That’s not necessary a bad thing. The world is full of less experienced programmers. But they’re making it look like it’s a hassle to release for Linux when in reality you can foresee and plan for this from the start, without much overhead down the line.
Why do people attribute decisions like that to the competence of the programmers? This is a business decision, nothing else. Most likely, some MBA looked over the numbers, saw a few hundreds or thousands of hours logged for tasks related to supporting Linux, and decided that Proton was good enough. Most likely, no programmer was even asked whether Linux support should be dropped.
And yes, even if you know what you are doing, every build going out to tens of thousands of active players needs to be tested, and that costs time and thus money, which is something every experienced cross platform developer should know.
Why do people attribute decisions like that to the competence of the programmers?
Because supporting multiple platforms, especially in gaming, isn’t magic or rocket science and almost always comes down to the setup of the toolchain.
This is a business decision
Very possible. But I go by their actual statement: “maintaining the native build across many distros was taking time away from developing new content”. My point is regarding the “maintaining […] across many distros” and not the “taking time away”. A good toolchain would make these differences extremely minimal.
hundreds or thousands of hours logged for tasks related to supporting Linux
Extremely unlikely. That would mean more than 10 developers working fulltime purely on Linux support since the release of the game. According to their team page on their website they have 7 developers in total.
every build going out to tens of thousands of active players needs to be tested
This is why experienced developers decouple the game from the platform specific stuff and test them separately.
The game is made in Unity so most of the platform specific stuff should already be production ready. Unity literally markets their engine as “Industry-leading multiplatform support” with the motto “Create once, ship anywhere”.
So my argument still stands. And as I said, it’s not a bad thing. The only thing I dislike is the indirect implication of Linux being a hassle when it would be nicer if they would take more responsibility for it.
On the one hand, it’s a shame in general, as Proton has truly been a pesky thorn on the foot for Linux gaming. There’s a world of difference between having native, first-class support, and basically running every game on an emulator that is on a lease.
Yes, its such a thorn being able to finally drop windows and play all my games on linux.
God won’t someone save us from this terrible miscarriage of justice. If we cant have perfection, then we don’t deserve anything at all!
you’re missing the point. the linux gaming market is increasing, but proton is in some ways a crutch keeping proper linux support from games because its much easier to support just one platform rather than two.
yes yes, if its not the perfect solution, then we should have no solution. its a tired old argument.
i don’t think anyone in this thread is saying we shouldn’t have proton, but just that it is holding back actual linux development. I for one love my steamdeck and use proton all the time.
but facts are facts, and there are less games being developed for linux because of proton.
At my studio we maintain a native Linux version with a custom game engine, and it indeed takes a lot of time. I don’t consider Proton a viable option as we lost the ability to integrate with Linux-specific stuff such as Wayland APIs or better input, but I can definitely see the appeal of switching to Proton… if your team uses Windows. If you have some developers on Linux, you naturally get a Linux build (if using cross platform APIs ofc) and it’s actually faster to cross-compile a Windows build every once in a while (skip the slow ntfs I/O) and ship that. But it requires getting more of the team on Linux :)
But it requires getting more of the team on Linux :)
Get them a Steam Deck and target only Steam Linux Runtime 3.
In a decade, most games will be cross platform but compiled for
windowsproton and people will have forgotten why. Then somebody or some group will come up with “cross platform compilation” and the circle will start a new only to return to proton or some form of it.Please don’t do this
It makes perfect sense to do this. You have no idea how much extra work it is to maintain a Linux-native version that works predictably across the entire range of Linux machine configurations. Factorio has one guy, raiguard (hallowed be his name), in charge of the Linux build, and he wrote a blog post about the unique challenges of supporting the Linux native build.
Proton is already known to be perfectly capable of running most games as good as or even better than Windows. Game developers can defer the issue of compatibility and focus on developing the game instead of having to implement client-side decorations for GNOME users.
I’m a software developer that releases for Linux. I know it’s a pain. I’m just in the camp of thinking we should fix it instead of giving up.
