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Comment by spatulan | Hacker News Reader

It would help if Linux games actually worked on Linux, instead of only on single version of Ubuntu that's usually a few years out of date, and you have to have libraries X, Y and Z installed, only it won't tell you this, so have to trawl through various support forums. And god help you if you're running something truly bizarre, like Debian.

I usually have more success running the Windows version through Wine than I do running the Linux version. I wish I was joking.

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That's interesting, I run one of the more esoteric mainstream distros, Arch, and I almost never have problems with Linux games on Steam. I ran into one issue with Hyper Light Drifter and libxcb incompatibility. Otherwise, everything has just worked to my memory. I remember things were a little rougher years ago, have you tried it again recently?

> I usually have more success running the Windows version through Wine than I do running the Linux version. I wish I was joking.

Glad you find it useful! If you are able and want to support the project financially, buying a copy of CrossOver from my employer is the best way to continue funding Wine's development. Our salaries don't come out of thin air ;)

> esoteric mainstream

Is this slang for hipster?

Heh, fair enough, esoteric doesn't mean what I thought it meant. I was going for something like "unusual" or "non-standard".

That's one of the benefits of Steam as a gaming platform on Linux. It provides a standard set of libraries that games run against, which match those used on Steam OS and Ubuntu.

Occasionally a developer might use a library outside of the runtime and you could run into an issue, but as you say, 99% of the time games will work under any distro. My situation is the same as yours - I run Arch, and almost every game I've run has worked, besides a couple of small issues.

The downside of this is that you might lose out on some performance gains that you could get from newer libraries, but it's an acceptable compromise for compatibility. A lot of the times devs say they don't want to develop for Linux because it's difficult to test against every distro, but I don't think that's an issue. It's fine to test for Steam OS and the last few versions of Ubuntu, and release it for that. With Steam, it'll almost always work anyway, and if there's a few incompatibilities on more complex distros like Arch or Gentoo, users will usually be able to fix them themselves anyway.

Strange. I run Steam games just dandy on Debian Sid with little to no hassle. The Steam runtime provides a base platform with libraries to build against, which cuts down on the library rot and version mismatches that plagued proprietary gaming on pre-Steam Linux, and I find that gaming on Linux using steam now fits roughly in the 'just works' ballpark.

Sure, I'm technically on my own support-wise, but game devs haven't yet rebuffed me for not having the right OS (I submitted a bug report yesterday for Life is Strange - a GPU issue, not an OS one, and pointing out my OS - and got an encouraging reply from Feral today).

Steam Runtime solves that issue. What you describe however happens with GOG games, since they don't have a Steam Runtime-like system to take care of dependencies.

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