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Comment by sascha_sl | Hacker News Reader

A dependency is a dependency. The distro does not matter. It matters what the game depends on and what the distro ships.

Or, you know, snaps and appimage and flatpack. Where your only hard dependency becomes Linux. Which doesn't break userspace.

Some early linux games made the mistake of using low level graphics libraries (not one of the opengl levels), these might not work because the newest drivers just don't support it.

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Except that Snaps and Flatpack are over-engineered inflexible garbage compared to how this is handled in sane environments. Flatpack can't even handle the concept of installing to different media without building a brand new repository on it FFS (I don't know if this is true of Snap because it is far too Canonical-centric for my tastes). There's no reason it has to be like this.

Even AppImage is slightly over-engineered in my opinion, but otherwise the only real failing of it is that since there's no standard for ELF embedded icons (wtf is wrong with UNIX devs!?) it's a shit-show to get them to show up as anything other than a generic one.

This isn't hard, Linux people. Just standardize on a set of core libraries and stop breaking ABI outside of major versions, then you'll magically have this thing we call a "platform" upon which applications can run without being recompiled.

Your helping hand is welcome! Even coordination of developers toward solution is helping a lot, because we have no free but dedicated managers. We are developers after all.

Create ticket in bug trackers of all major distributions and describe the problem and your proposed solution. If your vision is right and attractive, developers will join the movement. This isn't hard, it's just time-consuming.

I would, except I've seen others do that and they are unsurprisingly ignored or ridiculed. Someone already made a standard proposal for ELF icons, nobody uses it.

Linux open source - you can contribute but on your own fork over there in the dark far away from us enlightened folk that actually make worthwhile contributions to this project. I only contribute on things that clearly have no "stewardship" or vested interests, lots of useful proposals shot down

Wow, very constructive, great post, love it, keep it up.

To the end user none of that matters, all they know is that this thing does not "just work". windows and macos has that, no flavor of linux does(currently). i look forward to the snap/appimage/flatpack war, it's long overdue

Eh, macOS breaks old apps like it makes Apple money.

Like Aperture from what.. 2014? Won’t run on the next macOS.. that’s an Apple application that can’t last more than a few years on an Apple system.

Even Linux desktops are better than that, but not much better. They seem so emotional.

And that was for me the main reason i stopped using macOS, as every new version of the operating system made software i had paid money for stop working - to the point that nothing works now.

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