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Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

It's more than just graphics APIs - Linux has long supported old-school OpenGL, so that wasn't really the problem.

The state of audio libraries and systems on Linux is worse and OpenAL is now proprietary. Even if you're making a desktop-environment game (E.g. using GTK without SDL) there isn't a good, widely-supported Linux API for audio.

Don't forget the other difficulties with porting Windows games (and software in general) to Linux that libraries like SDL can't help with, like file-system locations, deciding if you want to only support X or Wayland if you need window-manager integration, etc (granted, these concerns are less relevant today as games send to be filesystem-silod, single-window or exclusive-mode applications - but think about how games were in the mid-1990s with the multi-window SimCity 2000 or those desktop amusement minigames.

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> Even if you're making a desktop-environment game (E.g. using GTK without SDL) there isn't a good, widely-supported Linux API for audio.

Depending on PulseAudio is fine now. The amount of people not running PA is negligible. If you don't want to do that, use an intermediary API like SDL or PortAudio.

Doesn't PulseAudio have major issues with latency?

Nothing that could be described as "major," no.

The difference between X and Wayland is way more than needing window-manager integration. You are forgetting that keyboard and mouse inputs run through Xorg so the problem goes way deeper.

You don't have to worry about that if you use GTK or SDL. They support both. The other really important thing in the age of console ports is support for game controllers, and that isn't handled by the display server at all. It has a separate API, which SDL provides a nice high-level interface for.

I think there are some similarities because libinput can be used on X as well as with Wayland.

Isn't there a Linux reference gaming platform?

Android, I guess.

Desktop Linux would be Ubuntu.

People are talking about all the different sound subsystems and input modules, etc... All that choice is great except it fragments the market like crazy.

I was wondering if EA and the other gaming companies had designated a particular configuration as "the" supported Linux configuration.

EA farms out game-porting projects to contract firms that use whatever frameworks they're comfortable with (and in this case, it's backfired).

I think Valve has done most of the legwork with their SteamOS which is based on Debian, but I don't know what libraries or frameworks they're providing as a standard baseline.

SteamOS! That's what I was trying to remember. IMHO, that's what game companies need to do- cooperate on a reference platform and build for that. If users want to game on Linux, then they will also adopt the platform.

On the other hand, there just might not be a viable Linux gaming market.

Battle Field V was never officially ported to Linux.

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