Basically your testing coverage explodes exponentially. That's why in a former gig the team I was part of decided to go from Linux to only Windows since it way easier to test only for ~3 majors OS versions.
Feral and Paradox for instance only support one (1) distribution. If you fall outside that, you're on your own for support, but you get runnable binaries.
[0] https://github.com/flathub/com.valvesoftware.Steam/pull/646 ; yes, LOCALE_* env variables make games crash; also, yes, Feral has been totally unhelpful.
Linux does have a stable ABI. The kernel ABI is stable. The glibc ABI is stable. The OpenGL ABI is stable. The Xlib ABI is stable.
What you can't do is link with a random libpng or whatever that you found on your system and then expect that to work for others. But that's the same on Windows.
Win32 is the only solution for a usable, stable, application-level ABI on Linux. I don't like that fact either.
[1] See CLSID_WICPngDecoder here, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/wincodec/...
Anecdotally I've had great success with it on Fedora and Linux Mint (Mint being a spin-off of Ubunutu).
Package formats are mostly irrelevant for Steam. The only thing that is packaged is a tiny bootstrap script with the proper dependencies to make sure you have stuff like 32-bit system libraries installed. You don't even need to use that.
That is plain wrong. I don't know who started with that line of reasoning, but it is very wrong.
The only good reason for not supporting linux are the drivers. And they will change more with time then with distro.
And no, solution is not flatsnaps. If there even is a problem, the solution is much simpler.
Looks at old Linux binaries not running because of glibc incompatibility or dependency version mismatch.
There is a mountainful of valid complaints for Microsoft, but SXS is one of those "its the least worst but realistic solution" to dependency hell. Someone saying that they are running old Linux libraries (without recompiling or patching) are either lucky to not use dependencies (usually terminal-based programs) or plainly lying.
Not really. (Also older games can also stop running on Windows. It's not really Microsoft's problem except in the XP to Vista transition where several APIs were emulated but in general games (on any platform including consoles) tend to poke everything and use APIs they shouldn't touch at all.)
Though I agree with you that binary compatibility itself is/was not that stable on linux as it was on windows.
you can buy an expensive GPU from nvidia that technically supports linux, for some values of "supports".
> Basically your testing coverage explodes exponentially.
well.. not really? i guess it's the difference between unit & integration testing. all i'm trying to say is that if you need to test out 50 different hardware & software configurations to feel confident that some character interaction happens in some obscure part of the game.. that's obviously untenable :)
in any case, i expect the linux crowd are far more likely to grapple any with issues that may arise, than the windows lot.