Comment by zxzax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zxzax | Hacker News Reader

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That has nothing to do with Linux at all, you can just as easily get some weird requests from people trying to run your game at 640x480 on Windows 98 or some other strange thing like that.

The usual response here (from any vendor, not just an independent game developer) is to say you only support the latest LTS version of Ubuntu/SteamOS with the officially supported drivers there and that's it. You're absolutely right to do that. If you want obscure distros to be able to run your program, you can open source it and let them deal with the packaging/testing/maintenance. The fact that all the OS packages are open source is the only reason all the random distros are even able to exist, so you're already making it difficult for them when you don't do this. No reason to dance around that.

"just as easily"?

What is the confusion? People on Windows 98 are able to send emails too.

People on windows 98 doesn't expect modern games to work for them. Many people on strange linux setups do expect games working on some linux distro to work for them as well and complains when it doesn't. Those people are the reason linux versions gets so many more support requests.

That's just about managing expectations, and it falls on you to be clear in your marketing. If you said "we support all versions of Windows" then you could expect someone to misinterpret that, the same way they would misinterpret "we support all versions of Linux." So really to make it clear, you might consider only saying "we support Ubuntu Focal" or something like that. Most products I see now make it pretty obvious that they only test on some combination of Windows 7/8/10 and above, so just do the same for whatever Linux distribution.

>you can just

You could, but clearly this developer didn't. You're responding to someone's real life experience with a hypothetical.

It's not hypothetical, I've seen the odd comment like that on various forums and github, etc. You can say you aren't going to support an obscure setup without judging people for having it.

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