Hacker News Reader

Comment by deng | Hacker News Reader

Yes, that's why you still have these 'ubuntu_12' folders in the Steam installation, since they have never updated this in the past 9 years. So in reality, native Linux development has pretty much failed, and they have put all their money on Proton. That is probably the right decision from a business perspective, but it's pretty much a defeat nonetheless.

View on HN

What's wrong with it? Having the Windows APIs turn into a portable abstraction layer is certainly amusing, but having wine sitting underneath the program is really nice (essentially for the same reason a VM is). For one thing, winedevs are way better at linux support than random gamedevs.

Yesterday my son wanted to play Overlord II that I had purchased ages ago. It has a native linux version, and I remember 3-4 years and a few distro/steam updates ago it worked fine. Yesterday it would hang on startup. I didn't want to spend an evening debugging it, so I flipped the proton override on steam. After a quick reinstall, it worked immediately and flawlessly.

So, I don't care whether a game is native [1] or run on an emulation layer as long as it works and performs reasonably well and, most importantly, it is supported.

[1] the reality of course is that many, but not all, native ports still run on some sort of buggy, proprietary translation layer.

One has to remember what Valve tried to achieve. If I remember correctly, Microsoft back then announced that the Microsoft Store would be an integral part of the upcoming Windows 10. Seeing the huge amounts of money Apple/Google/Valve were making with their stores, they openly played with the idea to only allow application installations through the Microsoft Store, most importantly games.

So Valve tried to break the Windows monopoly on games by creating a native Linux SDK and releasing the Steam Machine, which was based on Ubuntu. The goal was to make Linux a first class citizen as a gaming development platform, not just something to run an emulation layer. The Steam Machine failed, because it simply wasn't very good. Valve quickly lost interest in native Linux and let the native SDK rot away into obsoletion. Fortunately, Microsoft being Microsoft, the Windows Store was (and still is) a terrible platform, so pretty much nobody is buying games there (except for Minecraft), and you can still install anything you want on Windows.

So of course you can say that you don't care if it runs natively or in an emulation shim. It would have been nice if Linux had become a game development platform and not just a kernel with a Windows API layer on top. So in a way, Linux' success here is similar to Android's: Yes, it's technically Linux, but not really.

> Fortunately, Microsoft being Microsoft, the Windows Store was (and still is) a terrible platform, so pretty much nobody is buying games there (except for Minecraft), and you can still install anything you want on Windows.

Microsoft has the disadvantage of being the biggest platform and the most scrutinized.

The Microsoft store is as good as the Apple and Android stores, but people using Microsoft are much more used to downloading something from the website they want to install something from. And developers don't have a strong incentive to send them to the Microsoft store from their website.

And Microsoft being such a big player, even time they make moves, everyone else digs in to prevent them from taking over. An example of the is steam machine.

> The goal was to make Linux a first class citizen as a gaming development platform, not just something to run an emulation layer.

Was it? Or was it a strategy they ended up not needing?

> One has to remember what Valve tried to achieve. If I remember correctly, Microsoft back then announced that the Microsoft Store would be an integral part of the upcoming Windows 10

Your recollection is incomplete. Microsoft was threatening to lockdown Windows app installations by requiring app signing for all executables in Win10. In the worst case, it meant the Microsoft Store would be the only store on Windows, and Steam simply wouldn't work on Windows.

Microsoft was toying with an idea that posed an existential threat to Valve. IMO, Valve's goal was to be unshackled from Microsoft's mercurial whims, and despite a slow start, they have finally achieved that goal in the last few years. Microsoft is still proceeding doen the TPM path, and has a turnkey walled garden - I think Valves call was the right one.

Check OS/2 and Windows compatibility layer.

I think it was Supergiant Games who said that because Proton is good enough, they're don't plan to provide native Linux versions of their games in the future.

Does the game run well in Proton? Then who cares if it’s not native. What’s wrong with using Windows APIs to run games on Linux? Let’s take Microsoft’s API, embrace it, and steal that sweet sweet gaming marketshare.

The other day I bought Ziggurat 2, a great game except for some mysterious input lag on the native version. Partially out of amusement, I tried playing it through Proton and poof, there went the latency. I do not know what kind of black magic it's using, but it seems to work quite well.

I think it's pretty much impossible now to create a modern game with the Steam runtime:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime#default-tools

At least we're past the days where the Steam installer would rm -rf your home directory

Personally I'd rather have all software like this.

Have platform agnostic code, or let it prefer windows. If your compatibility layer is so good I don't care.

Better than what we have now where tons of applications don't run on Linux or Mac OS.

Not so much failed as it was never a real thing in the first place. Valve supported steam machines and linux gaming so they could fend off Microsoft's attempts to monopolize all gaming with proprietary executable formats like in the windows store. Every time MS starts this up again Valve will wave around the linux/steam machine flag until it stops and then they go back to not caring about linux.

> then they go back to not caring about linux.

So they care so little about Linux they are going to release a subsidized console using Linux next year? Give me a break with your cynicism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com