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Comment by NmAmDa | Hacker News Reader

They are small subset of players because there are no wide support for gaming on Linux. If this change by game developers then this percentage will increase dramatically.

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There's no wide support for gaming on Linux Desktop because historically there hasn't been anything one could call "The Linux Desktop" for them to target. The landscape is so ludicrously fragmented that you can't rely on any software to be installed other than the kernel. Valve got around this by just packing their own runtime libraries with Steam.

It was pretty obvious when Stadia "made" devs port to Linux. When the economic incentive was there, the technology wasn't much of an issue.

Staia presented a known system to target, not a fragmented mess of ever changing 'distributions' that don't even attempt to maintain binary compatibility for a single release.

Distributions do maintain binary compatiblity for base system libraries. They do not bother with binary compatibility for additional libraries that are there to support the applications shipped with the distro. You wanting those libraries to be part of the Linux desktop ABI does not mean that there is no stable Linux desktop ABI.

I'm not sure what Stadia includes in their base system but if they have any interest in long-terms maintenance then I'd expect that the base system is minimal and everything else is bundled with the game - even if provided by an SDK.

For desktop Linux you can rely on glibc, OpenGL, Vulkan, X11 (even with Wayland) and OSS/ALSA/Pulse() being present. That is really all you need* to run a game and there are plenty of libraries that you can ship with your game if you want their functionality, statically linking them when possible. This approach has been shown to work since 1999.

(*) Audio subststem devs' insistence on reinventing APIs is disappointing, but just use SDL or OpenAL Soft or whatever to abstract it for you or tell your users to use the available compatibility tools.

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