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Comment by throw10920 | Hacker News Reader

> When contacted for comment by The Verge, Sweeney described Linux as “a terrifically hard audience to serve given the variety of incompatible configurations.” Asked whether it would be possible to enable compatibility just for SteamOS, he said “Linux is a small market already and if you subdivide it by blessed kernel versions then it’s even smaller.”

Claiming that Linux is a hard audience to serve is BS - just support a single distro (or platform, e.g. Valve's Steam Linux Runtime), and most Linux users will happily use it (or figure out how to get your thing to work on their platform on their own). In the specific case of the Steam Deck, it uses Steam OS and has a very limited set of hardware configurations, so there's exactly one target - Sweeny is just misdirecting/lying in order to obscure the real reason, which is money.

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As someone who ported a game to Linux, and the person in the office who debugged most of the issues, my experience is the exact opposite: users run fringe configurations and get angry when we don't support their exact use case. Or get angry that we use certain middleware. Or replace a random .so file with another one and then blame us when things crash. Or countless other support requests.

Some concrete examples of tickets that were more unique:

* Game doesn't work on ratpoison (turned out to be an issue with focus management, turns out that WM is not ICCCM compliant)

* No sound when using OSSv4 (sorry, we support ALSA only)

* Chat box does not work (turned out to be an input method issue, user was using fcitx, the toolkit we were using only supported ibus for text entry)

* Game graphics are glitchy (bug in Intel mesa drivers, reported upstream, still unfixed https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/2565 )

I stand corrected, then! Linux gamers will complain if you don't support a wide range of configurations. I guess I had hoped that they wouldn't be that entitled (I'm a Linux user only using Ubuntu because I know how difficult it is to support a bunch of whacky setups).

I see two reasonable paths forward from here.

The first is to intentionally avoid supporting Linux, pointing to examples like this one, until Linux gamers get over their entitlement at not having super-obscure things like ratpoison, OSSv4, or a particular configuration of DLLs installed supported by games.

The second is to only support a single Linux configuration. This shouldn't be a ton of work, and still allows you to capture a small amount of revenue from the ecosystem (as well as getting some goodwill from the community - "no Linux support" is something people can beat you over the head with without sounding too unreasonable, but "doesn't support my Linux-from-scratch setup on my toaster's MIPS processor" is not).

What's the clear "money" reason? Because you could just as easily argue that it makes financial sense to support the steam deck - it's a mobile platform that they easily could support by sideloading (i.e. without paying the platform owner), which has been their big fight the entire time?

The "money" reason is they don't want to sink money into developing the game/DRM for Linux, given its small marketshare - they can still claim that they support the Steam Deck with Windows installed, so that comparison doesn't work.

It sounds like they're actually saying they see Linux as a conduit for cheating and they don't see enough upside to be worth that risk.

What a nice guy is that Sweeney! Who cares about Linux, it is small market?! Gamers are gamers no matter what OS or platform they use.

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