I used https://github.com/naavis/4k-Intro-Template/ to get started.
The main ingredient of the secret sauce is a special compressing linker, called crinkler.
The main ingredient of the secret sauce is a special compressing linker, called crinkler.
Dont forget that most democoders want to make stuff. Something like Visual Studio, which you can (pirate and) install, and then you type code and press a button with a play icon and see the code run, that’s super nice and it’s had that UX for 20 years or so.
Compared to Linux at the time, which drew the kinds of people who enjoyed building up their perfect Gentoo from scratch and setting up their Vim just right, and making automake detect dependencies on all the distros. To your average demoscener, all that stuff gets in the way of getting graphics on the screen.
These days the difference is pretty much gone though, so it’s just momentum. You can install Ubuntu and a random IDE and code some opengl in an SDL window and things will Just Work just like they would on Windows. And I assume even Linux these days has a way to deal with dependencies that’s as easy for devs as Windows’s “just add the DLLs you need to the zip file”.
Also since intros were size-limited you kinda needed control of your pipeline to achieve the smallest size of the _binary_. For a 4k intro different compilers could produce different sized binaries, the .exe compressor crinkler mentioned above does some "function-order-randomization" to improve compression by a few bytes by having the correct ordering of data/functions so just running a slightly different version and/or not long enough could fail to produce something below 4k.
I got out of the demo scene after the Commodore 64, but isn't the whole point that it's supposed to be hard, not easy? That's what makes it amazing.
At the risk of sounding dismissive, Linux was for the kinds people who enjoyed configuring stuff, digging through man pages, editing textfiles and then recompiling their kernels. It was for people who loved tuning their system 100% perfectly to their needs. Not for people who just wanted to code cool computer art.
Actually I think most democoders, even the insanely good ones, have very little patience. The attractive thing about coding graphics is the dopamine cycle is short. It's code, run, woa cool!, code, run, woa cool!.
For demos the social aspect is important and one thing Windows is good at is that you have good chance of being able to run random exe you downloaded, which is far less a given with Linux and especially with 3d graphics and audio
Flatpak might now represent the sort of platform that could be good enough, but really the best would be to have something similar but more minimal and specifically designed for demos; I'm thinking some kind of sandbox that would run single elf executable and expose just enough primitives (mesa, wayland, pipewire, glibc) to make democoding feasible and would give fair even ground for sizecoding.
Code was often kept secret, to add to the mysticism of the amazing algorithms (which often turned out to be very clever tricks, and not academic breakthroughs), or to simply hide the fact that the code was a terrible mess.
With regards to Linux -- Avoozl and I wrote a 4k intro for it in 1999 [1]. It was quite a lot of effort, with custom ELF headers to shave off a few bytes. There were but few people willing to run the thing as root though. (This was a requirement for svgalib, and us demosceners couldn't understand why unix sysadmins took offence with that :)
If anyone manages to turn it into a YouTube video, I will, ehm, applaud them for it!
Most are 4k exegfx, which means they are still images, but "scalemark" is an animated 4k intro with music.