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Comment by highwaylights | Hacker News Reader

Another way to look at this is to say that the massive uptick in Steam Deck users is really good for the future of Linux gaming given that if current trends continue with the next version of the Steam Deck it may well get to the point where it becomes worth it for developers to focus on native Linux builds rather than being Proton compatible. Especially in cases where Unreal / Unity takes most of the heavy lifting away anyway.

I'm not overly optimistic given that the biggest barrier to supporting Linux has always been how much variance there is in terms of what's out there, but it's still a good thing for Linux.

In terms of perceptions of desktop Linux I don't really think it matters. Linux isn't going anywhere and as software probably has more penetration right now than any other operating system ever has.

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> I'm not overly optimistic given that the biggest barrier to supporting Linux has always been how much variance there is in terms of what's out there, but it's still a good thing for Linux.

Nope. The biggest barrier is the FUD around there being so much variance. 99% of desktop Linux is glibc-based. Beyond that, binary compatibility is no harder than Windows. Differrent yes, meaning devs used to Windows have some learning to do, but not drastically different even.

once a developer from a company whose device i had bought, told me they couldn't support linux because every distribution had a different way to open a serial port and read data.

Wouldn't that be handled mostly by the kernel, and they all more or less use the same kernel?

It is almost certainly handled by whatever library they are using to interface. And if they didn't pick one that is targeting linux, then that would be more work for them.

That is, this is likely easily solvable, but it is most easily solvable at the beginning of a project by choice of base libraries. I can understand not wanting to change things after the fact for a presumably small user base.

Are you replying to something else?

They claimed that they'd need a different implementation per distribution. Which makes no sense. It's just open()/ioctl_tty()/read()/write(), all of which are in the libc of every distribution that has ever existed since the 90s.

Fair, I'm putting charity to the claim and assuming that they coded against a Microsoft toolchain. That is, my assumption would not be that it was the different distros, but that is just an easy thing to say.

Yep. But they are so completely ignorant about linux that they probably even believe that nonsense excuse is real.

The WIN32 is Linux's most stable API. Joking aside I don't see native ports becoming more common, we tried that a decade ago with Steam Machines and it was for the most part a disaster made of awful ports and zero support. Proton has a large community around it and just keep getting better every release, I can't see people giving that up.

Steam Machine failed because nobody made them and what we did get was overpriced for the performance delivered. There was no reason to buy or make a Steam Machine over a standard PC, thus no audience for publishers or devs to care about. The Deck delivers something people want and people are buying it and using it.

That said, I think most of us, except for the die hard purists, are fine with Proton compatibility being the main target for companies. As long as a game runs as well as it does elsewhere without restrictions or inconvenience, most of us are happy and don't care about the technical details of how it's running.

> WIN32 is Linux's most stable API. Joking aside

If we talk ABI's not API's, it's not a joke https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/

> The WIN32 is Linux's most stable API.

It's funny because it's true. Valve took advantage of Microsoft API stability guarantees and executed with an overnight success 10 years in the making.

It's actually a great thing, too. You build a game once and it's more stable than any distro packaging could ever make it be.

And just like OS/2 "runs Windows apps better than Windows", it will only reinforce Windows strenght as the main OS game developers care about.

Unless Valve starts extending the Windows API, after having embraced it...

Bottom line is that Valve doesn't want to pay for Windows licences, that is all.

I thought the all this Valve on Linux work came about back when it looked like Microsoft was going to really push their Windows Store.

So less avoiding Windows licences and more avoinding getting cut out by MS.

Both, which is kind of ironic, as they need to emulate Windows and DirectX, and have been a complete failure making studios port their PlayStation, Android and Switch games to SteamOS, despite the heavy POSIX flavour of those platforms, specially in what concerns Android and its relationship to Linux.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking that it's the Steam Deck that's skewing these. Which is fine. Both Linux and MacOS are dwarfed by Windows.

The weird thing is, for me personally, is that of all the games I collected over there years when I did Windows gaming, many of them are now Apple Silicon native. Sure, the big ones like Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises aren't there, but many others are. Even the brand-new Baldur's Gate 3 is on Apple Silicon. No Man's Sky is now too.

I'm not a big gamer anymore, but it's just interesting to see.

There is a problem unique to linux. The linux don't have a stable userspace runtime environment agreed by all parties. Every distro decides their own. This is both a gift and a curse.

The pros of deciding your own runtime environment allows you to customize the system more and even run Linux on machine that has very strict resource limit.

The cons is that it is almost impossible to run a software everywhere without bundle literally anything you use into own binary. The steam itself do it(steam runtime), but I don't know if it is even close to a complete resolution because it don't really solve the problem for softwares outside of steam.

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