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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I’m a software developer that prefers Windows. <waves>

I make video games. Most video game devs used Windows. Most video games are played on Windows. In a great twist of irony a majority of gaming hours spent on Linux now do so through SteamOS and is doing so by emulating Windows! (Well, close enough).

Developing on Linux sucks and is bad. There’s no good debugger. glibc is a nightmare of bad design. Linux package management is bad. Linux is fine if by programming you actually mean devops though I guess.

macOS is kinda sorta ok. But might as well use Windows at that point. Apple Silicon is stupid sexy though. Definitely wish Windows ran on that.

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Doesn’t this depend on the game engine you use? I’m not a professional video game dev but I’ve dabbled with Godot on non-windows OSes and didn’t find it to be a terrible experience

Godot is cool. It’s currently for hobbyists.

Unity works great on macOS. Mobile devs are probably mostly on macOS and Unity. PC and console devs are all Windows though.

Unreal probably works ok on macOS. But as the games are all PC and console games the devs are on Windows. Debugging consoles is typically done via Visual Studio only. And the adult version, not VSCode.

i would like to highlight, and not discredit, the great work valve has done for the linux ecosystem, namely in getting arch based distros to a quality that hacker news comments can write it off as “emulating windows”

for example, all my non-windows, non-steam gamepad support stems from valve investing in improving upstream compatibility to where devices just work, without needing to go to a vendor website to download an .exe for a driver— now that’s emulating windows.

Valve is great! I love my SteamDeck. I just think it’s hilarious that the trick to making gaming on Linux possible was to use exes compiled for Windows.

Is it? When there’s a dominant player that’s practically the only way?

No. Linux just sucks and is bad at deploying proprietary software in a reliable manner.

It's not particularly difficult to target a broad combination of Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox. They're all basically the same. Even x64 vs ARM is largely irrelevant.

In a sense SteamOS isn't even Linux. It's one distribution with no user modifications running on one set of hardware. It's closer to a console than to "Linux".

Meanwhile Linux isn't even a thing. It's many many many different things. Once upon a time I shipped a game that supported Linux. It's been awhile but Linux players were roughly 1% of the audience but they represented 50% of bug reports. And no, Linux users were not "good" users who were simply better at reporting bugs.

> No. Linux just sucks and is bad at deploying proprietary software in a reliable manner.

Yeah this is a feature. Games on Linux are running fine by the way.

Linux just sucks at deploying proprietary software in a reliable manner.

that’s only a tiny aspect of it, which is why i used the word “reductive” specifically

there’s so much more internal plumbing that happened, mostly in the hardware compatibility and device driver layer of the stack.

i’ve been double clicking .exes using wine since 2008. i haven’t been able to use every gamepad under the sun on linux until valve funded device compatibility— not just “steam” or “steamos” or “steamdeck”— the upstream.

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