Hacker News Reader

Comment by aucisson_masque | Hacker News Reader

> Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.

I though the steam deck would be the reason why developper start building their game for linux, but it seems like it's a bigger issue than just making a "linux file". Once they have rewritten the code for the steam deck, what would prevent them to compile the game for Debian and other linux distributions ?

I really have no idea how much more work it is but assumed it would be straight forward.

View on HN

You can run the game on Linux just fine, Larian just won't help you if it breaks or bugs out. SteamOS is just a well-customised Arch fork, after all.

Announcing official Linux support would also require testing on Intel and Nvidia GPUs, as well as other types of AMD GPUs, which would probably take much more time and effort than testing for a device with effectively two hardware revisions you need to test for. I don't think they want the support burden, and I don't disagree with them having had to debug obscure Linux GPU issues myself.

I would assume the issue is all the variation in different distros. Plus the driver/hardware combinations. While some setups would just work they don’t see it as worth spending the time doing the validation/patching required. The steam deck is 1 device to test, with a single software stack. Much easier to target, and with a known customer base. Which brings up the other issue that they would be unlikely to make their money back on a general Linux release. Companies have cited this as a reason for not doing macOS releases in the past and based on the last steam survey Linux usage is in a similar ballpark (2.6% vs 1.8% for Mac ).

Despite all this I think it’s still a move in the right direction.

Valve released a runtime specifically to combat the variation problem. This allows developers to target a specific runtime and Valve will make the software stack work with as many distros as possible.

On the other hand, that stack can only contain so much, and a lot of Linux bugs involve sound subsystems, GPUs, and compositors/X11/window manager configuration issues. You can't quite target the Linux runtime and assume everything will just work, but at least you don't need to target specific versions of glibc and libxml2 anymore.

> Once they have rewritten the code for the steam deck, what would prevent them to compile the game for Debian and other linux distributions ?

You can install Steam on Debian.

I think the value here is that with Steam being the "approved launcher" you offload a lot of "distro weirdness" over to Valve. The value of a standalone build seems fairly low for most game devs.

They're just talking about official support (i.e. support tickets). It'll probably still run elsewhere, they're just not promising to help you with bugs on other hardware & configurations. Entirely reasonable IMO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com