Hacker News Reader

Comment by gethly | Hacker News Reader

I heard Jonathan Blow say that the problem of Linux, or native gaming on Linux, is the gazillion of libraries of unimaginable number of versions. I find it funny that investing a ton of time(by now decades) and money into making a API layer for Windows API made more sense than to clean up or somehow standardise Linux itself.

What a mess this thing is. Though, I am definitely not moving to W11, so Linux will be in my future one way or another.

View on HN

Steam works around this using a chroot (container-like) into an environment with controlled libs. That being said, I have never seen it work: I always end up enabling Proton.

There is the school of thought that Wine is merely the Linux gaming ABI, and I largely agree. Native Linux binaries "feels" better but doesn't bring much from a practical standpoint.

I thought Steam uses Proton. How many of these gaming layers are there? Also, it looks like yet another unnecessary fragmentation.

For Linux-native games (there aren't many) it uses what I described, making the system look a lot like Ubuntu to the game. Proton is for Windows (PE/exe) binaries, not Linux (ELF).

Jonathan Blow is sharpshooting and being intentionally difficult in order to sound smart (he really needs to engage in that behavior less, he's smart enough as-is). Virtually nobody bothers with Linux-native binaries for games. Compile your game for Windows, test it on Linux+Proton, find that it probably works fine, it's not hard.

> Virtually nobody bothers with Linux-native binaries for games.

Well, that was exactly his point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com