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Comment by jebblue | Hacker News Reader

I agree in both cases. There would be no Ubuntu today without Debian (although I've never installed it because I tried years ago and found it to be too difficult which is why I went with Ubuntu after becoming less than enchanted with RedHat) and really I thought case issues were a thing of the 90's, early 2000's at the latest. I've read that Debian has gotten easier to install though but I'm not sure from their web site which one. They need to get someone with a marketing background to help them with their web site.

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I can totally sympathize, and we'd like to support every distribution. :-( But the simple statistics show that we get the most bang for our buck by supporting Ubuntu because of its desktop market share.

The great thing about the Linux community is that it's full if crazy smart people who will go out of their way to make sure stuff is working on their distribution. And of course if something isn't working on your distro, it'll be just like the player -- send us a bug report or poke us on the forums, and we'll do what we can. But in order to not spread our resources too thin (especially considering that this is starting off as an experiment), we have to set some boundaries, and we need to do what will make sense for the largest number of users.

And case sensitivity problems will exist as long as we have a mixture of some platforms (Windows/OS X) using case-insensitive filesystems by default, and others (Linux) using case-sensitive filesystems by default.

I think the point that grandparent was trying to make is that with Debian support, Ubuntu support comes almost for free, and you get other Debian descendants included as well. It broadens your set of officially supported users quite a lot for a cost comparable to adding support for a new Ubuntu release.

While generally it's also true the other way around (if something is made for Ubuntu, it's likely it will work on Debian without big issues), it would be nice for companies to recognize Ubuntu's roots and make the support official.

Of course in practice the community will quickly report back to you something like "hey, change your dependency to include libjpeg-turbo8 or libturbojpeg0, in Debian there's no libjpeg-turbo8" (real example from early Steam package), however, maybe it's just me, but when I see something having official support for Ubuntu only it sounds like "we were too lazy to give it a try on other distros", while explicitly stating support for Debian-based distributions starts sounding much more professional :)

You haven't been asked to support every distribution, just Debian, and possibly Ubuntu. Please pay attention to this advice. Supporting Debian practically gets you Ubuntu support for free, as well as a number of other popular distributions.

I am going to save this comment for the next time someone asks why more games don't have official Linux support.

Steam and most Linux games can be run on any distribution with a bit of work on the user's part. The problem with officially supporting something is that suddenly the vendor is responsible for the game not working. That shit costs time and money. You say Debian, but sooner or later someone will demand support for Damn Small Linux. It's better to just stop at Ubuntu and let users of other distros install the right dependencies themselves.

Perhaps you're new to Linux. Let me assure you that Debian is a very popular distribution upon which many other distributions are based, and is in no way equivalent to suggesting support for one or a number of niche or less popular distros. I don't even use Debian myself, but I suggest it because I know that if Debian is supported then getting support for my preferred distribution will be effortless; the same is true for Ubuntu.

I wanted to play around with Unity several times so if I get to do that it would be fun, thanks to you and your company for looking at making it a reality.

Even worse, on Mac OSX some people use case-sensitive file systems. So you’d have to support it anyway.

No, the only sane way is if only the standard OSX config is supported. You can't do all kinds of weird things with your system and still expect it to be supported. As a developer, you want to support as few types of systems as possible, because that's easier and a tiny number of types comprise the great majority of systems. The extreme variant of this is of course console exclusivity.

iOS uses a case-sensitive file system, so that's one reason to keep it working if you already support the other OS in the family.

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