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Gamedev and linux
(treebrary.pone.social)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
I remember a gamedev complaining about this on Twitter but the outcome he came to was that he hated that Linux users submitted bug reports, stating the OS itself was broken and he refused to help any of them.
I remember threads like this from back when Valve was pushing Steam Machines. Won't name names, but there were very successful developers throwing tantrums once the bug reports started to flood in. Many weren't prepared to actually provide support and spent years regretting it (according to postmortems.) I managed to get a refund on one game after the developer's Twitter rant went completely off the rails re: Linux being unfit for desktop. Weird that they were 100% fine with Linux when it meant getting my $15, $20, or $30. Makes you think!
Garry from Facepunch was pretty down on Linux from Rust (the game) because of the high bug to purchase ratio and because some stuff just didn’t work on the Linux version of Unity but worked fine on Windows. I mean, fair enough.
Looking in to it a bit more, it looks like they handled this extremely well, admirably even! https://rust.facepunch.com/news/updated-linux-plans
I remember this. I refunded the game ASAP. For the longest time they've neglected the Linux client to the point where it was just broken and crashed often and you couldn't even play with Windows players because the Linux client was so far behind. And of course the Windows version ran just fine on Linux via Proton. Yet they seemed surprised and annoyed whenever Linux players pointed this out. That's where I lost all my respect for them as a developer. I would refund Gary's Mod too if I could.
You shouldn't remember the ravings of idiot minds.
Only recalled cause of this dev doing effectively the inverse.
I was not faulting you. I was advising best practices.
Good devs are good regardless of context, they may have their personal preferences but in the end welcome bug reports and feature requests, especially the helpful ones because it helps the project. Bad devs are dicks regardless of context as well, all they care about is review rate and other numbers appear in the scoreboard
Professionals have standards.
IIRC it was Planetary Annihilation and the guy ranting wasn't even a programmer.
Yeah this article is a nice juxtaposition to that deranged rant. Hopefully if more game devs see it they'll appreciate the Linux gaming community a bit more.
A dependency was missing, betcha?
I've seen that several times. I expected that's where this post was going, nice to see that was wrong.