https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1kcklcf/comment/mq3fruk/

interesting explainer on why (basically) nobody is porting games to linux

it boils down to the system ABI ("glibc") is not stable, and isolated containers are impossible to monetize.

steam has the v3 version of the same titled runtime which solves this but engines need to start supporting it first

plus if you hate containers (like podman, docker) you're shit out of luck.

also running this runtime outside of steam as an end user is not trivial

so one thing has to start happening, and one thing this one would like to happen:

engines need to support the steam runtime as a build target first

and, the steam runtime should make their own appimage format so distribution outside of steam is less acidic.

@ada frankly what needs to happen is for ABIs to get their shit together and become more stable

@lizzy@social.vlhl.dev not going to happen with the current project leadership and you know that

@ada ? fsf maybe, but freedesktop (on the mesa side)?

@lizzy@social.vlhl.dev mesa has too many cooks, also generally bad testing culture so abi breakages are going to happen

i think recently mesa-git was broken for my configuration because they decided to make some components of mesa static which wasn't updated for a few subsystems

@ada this software has existed for, like, 30 years now? how have they not figured out software engineering yet.

pretty much every regression/bug that gets fixed on wine gets a test, and i would say that when submitting fixes upstream, 80-90% of the work is testing

tho, there's several downstreams (wine staging, proton, crossover) that are more hacky, but those hacks then gradually get turned into properly written and tested patches that flow back upstream and everyone is happy.

i wonder if this model could help other linux software as well

@lizzy@social.vlhl.dev TDD and open source are nearly antonyms at this point, only enterprise (and enterprise OSS) end up having those.

which wine falls into that latter category

@ada it's an issue of culture and not an issue of impossibility, really. a foss community can definitely do TDD, they just, don't, for some reason. maybe because the people contributing to it are too far removed from the average user, if something breaks for them they can just fix it, and without monetary incentives/feedback that forces you to operate in a more user focused way, processes are optimized for developer experience instead

I still have some old CDs with Loki Entertainment, a company from the early 2000s who ported games to Linux: Simcity 3000, Heavy Gear II, etc.

None of them will work today. They're for an ancient version of GLibc. Meanwhile there are still a decent amount of WinXP games that will still run on Win 10/11 (maybe not well; maybe in an offset window and not fullscreen .. but they'll start and make an effort).

I think a stable ABI isn't really possible with just the way most Linux libraries work with all the optional includes and flags. It's the nature of every distro compiling their own versions of everything. You also see compatibility being an issue on macOS. There are a lot of games from 10.7 or 10.8, that have never been updated and will not run on any modern OS version. Apply is terrible about backwards compatibility with OS X, which is why it's never taken off as an OS for games.

@djsumdog @lizzy @ada remember the most stable abi on linux is Win32

@PurpCat @djsumdog @ada yea, on wine things just won't work in the first place 20% of the time, great, what an improvement. but at least it's "stable" or whatever

@lizzy @djsumdog @ada
>things just won't work in the first place 20% of the time

Cue the screaming goose meme on who is to blame for that

@PurpCat @djsumdog @ada in many cases it's a problem with unimplemented or misbehaving shit in wine (source: i am literally a paid wine developer)

@lizzy @djsumdog @ada I mean, there's a difference between trying to run some Windows 9x app from Japan that was literally undumped for years, and some game that worked until they added in kernel level anti-cheat.

The latter is what causes drama as of late.

@PurpCat @djsumdog @ada game companies being assholes intentionally is not something you can really do anything about but "win32 is the most stable abi on linux" implies that the best bet for building an application that works reliably on linux is to build a windows application and run it on wine, which is just plain wrong

@lizzy@social.vlhl.dev @PurpCat@clubcyberia.co @djsumdog@djsumdog.com (on an aside; to be fair on the screaming goose, eac linux enablement seems to be enabled by default now since i can't find a reason why every recent game has it enabled despite not even being aware it's a toggle. it's specifically fortnite that the screaming goose screams over)

@ada @djsumdog @lizzy Not just Fortnite, but also Vanguard, CoD, Apex/EA, etc.

@PurpCat@clubcyberia.co @djsumdog@djsumdog.com @lizzy@social.vlhl.dev it does also seem to be specifically western developers. eastern/slavic seems to be going in the opposite direction (server based detection rather than kernel), probably a sign of the future since cheating is significantly more rampant there.

@ada @djsumdog @lizzy western developers literally only care about money, they can't even patch RCEs in their games.

as long as some schmuck is willing to spend $80 or $100 on Call of Duty reskin 420 with the same problems as last years...

@PurpCat@clubcyberia.co @djsumdog@djsumdog.com @lizzy@social.vlhl.dev a dollar per gigabite, impressive.

@ada @djsumdog @lizzy it's comically bloated btw, you can't just install BO6 you need to install Warzone too and the shitty hub launcher.
https://www.eurogamer.net/activision-warns-a-standard-500gb-ps4-may-no-longer-fit-call-of-duty-warzone-black-ops-cold-war-and-modern-warfare