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Comment by richardwhiuk | Hacker News Reader

The key here is that games on Windows don't target the NT Kernel, they target Windows 7, or Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, which are full distributions.

To have any reasonable chance that this will work, you have to target Ubuntu 16.04, or CentOS 7, not just any random Linux distribution.

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But the thing is that a game targeting Windows XP or even Windows 98 still has a good chance of running on Windows 10. On the Linux side, good luck getting binaries made for Ubuntu 14.04 run on Ubuntu 16.04.

Interesting relevant tidbit by Linus Torvalds himself about the packaging and distribution of Linux "desktop apps".

Basically, Linus has made a desktop app, and the website distributes binaries for Windows and OS X, but not for Linux. Link goes to 4:50, relevant rant starts at around 5:58 :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&feature=youtu.be...

Only because Microsoft pours a lot of effort into their compatibility modes, emulating older API versions for old programs.

Seriously? This is just wrong. If you pull down a game for Windows on Steam it doesn't matter if you're running Windows 7, 8, or 10, the likelihood that it'll run fine on any of those is high. The PC games market is decidedly not all running just one version of Windows, some folks are still running XP. But the underlying systems are well designed enough to enable games, and apps, to run just fine across those different platforms. If that's your excuse for games not running well on linux, then you need to find another excuse.

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