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Comment by bjo590 | Hacker News Reader

https://store.steampowered.com/linux

If a game is going to support Windows + macOS than it isn't much more work to also support Linux these days. There are many games released on Linux every year.

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That's right, Proton is amazing. I've been playing classics like Rome Total War on my Linux setup

Beyond that, most game devs today use established engines like Unity or Unreal, which typically have one-click build buttons for all major platforms. The level of abstraction has been raised, which affects not only game logic but even things like graphics APIs (DirectX vs Vulkan vs Metal) and packaging (installer, icons, etc). The bar has never been lower to throw in Linux support, even if you don't expect a huge market.

It's sad that the CEO behind Unreal, Sweeney, bought Rocket League, which uses Unreal, and promptly removed Linux support.

I've seen it argued that releasing a Linux version (even using Unity/Unreal) is worse than releasing a Windows version that runs on Proton, because the Windows API is stabler and the Linux version will inevitably bitrot without continual updates.

There's a serious rumor that this is what actually killed rocket league on Linux. Why maintain a fork if proton is better anyway?

Proton is good, but in no measure 'better'. Linux isn't as unstable as everyone makes it out to be. Quite the opposite. Proton still has to work on linux, afterall. If Linux support bitrots quickly, then so does everyone dependent on proton.

While Linux might not be as unstable as everyone makes it out to be, your argument doesn’t support that at all. The point is Valve maintains Proton so that everyone and their mum doesn’t need to maintain their own Linux fork that’ll bitrot. Without an entity maintaining Proton it could stop working in a few months for all we know.

Yes, and nobody knew how to deploy or use Linux applications until Docker came along and saved us all.

I for one knew how to deploy Linux applications long before Docker but know nothing about the GPU/graphics stack on Linux which is crucial to game devs, and FWIW I ran into graphics problems when I tried Ubuntu Desktop (yeah, just the vanilla Desktop, not gaming) on my Nvidia GPU last year, so again your snarky response contains no relevant info at all.

Better controller support, especially vibration, and higher frame rates count as measures in my book. Have you tried it?

Yes absolutely. Proton is a great product. But underneath, it's still Linux. So saying 'Linux support is terrible, Proton is better' makes absolutely zero sense.

That's really interesting, I hadn't heard that

Also https://itch.io/games/platform-linux

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