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Comment by ChikkaChiChi | Hacker News Reader

Without getting into spoilers, I'll say that playing "Inscryption" really got me thinking about Docker's continued development could help consumers in the gaming industry.

I would love to see game being virtualized and isolated from the default userspace with passthrough for graphics and input to mitigate latency concerns. Abandonware could become a relic of the past! Being able to play what you buy on any device you have access to would be amazing.

I won't hold my breath, though. The industry pretty loudly rejected Nvidia's attempt to let us play games on their cloud without having to buy them all again. Todd needs the ability to sell us 15 versions of Skyrim to buy another house.

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For games on Steam there's the Steam Linux Runtime which can run games on Linux in a specialized container to isolate them from these sort of bugs.

There's also a variant of this container that contains a forked version of Wine for running Windows games as well.

Doesn't the Steam Linux Runtime have a problem in the other direction though? Games are using libraries which are so old that they have bugs which are long since fixed or don't work properly in modern contexts. Apparently a lot of issues with Steam + Wayland comes from the ancient libraries in the Steam Linux Runtime from what I have been able to find out from googling issues I've experienced under Wayland.

> Abandonware could become a relic of the past!

That would eat into some business models though, like Nintendo's quadruple-dipping with its virtual consoles

Good. All those games should be in the public domain anyway. It's been 30-40 years, Nintendo has been more than adequately compensated.

Write to your representative and plead to reduce copyright (I'd pitch in for the original 14 year term).

I would certainly do that if I was american.

I agree, but some notoriously litigious companies probably will not.

Flatpak is basically Docker for linux, there are layers and everything. What you're saying should be possible if you make a AppImage/Flatpak out of the Steam Runtime+Proton(if needed)+Game, it should run anywhere with the right drivers.

Good luck once wayland starts to actually be used to run any game from before wayland.

Xwayland exists, all my games use Xwayland, there are no stable proton/wine implementation that's uses Wayland natively.

It exists now, but it will be left to rot once (probably in another 15 to 20 years) wayland is finally ready and most software is migrated to it.

Isn't that what gamescope has been doing for quite some time?

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