I'm not a big gamer but after watching the industry and Linux/open source in general for many, many years, I'm more convinced than ever that it's the gaming community who will save general purpose computing (that's also a nod to Valve for everything they've done for Linux as well, which has been major).
To this day, I have exactly one game that I have not managed to get working on my linux system: GRIS, bought from GOG. I tried everything suggested online, nothing worked. Since then (I still have not played GRIS), I tend to get stuff from Steam.
Lutris handles the wine config for me, works 99% of the time.
Have you spun up a SteamOS VM?
Demanding that a small shop fighting DRM now also funds support for your rare operating system is some massive entitlement, especially since there's plenty of ways to make them work now.
https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
They could put a permanent banner on their website, I'm sure that would bring in some signatures.
Every game clearly indicates whether it provides a Linux installer so there aren't any surprises there, and even in the cart you'll get a banner message saying something like, "Some of these games don't work on your operating system (Linux)" to avoid surprises.
You can even search the store filtering only for games that provide a Linux installer, which is a control I use regularly. It's disappointing how few games do offer that, but it's getting better everyday (for which I largely credit and thank Valve).
They don't support Linux with GOG Galaxy, but given they maintain compatibility with Lutris and Heroic and others I think I actually prefer that to official GOG Galaxy Support.
This is a bit of an issue.
For example, Dead Cells offers daily challenges and has a few items locked behind completing them. They facilitate these by using the platform's tooling, which means the GOG version uses Galaxy and Linux users can't access it. And as far as I can tell, there's nothing on the site telling you this, troubleshooting the problem took a fair amount of digging.
A small thing, and I still opt for GOG over anything else, but it can be annoying.
This is one of my problems with the "PC gaming = steam" attitude that has become prevalent, PC as a platform is broad and varied, and if you're going to sell your product on multiple stores without making clear that they're different then you really should support them, otherwise be honest enough to only sell where you are prepared to. I'd say managing expectations and who's responsible only gets muddier when you're involving compatibility across different windows versions, hardware generations, or different OSes entirely.
[1] - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zjwUN1mtJdCkgtTDRB2I...
1: https://github.com/imLinguin/comet 2: https://www.gog.com/forum/dead_cells/daily_challenges_on_lin...
On my homemade NixOS SteamOS-like gaming box, I have it boot into the SteamOS interface, and it's pretty and console-like, and it's nice to be able to quickly install my GOG and Epic games and automatically add it to Steam so it can be easily played with that interface.
Windows gaming really needs to stop.
The linux kernel one is very stable, but the libs ones isn't.
As soon as the dev ensure and cooperates with wine/proton to make it work nicely, i'm game.
Needing those old libs in linux is rather cumbersome, if at all possible. So having wine doing the translation layer is a really good thing. As it frees the devs to be able to focus on 1 plateform.
I also noted that the switch enabled a lot of linux native ports. That's also a nice side effect.
TBF, that's also true when compared to Windows. The only actually stable ABI in all major OS's are Linux Win32 via Wine.
> (because glibc is forwards compatible, but not backwards compatible).
I've lost count of times I've had "portable" binaries not work because I'm using a newer version of glibc and the binary was compiled for Ubuntu/Debian.
The only "standardised" way of making native Linux apps portable and "work for life" is to use the thing that worked in the server space, containers, Flatpak being the vendor-neutral and more widely supported for desktop apps.
Outside of graphic and input, game engines make use of very few native APIs compared to applications as they're made to be portable with consoles.
I actually will often get better performance doing it this way; Jupiter Hell, for example, has a native Linux port, but I almost exclusively play the Windows version on Linux. I'm not entirely sure why this is, maybe performance issues with OpenGL compared to the D3D->Vulkan pipeline.
Linux has so much fragmentation between distros and the like, the Windows API is ironically one of the easiest ways to get stuff working consistently on Linux. If you're playing games on NixOS, for example, you have to do extra work to get Linux versions working a lot of the time because NixOS kind of breaks dynamic-linking by default. If you play the windows versions on NixOS, it's often as easy as `wine myGame.exe`.
Maybe someone at GOG will actually read this and let a project manager to let a programmer know to fix this. Because they keep doing everything else other than fixing a really really annoying bug. We shouldn't have to force-quit apps!
https://www.gog.com/forum/general_beta_gog_galaxy_2.0/macos_...