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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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My personal opinion is that Windows is an easier target because all Windows machines are consistent in their underlying interface with the user's hardware. Same idea with MacOS. You know what display manager and graphics library to target, and what packaging format to target.
Then, there's Linux, which can be one of any number of distributions with varying software stacks, packaging formats, etc. It's not that Linux gaming is radically difficult to support, it's just much less standardized. This makes it a lot more work for a much smaller demographic. The Vulkan graphics API has made some of the software issues much less of a problem, but you still have to contend with things like different display managers and stuff like packaging differences between distributions.
Makes sense. Would packaging like Flatpak or AppImage be an option? Or just make sure it runs with Wine? Probably all not that straightforward.
Making sure they run well with Wine is probably what many game devs are dong who specifically want to support Linux. Right now the vast majority of games run out of the box on Wine, so there probably isn't much a dev has to do if they want to make sure it runs great.
I think the problem with packaging isn't so much that there aren't good options. Some people don't like Flatpak. Some people don't like snaps. Maybe AppImage would be a good option. But these are all choices that can potentially fragment the target demographic even further, which reduces the value returned for the time invested in supporting it. Just my opinion, certainly not an expert.
Wine is a great solution for windows-only things. The great thing about gaming, though, is that many of them are using languages like C++ which have full support on Linux systems natively. If you then have your graphics running through Vulkan, that also works across platforms. So, in my opinion, Wine shouldn't be something we continue to need for gaming. Not saying Wine won't be used or won't continue to be useful for gaming, just that it doesn't have to be the primary path to support Linux.