With Valve On Linux, Has LGP Lost All Relevance?

[gbudny]

http://blog.linuxgamepublishing.com/...ased/#comments

"gbudny says:
July 21, 2012 at 12:02 pm

Do you plan to sell games on Steam for Linux?

clivecrous says:
July 21, 2012 at 12:55 pm
We’re certainly open to the idea."

[DMJC]

Everytime some dumbass points out linux support is hard because of libs/distros I remind them that Loki solved that problem over a decade ago. Staticlly linked libs + self extracting executable installers. It's not rocket science.

[Kano]

Usually the libs are not statically linked. I think that would not be allowed by lgpl. Sometimes they use different names however. Older packages require that you replace often libs like openal by newer ones. Same applies to qt or sdl support libs. What matters however is the libc6 used to compile the binaries. Like when you use a distro with new libc6 then the binaries wont run on a distro with older libc6, but usually with a newer one.

[johnc]

That's what id Software used to do.

[DMJC]

That's what id Software used to do.

Everything iD software did on Linux was directly sourced from Loki. They got advice and programming knowledge directly from the Loki programmers for making Linux ports. The commercial Linux gaming scene is very small, but its tendrils extend into some of the biggest companies in the industry, unfortunately not to the management level in most cases.

[gilboa]

Everytime some dumbass points out linux support is hard because of libs/distros I remind them that Loki solved that problem over a decade ago. Staticlly linked libs + self extracting executable installers. It's not rocket science.

/+10.
This is more or less what LGP is/was doing.
(Though I personally replaced the libs with native copies in both X2 and X3 to get additional features (OpenAL/SDL))

The irony is that the same is being done since Windows 3.11 in more-or-less every single Windows applications I worked with / developed.
msvcrt*.dll changes across different Windows versions / VS distributions (let alone side DLLs such as dbghelp.dll) can wreck havoc on unsuspecting users, hence, even Microsoft bundles world + dog DLL in all of its products.

- Gilboa