Steam Linux Usage Was At 0.74% For July

[GI_Jack]

So you meant to say that the issue is distro fragmentation?

Distro fragmentation is not nearly as bad as everyone makes it out to be. The reason, is there are many distros, but there are only a few parent distros.

So most distros are pretty compatible with Debian, Redhat, Arch and Gentoo.

with systemd, all the distro specific initscripts now became standardized.

[Almindor]

This is something that flatpak can rectify for the most part. All non-standard deps can be be packaged with the game and run in an isolated container.

Sure for libraries. But not dbus for example.

I had a recent run-in with a dbus issue where a game was using it for something (I suspect window management or such?) and it basically just froze due to a dbus error. Turns out the older dbus libraries packaged with the game were sending messages that the newer OS dbus rejected.

It's not all in the .so files, there's a lot of IPC and other stuff going on with modern distroes and it's not so simple to keep things going accross.

Even on ubuntu with the "supported on ubuntu" there are usually issues. See steam controller games support etc. I had to return at least 3 games that had the "controller supported" flag on steam, because they didn't actually. It either didn't work fully, or at all. Worked on windows of course. note: my controller works ok on other titles so it's not some udev permissions issue or such. From what I can say it depends on which libs the games used to drive the controller.

For closed-sourced games to work reliable accross linux distroes and versions we'd need a sort of standardization of libraries, APIs, ABIs and protocols and backward compatibility of at least 2 years, preferably 5.

Oh wait, thats windows

So in the end I just have windows as a gaming OS and linux for everything else. I think most people settled for this setup.

[entropy]

Why don't they charge developers a little less in case they provide Linux builds?

[bintsmok]

Linux is not good for closed source software like games.

Almost every time I want to play a native game (steam or otherwise) there's always a catch.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM2Ytmu0abc-1o5_MoZ6AK0zmMH4FlKYF

[GI_Jack]

Sure for libraries. But not dbus for example.

They could in all likelyness provide an API translation layer.

[mastercoms]

Steam has a NASTY habit of downloading old library files very often and installing them causing lots of issues. Valve has yet to fully implement a checker to ensure the systems libraries are used first, it doesn't help when each distro has its own idea of were to put them and we all know Valve only really cares about ubuntu defaults.

It has been a while since they implemented preferring native libraries.