GDC Europe survey shows 17% of developers plan to release Linux titles

Quoting: mr-egg

Quoting: Finn

Quoting: Purple Library GuySide question: It seems like Chromebooks have been selling surprisingly well lately. Is anyone writing games for them? Would such games run on normal Linux? If they don't, could a library be written to make a normal Linux run them (or vice versa, to make a Chromebook run games for SteamOS as long as they were lightweight enough for the little thing)? Would any or all of these things be useful for general Linux gaming?

You can already play Steam Linux games on a Chromebook via a crouton chroot. I've done some gaming on my Toshiba Chromebook 2 2014 via an Ubuntu chroot and it plays stuff like Nuclear Throne, Risk of Rain and Binding of Isaac fine. I mean, it's not ideal (don't expect anything 3D to run), but for simple 2D games it's adequate. I've actually been thinking of trying out some VNs on it.

I don't think that was what he was asking. It was not can you technically put Ubuntu on a weak chrome book and play Steam games. I think it was more can chrome games work on Linux with some fiddling/api easy on an existing dedicated gaming PC with Ubuntu on it.. because they are both Linux.

Well, looking up the crouton thing, I think it has potential. It's not a virtualized OS or a wiping of ChromeOS to install something else. It wouldn't be possible to do crouton on Windows, say--it depends on the kernel being compatible. And, apparently it doesn't cause speed penalties. Currently it's kind of rough-and-ready and apparently completely insecure, but it wouldn't be hard to slap some kind of convenient UI on the thing (I don't know anything about security though). The only thing is that it's kind of overkill at the moment--it basically substitutes the other OS' whole userspace, starts up XFCE or something and letting you go from there yourself. But it's a proof of concept for sure--seems like it should be possible to use the same basic idea to launch straight into individual programs meant for the other OS.

I was also interested in the other direction, but actually the solution looks like it should be fairly symmetrical--if you can do it in one direction, you should be able to do it in the other. So if you can make ChromeOS be Ubuntu, you should also be able to make Ubuntu or SteamOS be ChromeOS.

I think there are possibilities here. If something like this got developed and streamlined, then potentially ChromeOS users generally would be in a position to play light SteamOS games, and SteamOS and other Linuxes would be able to play ChromeOS games (and other programs, although since ChromeOS is so browser-centric, on a browser that's available in Linux anyway, that might not matter that much). And then Linux would have more games that run on it, some of them not runnable by either Windows or MacOS, and Steam would have a slightly bigger potential customer base (Chromebook owners), and Linux/SteamOS would have a bigger Steam market share. Everyone would be happier except Microsoft.