Developer of PlayStation 1 emulator DuckStation threatens "removing Linux support entirely" but not yet

By Liam Dawe - 1 Aug 2025 at 11:21 am UTC

Seems the main developer of the PlayStation 1 emulator DuckStation is not happy with Linux packaging, threatening to remove Linux support.

As quick a bit of background - the project was previously under the open source GPL license, but was changed in September last year to a more restrictive license. This was due to people violating the old license, which isn't exactly going to stop anyone violating a new license but anyway…

On the official GitHub a change was made by Connor "stenzek" McLaughlin to remove the PKGBUILD for Arch Linux. In the change description stenzek noted:

I originally provided this an alternative to the broken AUR packages.

However, it seems that Arch users would rather use broken packages and keep complaining to me instead of their packager. I specifically forbid packages for DuckStation (see README.md), and there's no way to request removal of these packages without handing my details over to a distribution I want nothing to do with.

So this is step one. Next step will be removing Linux support entirely, because I'm sick of the headaches and hacks for an operating system that only compromises 2% of the userbase, and I don't even use myself. But I'm hoping the Linux community will be reasonable, because as someone giving up my free time and not being compensated in any way, I shouldn't have to deal with this.

Just grep the source for "wayland" and you'll see what I mean.

Emphasis ours.

However, despite what clearly looked like a threat to just remove Linux support is not exactly true (not yet anyway). While it certainly reads like that was their plan (there's not really any other way to read into such a thing), in the official Discord they later said:

Since people seem to be spreading misinformation (yay), let's make some things clear:

Linux support is not being removed from DuckStation, I have no immediate plans to do that.,

I've created a deletion request for the AUR package that is causing headaches, if they can remove it, that solves everything and we can go back to business as usual.,

If they don't, then we'll see. I don't really feel like playing a cat and mouse game of making changes that prevent it from building/running in that environment, it's easier to just walk away.

What a messy situation this emulator has been.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: Emulation, Misc, Sony

14 Likes

About the author - Liam Dawe

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can also follow my personal adventures on Bluesky.
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23 comments

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WORM 17 hours ago

@Cyril to be clear, we're thinking AUR packages should be fine, right? Since it doesn't distribute the source or binaries? Of course anyone who executes the PKGBUILD would be secretly violating the license as pointed out by that second DrMcCoy comment.

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tohur 7 hours ago

Just package it for flatpak officially and be done.. let it be known anything outside flatpak is NOT supported.. and go a step further do what bottles does and make packagers put a disclaimer in the non flatpak packages!

Last edited by tohur on 2 Aug 2025 at 6:52 am UTC

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Cyril 2 hours ago

@tohur As I said it's already there but... from their Github page:

Due to various Flatpak limitations and Flathub randomly breaking regularly, the Flatpak package is not recommended. We recommend that you use the AppImage instead.

And this comment tells a bit more on this situation:
https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation/pull/3454#issuecomment-2982578243

Thanks for the PR. I'd be hesitant about adding any permission since flathub displays scary warnings for filesystem access, making it sound like my application is malicious.

Additionally, their silly system requires manual approval of any changes, and the last time it changed, they approved the aarch64 variant but not x86. So I had to push a dummy commit and another release, spamming all users with a notification just because of this pointless process. Much larger app stores such as google play don't require such rubbish.

I'm considering dropping the flatpak for this reason and others, but a middle ground where the CI builds bundles but they're not published on flathub is an option. In which case the added permission is a non issue, and I can just request full filesystem r/o access which solves the portal paths constantly breaking problem too.

Generally speaking, I'm not a huge fan of workarounds for one specific piece of hardware that I don't own and can't debug myself. This sounds like something that should be covered in flatpak itself, not applications.

Alternatively, why can't users just manually add the permission themselves? Or, of course, use the appimage.

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