Quoting: Guest

Spoiler, click me

You are right in that the ABI unstable nature of Linux makes it difficult to support well. However, it is not impossible, but it does require knowledge and skills that your average developer will not have unless they are already very familiar with the platform.

Steam's runtime was a good attempt to alleviate this, however it creates problems of its own. We used the steam-runtime SDK at VP simply because it gave a nice consistent set of libraries to build against. However, it quickly became a problem that they were too old, and the toolchain used to build against them (gcc 4.5) was also getting too old.

Valve did work on a newer steam-runtime, but it was only usable from inside a chroot. This is no good when you are using an IDE or some other application which wants to call those tools - you either have to run said IDE/app inside the chroot (which can be a dependancy nightmare) or live with a relatively slow invocation of the chroot enviroment for every file compiled.

Yes I know this is where the fanboys start screaming "use makefiles!" but this not what game devs are used to on other platforms, and quite frankly, they are cumbersome.

I did actually start to assemble a custom "SDK" for VP's Linux stuff, based around GCC 4.8 (which was still fairly current at the time).. but other things stopped me getting it finished off. Building your own toolchain with crosstool-ng or the likes is certainly not what your average dev will be used to dealing with!

edit: I should also say that expecting a developer to recompile the game when there's ABI breakage is not an acceptable solution. You really cannot expect a a developer to support something forever, and "just release the source code" is not a viable solution. More work needs to be put into ABI stability on Linux, for it's own good.

Quoting: Leopard

Quoting: AnxiousInfusionI don't know if it's running better now because of patches, or because I finally abandoned that godforsaken fglrx.

Probably because of the dropping fglrx.

How can you stand with it until now?

Quoting: MintedGamerI've given up on waiting for the Galaxy client for Linux, and Witcher 3. Its clear that Linux users are an afterthought to CDPR and GOG.

Valve have done a HUGE amount to make Vulkan and Linux gaming more viable and the number of games in Steam is rapidly increasing, while CDPR have done nothing to help Linux gaming and have been giving empty promises about the GOG Linux client for many years now. My money goes to Valve every time.

Quoting: QantouriscI counted only 5 degrees of freedom:
X Y Z Location, Z,X Rotation

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: BdMdesigNOn GOG its free, too.

As clearly stated in the article, GOG do not have Linux versions.