Quoting: ShmerlWhile it's annoying, I found one relatively simple workaround. Run such games with:

HOME=$HOME/.local/share

Then all that clutter will move to more appropriate location.

Good find! Redefining HOME could be used for many things, it's a cheap "user isolation/virtualization" technology, like chroot but for data. You can add any number of "profiles" in terms of settings/accounts/data to any app, even if it doesn't directly support it.

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Quoting: ShmerlIt's actually ABI forward compatible, not backward. See https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/abi.html [External Link]

I always mistake forward/backward compatibility, it depends on the point of view, probably that's why. Yes, this seems impossible to solve once and for all. Either your game doesn't work because the system library is too old or the rest of the system (that's required for the game to run) doesn't work because you shipped a library too old now. The only solution is to constantly update the libs and ship them ASAP with the game binary or just don't use the modern C++ features and stick to stone ages of GCC 4.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThese days it might also be worth looking into those Snap or Flatpak thingies. Extra fiddling maybe, but near as I understand it could buy you quite a bit of distribution-agnostic-ness.

Snap isn't that good yet. Maybe on Ubuntu it just works but on Debian I only got the CLI apps working. As I understood it, the snap developers have to hardcode NVIDIA driver paths in the framework and I use the binary non-repo driver. So OpenGL doesn't work and at least Krita couldn't run.

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: rkfgSTASIS is suffering from this right now. The engine needs newer libstdc++.so.6 than provided in SteamOS so it doesn't start there. So another advice: check your dependencies on older distros if possible and either ship the libs with the game or link them statically if you can.

libstdc++ is a mess. Even if you statically link it, you might still hit a snag. For instance Mesa is using system libstdc++ in libgl1-mesa-dri, and you can get a conflicting situation.

Well, yes, if you load any system libs that dynamically depend on the same library you linked statically. I'd say libstdc++ poorly versioned and the messages it shows are kinda cryptic for non-savvy people. At least it's backward compatible so there should be no downsides supplying your own version.

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Quoting: EhvisI remember one game where the developer had a Unity3D game running within a day, but had dependency problems when starting from the Steam runtime.

STASIS is suffering from this right now. The engine needs newer libstdc++.so.6 than provided in SteamOS so it doesn't start there. So another advice: check your dependencies on older distros if possible and either ship the libs with the game or link them statically if you can.

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all of us likely know people on Windows & Mac we will end up recommending the game to, especially if it has any form of multiplayer

This one is really important. In my group of internet friends we have two guys on Linux and 2-3 on Windows. It's no fun playing a multiplayer game with random people or alone so if a game is good and is available on Linux you'll get 4-5 sold units instead of most likely zero. It's easy to find nice crossplatform multiplayer games to play together and having additional platforms supported very often encourages Windows sales as well.

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Quoting: heidi.wengerThrough Wine it's getting better and better. Games are getting easier to port later on now that there is Vulkan taking over, game engines get better Linux support..

These two points combined, Wine already supports Vulkan, it just passes the calls through without any noticeable overhead because the API is the same on Windows and Linux. So in the worst case a Wine-wrapped port is almost always possible (except if the game is protected with Denuvo crap or such). Honestly, I stopped caring about the port techniques. If it works fine out of the box it's enough to be a good port.

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Quoting: lucifertdarkIf they're going to turn tail & run because of a few small minded people then they might as well shut up shop altogether as it's only going to get much worse now thanks to this.

GOG Galaxy not being ported to Linux could also be a part of this conspiracy, now I understand that. GOG is owned by CDPR.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: rkfgLack of communication is what kills any trust and respect, not bugs and other issues. Sadly, still many don't get it, they ignore people instead of at least saying them "we're aware of that/working on it/looking for a fix/getting better with your platform of choice/well, at least weather is nice and you're alive/oh come on gtfo already". Anything would do better than ignorance and silence. Literally anything.

Lack of communication is the primary approach of legacy publishers. I feel CDPR fell into that trap, and adopted same approach to communication.

Not only them. Red Thread Games (which is an indie company) kept silence about all Linux issues in Dreamfall Chapters that I sent them. I posted on Steam forums, on their own forum, bugged them on Twitter and got nothing. Maybe in their GOTY version or whatever it's called all that is fixed, I dunno. Even if the bugs were in Unity they could at least post something about being aware of that and waiting for a fix. Instead I felt left in the dark without any knowledge about the Linux version future. I didn't want to ruin the immersion because of visual glitches but in the end completed it as is. Same silence and lack of any confirmation I saw in Planetary Annihilation bugtracker, regarding the UI crash.

Not only we, as a community, have a long way to go. Devs should step it up as well. Respect is a mutual thing, you know.

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Quoting: OLucasZanellathey will not think "better not port it then" because there is money to be made there, so they'll think "better make sure it is good before releasing it then."

Very this. Remember No Man's Sky, they also stopped any communication after that "release". Did it do them any good? You know the answer. Lack of communication is what kills any trust and respect, not bugs and other issues. Sadly, still many don't get it, they ignore people instead of at least saying them "we're aware of that/working on it/looking for a fix/getting better with your platform of choice/well, at least weather is nice and you're alive/oh come on gtfo already". Anything would do better than ignorance and silence. Literally anything.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: wvstolzingIf CD Projekt thought there was a viable (given what THEY think of as viable) market for their product on Linux, they would have initiated the project, regardless whether the Linux community is made up of saints or demons sworn to eat the developers' babies.

Yes, that's why I don't buy this argument of "attacks from community cancelled the effort". They got many more times attacks from Windows users, and that clearly didn't stop their Windows release.

Also, a simple point: you can't really make a crowd to behave. There are always some individuals that would be displeased and would spread hate. That's how things work, everywhere. Bringing collective responsibility to the equation is unprofessional (if that's really true) to say at least, it only adds to hatred and malice. I'm sure it's easy to find examples of that in history. Collective responsibility is destructive, that's pretty obvious. We can't change everyone in the Linux community, it's not possible. But developers can change their attitude towards the community and control the damage (probably being) done. A dev studio is a single entity that can change but a crowd is always a crowd even if it calls itself "community". It's way too big already to play behavioral games.

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