I think the flatpaks are really great (I'm using distro, that is made for use with flatpaks), but there is one issue with Flathub regarding games, the runtimes (shared libraries between flatpaks) are updated continuously so you still have the same issue like with current Linux OS, the libraries will be incompatible in a few years. You can still make your own flatpak with old runtimes though, but they will be rejected by Flathub for security reasons, which is understandable, but it lacks the purpose of distribution by Flathub.

I would say that for game distribution the stable environment like Linux Runtime Containers provided by Steam is a must.

From current multi-distro packaging solutions the most useful for games is probably AppImage, which allows you to just package everything inside it and you don't need to install anything on the host machine to run it. There are few caveats however:

1) Often some libraries are missing inside AppImage, because there were on the OS of packager and he didn't found they are actually missing

2) No integration to distribution, at least not any I was able to found in past

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: Zlopez

Quoting: CatKillerThey haven't said that they'll bother testing it in Proton themselves, nor fix their game if it doesn't work in Proton, so that's still the 10% tier of the sliding scale - assuming it ever works at all.

I would say that if this isn't issue in Proton and it's reported against Proton it will be passed by Valve to developer. Which means it will have a much bigger weight than just complains from few users on Linux. Especially with Steam Deck being a thing.

IF someone reports the bug to Valve, and IF Valve go through the effort of determining the cause, and IF they can persuade the developers to fix their game... eventually they might provide a fix

compared to

Before release a dev sees that an update doesn't work on one of their test targets and fixes it

One of these things is much more valuable than the other.

I definitely agree that this should be a responsibility of the developer.

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Quoting: CatKillerThey haven't said that they'll bother testing it in Proton themselves, nor fix their game if it doesn't work in Proton, so that's still the 10% tier of the sliding scale - assuming it ever works at all.

I would say that if this isn't issue in Proton and it's reported against Proton it will be passed by Valve to developer. Which means it will have a much bigger weight than just complains from few users on Linux. Especially with Steam Deck being a thing.

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Let's see how this goes, if the Steam Deck will really change the OS composition for gaming market (Linux will not be less than 1.0%), it could mean that more and more developers will target Linux as one of the main platforms. And with the Linux Runtime containers provided by Valve, they even have an environment that will make sure that their game will run in it even years after release. Which is unfortunately not a case today, when old game titles couldn't be played anymore because the required libraries are no longer available :-(.

Let's face it the games are usually not a kind of software that targets for continuous delivery and after it's not profitable anymore it's left to rot. In this case Proton and Linux Runtime Containers could really help.

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Quoting: DorritI'll never, ever, use streaming services for whatever purpose.
My movies and TV series are on DVDs, the music on CDs, the games on HDDs and the books on paper.
Streaming/cloud/online is just another way of control over the populace, together with video surveillance, facial recognition, smart phone apps...
Covid passports anyone?
Digital money Ma'am and Sir?

Shove your Brave New World where the sun doesn't shine.

I don't like to have physical copies of movies or music, it's just something you will rip (not possible everytime, because of DRM) and then just throw away (I don't even have a way to play them anymore). For the books, when they are not available in my country it's too much money for shipment so it's not feasible for me.

But I agree the streaming is killing the rights to own something and helps with the surveillance.

And with the Covid passports, you mean the same that Linux Foundation started to work on? :-D

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It looks like the games will be at the same place like movies, audio and e-books are nowadays, where you have a hard time to actually find something that is distributed in some open format. Now you can at least download games with DRM attached (praise to GOG for distributing non-DRM games), but looking at the game streaming services popping up, it seems that this wouldn't be true in the future. Let's see how this ends, but I'm afraid that in few years you will not be able to play anything AAA without streaming it from some cloud service.

Let's hope my vision is not true, but the games are the only part of the entertainment world that is not yet DRM online only in most cases.

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The porting toolkit sounds nice, it is open source or better free software?

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I played the game on Proton, but I think the authors didn't understand what Point & Click Adventure means. Because it's mostly point & click, with three actions on each item, and very little adventure. If they just lower the amount of items (it's more than 10 items for each location, even in those location that doesn't have any relation to story, multiply this by three actions you can do on each and you can see where the problem is) in each location and just focused more on the story the game could be much better.

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Quoting: KROMNow, if they finally would create a new control center for Linux to configure all that fancy stuff, that'd be awesome.

And ideally make it open as well. :-)

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I found out about this game here on GOL and I'm glad I did. I was looking for something similar to Settlers 2 for quite some time and was positively surprised that this is even distributed as Flatpak :-)

I even started helping with the translation, because I fell in love with this project.

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