according to the latest valve hw survey, more steam users are on linux than mac

@eevee does this survey include the Steam Deck as Linux or is it listed separately?

@eevee #SteamDeck weee

#Wine / #Proton is amazing

@eevee was that recently not the case?

@aeva i haven't looked in years and there's no trend graph for it so i'm not sure

i don't use wine/proton. if you don't want me as a customer then i'm not going to fight you over it

@eevee I'm at the point where I won't mess with the settings, but if it works out of the box, I'm not *too* mad

@eevee Is the pro-native Linux? Or pro-Apple?

(Either is fine I just don't understand lol.)

@scottmichaud linux, though both really

@eevee this made me realize that i don't actually know what would require more effort from a gamedev:

1) porting their win32 game to use non-wine APIs on linux; or

2) testing/supporting their win32 game to use wine on linux (and patching wine where necessary)

(but if they don't do at least one of those things, then yeah, agree)

@eevee Steam on Mac is an unbelievable mess. Half the games only work on old versions of the OS, because Apple removed crucial bits over the years such as 32-bit support and OpenGL.

But Steam itself won't run on these old OS versions anymore, so now you need to update your client so you can't play your games anymore.

@Tijn apple seems to treat their platform like it's a video game console. every five to ten years there's some hard cutoff and they only bother with back compat for stuff made since the previous cutoff

i bought a game that worked on wine and then it stopped working on wine and stayed that way for like six years. eventually i got so mad i wrote my own version of the game that could read and play all its data files. that's what lexy's labyrinth is.

i'm not interested in paying for the privilege of gambling on wine. never again

@eevee This isn't too surprising. Mac has never been a gaming platform, and Valve has specifically targeted Linux.

@eevee that seems somewhat disconnected from my experience. even for games that do natively support linux, just running the windows version through wine/proton is usually the more performant, less buggy and overall better experience. And especially with how popular the steam deck has been, plenty of developers are at least unofficially supporting wine and making sure it doesn't break.

@eevee for what it’s worth, I bought just about every game that came out on physical media for Linux starting in 2001 and ending in 2008 or so and exactly zero of them work on a modern linux installation. By contrast a good 75% of games I bought for Windows in that period work great on Proton now, many of them with one-click installs on my steam deck. The lack of any kind of defined linux platform absolutely kills longevity of native ports

@glyph i don't know man i'm always a bit frumpy about stories like this when the internet is awash in questions about "what is msvcrt.dll and where can i download a binary from the internet"

also that game i rewrote struggles to run on windows for some people and the blessed solution is to use a windows port of wined3d

we tried to play fallout on our windows media machine some months ago and the general consensus seemed to be to use a fan-made patch because the game is nonfunctional on windows 10

and no one looks at this and says whoops the lack of a defined platform kills the longevity of games. no one looks at this and draws any conclusions about windows at all

@eevee I had this same philosophy for years, and I only played games on console as a result.

I like gaming on handheld so when Valve announced a handheld gaming device based on Arch I had to buy it. And honestly, I don't regret it at all. I have had maybe 2 games that didn't run perfectly out of the box on Proton in the last 2 years. One of those required Proton-GE because of proprietary codecs.

Valve has invested so much effort into Linux gaming that I feel like they deserve my business.

@eevee people draw conclusions about windows all the time, this is an extremely frequently discussed aspect of the platform. Like there’s probably a drinking game where you try to talk to a Windows developer and see how long you can go before they start quoting Raymond Chen’s New Old Thing. Even non-developers talk about long-tail compatibility quite a bit; this is a good thread discussing some of Windows’s compatibility limitations: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/wznszw/microsofts_backwards_compatibility_is_legendary/

@eevee nobody says something like “lack of a defined platform kills longevity” because that would be silly? the platform is extremely well defined, it’s just not infinitely backwards compatible. (Also, it is bad. Msvcrt is explicitly *not* part of the platform so depending on it in a way that makes a user do a web search like that is just an error on the part of the ISV. But it’s easy to corrupt an install by dumping random junk into the Windows directory.)

@eevee Yeah, and not just the Mac either. All the first wave iPhone games are gone too.

There were some real gems among them that people (me) paid real money for, and they've just... vanished.

@eevee I very recently bought Deathloop on Steam because it had a Proton platinum rating only to find that it will refuse to admit that DirectX 12 exists on Linux. Apparently the community fix for this is to download the Empress crack of the game which was patched to not require this check

Luckily I managed to refund the game but still

@Nekojimi that's not fuckin platinum!

@eevee
no wonder since #apple double killed #i386 support

@eevee Valve hasn’t made an arm64 version of steam. They’ve pretty much abandoned macOS.

@eevee @glyph wine is not just windows comaptibility, it's _old_ windows compatibility. I wonder if there a similar project for old linux? Maybe you could do it in a sane way with flatpak?

@mw @eevee I don’t believe there is, because there’s just not enough unique software to justify the time investment. All the old games whose Linux versions don’t work on Linux have Windows versions that work fine on Proton or Wine, and all the old apps that people actually used in large numbers have source you can recompile. The tricky part is emulating stuff like /dev/dsp or emulating old GPU interfaces for games that talked directly to things like DRM, not so much the bit Flatpak solves

I bought just about every game that came out on physical media for Linux starting in 2001 and ending in 2008 or so and exactly zero of them work on a modern linux installation.

I only own a couple native Linux games from this time period, the ones that come to mind would be Unreal Tournament (1999), Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake 2, Neverwinter Nights and the best video game of all times: Alpha Centauri. 100% of them work nicely on an up-to-date Debian Sid.

CC: @eevee@queer.party

@vv221 @eevee seriously? From their original installation media, not with modern patches? I confess that when all these games (except alpha centauri, never played that) gradually stopped working in the early 2010s, I didn’t regularly re-test them to see if they miraculously recovered.

@vv221 @eevee (other games that broke for me in this window: rune, simcity 3k, civ:ctp, myth 2: soulblighter)

@Contrariwise I bought it, fired it up on linux, had a brief "hell yeah! year of linux on the desktop!" moment, then put it back on a shelf because I had no time for anything (ironically, because I…worked in the game industry, at the time) then a few years later pulled it down, tried to fire it up and got a page full of dynamic linker errors, and gave up. I've still basically never played it :(

@glyph @mw @eevee what you're failing to acknowledge that "working fine on Proton or Wine" is culmination of thousands of hours of community and paid professional work put into making that "time investment". it isn't free or magical. without that same work put into Windows ports, huge amounts of games would be lost media just the same.

so yes, you've inadvertently identified that archiving and preserving interactive computer media takes effort and time. I would encourage you to not look at the situation from the perspective of a dead-eyed consumer.

@glyph @mw @eevee to put it another way: Valve reportedly put 100+ developers on the Proton/Wine, Linux, and Vulkan compatibility layer projects because they didn't want to pay Microsoft for a WIndows license or write their own OS for every SteamDeck sold.

if Microsoft made Windows free, like Apple does with macOS, I guarantee Valve would pull those devs off of Proton. Proton would start having serious issues after 3-5 years, and be practically inoperable in 10.

@AmyZenunim @mw @eevee I do not understand why I am a “dead-eyed consumer” here. I more or less agree with everything you are saying here. In fact… it was mostly a restatement of the point I was trying to make? The large back-catalog of windows-platform software is a tremendous motivation for the community to spend (and continue spending) that effort on Wine, the relatively meager Linux binary back-catalog is the opposite. Valve’s investment obviously turbocharged the process.

@AmyZenunim @mw @eevee your specific prediction about proton’s inoperability seems more pessimistic. the ad-hoc conventions of the linux platform these days are more stable than 3-5 years, particularly for projects where source is available, I don’t think it would decay nearly that fast; unless you mean it would stop keeping up with *new* DirectX versions, in which case… of course, yes.