[zmw]

People who own a Linux workstation at home and just want to play a few games is vastly outnumbered by people who own a Windows desktop at hone and just want to play a few games. Probably at least 100 to 1. And the former group, with the “almost works” compatibility, will be a much bigger maintenance burden per customer.

Heck, I’d bet money that the Linux casual gaming crowd you described is also heavily outnumbered by people who have a dedicated Windows gaming PC (e.g. me, Mac user otherwise).

[ajvs]

You're neglecting the crowd that have Windows at home and want to stop using it also. If gamers can have the exact same UX on Linux then that's one of the biggest obstacles to switching solved.

[Multicomp]

Like me. I will hug windows 7 goodbye on my way to Neon OSville, with redoubled hope my sim City 3k and rct2 may now work without having to be in a VM

[derefr]

"People who own a Linux workstation at home and just want to play a few games" make up a disproportionately large amount of the developer-base for pretty much any software, though, including games. It doesn't matter if none of your users care about a particular feature, if a fair number of your own devs do.

[pjmlp]

There are lots of developers pretty happy with macOS and Windows at home.

[derefr]

Yeah, but for a piece of software to acquire Linux support, you don’t need the majority of its developers to own a Linux workstation and want to use the software with it; you just need a non-negligible amount (i.e. enough developers with the spare man-hours to get the work done.)

Sometimes, in fact, it only takes one or two developers. I can’t think of a good Linux example here, but I know of a good few projects (Dolphin, for example) where the macOS target is supported entirely by the one or two developers on the team who use macOS.

[pjmlp]

Quite true, my comment was more against the typical HN remark that "developers" only use GNU/Linux, as if the software for the two biggest desktop environments would appear out of thin air.