[gjsman-1000]

Unless you statically linked GTK, possibly Xorg, and more into a ludicrous bundle size, you’d still be screwed.

As for “just get the libs,” that’s hilariously easier said than done. Try my example - it’s enough to make an engineer cry.

[filmor]

Your example doesn't make sense. Linux distributions have always had this trade off: Binaries provided through the package manager work with the libraries that are provided by the same package manager. I have a bunch of older gog or Humble Bundle Linux releases of games that still work fine on my system because (Windows style) they carry around all of their libraries with them. Linking Xorg doesn't make sense and applications linked statically against libX11 will work perfectly fine even with Xwayland.

[crickey]

https://www.x.org/wiki/Releases/ https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/linux/ I mean it will probably not be painless and other applications u run might break* but xorg is relativly stable. Liba are out there are free to get. Usually people are arguing that the conveniences isnt there not that its not possible.

* if u dont sandbox this a bit with custom lib paths

[gjsman-1000]

I didn’t dispute that it isn’t possible.

What I am disputing is how this comes off to a game developer; 5 years from now, heck, 2 years from now when their games require library surgery to keep running... that’s just an awful experience.

That is not what a developer would consider a stable ABI. They could look into Flatpak - but look at what’s trending on Hacker News today - a rant against Flatpak.

Win32 over Proton is the winner for them; all other proposed solutions are hilariously naive and optimistic to what game development requires. No game developer is ever going to individually package, and consistently repackage, their game for 20 distributions. That’s never going to happen.

[smoldesu]

> No game developer is ever going to individually package, and consistently repackage, their game for 20 distributions.

Nor do they. Steam Linux Runtime exists.

[memefrog]

There is no "library surgery". This is EXACTLY what people are forced to do on Windows already: bundle all dependencies.

>No game developer is ever going to individually package, and consistently repackage, their game for 20 distributions. That’s never going to happen.

Nobody has suggested they should.

[crickey]

Well u sure made an effort to exclaim how hard it would be. If a developer had an install guide with links to dependencies or mirrors to those dependencies it wouldnt be very hard as they should have internally for their dev/ testing. Do windows devs not track their dependencies? Relying only on Win32 ? Whos the naive one ?

[memefrog]

No video game has any use for GTK+.

XLib is tiny by modern standards.

[simion314]

>No video game has any use for GTK+

my memory might be wrong but I had issues with native linux games that had level editor based on GTK and python, could not get them to run after 3 years since launch, I do not claim it is impossible just that I could not do it with some a few hours effort.