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by automatoney 887 days ago
As a hobbyist game developer, I would love to see the field move away from being so windows focused. It's pretty annoying that every other kind of development I do works well enough across all platforms, but when I want to do game dev I pretty much have to boot into windows.

And as a game user, I would also just rather have games be cross platform, than use whatever OS specific optimizations happen now. But I've also never really cared too much about having high framerates, high resolution, millions of polygons, etc.
2 comments
retrochameleon 887 days ago
Riot Games recently announced that Vanguard, their kernel-level anticheat, is going to be required to play League of Legends soon. There was a considerable Linux community for League at r/leagueoflinux, and they are obviously upset. But regular users are also rightfully upset and stated their intent to give up league if this goes through.

Vanguard must be launched during boot, and has to remain running 24/7 in order to launch and play the games. Not to mention that Riot Games was bought by Tencent... TikTok mass surveillance spyware was bad enough. Fat chance I would ever let the CCP pwn my personal rig with 24/7 running kernel-level malware/spyware that can never be validated because it's obviously closed-source.

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red-iron-pine 887 days ago
damn think of the pwn possibilities there -- kernel level right from boot, and updated regularly, without having to obfuscate. red team wet dream.
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pjmlp 887 days ago
It isn't only Windows, we also have XBox (ok, a Windows flavour), PlayStation (a FreeBSD fork), Switch (a mikrokernel OS with POSIX like stuff), Android (a Linux where no one ports games to GNU/Linux from), iOS/macOS (NeXTSTEP derived OS).

Many of those, with UNIX like OSes, could easily port their games to GNU/Linux (specially the Android NDK ones), they don't because it isn't worth it, monetary speaking.

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shzhdbi09gv8ioi 887 days ago
I'd argue the Windows API at this point is a stable platform that can be targeted to deliver for Linux gamers.

The Linux native ports keep breaking because of outdated dependencies, while Wine/Proton offers a stable experience that keeps getting better (most recently the Wayland support).

It seems to me that releasing native Linux games at this point cost more than it's worth.

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