[forrestthewoods]

Sarcasm is an extremely poor method of communication. Speak plainly and clearly.

> Performance profiling and debugging tools are critical for game development.

Profiling and debugging tools are RADICALLY superior on Windows. RADICALLY. GDB/LLDB is garbage. For debugging Visual Studio (for adults, not VSCode), or on special occassion WinDbg, is great. Raddbg may be awesome some day and may also support Linux. That'll be great. Today is not that day.

Superluminal is spectacular. They're working very hard on a Linux version. It's taking them a long time because Linux is bad.

> All major game engines I am aware of support native Linux builds and have for years, anyways.

Unity and Unreal do have buttons to export to Linux. Most proprietary game engines don't have Linux clients. Linux for headless servers you control is fine.

> 80% of the servers

Yawn.

The Linux pain is trying to deploy proprietary binaries that run on customer machines which are infinite in variation. Running headless on a single Linux image you control is very different.

Anyhow. Let me know when you ship a game with 3D graphics to customers and have to deal with all their support issues!

[arcfour]

Hey, want to race to install toolchains? I'll install everything I need to build the Linux kernel and, say, typical SDL2 applications. I'll give you a 3 hour head start, all you have to do is install Visual Studio, WDK, and the Windows SDK, and hope they play nicely with each other!

Good luck! Then we can switch places so you can install for the 5.3% (and growing) of your gaming userbase that doesn't use an OS with ads in it.

P.S. he who lives in the house of WinDbg is not allowed to throw stones. At anyone. Ever. Nobody thinks that it is "great," you must be kidding.

[fyredge]

I think you are coming at this with very different priorities. For most people, installing tool chains is a one time job, that they can grit their teeth through if it works well for them. No one wants to constantly install or reinstall and make sure the installation process is lightning fast.

It's the reason why Linux still hasn't taken off on desktop. People want good application support, not infinite customisations and blazing fast compile speeds. In fact, slow compile speeds might even give people an excuse to go chat with colleagues and take breaks. What you want is not what others want too

[forrestthewoods]

It's funny you mention that.

You know which platform is super duper mega easy to cross-compile to? And you know what platfrom is (almost) FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE to compile against an arbitrarily old version of glibc? The answer (in order) is Windows and Linux.

But in anycase you still have it wrong. Compiling and running for your machine isn't the problem. The question is can you give me a binary that runs on my machine. And also I'm not going to tell you what the environment is. But I will yell at you if it doesn't work.

Anyhow. Portable toolchain install for MSVC + WinSDK took about 30 seconds to download. Very easy. Here you go: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mmozeiko/7f3162ec2988e81e...

I do agree it's annoying this isn't default behavior.

> you must be kidding.

Geez you are very frustrating to communicate with. I literally said "for special occasion". Good grief. Visual Studio debugger is kinda mediocre but still best-in-class and Linux doesn't even have an equivalent to compare against. WinDbg has some slick commands for super niche cases. Awful GUI with no discoverability though. (Just like Linux! bad dum tsh)

[delta_p_delta_x]

> Hey, want to race to install toolchains?

Not the parent commenter. It's really not that hard.

MSVC: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/?q=build+tools#...

Clang targeting MSVC ABI: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases/download/llvmo...

Clang targeting MinGW ABI: https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw/releases/tag/20260421

GCC targeting MinGW ABI, running in MSYS2: https://github.com/msys2/msys2-installer/releases/download/2...

Or, if you want a command-line, winget makes it easier still:

  winget install -e --id Microsoft.VisualStudio.BuildTools LLVM.LLVM MartinStorsjo.LLVM-MinGW.UCRT BrechtSanders.WinLibs.MCF.UCRT

One-liner, roughly on par with `pacman -S base-devel clang llvm`. To install libraries, I use `vcpkg add port sdl2` in my project, a la cargo. No more fudging with system-level dependencies.