> Games are mostly just doing their own thing, only interacting with the system for input & output.

They should be trivial to port then, no?

Yes, they are easy to port a lot of the time. Especially now because you can use DXVK to translate DirectX calls into Vulkan, so you don't need to write a Vulkan renderer. Input is sometimes a trickier one to deal with but a lot of the time games are using cross-platform libraries for that already!

Despite all this the Unity engine has spotty Linux support. Some games run better under Wine vs. Unity's native Linux builds. It's Vulkan renderer has had a memory leak for a while now. Input has randomly decided to double keypresses on some distros.

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MindSpunk 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The hard part of Linux ports isn't the first 90% (Using the Linux APIs). It's the second 90%.

Platform bugs, build issues, distro differences, implicitly relying on behavior of Windows. It's not just "use Linux API", there's a lot of effort to ship properly. Lots of effort for a tiny user base. There's more users now, but proton is probably a better target than native Linux for games.

	▲	simonask an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It’s not really about OS differences - as the GP said, games don’t typically use a lot of OS features. What they do tend to really put a strain on is GPU drivers. Many games and engines have workarounds and optimizations for specific vendors, and even driver versions. If the GPU driver on Linux differs in behavior from the Windows version (and it is very, very difficult to port a driver in a way that doesn’t), those workarounds can become sources of bugs.

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p1necone 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah but Windows is a more stable api to develop against than Linux (at least when it comes to stuff that games need to do) - it doesn't feel "pure", but pragmatically it's much better as a game developer to just make sure the Windows version works with proton than it is to develop a native Linux version that's liable to break the second you stop maintaining it.

	▲	greiskul 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As someone once said it best, Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux: https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/

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codebje 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The killer for games tends to be the anti-cheat or anti-piracy layers.

I have a Windows game I can't run under CrossOver (aka Wine 11) or a VM, only because its anti-piracy layer doesn't accept those circumstances.