Linux gamers often say stuff like “it’s literally one toggle in [insert game engine here]” but that’s never the case. Doesn’t mean new devs don’t fall for it.

If developers (those that come from Windows) fall for anything, it’s the myth that Proton is already perfect and native ports have no value.

With Steam Deck the hurdle for game developers to dog food native ports of their games is lower than ever. SteamOS comes with Podman and Distrobox, so installing the Steam Linux Runtime SDK on Steam Deck’s desktop mode should be doable after reading a howto.

It’s very difficult to justify the additional effort of implementing a platform that serves exclusively the playerbase with a ~3% market share

And yet there are many games that have a native Mac port and no native Linux port, such as the recently released Ball Pit: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2062430/BALL_x_PIT/

How is it to justify that a platform with an even smaller install base gets the native port? Two ports, actually, because ARM and Intel are both natively supported. Why aren’t Mac users expected to use Whisky to play Windows games but Linux users are expected to rely on Proton’s battery munching API translation? Apple is even worse in breaking compatibility, so game developer cannot even expect their Mac games to still run in five years.

The problem isn’t “the playerbase with a ~3% market share” because 3% is still millions upon millions users in absolute numbers given the massive PC install base. According to https://www.theverge.com/pc-gaming/618709/steam-deck-3-year-anniversary-handheld-gaming-shipments-idc there were 6 million Steam Decks sold last February and Linux is still rising in Steam’s Hardware Survey. According to a bit of googling, Steam hat 1.5% Linux users that month, a third of that using SteamOS.

I’m too lazy right now to extrapolate even a rough ballpark of the overall Linux user base on Steam but even if we assume that a big number of Steam Deck buyers doesn’t use their device, I don’t think a user base north of 10 million is too far fetched.

So the problem isn’t the 3% number, it’s the developer’s / publisher’s attitude to expect that Proton just works without any QA and that Mac users are somehow valuable while the Linux peasants are not.

Leave a bad review then.

It takes a lot of effort for little money.

The effort is not that high if the engine used already supports Linux and was written with cross-platform compatibility in mind (which is every modern engine because of consoles).

Also save data is not shared between the versions, so if you’ve already sunk a lot of time into playing the buggy native port, switching to proton requires you to start over.

To mess this up one as to be a special kind of stupid. It literally only requires to set up a few paths on the SteamWorks web UI: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloud?l=english#steam_auto-cloud

Linux just barely broke 3% share. As a company, whose goal is to make money, would you focus on what 97% of your base uses, or the 3%?

If your game is mobile friendly, treating Steam Deck not as an afterthought may be beneficial. Proton is not perfect. It has bugs, it loads a whole fake Windows environment into memory and API translation costs CPU and battery.

Further more, the company needs to spend QC resources for 1-2 versions of Windows, vs the multitude of Linux distros

That’s completely wrong. For games, the developer only needs to target whatever the latest Steam Linux Runtime is. It’s 100% identical across all distributions where the Linux version of Steam runs. That’s its entire point. Steam Linux Runtime is a more stable target than playing catch up with yearly Proton releases.

So standard Audi driver cruising speed.

Regular cuising speed here in Germany (I assume, no idea what a mph is in real units.)

Plasma has server side decorations under Wayland. While it’s admirable to wanting to support as many desktops as possible, I think it’s also fine for games developers to say “we support SteamOS – its Game Mode and its desktop mode”. Both are built on standard APIs and if a specific desktop doesn’t care to implement standards, sucks to be them.

Because they live in a fantasy world where optimizing a game for Windows and pouring countless of hours of QA into the Windows version makes a merely cross-compiled Linux version magically great as well because “PC is PC, right?”

Main Linux target for UE is Red Hat Enterprise Linux for movie CGI. The “we want open platforms” company don’t care about Linux gaming.

I think you’ve got that backwards.

No, I made the factually true clarification of “Yes, the focus shifted to painting a bunch of years ago but Krita still started out as “KImageShop”. There are many image editing features available”

Not liking the name of the software I use and saying your preferred application is superior is better because it’s prettier are emotional arguments.

I made a technological argument about GTK the lack of proper cross-platform compatibility and that has absolutely nothing to do with prettiness.

That you like software that insults people with disabilities is another matter but you cannot with a straight face claim that I did not make factually true arguments about image editing capabilities, technological downsides of GTK, and later the availability of certain plugins.

I stated that Krita doesn’t do what I need it to do at the moment but would consider switching to it if it did.

Nope, not in the comment I replied to:

And I did not respond to you personal preferences stated in https://lemmy.world/comment/20267684. I made a clarification about the image editing capabilities. I did not quote the rest and I don’t care about your personal preferences but at that point you were seemingly already emotionally riled up, so you did no longer grasp this detail.

I made my point about the technological side I wanted to make. You now make it emotional. I’m muting this thread now.

And it’s really weird for you to get this defensive when both applications are FOSS.

I made a factual clarification and you were the one who got weirdly emotional after that.

Most of Ubuntu is obsolete the day it’s released because of how Ubuntu is structured: the supported Main repository and the unsupported Universe repository (unsupported by Canonical and entirely relying on community members that backport bug fixes in accordance to Canonical’s strict version freeze rules).

So it’s a coin toss if Universe packages get updates at all and if they do in which time frame. Packages in Universe also are not release blocking, so breakages known ahead of release there are waved through, as happened only very recently with 25.10 and it’s broken Flatpak support.

So the majority of packages are unsupported and Mint insists to build a newbie targeting distribution out of this and carry ancient packages around for years. The Mint team is already having their hands full with replacing Snap software with their own deb packages, so they don’t have the capacity to deal with all Universe packages. Probably they hope that software for their user base gets updated by an unpaid Ubuntu community member and that unfixed packages are simply not used by their users.

I think it’s the moral duty of us more knowledgeable people to discourage the use of Mint. If someone wants a Mint distribution, better use LMDE. Otherwise something like a Fedora Spin is probably currently the best newbie friendly option these days.

Only some?

Do Americans not have FritzBox routers for that crap to be the most popular router?

Either way, the GIMP is better suited even if it’s uglier.

No, not for all use cases outside of painting. I listed a couple, you ignored them. Using GTK on non-Gnome systems is an objectively worse experience other than mere looks. GTK’s brain dead file pickers for example. Absolutely unusable.

https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion and https://github.com/Acly/krita-vision-tools don’t exist for Gimp either (I know of two that work with cloud services but not local).

I’m not going to tell others it’s designed for something it’s not.

“Yes, the focus shifted to painting a bunch of years ago but Krita still started out as “KImageShop”. There are many image editing features available” is an objectively true statement I made. People saying that Krita is not suitable at all for image editing are in the wrong. Krita handles both editing and painting.

it’s not going to become my main tool for photo editing.

That’s fine and I moved on from Gimp.

Sometimes companies gradually reduce the usefulness of the free product to incentivize people to pay.

If they’ll at some point revert to the old Affinity business model, there is really not a downside, isn’t it? Pay for Affinity and get to use Affinity is what V1 and V2 already did. But the comment by Neon Nova was about the pricing of Canva’s AI service and the cost of that is completely irrelevant to “traditional” Affinity users because we’re not interested in that feature anyway and – at least right now – they rule out any subscription model for Affinity itself.

They may do this.

Well, that’s speculation and reduction of the Affinity feature set is a completely different matter anyway. While I’m not fully on board with the GUI changes – changing canvas size has been moved to a weird sub menu, for example – but in my view I got a major upgrade for free that also reduced the disk footprint from 9GB to 3GB (Mac version, didn’t look at the size on Windows before uninstalling V2). So at this very moment it’s a useful upgrade for people who used V2 anyway.

Krita may have started out as a photo editor, but that’s clearly not its focus today.

Editing features were not removed, so it’s still a capable image editor, formal focus or not.

not sure what method you tried, but I was able to get V2 running via Lutris using the guide in this repo

Relies on a patched variant of Wine, so hardly “works great with Proton/Wine”. I tried V3 with regular Proton and the installer didn’t even run.