I’ll ignore the market share question and talk a little about history. The compatibility layer is what killed OS/2 back in the day.
See, IBM (with OS/2) and Microsoft (with Windows 2.x and 3.x) were cooperating initially. Windows was the new kid on the block, and MS was allowing IBM to make a windows application compatibility layer on OS/2 in the early days. Think Windows 2.x/3.x. This was a brilliant stroke on behalf of MS, since the application developers would choose the Windows API and develop against that API only. Soon, there were no real native OS/2 apps being sold in any stores. Once MS Office came about, OS/2 was effectively a dead commercial product, outside of the server space.
The parallel here is that wine allows developers to target only the Windows API (again). This means you don’t have to bother with linux support at all and just hope that Proton or whatever will do the work for you.
There are some modern differences though. First: Linux didn’t start as a major competitor to Windows in the desktop/gaming space. We’d all love the Linux marketshare to increase, but largely there isn’t a huge economic driver behind it. So Linux will increase or not and the world will keep on turning. We’re not risking being delegated to history like OS/2. The second: the compatibility layer is being made as an open source project, and this isn’t MS trying to embrace-extend-extinguish in the same way that their assistance to IBM implementing that layer was. (We could quibble about .Net and Mono and others though.)
So I don’t think it’ll play out the same way. Linux will be okay. It’s already a vast improvement from prior years.
Historically, there was nothing like a killer hardware situation for OS/2 – no equivalent of the Steam Deck – that was driving wide hardware adoption to encourage additional native apps. Valve has done more for linux desktop adoption in the last few years than anyone that came prior.
I remember it well. I think the biggest difference between OS/2 then and Linux today is that OS/2 wasn't all that much better than Windows in any easily understood way for the average non-technical user.
Because for decades Microsoft has yielded to Linux’s superiority with unethical anti-competitive behaviour. E.g., it’s hard to compete with hardware that comes pre-installed with Windows.
Also for decades, Linux has had awful drivers for graphics cards (among other things) and godawful usability. It’s not like Linux would have taken over the desktop computer market in 1998. Have you ever tried installing a vintage distro? It’s a nightmare.
Not been my experience at all. Or am I misunderstanding and you’re saying that’s a past problem? Because I’ve used both AMD and Nvidia drivers on Mint and they’ve both been fantastic.
They’re a lot better these days, but I remember 15 years ago I had to spend hours in a command line just to get Linux to recognize my video card, much less utilize it properly. It’s definitely come a long long way but still far from perfect
Linux is such a tiny slice of the market compared to Windows, it doesn’t make financial sense for dev studios to spend any of their budget in it, because they just won’t sell enough copies to make it worth their while.
A few devs who did have commented that Linux users are like <1% of players but most of the crash reports or things like that. That was before the Steam Deck blew up though, so now you might have more Linux players, but those mostly use Proton, so why do you need a native Linux version.
I think it’s still nice to have just so that way if for some reason Proton suddenly disappears alongside Wine (alongside all their forks and other related things) in some catastrophically low odds event you can still play the game or use the program.
This was true, but a big part of that reason (as followed up on by some other devs) is that Linux users are usually tech-savvy, and frequently work on software. They contribute more bug reports because they know how to report a bug. You’ll have more bug reports, but not necessarily because there’s more bugs (though that too), and as a bonus the users reporting them will probably be able to help you fix those bugs a lot better than the average Windows user.
yea dependencies seem like a real issue here, I don’t think Linux supports side-by-side versions like Windows does, Windows will just install every version of DirectX and libraries like that
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