GNU/Linux means Linux plus bash, coreutils, glibc, etc.

What do I need to make a video game? Input, sound, graphics. What use is a shell, a userland, or even a C library (if I'm not writing in C) for making a video game?

Android is _not_ GNU/Linux. It doesn't need to provide a shell or userland as part of the platform, and its C library is bionic not glibc. It also provides a lot of things GNU doesn't*, like input, sound, and graphics. It's also not designed to run on a desktop, and the differences between mobile and desktop are non-trivial and slowly growing.

Windows and macOS are full graphical operating systems. Linux is just a kernel. GNU/Linux is just a command-line operating system. Great for servers, terrible for video games.

Moreover, commercial video games are distributed in binary format, not source. Even if input, sound, and graphics were solved on Linux in a consistent way, the developers** can't help but break ABI compatibility every couple of years. Many apps from Windows 3.1 days can still run on Windows 11. What binary from Linux's early days can still run today, never mind with graphics or sound?

* = You could include GLib/GTK+/GNOME but then you're targeting a specific desktop environment and not simply "Linux" or even "GNU/Linux" anymore

** = Except for the kernel developers, upon whom Linus forces "never break userspace" as a hard rule

I think you're talking past each other, and actually agree with each other.

I believe pjmlp's point (although it requires a fair bit of reading between the lines) is that Windows already has fantastic backwards compatibility (as you elaborated on), and Valve's work has created a situation such that all developers need to do is target and build for only Windows, release Windows-only binaries; then, Valve/WINE will do the hard work in ensuring they run seamlessly on Linux. This means developers don't need to care about building natively for Linux (à la Factorio and a tiny handful of other games). In other words as another commenter said, the real stable ABI on Linux is Win32 + WINE.

Furthermore, Valve's work also negates the work of open-source engine and game developers who have ported their engines and games to native Linux. This is because developing for Windows is a known quantity, and there is an overwhelming volume of resources, effort, and experience in writing games for Windows.

pjmlp concludes with 'Now with Windows based handhelds, Valve will learn what happened to netbooks', which I gather to mean that the Steam Deck will lose popularity to Asus and MSI's (and soon, other manufacturers too) handheld systems, since running most games directly on Windows is still easier than the occasional faff that someone has to do when running games on WINE/Proton.

It's possible they've shot themselves in the foot, but in order for things to play out like that, I feel like there would have had to have been some demand in the first place. Wine/Proton makes possible something that the vast majority of game developers were never even considering: playing their games on Linux. As you note, Factorio is one of very few mainstream games (by which I mean, AAA and indie, not open-source) to target native Linux support, and did so long before the Steam Deck.

Even on macOS, which sits between Windows and Linux in terms of stability and user base, the selection of available games is about 10-20% of my library. Apple dropping support for 32-bit x86 (only to kind of resurrect it with Rosetta 2 on M1/M2/+) and only barely supporting OpenGL anymore while refusing to support Vulkan at all doesn't help. Credit again to Factorio for porting to macOS/ARM64, but they're once again in the small minority.

There's an interplay here between user-driven demand and platform-provided stability. As much of a faff as Wine/Proton can be, writing a game to properly support, say, Wayland is worse. That's a problem Valve _could_ help fix, but won't do anything for the vast majority of existing games.

I specified Android/NDK for a reason, the NDK has all the same C, C++, SDL, OpenGL, Vulkan stuff that you will find on GNU/Linux.

Ok, sure, if you already wrote your game to be cross-platform, then porting it to one of the platforms your libraries support may well be trivial. That feels almost tautological and the precondition you've set up here doesn't apply to most games.

SDL2 is a great library, and many good games have been built using it. But then your target platform is not Android at all, it's SDL2's platform-agnostic abstractions (plus OpenGL or Vulkan if you're doing 3D graphics). And you still may run into input handling issues if you didn't think carefully about the differences between mobile and desktop.

Then, to achieve something like the binary compatibility Windows already provides, you'll need to statically link your executable on Linux. That definitely means no GNU because virtually no game developer is going to allow themselves to be forced onto a copyleft license.

"GNU/Linux" doesn't have a stable binary graphics API. Someone rather controversially pointed out that if you want to make a binary that runs for the longest possible time across the widest set of linux distributions, you should make a Win32/DirectX binary and tell people to install WINE/Proton.

Wine/Proton works because it can be recompiled for every version of every Linux distro, whereas the average video game can't.

Honestly, somebody could have done something like this for "native" Linux but the incentives never really fell into place. It could even have been Valve, but I would guess they weighed the options and found this to be the one that gave them the widest compatibility without expecting too much of the game developers, many of whom were reluctant to make their games available on Steam at all.

Sure Linux has a stable graphics ABI. It's called Proton./j

It's a riff on only stable OS API on Linux is Win32.

If they cannot manage themselves, it is not by becoming Windows/Linux that would save the situation.

> has skipped classes on OS/2 history lesson.

The comparison with OS/2 only applies at a very surface level - and isn't even the whole reason why OS/2 failed when it had to compete with Windows. Among other things:

1. OS/2 could only run 16bit Windows applications at a time when Windows was switching to 32bit. Even the 16bit Windows applications were not 100% compatible and that is despite using Microsoft's code.

2. OS/2 had much worse hardware support than Windows as everyone was targeting Windows. On the other hand IBM as a whole never put much effort towards OS/2.

3. OS/2 Windows support had applications either run inside an isolated environment or they looked "alien" next to OS/2 applications at a time when GUIs were still trying to look consistent. While this is also the case with Wine/Proton, the focus on games makes this point moot (and people do not seem to care as much about GUI consistency these days).

> Now with Windows based handhelds, Valve will learn what happened to netbooks.

So far every single Windows handheld review i've seen that compares it to Steam Deck mentions both how the UX is worse than Steam Deck and games are -ironically- more likely to have issues on the Windows-based one. The only two saving graces for Windows handhelds is that they tend to be faster (but only when running at full throttle which limits their battery lifetime - Steam Deck runs faster at lower watts for better battery lifetime) and that anticheat rootkits work on the Windows handhelds whereas they do not work on Steam.

And you also forget that Valve did try to get game developers target Linux and put a lot of effort in the ecosystem for literally years before making Proton, yet developers largely ignored that.

Turning GNU/Linux into Windows/Linux won't make it work, regardless.

Microsoft is already half way there with WSL, as soon as they realised folks rather buy Apple gear for UNIX experience, instead of supporting Linux OEMs.

"Runs Windows better than Windows" didn't work last time, and won't now.

And if XBox really goes full speed ahead as cross platform brand, as the console rumor mill has been discussing, lets see how many Microsoft owned studios stuff keep landing on Steam.

> Turning GNU/Linux into Windows/Linux won't make it work, regardless.

It already works, i play games every day, pretty much all games i play are Windows games and i can count on my hands the number of times i booted on actual Windows the last three years.

The fact that "..pretty much all games i play are Windows games..." is the proof it won't last.

It suffices for Game Pass and Epic Store to be more appealing to studios targeting Windows, plus all Microsoft owned studios being taken out of Steam.