Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets
I&#x27;ll take the step and say that most developers do the mistake to treat linux like any other proprietary system which they can target with stable interfaces and call it a day.<p>Free software changes more often, but when it does, it is not that big of a problem because you have both control over code and the code that your code interacts with, because all code is accessible.<p>If game developers opened up, and here I don&#x27;t demand the optimum, which would be open sourcing their game[0], but just to get people involved that actually are active in both their code and the free software community, they could deal with the eco system much better and make their code actually work even on most of the many configurations that exist.<p>Of course, the usual argument is that game developers don&#x27;t have to care about this on other systems, but in fact they did have to gather experience and training on the other platforms, and with free systems, once you are involved in it, you can deal with it much more efficiently than what it seems at the start. There is nothing magic about filing a bug against mesa.<p>I am one of the persons that contacted Uber about PA not working on my linux system. It was a recent Debian stable without modifications. They didn&#x27;t offer meaningful support. I just asked them to install a debian stable with free mesa drivers on a computer with a recent AMD gpu, and try to build and run PA, and see why it doesn&#x27;t work (there were obvious, easy to reproduce issues). That is not a lot of engineering time, and I bet solving those problem would have solved many problems in linux systems.<p>[0] This starts to become a cultural problem that seems to need laws to deal with. As a society, we shouldn&#x27;t accept to never have our cultural heritage, which games are part of, in the public domain in a usable form (source code and documentation).<p>Edit 1: Writing closed programs for a free software community is difficult. I think that it should be difficult. That pain is a constant reminder that you&#x27;re doing it wrong.<p>Edit 2: Steam counts unsuccessful launches of a game where the game is laughibly broken as playing time, so after some extenstive testing, you can&#x27;t even refund a game on Steam because it says you&#x27;ve played more than 2 hours -.-