Leaving Lyndow [Steam], the short, but impressive adventure game has officially removed Linux support on Steam due to the amount of bug reports.
The developer explained their reasoning on the Steam forum post:
QuoteAh, yes I only recently decided to pull support less than two days ago. Anyone who has already purchased the game for Linux can still download it (apparently its working for some), but I have been getting so many bugs from so many different distros I decided to take support off the store page. Linux users account for less than 2% of our customers but over 50% of our bug reports, so I've found myself a bit over my head with Linux. I'm afraid I made a terrible error in judgement when attempting to port for linux, and its my bad. I'm sorry for the confusion!
If interested, you can see the post about it here.
It's not the first time I've heard about this, as I often see the developer of Caves of Qud tweeting about how many bug reports they get from Linux gamers. There's a number of others who I hear the same from too, which is quite a shame, but it's going to happen when developers aren't all that familiar with Linux and the game engines often have issues the developers cannot work around too.
I think a fair amount of developers rely too heavily on just pushing out builds and hoping for the best. Researching the platform and testing it each time you do updates is pretty essential. It may sound dumb and quite obvious to do so, but the amount of times I've seen developers say they don't have "a Linux machine for testing", yet they push out a Linux version and sell Linux copies is quite staggering.
It's a shame, but it's not a massive loss as it really is a short game. Perhaps someone good with Unity can help them fix it up.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: Duck Hunt-Pr0Quote"Linux users account for less than 2% of our customers but over 50% of our bug reports"
I'd wager there's one main reason for that; Linux users tend to be willing to report discovered bugs faaaaaaaaaaar more often than (those lazy slob) windows users..
I'd say this is the case. I used to report windows bugs for games like space engineers, and 7 days to die, but quit because people kept complaining to me it was a early access game and I should just accept the bugs. Even when I posted in the bug report section. So few people understand that to fix bugs, we need to report them first.
3 Likes, Who?
I'm pretty gutted about this. I wasn't really aware of this game until this issue and I'd probably have bought it if I known - I love the walking-sim genre.
I just wish the Dev wasn't so focused on helping everyone. The support goal should be steamos and ubuntu, to hell with the rest. It's nice to be nice, but when you're running a business, you have to be realistic.
So yeah, hugely disappointed with this. I'd be buying it otherwise.
On a more positive note - I'm really enjoying Quern at the moment. It's a walking-sim-with-puzzles, in the style of The Room (a little - mostly I mean in the way you interact with objects). Lots of fun, if a bit frustrating at times.
I just wish the Dev wasn't so focused on helping everyone. The support goal should be steamos and ubuntu, to hell with the rest. It's nice to be nice, but when you're running a business, you have to be realistic.
So yeah, hugely disappointed with this. I'd be buying it otherwise.
On a more positive note - I'm really enjoying Quern at the moment. It's a walking-sim-with-puzzles, in the style of The Room (a little - mostly I mean in the way you interact with objects). Lots of fun, if a bit frustrating at times.
3 Likes, Who?
wait its unity and he does not know how to fix it holy crap.
0 Likes
Quoting: Whitewolfe80wait its unity and he does not know how to fix it holy crap.
Yeah, surely you just hit the "Export" button and choose "Linux", right? /s
0 Likes
slaapliedje Jun 26, 2017
Quoting: Doc AngeloUbuntu 12.04 (from the year 2012) is still supported, and will be until 2019. https://www.ubuntu.com/info/release-end-of-life
I have no idea if compatibility with Linux is harder than with Windows. Windows devs have to make sure that the games work with 7, 8, 9 and possibly XP.
No, it really isn't. 12.04 is dead. You have to pay for extended support, just like RHEL 5.x
Pretty sure anyone on the planet that uses Ubuntu to game on isn't going to stick with such an old distribution.
1 Likes, Who?
slaapliedje Jun 26, 2017
Quoting: BeamboomQuoteso many bugs from so many different distrosOk, not to be a jerk or anything but to be bluntly honest here, in this context I think Linux users on other distros than the officially supported distro on Steam - Ubuntu - should just stuff it and stop reporting bugs and either find a solution themselves or dual boot into Ubuntu for gaming. Plain and simple.
Yeah, harsh I know, but it's only doing us a disfavour at this point in time to spam developers with issues that only occurs due to their exotic window manager, sound architecture, graphics drivers or distro quirks. You're not doing anyone a favour, guys. Nope.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but where does it say that Ubuntu is the only supported distro for Steam? SteamOS would be the one, I think the only reason most games show 'minimum requirements for Ubuntu' is due to them not being updated.
Realistically they should say something like "Linux Kernel version: blah, nVidia Driver: blah or AMD driver: blah, CPU: Memory: disk usage:"
Back in the Loki / LGP days, that's exactly what it did because they had cross-distro support. Steam is very Distro Agnostic. I've even ran it on a CentOS7 system.
0 Likes
Doc Angelo Jun 26, 2017
Quoting: slaapliedjePretty sure anyone on the planet that uses Ubuntu to game on isn't going to stick with such an old distribution.
Thanks for the info that the extended period is for paying costumers. Ubuntu 12.04 was still supported just a few months ago. And I know people who had 12.04 on their systems just a few months ago. Not everyone wants to upgrade everything all the time. I've running Debian Stable now, and intend to do so as long as it is supported.
0 Likes
Quoting: scaineI'm really enjoying Quern at the moment. It's a walking-sim-with-puzzles, in the style of The Room (a little - mostly I mean in the way you interact with objects). Lots of fun, if a bit frustrating at times.
I found the map design of Quern to be excellent - lots of gameplay in a relatively small space.
0 Likes
Micromegas Jun 27, 2017
Quoting: slaapliedjeRealistically they should say something like "Linux Kernel version: blah, nVidia Driver: blah or AMD driver: blah, CPU: Memory: disk usage:"
Back in the Loki / LGP days, that's exactly what it did because they had cross-distro support. Steam is very Distro Agnostic. I've even ran it on a CentOS7 system.
This.
I guess the confusion about the now suddenly perceived need to develop games for "thousand different Linux distributions" again comes from one or more severe bugs in one of the latest Unity game engine versions. For instance that one bug that caused many Unity games not to work with certain window managers. And because many distributions use certain window managers as a default it looked like the distributions are again important. But any distribution can run any window manager. So as far as I know the distribution itself normally shouldn't be important if the game uses the Steam runtime environment and game development platforms like Unity manage to keep their bugs under control. Am I right?
2 Likes, Who?
Quoting: scaineQuoting: Whitewolfe80wait its unity and he does not know how to fix it holy crap.
Yeah, surely you just hit the "Export" button and choose "Linux", right? /s
I know it's not that simple but it is unified code ie the problems that are happening in Linux have to be happening in Windows or similar unless the Windows guys are not reporting errors.
0 Likes
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me