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Sad news, Facepunch are no longer selling the Linux version of their survival game Rust [Official Site] after removing mentions of Linux support yesterday from their Steam page.
Linux support has been available in Rust since 2013, along with continued support during Early Access and after the official release earlier this year. It was a bit of a surprise that we got an email from a reader, to mention that the Steam store page for Rust was no longer showing the SteamOS/Linux icon or listing it in the system requirements.
Thinking it was a mistake, since nothing was announced, I reached to Facepunch to which they replied with:
Hey dude - yeah we stopped selling Rust for Linux.
I did request more information as to why and will update this article if I receive any further information. To be fair, they haven't had a lot of time to respond again yet, but I feel it's important to get the word out.
It's possible it's due to issues with the Unity game engine, which has suffered some nuisance problems with their Linux support lately. We've gone through black screens, no input in fullscreen and the latest being double-input issues—all issues that have plagued a number of games that use Unity. All of which have been solved in updated versions of Unity though. Still, it has become more of a hassle for developers to support us due to issues like this repeatedly coming up.
To be clear on something though, it might only mean that they're not actively advertising it as a Linux supported game, while still allowing Linux users to buy it and play it—something a few other developers do as well. I highly doubt they would actually remove the Linux version, after it being around for so long.
Really sad about this, we have an active community-run server with plenty of people enjoying themselves on it. Sin has livestreamed plenty of it on our Twitch Channel, purchased skins and all. With all the additions to the game, it was really becoming quite interesting. Even I was also going to be jumping back in soon, so this has me a little down as I did quite enjoy the game as well.
As always, please remain respectful in the comments. Issues like this can become quite heated, but let's not go throwing any insults around. Now is a time to show your support, not have a war of words.
Updates
Garry responded on Twitter and said this:
We stopped selling Rust on Linux because we won't/don't give it the QA support it needs. There are situations where there's a Unity Linux bug that pops up, and we ship with it - because it's the right decision for 99.99% of our players.
And while 60% of Linux users are fine with this, they understand their position in this world, it's probably not the right thing to act like it's fine. So while we're still going to ship Linux updates and keep it up to date.. we're not going to sell it anymore.
Also Linux Community - being abusive, demanding, rude to the few developers actually shipping games to your favourite OS isn't the way to go. It makes me regret ever shipping Linux versions.
I've said it before and I will say it again: Developers are human, people do need to understand that and not resort to throwing insults around right away. Even so, if you sell a game on any platform you should be doing QA on it—there's no excuse for not doing it.
Update #2 - Here's what another developer said on Reddit:
Linux is and will still be supported but the decision to remove Linux from purchase was mainly based on multiple issues in the current Unity version (2018.1.4).
We're currently unable to downgrade to a Unity version which corrects these Linux issues and we're unable to upgrade Unity to 2018.2 due to a number of new issues.
Linux is in a state of limbo in which we're unable to resolve, instead of selling a broken platform we decided to remove it from purchase but still offer it to existing players.
Once Linux is in a working state we'll review the decision.
Hat tip to Basiani for letting us know.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: Whitewolfe80As for the throw away community line we have this every so often it goes back to once again the linux die hards that think they throw f bombs and act like Stallman or Linus.1. No it does not.
2. Had it occurred to you that that is, itself, a rather inflammatory and offensive comment?
3. Do you in fact have any idea how Stallman acts?
orochi_kyo Jul 28, 2018
Quoting: GoboI was interested in Rust years ago. But I read about toxic players ruining the fun in game repeatedly, so I never bothered to actually buy the game or join any giveaways. Those toxic players cannot be concentrated on Linux only, there are a lot of idiots on other platforms as well. And as far as I understand Rust used cross platform play, so judging by the percentage of Linux gamers there have to be lots of bad apples in the Windows users group.
And I don't believe Linux users are more vocal than users of other platforms in general. But I do believe that lack of QA leads to more pain for those users which fuels the flames. If your product has different quality on different platforms, those users will sound off accordingly. Ask developers with great Linux support if they think of us as toxic and they will tell you otherwise.
Eat your own dog food.
Completely agree with you, the game has been broken on windows many times and I'm pretty sure Windows players has rant Facepunch too but Garry is just mad on Linux.
Obviously he expect people to be better than him, not being angry that the game wasn't on sale on Linux anymore and they didn't say anything. Way to go Facepunch.
Also I didnt know we can use the word "HATE" to describe a situation when someone isn't agree with our arguments.
Quoting: GuestQuoting: GuestEr, the bugs are in Unity. That is down to the Unity devs to solve. This is like saying if you have problems driving your car, you should become a mechanic and fix it.
[…]
If Ford uses a transmission from Dana corp and that transmission is crap in the car you buy, you don't call Dana about it, you call Ford about it.
And even though Dana is responsible for the broken transmission (or Unity is responsible for the broken state of the engine), Ford is still responsible for creating and delivering a broken car that uses broken parts (or, the game dev using a broken Unity build, for delivering a broken game).
When you do any software whatsoever you don’t just happily upgrade every dependency you use and push that to production. You first check if the new versions don’t break the software, and only if they don’t, you release a new version with upgraded deps. If the new version introduces bugs that break your software and you cannot fix it yourself, you file a bug report and wait for the fix.
Why Unity reputation are getting worse since in the last 2-3 months?
I'm talking about the whole (outside Linux) gaming community in general.
Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: Perkeleen_Vittupää"Linux is a second class citizen, we don't run it internally because only 17 people use it"As I said before, he's blunt and sarcastic (and no that's not toxic), repeatedly digging up such a thing from years ago to get people all riled up isn't helpful.
https://mobile.twitter.com/garrynewman/status/615071229947564032?lang=en
Also, there's no need to instantly jump to grab your pitchforks guys. Like I said, we don't really know their reasoning, the issues with Unity and GPU drivers are quite literally out of their hands and it wouldn't surprise me if those are the causes of them doing this.
I don't think it's good that we found out like this, I do think they should have announced something when it happened or just after and not leave it up to us to let people know.
Oh, I'll tell you his reasoning, it's actually pretty simple. The only reason he exported a Linux version of Rust in the first place was because of the off chance SteamOS *might* have gone somewhere. Since it didn't/hasn't, he doesn't see the point in continuing support. Now, Garry has a chip on his shoulder as far as Linux and the community goes, so he's included some whinging about us with the announcement.
Last edited by Dolus on 28 July 2018 at 8:11 pm UTC
Quoting: DolusTheir main reasoning was already explained pretty clearly.Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: Perkeleen_Vittupää"Linux is a second class citizen, we don't run it internally because only 17 people use it"As I said before, he's blunt and sarcastic (and no that's not toxic), repeatedly digging up such a thing from years ago to get people all riled up isn't helpful.
https://mobile.twitter.com/garrynewman/status/615071229947564032?lang=en
Also, there's no need to instantly jump to grab your pitchforks guys. Like I said, we don't really know their reasoning, the issues with Unity and GPU drivers are quite literally out of their hands and it wouldn't surprise me if those are the causes of them doing this.
I don't think it's good that we found out like this, I do think they should have announced something when it happened or just after and not leave it up to us to let people know.
Oh, I'll tell you his reasoning, it's actually pretty simple. The only reason he exported a Linux version of Rust in the first place was because of the off chance SteamOS *might* have gone somewhere. Since it didn't/hasn't, he doesn't see the point in continuing support. Now, Garry has a chip on his shoulder as far as Linux and the community goes, so he's included some whinging about us with the announcement.
Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: rapakivBut I never seen so much hate in GOL as in this thread, relax, life is short, enjoy itHate? Really?! What bemuses me about this discussion actually is that the reaction is more extreme than the dislike of the actual developer. I don't really have a dog in this fight.
Really? What boggles my mind is that all the negativity comes from people that don't have a dog on this fight. The people that actually do play the game are understanding and sympathetic to the dev's decision, go figure...
burningserenity Jul 29, 2018
Quoting: svartalfThere's a reason I'm...unlikely...to use Unity for any game I'm fielding anytime soon. And yes, there was more to that remark than meets the eye. ;-D
Are you perchance working on Scavengers?
mulletdeath Jul 29, 2018
Linux in general just gets the short end of the stick for proprietary anything, and in general I feel that using Linux on the desktop is taking your life into your own hands (in both the good and bad sense). It just seems more logical to expect to have to get things working as a community or on your own for any game regardless of whether or not it's "supported" for your OS (and if you use anything other than a recent Ubuntu or Mint, then you're not likely to be officially supported anyway). So I just don't really "get" being upset when a game is put out on Linux but it doesn't get Windows parity all the time.
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