For those hanging on hoping Facepunch will go back to officially supporting Linux with Rust, you might want to sit down. They've made a comment on it on their latest blog post.
As a little reminder, back in July last year I reported on how Facepunch removed Linux support and any mention of the Linux version of Rust from Steam. Since then though, they have continued to update the Linux version so people could still play it, it just wasn't advertised any more (you could also still buy it new and play it on Linux). That may be changing, going by what they said as quoted below:
This update brings a new set of fixes for the Linux client that should resolve some of the issues that have been reported. Unfortunately I also have to take this moment to address the future of Rust on Linux. We are currently debating internally whether or not to end Linux support in the near future. There are many reasons for this but the biggest issue right now is the problematic state of Linux support from third parties. Any software that supports Linux faces the same problem of putting in a lot of effort for an extremely small customer base, so we are sympathetic for the decisions our partners have been making. Unfortunately this means we keep encountering problems with Rust on Linux that cannot be solved by us directly and require us to wait around for fixes, which can take months or in some cases never materialize. We have not made a decision on whether or not to continue supporting Linux yet, but we wanted to communicate this process early so the community is aware of it.
I have to say I am still really sad about this. Rust did become my favourite survival game on Linux, we had a good community server going and plenty of people were enjoying it. However, if they're not able to support it due to issues outside their control (like the many issues Unity has had over the last year) it's obviously a big problem for them and somewhat understandable. I also appreciate how they're being a little more open about it now.
My issue is, what happens if/when they do decide to entirely stop supporting Linux? Most people would obviously be way past the usual time for a refund so we would be left with nothing. Steam Play could help in situations like this, if it wasn't for Easy Anti-Cheat not working under Steam Play. Not good.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
The biggest issue so far were the weird artifacts filling the screen, issues that was "solved" by un-ticking a box in the Unity editor.
Yeah, and that was because a clever Linux guy with an hex editor discovered that for them, while they pretended for two months that "they're working on it".
There's still the flickering issue, but I hardly believe that this one is caused by third parties.
salamanderrake May 2, 2019
What do they want to do if Steam games are streamed via Stadia in the future? What runs on the desktop becomes less and less important. No data center in the world will ever run on Windows. Just because of the license costs.
Quoting: PatolaWe're doomed... Linux gaming will die. :'(We're not, we're really not. Let's not go down that road. Out of all the games we have plus Steam Play, how many have removed Linux support? An absolutely tiny fraction compared to the overall amount.
Last edited by cprn on 2 May 2019 at 10:28 pm UTC
Quoting: TheBard[...] What we can expect from developers is spending some time (1% of their time because we are 1% [...]
That's not exactly accurate. A good developer understands the benefits of compiling for 2nd, 3rd and 4th platform and knows how that translates to overall architecture and stability improvements. Bugs found while building for Linux are there in builds for all other targets. What causes rendering artifacts on Linux might be responsible for slowdowns on Windows. What looks like flickering on Xbox might be just a different light colour on Mac. It doesn't translate 1% to 1%. I bet porters like Aspyr, Fanatical, Icculus and Ethan Lee reported thousands of issues in original codebase they had to work with that improved everything from load times to frames per second.
ElectricPrism May 3, 2019
2. Make sure to publicly defer blame via blog with "Hey guys, it's not our fault"
3. Pull the plug on a customer base that has given you money for a product thereby revoking their ability to use their license.
When the shit hits the fan every Linux gamer who has a copy needs to spam the fuck out of their refund system to remind them how much of a pain in the ass and mistake they made for themselves.
To clarify: Their profit model isn't SaaS (Software as a Service), it's selling licenses.
Last edited by ElectricPrism on 3 May 2019 at 3:02 am UTC
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