Big Ambitions drops Native Linux support shortly after the Steam release

Smaller ambitions.

You know how Linux is a community effort? The devs could've reached out to the community and gotten together with a few techies on a private feedback environment (privated Discord channel, whatever) and gotten help from people who play the game on Linux who might know exactly what the bugs are and how to fix them.
Even if the players in question don't know immediately how to fix it, there are enough helpful Linux users who can link to stackexchange or other sites where similar problems have occured to steer the devs onto the right path.
By fixing cross-platform bugs, the whole codebase should be more stable overall and potential for future gamebreaking bugs are mitigated.

I'll be ignoring that title myself.

Porting always increases code quality.


But in the end, if you're not developing all platforms together, in the same codebase, with continuous testing, you'll end up with diverging code and a mess that is difficult to fix.

Not great - but as the explicitly said they will make sure it is tested on proton, i'm halfway fine with that. A properly supported proton is better than a half-assed, barely working native port imho.

The thing is most of us have said this from proton inception,it's far cheaper to let valve and the codeweavers team do the heavy lifting and just support fixes on proton. It's not what we wanted but it is understandable.


Last edited by Whitewolfe80 on 21 March 2023 at 11:37 am UTC

Sounds like they bit off more than they could chew....... Thats the problem when you have BIG AMBITIONS........

Publishers who do this should be banned from Steam.

Not so big ambitions afterall. Not that native Linux support is still necessary nowa(Proton)days. But it surely demonstrates a good and clean code base. The fact that the developers cannot live up to the (promised?) Linux version does not necessarily show ignorance for Linux, but it shows low ambitions in respect of their own code base.
(needsledd to say I wont buy a game if I already know that the developers have low ambitions for their code base, neither for Windows(!) not for Linux, unless the game is already known to be good despite its bad code base).

Quoting: TermyNot great - but as the explicitly said they will make sure it is tested on proton, i'm halfway fine with that. A properly supported proton is better than a half-assed, barely working native port imho.

I'm fine with this as well. I'd rather a title I know works via Proton than a native port that doesn't work at all, and I've a few of those.

I hate to say it, but I don't yet think we are at the point in history when it's fair to lambaste developers over this.

For one thing, I find that often developers who do have native linux support don't know what they're doing. For example, I've recently been playing the fun and relaxing board-game-like "Terraformers". It has native linux support, but they put their game data directly in `$HOME`, which is, of course, infuriating. I have posted in steam forums requesting they fix it, and it seems the developers do not even know about XDG directories.

Another (yes, very frustrating) thing to consider is that, while I assume most of us on this forum probably consider linux to be the only sensible operating system for software development, this is true of just about everything except games. If a developer has any intention to sell their games, they have to support windows, I'm sure there are even reasonable arguments that it would be crazy of a game developer to have a primary development environment other than windows. As a maintainer of open source projects, sometimes people complain to me about windows-specific issues, and my response is basically "good luck with that". It's hard to blame windows developers for taking the same approach.

Modern wine/proton works so well that I don't think it's such a bad thing that we lean heavily on it. My main worry is that I fear proton development is now irrevocably tied to the commercial success of the steamdeck, which is definitely not a great situation.