I think part of what he means is that out of the big three - Windows, Linux, and macOS - both Windows and macOS have their own radically different APIs, while Linux sticks to the more neutral POSIX APIs. And as it so happens, both Windows and macOS supports much of those same POSIX APIs as well.
So programming a piece of software on Linux using the native APIs makes it a lot easier to port onwards onto other platforms like Windows or macOS.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I looked through their API and SDKs a bit, looks mostly aimed towards higher-level mods - texture packs, localization, models, scripts, etc. Though their built-in virus scanning with VirusTotal is nice for the lower-level ones.
They do seem to lack a robust system for version dependencies as well as inter-mod dependencies too.

Really happy to see someone working on providing a reference for how to do mod handling though, this does tend to end up far too big of a mess usually.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Damn it, and of course I already own the game since before, so can't even throw money at them for the Linux release.

Steam could really use a donate / gift button for developers, to really show appreciation for things like this.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Oh wow, I didn't think it would be possible for me to be happier with Jackbox Games.

I don't suppose anyone knows if they have somewhere where you can just arbitrarily throw money at them? Already own the packs in question after all, so hard to show my appreciation through that.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Going to note that there's now a flatpak package up on flathub for OpenMW as well, so if you prefer that type of an install then it's also an option.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: ZlopezAnd the Flatpak package for Steam is already worked on GitHub

There's actually a Steam package available from flathub as well, been using that myself since it appeared.

I'm still interested to hear about what Valve were planning when they talked about using something alike Flatpak for their own package handling on Linux.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I must say that this is both quite unexpected, as well as very appreciated. No more messing about with deb repos and backports just to launch things like media centers, curious to see if we'll get a controller friendly desktop portal to go with it.

Hopefully this also means Valve are looking into cross-distro packaging of Steam games, since one of their Linux developers did comment about designing a Flatpak - then xdg-app - inspired packaging system for the runtime and applications.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI kinda like Flatpak, but it seems to me like a useful secondary thing rather than something that can or should kill .deb or .rpm and apt and so on.

It's worth noting that Flatpak is not designed to compete with system package managers, which neither Snappy nor AppImage are trying to do either.

Flatpak is designed for packaging userland applications in a way that means users don't have to worry about dependencies, and the sandboxing means you don't have to worry about broken code damaging your system either.
Additionally, it can be run entirely in a user's home, so users don't need to pester sysadmins about installing applications or dependencies - nor about keeping them up-to-date.

I'm actually more of a fan of Flatpak than Snappy in this particular case, Snappy requires a system daemon while Flatpak only requires an application in PATH - on a new kernel it doesn't even require setuid.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Worth noting is that the Flatpak install is unable to access your home folder, so even if it wanted to conflict with your full Steam install that would be impossible for it to do. You can even run both Steam installs at the same time because of the sandboxing
I'm unsure how well non-nVidia drivers work for Flatpak at the moment though, only have nVidia systems on hand.

View this comment - View article - View full comments