Live data from Hacker News

Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

twitter.com

71–80 of 415 posts

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#71
post #62

I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old vers…

Some binaries are meant to be linked statically

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#72

Gaming is the #1 reason I haven't fully switched to Linux on the desktop at home (at work I exclusively run Linux). A lot of my Steam games work flawlessly with Linux but others will just silently fail to launch and it takes hours to properly diagnose and fix, which isn't what I'm after when I get some time to play games.

I've switched to 100% Linux at home due to Steam Play. All of my Windows games (except 2) work perfectly on it. I really hope Valve keeps improving it, it has the potential to be a game changer for Linux gaming.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Linux users want all their software to be free.

Many Linux user would pay for games, and they would pay more for a Linux version than a windows version.

Maybe, but many Linux users would also complain that the Linux version is more expensive.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#74
post #62

I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old vers…

Why use not Electron? Take a look at vscode it has plugins and it seems to work everywhere.

Unfortunately DAW and VST plugins are not something you can make in Electron

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#75
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the thread it seems this all happened a while ago: > The world of 2014 Linux graphics drivers was not a friendly place. We absolutely encountered issues where some driver revisions only worked on certain distros, and AFAIK we did not use anything specific to a Linux distro. About the same time Chromium project found a lot of GFX bugs and created a lot of workarounds but when I disabled all of them now in 2019…

I first started using linux in 1998 with RedHat 5.2, installed from a CD off a magazine. At almost any point in my time using linux there was something "temporarily broken" that would eventually get fixed/improve some time down the road (modems, sound cards, wifi, power-management modes, GPUs, etc), at which point it didn't take long for something new to break. There are of course those calm eras of peace in between…

Ha, I started with Slackware around the same time (downloaded over 2 days to about 10 floppies).

When I got bored of fixing stuff I moved to Ubuntu. It pretty much just works now except when I break it (which is often). Point being I could just install and run with zero issues.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#76
post #62

I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old vers…

The DAW isn't Bitwig is it? (just because your username has the same amount of syllables ;) If so, then PLEASE keep up the great work supporting Linux. I was only able to ditch my Mac a year ago because I switched from Ableton Live to Bitwig!

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#77
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still represent a vastly disproportionate amount of work for how much extra money they get you. They get you 0.1% extra sales, but they cost you 25% (= 20/80*100) extra support work. And this is nevermind the extra time spent during development. Your point would hold if the issues reported by Linux users would also fix issues on Windows. Some issues would occur on both systems, but I bet the vast majority is wei…

> I bet the vast majority This is the crux of your assertion and requires substantiation. On the other hands, all these Linux user might be doing you "a favour" taking the time to log these tickets that less conscientious users on other systems would. Of course that does depend on the classification of the tickets but coming from that community I wouldn't expect them to be trivial issues ...

[deleted]

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#78
post #62

I work for a small company that produces a DAW and VST plugins. Supporting Linux is a huge amount of work compared to Windows and Mac. The main issue is that 'Linux' is not a thing you can support. You have to pick the distros you want to support, and then once you've picked a distro, what versions you want to support. And you need to use the C++ version that ships with that distro, so if you want to support old vers…

I don't know why people say that. You don't support Windows XP and Windows 10 either with the same binary.

In contrast to Windows you can provide or pay someone to provide libcurl3 if you want to continue to use it. MS will just say you can go F yourself.

In contrast to Windows you can study the source code and write a wrapper that provides a central API point that you can use in your single code base.

In contrast to Windows you can actually go there and provide patches. Even if the original authors won't merge it you can still use it via a fork etc.

And last but not least I bet there are actually still people supporting and providing libcurl3 binaries to this day and you just need to google their package server and add 2 lines to your installer script (one to add the public key for that package repo and one to add the package repo to your package manager).

PS: If you provide software for sizable amounts of people you need to provide 1-3 out of 3 reasonable Distros: Debian, RHEL, Suse. Even if you just provide one most people can deal with it thanks to VMs or docker.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#79
While I am a Linux user, I boot my workstation under windows for gaming. So I would not even be accounted as a linux gamer by the stats.

While rebooting is a bit cumbersome, I don't really mind now. I also wouldn't trust all the games I play to run as my user on my workstation. And it would take a bit of efforts to properly sandbox them.

Re: Game dev: Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets

#80
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it is measured by number of installs or downloads. Either way the statistic is still very telling. If 0.1% of installs/downloads/purchases created 20% of the bug reports, I can understand the developer's frustration.

The stats might be measured differently: Steam might not report a Linux user as such if they played on Windows at first (or something like that), while the tickets might be correctly labeled as Linux-specific by the user.

The original release was online only, so I imagine they have some fairly accurate idea on the number of clients connected. Even when the same user is using multiple different clients.
Post reply on HN