I’m asking because I just bought Cronos: The New Dawn on Steam because it has a native Linux port. To be fair, I would have bought it at some point anyway but I got excited when I saw it had a Linux port. The game is missing features that the Windows version has, It runs horribly at any setting other than very low. I think they only bothered testing for the SteamDeck. But if that’s the case, why does it support FSR 4.0? To be fair, the Windows version doesn’t run amazing either if you enable ray tracing but it still performs way better than the Linux port. Why do devs keep doing this? I’ve bought many Linux games that have problems that the Windows versions don’t have. Why even make a port if you’re not going to bother testing or optimizing it?
The market share is never a precise number because not everybody is asked to do the hardware survey, and not everybody who is asked does. But the Linux userbase is small enough that “~3%” is in the ballpark.
Version control of dependencies is not as difficult as it seems. Unix systems can easily implement bundled dependencies like Windows does, even without sandboxed or monolithic packaging formats. The important thing is to tell the dynamic linker (
ld.soin Linux’s case) where to look for the library files, similar to howPATHis used to locate executables. This is similar to how containerization works to a lesser extent, and the Steam client actually does this by loading its own.sofiles from~/.local/share/Steam/.... I’m sure there are additional challenges, my knowledge is superficial and approximate at best.But the point still stands: in most cases, Linux-native ports are simply not worth the effort, either because of limited resources in small teams, or because of profits in large studios. BG3 and Factorio are definite outliers.