Comment by Shorel 2 days ago
The most stable Linux API is Wine/Win32.
There are many older games I can't install on Linux anymore, because they used an older SDL1 or some particular X11 version or some GPU driver that's no longer available for the current kernel.
The exact same game, Windows version, can be installed and runs flawlessly on both Linux and Windows.
So, native Vulkan executables? Sure, if they can continue to run in 20 years.
Even glibc breaks ABI. The linux userspace ABI is too unstable and games don't have to be doing weird things to hit it.
I never understood why glibc needs to break ABI. It should not be allowed to. Ever.
You are not reinventing the wheel. Just maintain the damn thing and keep it running as is. As Linus once said "If there's a bug that people rely on, it's not a bug, it's a feature.".
Valve is working on this problem for native Linux games: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steamrt/...
This is a similar idea to flatpak/snap etc.
os/2 2.1 was free during some periods in the 90s, I and several friends got it just for the free floppies. Though none of us paid for windows either, I guess it was free as well.
The development tools for OS/2 were worse and far more expensive.
It’s working right now, what are you arguing against.
What do you mean? There is a whole library of thousands of win32 games spanning more than 2 decades and the community is tracking and reporting bugs in each and classifying their level of performance.
That’s one of the most successful computer projects I’ve heard of.
Those games did weird things. Every distro still ships SDL1, x11 didn’t really break API, and requiring a specific driver is obviously broken from the start. I won’t say none of this happens but the platform isn’t to blame there.