this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
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Tbh, Proton is a better development target than native Linux support.
Proton is a nice and stable target that works predictably across all Linux systems.
Releasing native Linux software sucks and has always sucked due to the massive diversity of distros and whatever people do with their installations. That's why we have seen developers move away from native releases to flatpak/appimage/... releases for all sorts of software for a long time already.
Games are even more special than your run-of-the-mill office program. Proton effective provides a really good target platform that's not affected with all the customization people do to their Linux setups.
If I was to develop a game today that is only supposed to run on Linux, it's very likely that I'd develop directly for Proton. And doubly so if my game is supposed to run on Windows too.
What distro choices could actually affect how well a game works across Linux setups? The only one i can think of is maybe sound API with Pulse Compatible vs ALSA only (now very rare) vs JACK only.
Graphics APIs are uniform (Vulkan or OpenGL). Networking APIs have been uniform for decades. Controller API had a brief disruption in the joystick API vs Event API which I believe has very much resolved in favour of the latter.
What am I missing? /gen
True
Most of the time OpenGL Instead of Vulkan(e,g. Xonotic,supertuxkart,GMOD Native.)
sometimes being outdated(e,g GMOD Native)
and sometimes Vulkan performaing worse them OpenGL/DXVK is the issues i faced (e,g.GZDOOM)
There's just too much variance in Linux setups that can cause issues and issues cause support requests and negative reviews. It's just not worth it in many cases.