I can tell you one thing and it’s that this is not about his feelings. It is about it not being worth the effort of porting the game to Linux. If there was as many steam decks as there are switches, you can bet it would be on steam deck. He doesn’t not care about Linux, he cares about placing his effort in the right place to make profit.
Stop spreading this bs. If it was this simple, no game would not be Linux-compatible. If they enable it, it is a huge responsability for them to make sure there are no experience breaking bugs, just like any other platform. It is a money thing, not an emotional “Tim does not like Linux” thing. Epic preferred being removed from the App store and they basically killed their Android version because they tought it was worth it during their lawsuits. And let me tell you, there are a LOT more iPhones than there are Steam Decks and desktop Linux computers out in the wild. If Epic is willing to give up on mobile platforms with millions and millions of potential players because they feel it costs them more to keep the game up rather than just shut it down, it means they don’t give a shit about the maybe 20 something thousand potential players on Linux.
Look, I would love for them to enable the anti-cheat on Linux and I would love to be able to play any game without booting my Windows partition, but I can’t. Such is life when you decide to use something that barely has 2.5-3% of market share as a desktop OS. To add to my previous points, the variance between setups is so great on Linux that is makes it basically impossible to fully support. We would need for immutable distros to be the main thing and we are not there yet. So many people have missing drivers, incompatible hardware, iffy setups that are unstable. That would be great for the Steam Deck, but if they make it for the Steam Deck, I doubt they could make it Steam Deck Linux exclusive
You’re definitely pointing real things, but it may not be as simple as you think making a game as large and as complete as Fortnite. Also, the point of 33M users is kind of moot imo, because the vast majority of those people won’t even install steam on their computer, just like there may be a billion Microsoft computers and only a fraction has steam installed. It is also pretty clear that valve will not help Epic make fornite more compatible on their platform, as they are a direct competitor. I am not saying fortnite wouldn’t work, I am saying they do not want to assume the maintenance burden of making such a large game run on an compatibility layer, because when shit doesn’t work, the blame goes to them and not the layer. And that’s bad PR
I’m thinking maybe you’re not aware of the extent at which Proton works these days. It’s come a long way, and fewer and fewer games are incompatible every day. Even games that Steam marks “unsupported” often work (for example, Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition with DSFix).
Games often play better with Proton than using their own native Linux runtime. On Steam Deck, and on my shitty Linux laptop.
My understanding about Fortnite, is that it’s literally just a switch they’d have to flip to allow EAC.
I am fully aware of the state of Linux gaming, and I do play game with Proton, but the experience is far from perfect with many games having visual glitches and unexpected crashes. Epic likely do not want to deal with this and Valve will certainly not help a competitor get on their platform . It may be true that for the EAC, it is a switch to be toggled, but this does not show the entire story which is also the game experience.
The last two games I’ve played: Lethal Company and BeamNG.Drive, both games that should be basically perfect. They both ran fine enough for me to play for an extended period, but there were some visual glitches like flickering or stuttering.
Edit: the person talking about echo chambers was so right… I’m getting downvoted for sharing my experience that happens to go slightly (!) contradict the “Linux is the best gaming platform” narrative
Well that must be why on my 2 computers I’ve had some minor issues like the game crashing for having the misfortune of changing my workspace or having flickering on the top of my screen for 3 hours that persists after restarts and reboots.
Just because your experience has been perfect does not mean mine and other people’s been. This community needs to stop taking criticism of real issues as an insult to their mother.
Because I have not been able to isolate and reproduce it yet. I also did no troubleshooting to see if it was present on other proton versions yet. And also the game crashing on workspace switching has been reported in the past, it is a known issue.
I can tell you one thing and it’s that this is not about his feelings. It is about it not being worth the effort of porting the game to Linux. If there was as many steam decks as there are switches, you can bet it would be on steam deck. He doesn’t not care about Linux, he cares about placing his effort in the right place to make profit.
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Stop spreading this bs. If it was this simple, no game would not be Linux-compatible. If they enable it, it is a huge responsability for them to make sure there are no experience breaking bugs, just like any other platform. It is a money thing, not an emotional “Tim does not like Linux” thing. Epic preferred being removed from the App store and they basically killed their Android version because they tought it was worth it during their lawsuits. And let me tell you, there are a LOT more iPhones than there are Steam Decks and desktop Linux computers out in the wild. If Epic is willing to give up on mobile platforms with millions and millions of potential players because they feel it costs them more to keep the game up rather than just shut it down, it means they don’t give a shit about the maybe 20 something thousand potential players on Linux.
Look, I would love for them to enable the anti-cheat on Linux and I would love to be able to play any game without booting my Windows partition, but I can’t. Such is life when you decide to use something that barely has 2.5-3% of market share as a desktop OS. To add to my previous points, the variance between setups is so great on Linux that is makes it basically impossible to fully support. We would need for immutable distros to be the main thing and we are not there yet. So many people have missing drivers, incompatible hardware, iffy setups that are unstable. That would be great for the Steam Deck, but if they make it for the Steam Deck, I doubt they could make it Steam Deck Linux exclusive
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You’re definitely pointing real things, but it may not be as simple as you think making a game as large and as complete as Fortnite. Also, the point of 33M users is kind of moot imo, because the vast majority of those people won’t even install steam on their computer, just like there may be a billion Microsoft computers and only a fraction has steam installed. It is also pretty clear that valve will not help Epic make fornite more compatible on their platform, as they are a direct competitor. I am not saying fortnite wouldn’t work, I am saying they do not want to assume the maintenance burden of making such a large game run on an compatibility layer, because when shit doesn’t work, the blame goes to them and not the layer. And that’s bad PR
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I’m thinking maybe you’re not aware of the extent at which Proton works these days. It’s come a long way, and fewer and fewer games are incompatible every day. Even games that Steam marks “unsupported” often work (for example, Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition with DSFix).
Games often play better with Proton than using their own native Linux runtime. On Steam Deck, and on my shitty Linux laptop.
My understanding about Fortnite, is that it’s literally just a switch they’d have to flip to allow EAC.
I am fully aware of the state of Linux gaming, and I do play game with Proton, but the experience is far from perfect with many games having visual glitches and unexpected crashes. Epic likely do not want to deal with this and Valve will certainly not help a competitor get on their platform . It may be true that for the EAC, it is a switch to be toggled, but this does not show the entire story which is also the game experience.
Which games have you had visual glitches and crashes?
The last two games I’ve played: Lethal Company and BeamNG.Drive, both games that should be basically perfect. They both ran fine enough for me to play for an extended period, but there were some visual glitches like flickering or stuttering.
Edit: the person talking about echo chambers was so right… I’m getting downvoted for sharing my experience that happens to go slightly (!) contradict the “Linux is the best gaming platform” narrative
Sounds like you’re the only one.. I’ve played several hours of Lethal Company, and it’s ran perfectly.
Well that must be why on my 2 computers I’ve had some minor issues like the game crashing for having the misfortune of changing my workspace or having flickering on the top of my screen for 3 hours that persists after restarts and reboots.
Just because your experience has been perfect does not mean mine and other people’s been. This community needs to stop taking criticism of real issues as an insult to their mother.
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Because I have not been able to isolate and reproduce it yet. I also did no troubleshooting to see if it was present on other proton versions yet. And also the game crashing on workspace switching has been reported in the past, it is a known issue.