this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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Linux Gaming

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Why do game devs keep making horrible Linux Ports? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 days ago by daggermoon@lemmy.world to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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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?

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[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 2 points 21 hours ago

Linux just barely broke 3% share. As a company, whose goal is to make money, would you focus on what 97% of your base uses, or the 3%?

If your game is mobile friendly, treating Steam Deck not as an afterthought may be beneficial. Proton is not perfect. It has bugs, it loads a whole fake Windows environment into memory and API translation costs CPU and battery.

Further more, the company needs to spend QC resources for 1-2 versions of Windows, vs the multitude of Linux distros

That's completely wrong. For games, the developer only needs to target whatever the latest Steam Linux Runtime is. It's 100% identical across all distributions where the Linux version of Steam runs. That's its entire point. Steam Linux Runtime is a more stable target than playing catch up with yearly Proton releases.