So much for games on Linux

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Many years ago, I used to be a Linux advocate. You know the type: trying to tell everyone how stable and fast Linux was, that it looked great unless you chose otherwise and was easy to use if you just wanted to use it, and how it obeyed you as opposed to a distant faceless corporation, even while being able to do all the same things as commercial operating systems.

People were incredibly indifferent, and that puzzled me until one day. It was an ice-cold shower to discover just how well they knew all that and how little they cared.

Because they know and don't care, you see. Fast forward fifteen years to 2018, when Microsoft pushed a Windows 10 update that would literally delete all your files. A few people complained a little, for a short while, then the whole story was completely forgotten. And nobody did anything. Even literally losing all their work wasn't enough to make people switch. I think it's safe to say Windows could burn down their house and they still wouldn't budge.

Then again, who was going to convince them? Linux users? Let me tell you a story about those, too. In recent years I started putting out native games for Windows and Linux, thanks to a convenient open source runtime. And people would complain I only had 32-bit builds. (Turns out, 64-bit Linux is terrible at staying backwards-compatible.) So at the first opportunity I started providing those all-important 64-bit builds. And nobody's downloading them.

Linux users are just a handful of loud jerks. I should have known that, too, from my days in a Linux User Group. They don't actually use Linux. They fool around with Linux, not so much because it's fun (though it can be), but because it makes them feel smart. Oh, they want to run games, but only to prove Linux can do it too. So it has to be the same big-name stuff everyone else is already playing. Not that they actually play, they just demo.

At least Mac users make things with their OS of choice. And complain about it at every turn, even if they would never switch either.

Might as well go back to making games for the ZX Spectrum. Those are by far the most popular out of everything I released. Yes, really. And that speaks volumes.


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Tags: publishing, platforms