SAsandGorgon·Nov 23, 2021
The short (but polite) rebuttal to this is - OSX.
DMG files are similar sized and proven to be very successful.
For e.g. - firefox (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/#product-desktop-r...). Win64 installer is 50mb. MacOS installer is 130mb. Linux 64-bit is 70mb.
Same is the case with Chrome - https://chromeenterprise.google/intl/en_US/browser/download/... . Windows MSI is 79mb. OSX PKG for the same is 195mb.
So by that measure - OSX has already lost right ? The entire package-everything-together has won in probably one of the largest OS ecosystem that exists today. Size does not matter... mom-proof experience does matter.
>How much progress could we make if Steam deprecated their runtimes, abandoned containerization for new games, and let all new games just use the native system libraries? How loudly do you think gamers would com
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plain if a distribution upgrade broke their favourite game?
This OTOH does not exist. Linux gamers are 1% of either the gaming market or the desktop computing market. All gamers either dual boot windows...or android.
Even for those who game on Linux, they do it on an abstraction layer like Wine. Which is what Valve maintains - https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine and https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton
Valve only needs to maintain wine & proton for a distribution. The games themselves ? well, they are windows only. Nobody compiles for Linux.