An interesting and important look at the development of Factorio’s Linux-native port from an actual developer: the platform in general, Wayland, GNOME’s bullshit, and dependencies.
Props to them for caring. If it was me I’d let GNOME lie on their stupid Client-side Decorated bed and the game would be borderless forever, fuck it.
Indeed, one of the big things holding Wayland back is that you don’t really ‘support It’, you have to support every damn desktop environment, and they’re all moving targets. Gnome should fix their shit.
Factorio runs amazing on Linux, probably the best game I’ve played on the platform.
I don’t know if this is still the case, but Linux was the only platform that could save in the background because they were forking the process to do so.
They mentioned it at the bottom of the blog: works ok Linux and macos. And they want you to enable it because there a bug they’re trying to reproduce.
I remember reading they did port this to windows, using the same kind of process, but it was originally only on Linux because the forking process was so easily implemented.
Plasma has server side decorations under Wayland. While it’s admirable to wanting to support as many desktops as possible, I think it’s also fine for games developers to say “we support SteamOS – its Game Mode and its desktop mode”. Both are built on standard APIs and if a specific desktop doesn’t care to implement standards, sucks to be them.
As I keep saying, it will be hilarious when Linux overtakes Windows on gaming PCs, yet Wine/Proton is the overwhelmingly dominant API.
