Vulkan Can’t Bring Games to Linux by Itself
FOR YEARS AND YEARS, being a Linux user meant giving up on the idea of playing top-tier games when they’re released. For the most part, that’s still true, but technologies are emerging that will make it easier for developers to distribute games for Linux.
The first big thing that offers promise is the Vulkan graphics API, the spiritual successor to OpenGL. As an open API, Vulkan has promised a cross-platform API for developers who want to develop for Linux, Windows, Mac, and even mobile devices. (The API also shipped with support for the modern Wayland graphics server.) The API spec was published in early 2016, and hardware released during the year offered support for Vulkan. However, very few games offered support, with most released in 2016 opting for DirectX 11 or 12. Id Software’s id Tech 6-powered Doom was a notable exception, showing the blistering-fast performance that Vulkan offered. Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 also supports the API.
With a high-performance, modern graphics API available for Linux, one would thing there would be a tidal wave of AAA games for Linux. That wave hasn’t come. A quick scan of a list of games with Vulkan support on Wikipedia shows eight games written for Vulkan. Only two of those (Dota2 and The
TalosPrinciple) are available on Linux. (Id’s Doom is curiously Windows-only, breaking from id’s history of releasing shooters for Linux as well as Windows.)
There simply aren’t many games written for Vulkan yet, but given time, that will change. The percentage of those games that are released for Linux might not, however. The big reason developers
Linux is a moving target in terms of libraries and drivers; a huge headache for very little return for a game dev shop.
shy away from Linux development is understandable. The market is minuscule compared to the number of gamers on Windows, and Linux presents a moving target in terms of libraries and drivers. Anyone who’s broken something like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth support because of an update knows what I mean. That means a huge headache for very little return for a game dev shop. But there are a few new packaging technologies that aim to fix that.
Universal Linux “container” formats are one of the most important new ideas for desktop users. They differ slightly from container technologies such as Docker, and aim to unify the Linux application distribution space.
These technologies promise to allow developers to package their apps with the libraries that they need. The formats allow them to stop chasing library updates, and distribute software images that are known to run on the vast majority of Linux systems without issue.
These formats also aim to unify distribution in the face of the fracturing caused by each distro’s package management solution. Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint have deb; Fedora and openSUSE have RPM; Arch and Manjaro use tar.xz; Gentoo builds everything from source because why the hell not? This landscape is hell for software distribution (and creates a lot of work that volunteers have to do).
Unfortunately, the three new competing formats—flatpak, snap, and AppImage—suffer from the same problem, in that there’s three of them. Hopefully, 2017 will see a clear winner pull ahead of the pack. But even if one does, and developers have a clearer and more stable platform to target, the chicken (penguin?) or the egg problem will likely persist: There aren’t many gamers on Linux because there aren’t many games for Linux, and there aren’t many games for Linux because there aren’t many gamers.