There are thousands, if not millions of Windows games that run perfectly (sometimes better than in Windows) on Steam Proton. In addition, proton can be used without Steam to run any games and applications that are not in the Steam library. This is not officially supported by Valve, but is not illegal. Lutris also has several proton-based runners. Linux users are usually tech savvy enough to figure out various dependency issues and get the game to run on proton outside of Steam if it can run on proton.
Therefore, it is not at all necessary to officially support Linux and release a native distribution of the game for Linux. It’s enough from Riot to just ensure that every new update works on proton, that’s all. Next, users will figure out how to play their favorite game.
Maybe I’m wrong, but my understanding is that Riot uses some undocumented or rare Windows APIs (or dependencies that use such APIs) which are still not implemented in wine/proton. How else can you explain that most games run identically to Windows on proton, but League of Legends does not?
Hey, thank you for your comments and I understand your position however I want to address some points.
The fact that there is no “Linux Target,” as you mentioned, is indeed a significant problem. However, the video you referred to is from 2014, and a lot has changed since then. For instance, there are already options—actually, a few—that somewhat solve the problem for a single target, such as Flatpaks, Snaps, and AppImages. Lutris itself is an example that, thanks to these formats, it’s possible to have a good experience. Yes, you still depend on Wine/Proton, but that is something that can be integrated into the “installation process” of the game, similar to how Lutris does it. The tools are there; maybe they need a bit more work, but I don’t think packaging is a problem anymore
With regard of the anti-cheats, there are plenty of game that are actually playable, Apex Legends for example that uses EAT, and Genshin Impact runs completely fine on Linux and is not integrated in the steam ecosystem at all and uses it’s own Anti-Cheat .
I think that right now the Linux ecosystem is ready for the most part to be a first-class citizen. Perhaps I’m overlooking something, and there might be some work to do to make it easier for developers to actively support Linux. However, I think that the lack of “Linux target” as a problem is mostly solved. I hope companies see that and start supporting Linux.
unified standard ? Rito could release a tarball with all the required dependencies, they could release an AppImage or flatpak, pretty much like ANY other linux game is distributed; Valve has been supporting linux officially for decades and their games still work without using wine.
even before the creation of cross distro packages like appimage ore flatpak, many devs ported their games to linux.
releasing the source code has NEVER been mandatory to distribute a program on linux.
there is literally ZERO excuse for a billion dollar company to not support linux officially
Honestly, I do agree that a linux build would be beneficial to league for quite a number of reasons, but I can imagine that even if the devs think it’s a good idea, if the management team fail to see the point in it, seeing that steam only has a 1.3% playerbase on linux for exemple, it will just not happen.
On Steam yes, but this honestly feels like a copium take. If you were to target a second platform at all, would you rather target the platform with 20% users overall, or the one with 3% (stats from your graphs)? And of course more Linux users will use Steam than MacOS, many Linux users use Steam for non-Steam games as well, whereas Mac users generally don’t need to in the first place, so yeah the people who use Steam as a swiss army knife of general compatibility in addition to controller compatibility (and ease of installation of that) are going to be a bigger demographic on Steam than those who are only on there for the initial intended purpose of the platform.
And the excuse to not support Linux is simple, extra effort and money spent for tiny returns. The investors and boomers in suits at the top don’t care about anything but money, justifying spending money on catering to 3% of the market is a very tough sell, whereas 20% is easier. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, and it seems to me like Mac is only supported because they’re giving in to the sunken cost fallacy, but it’s the excuse that has been used literally always.
The Linux users on Steam using it for non-games is VERY little. And this are very likely using other wrappers/callers like Proton-Call.
You need to know that of that %20 user share showed on MacOS, an extremely small fraction of it plays videogames on their computers at all. MacOS is very often used in work environments only due to its great support of work many proprietary professional tools, or in general as a luxury item.
But MacOS also has nowhere near the compatibility support of Linux, as tools like Proton or many other compatibility tools for other systems are unsupported or require extra steps.
this is all assuming that the picture is to be trusted at all, with claims like there are more arch users on steam than ubuntu which i find hard to believe. “officially” supporting linux would be opening a whole new can of worms for them. “my flatpak isnt working…” “my appimage doesnt work…” “how to linux?” “hi, im running snap on slackware from 1999, how do?” etc. These solutions aren’t great to begin with and they will now have to start monitoring for dependency changes everywhere. there are far more than 0 reasons for them not to officially support linux. Their anti-cheat is written for windows, and they are probably wanting more functionality than looking at your empty wine prefix. macOS is a proprietary system and league very likely wants to keep their game that way as well. mac also has 10s of times the users instead of 1000s of times the distros.
and you think that problem is limited to linux ? some people still try to run modern games in windows 7 and ask the EXACT same question on the steam forums
my appimage doesnt work…
appimages are self contained binaries like self contained exes on windows, if someone has a problem with the appimage that’s probably because the appimage is poorly made, like any other self contained executable
it has been quite silent for the past days
I think the problem being on riot end means that either we will have someone spending weeks reverse engineering lol to find a fix, or riot deign to make a fix for us, which will sadly probably not happen
It’s pretty easy to determine what your target on Linux is. Targeting on Linux doesn’t work the same way it does for windows, so it is easy to see why you make that argument. Linux so much isn’t a target in and of itself, but rather a target you make yourself. If I were to start with sane defaults it would be targeting Vulkan 1.3, X/Xwayland, wine/proton 8, and your choice of GTK or QT for GUI. Everything else can be easily virtualized inside a Flatpak container. Hell, if your engineers gave the community a goal of what Windows API’s to support and what they are looking for, I bet riot wouldn’t even need to do the hard work. I work with a group right now troubleshooting issues and just having a few breadcrumbs to help us fix broken stuff would be a massive leg up… The parts are already there, they just need a few tweaks to better support the direction that riot wants to go in terms of anticheat. I think riot programmers are a bit naive when it comes to the Linux platform, and this is why they don’t think a Linux version is viable. If they made a client that was on Linux natively and even started with a target that was far out there, every Linux user who wants to play league will find a way to meet that target… Set a target and stick to it. The community will build a bridge for the rest.
13.24 is out and… the bug is still there. Tho I had a different one at first.
I created a pratice tool game and tried to launch it against a bot and I had an error message BEFORE the champion select. Re-creating the game leads to the classical bug with the reconnect screen after champion select
i don’t have a shred of hope left that money hungry, greedy rito would do anything to fix this, so fingers crossed that there’s an angel out there willing to do their job for them
