I’m getting ready to launch my game on Steam and Valve suggested that I thoroughly test it on a fresh Linux installation. As a long-time Linux user (mostly Debian), I’m aiming for a Linux-first approach even though my game is also designed for Windows. I noticed that Arch seems to be the most popular distro among Steam players, especially with the Steam Deck being based on it. However, setting up Arch just for testing seems like overkill, especially after I had some trouble with `archinstall`. Can anyone share their experiences? Are there significant differences between Steam games running on Arch compared to something like Linux Mint? Also, have you encountered any distro-specific issues with Steam games?
2 Answers
When supporting multiple distros, compile your game with the oldest glibc version from the distros you plan to support. Keep in mind that glibc won’t be selected from the Steam Linux runtime, as far as I know.
If your game works well on Debian Stable or Linux Mint, it’s likely to run fine on other major distros too. Just make sure to test it with both stable and bleeding-edge Mesa or Nvidia drivers to cover all bases.
Thanks for the reassurance!
Thanks! I’m using Godot for development, so I don’t handle the compiling directly, but I’m leveraging Godot’s compatibility renderer for older machines.