Sounds awesome, at least in theory. It remains to be seen how much interest there is from Publishers.
I’m hoping he could revive some of the really old and poorly working Linux ports as well as games that barely run on modern Windows or Wine these days.
Although in practice I can’t think of any game in my library that is in need of such a refresh, they generally all work decently in Wine (and modern Windows) even if some have a broken Linux port.
Edit: Maybe this is more exciting for macOS as there are plenty of Mac games that remain 32 bit only and thus can’t run on Catalina and above (also who knows how long Apple will keep OpenGL compatibility and Rosetta around). And on mac you can’t just simply “run the game with Proton” instead.
Also as another thought, while the Linux port requirement is of course a plus for us, it might be off-putting particularly for publishers that have their own shitty stores / launchers without Linux support.
I have a feeling they’re slowly but steadily moving from deb packages to snap-only completely. Because unlike what Mark Shuttleworth said when they abandoned Unity, Canonical doesn’t let their users decide which technologies should catch on. The Linux desktop as a whole is moving to a Flatpak future for desktop apps, yet Ubuntu keeps pushing Snaps down their users throats whether they want it or not and sort of “fight” Flatpak on Ubuntu spins.
I get it, Snaps are more versatile than Flatpak, you could make everything on the system a snap (can’t ship a DE or the kernel as a Flatpak now, can you) and CLI programs as Flatpaks also suck compared to snap (and distro packages obviously), but for desktop apps Flatpaks are just the obvious choice and the Linux community has shown that.
I’m waiting for the day where you can install Flatpak as a snap on Ubuntu lmao
Facebook and Instagram, sure. But plenty of people are more or less forced to keep WhatsApp either because of people they want to be able to message that refuse to use anything else, or perhaps even because they need to be in some WhatsApp groups e. g. for work.
Communication platforms aren’t like web browsers or operating systems where you can switch at will to whatever else works for you, you’re more or less reliant on everyone you know also making the switch.