ID:2846219
 
i've been on byond for about 13 years about, this is my first post. I'm not here to flame focus on development, but I seriously do not understand what obstacles limit active development for linux. I understand internet explorer and what not, but it's 2023.
BYOND was designed for Windows. Also a very small minority of our users are on Linux. It wouldn't really make much sense to put in so much leg work just so people can use BYOND on Linux.
BYOND has a single full-time developer who isn't a Linux guy.
Despite making up 1% of the userbase, Linux users are responsible for 90% of bug reports

Source: Some game dev studio that did a Linux port of a game a while ago and all they got in return were complaints.
To be fair though, good bug reports are always useful. I value that aspect of the SS13 community in particular.
Actual quote: Despite having just 5.8% of sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux. However, only 1% of those bugs were specific to linux
In response to Alexkar598
Which also fits with my experience from the SS13 community. The big server owners are the ones finding the esoteric bugs.
I don't think it's worth wasting energy trying to develop for Linux. Instead, its better to spend quite a bit of energy on compatibility with Wine.

BYOND works almost perfectly under Wine and the only place it doesn't work well is in Internet Explorer 10 (some javascript issues on some servers)

Apparently, IE11 is finally dying and a transition to Chromium is planned. I think this will help a lot.

In response to Alexsaxsax
Alexsaxsax wrote:
I don't think it's worth wasting energy trying to develop for Linux. Instead, its better to spend quite a bit of energy on compatibility with Wine.

BYOND works almost perfectly under Wine and the only place it doesn't work well is in Internet Explorer 10 (some javascript issues on some servers)

Apparently, IE11 is finally dying and a transition to Chromium is planned. I think this will help a lot.


Hey, is this true? Because, ultimately, this would add more support for Linux users and I would be sad if this was just an assumption and not an actual announcement.
In response to Meme01
Meme01 wrote:
BYOND was designed for Windows. Also a very small minority of our users are on Linux. It wouldn't really make much sense to put in so much leg work just so people can use BYOND on Linux.

Back in the very early 2000s I had suggested adding support for dlls to allow for running native optimized code and the idea was shot down because Dan didn't want to tie the code base to Windows like that. So I think early on there was interest in trying to be cross platform. I was strictly a Windows user at the time so I was kind of annoyed.

Now that I exclusively use Linux I wish Dan and Tom would have stuck to that.
In response to Theodis
Theodis wrote:
Meme01 wrote:
BYOND was designed for Windows. Also a very small minority of our users are on Linux. It wouldn't really make much sense to put in so much leg work just so people can use BYOND on Linux.

Back in the very early 2000s I had suggested adding support for dlls to allow for running native optimized code and the idea was shot down because Dan didn't want to tie the code base to Windows like that. So I think early on there was interest in trying to be cross platform. I was strictly a Windows user at the time so I was kind of annoyed.

Now that I exclusively use Linux I wish Dan and Tom would have stuck to that.


We're in luck because there's going to be a transition to WebView2 which comes from Edge which is based off chromium which means all the issues with IE and WINE will no longer be a problem. Then we can finally use the new cool HTML5 stuff under WINE.
In response to Audio freak XD
God I can't wait. I can finally get rid of my Windows partition.
Same here. Windows is a waste of space, and the day when I’m free of it cannot come soon enough