Hey I am making a game and want to release it to linux a few days in advance of the windows release to supporters. I think the godot binary will run without instillation with static dependencies but if not maybe I could use docker or appimage to make it work that way. Not really sure what else to say here, yea. Is this possible in 2024? I know back in the day just releasing a game for linux made it linux exclusive but I don’t want windows users to reverse wine it, especially because the linux version will come with some bonus stuff.
All of the packages that make up Lubuntu come from the Ubuntu repositories, so you can’t really have something exclusive to Lubuntu. You can have something exclusive to Ubuntu, kind of. Native packages in Ubuntu are in the form of Debian packages. These are most often synced from the Debian repository, with the occasional Ubuntu-specific patch, but there’s the occasional package that’s only found in Ubuntu. To get a package in the repos, will take learning about Debian packaging and then getting help from Ubuntu developers.
Other Linux distributions use entirely different native packaging formats (i.e. they are alternatives to the Debian packages). Those native packaging formats don’t tend to work on other systems. By that I mean, e.g. you can’t use RPMs on Ubuntu or DEBs on Red Hat.
That said, if you want to have a single package that every Linux user can use, you’d opt for one of those universal packages (Snaps, Flatpaks, AppImages). Of course, some people don’t like them, so you might want to bother with having all the formats.
I would advise against using bare source code as your main distribution methodology. Packaging has become such an expectation in Linux, especially with the advent of these universal packages, that it isn’t sensible to do otherwise.
To illustrate this a bit, let’s consider Firefox. For Linux alone (Windows, macOS, mobile, etc. is all different), there are the following options that they offer for software distribution:
- Flatpak (developed by Mozilla)
- Snap (developed by Mozilla)
- Debian package repository (developed by Mozilla)
- source code (developed by Mozilla)
- native packages from your distribution’s package manager (probably not developed by Mozilla)
As far as Godot is concerned, I don’t know. It sounds like you can publish to all the platforms. Admittedly, it doesn’t handle packaging, so you need to deal with that. You will need to export for Linux separate from Windows for obvious reasons. Even without packaging, those will be two different things.
Hopefully that helps answer your inquiry.
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