LXer: Why We Shouldn't Accept Bad Linux Ports
 

Published at LXer:

Thanks to the recent fiasco of The Witcher 2 I wanted to write down some thoughts on why we shouldn't accept bad quality ports from developers.

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Well, yeah. The porting house charged money to do a port of a product that is being sold for money. When the porting house performs terribly on a job that they were paid what I assume is a significant amount of money for, you don't then excuse it with "be glad you got anything and be grateful they tried, you entitled rude Linux whiners."

Honestly, this makes me wonder what other games Virtual Programming has ported, and if their previous projects worked out better. If this was their first project, then the company deserves to fold; they built their business on a proprietary, in-house porting tool that's proven to be inferior to the obvious free alternative (Wine).

This was indeed their first Linux port, usually they make ports for OS X, also using their eON technology. I thought about buying the game when I saw the massive sale, but after reading about the problems with that port and learning that they did not fix problems with the OS X port I did not. I guess they did not realize that there will be such a massive outcry about the quality of that port, thinking that the small Linux gaming community will take what you throw at it.
After reading on the Steam forum comments from one of the developers like "There are problems with multi-threading on Linux in our wrapper" (so they knew about it) and "there are so many Linux systems, we couldn't make enough tests" (so why not early-access or a public beta?) I think they got what they deserved. Hopefully CD Projekt and other companies have learned from this debacle and will show us a better performance in the future.

In unrelated news, a Linux port of XCOM: Enemy Unknown (and the Enemy Within addon) is announced for this summer and they confirmed to deliver a native port. They will get my money instead.

I can't really comment on the quality of the port as I haven't managed to run the game yet.

I bought this game on steam for windows over the christmas sale so the linux version automatically was added to my account. Unfortunately, I haven't managed to run it yet. I don't have time to investigate the problem now. The unfavourable reviews do not encourage me to do it anyway. Perhaps next month I'll find some time. It's a shame. I was looking forward to this game. I haven't played the windows version much either.