Recently it was noticed that users on more bleeding-edge Linux distributions that updated saw Easy Anti-Cheat no longer working on Linux, the culprit was glibc and now a Valve developer has spoken out about it.

Writing in a small thread on Twitter, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais said:

Unfortunate that upstream glibc discussion on DT_HASH isn't coming out strongly in favor of prioritizing compatibility with pre-existing applications. Every such instance contributes to damaging the idea of desktop Linux as a viable target for third-party developers.

Our thoughts on the topic from this prior compatibility issue in BlueZ apply more than ever: https://github.com/bluez/bluez/commit/35a2c50437cca4d26ac6537ce3a964bb509c9b62#commitcomment-56028543 It is unfortunately yet another entry in a growing list over the years.

We understand that working with a focus on compatibility requires more resources and more engineering trade-offs, but strongly believe it is nonetheless the way to go. We are very interested in helping with any underlying resource constraints.

This prompted CodeWeavers (who work on Wine and with Valve on Proton) developer Arek Hiler to write a blog post titled "Win32 Is The Only Stable ABI on Linux" and their ending statement is something people should think on:

I think this whole situation shows why creating native games for Linux is challenging. It’s hard to blame developers for targeting Windows and relying on Wine + friends. It’s just much more stable and much less likely to break and stay broken.

Hiler certainly isn't the only one to think like that, with another CodeWeavers developer Andrew Eikum mentioning on Hacker News some time ago:

As a long-time Linux dev (see my profile), I have also found this to be true. Linux userland APIs are unstable and change all the time. Some transitions that come to mind that have affected me personally: ALSA->pulse; libudev->libudev2->systemd; gstreamer 0.10->1.0. All of those changes required modifications to my software, and the backwards-compat tools that are provided are buggy and insufficient. Meanwhile, you can still write and run winmm[1] applications on Windows 10, and they will work in almost all cases. It's simply the case that the win32 API is more stable than Linux userland APIs, so it's entirely plausible that games will run better in Wine, which shares that stable ABI, than they will on Linux, especially as time goes on and Linux userland shifts yet again.

[1] winmm dates to the Windows 3.x days!

Situations like this can be pretty messy and this is not a case of open source versus secret closed source anti-cheat stuff either, since the glibc issue affected a Native Linux game (Shovel Knight) and Linux software libstrangle. No doubt there are other things yet to be discovered that were broken by the change.

It is of course also a case that Linux distributions need to ensure they do quality assurance testing, especially for gaming which can end up showing up issues quite easily and that bleeding-edge distributions can and clearly do end up breaking things by pulling new software in so quickly.