For solo devs in particular, the games kinda need to be simple. Making games is hard (when not using AI)

My game isn't even out and I've had to scale back my public socials posts because of AI ripping off my art - which isn't even all that good in the first place

As another comment said: get in the habit of using source control. GitHub & GitLab are free, and if git is too intimidating there's mercurial or subversion

it's not just about backing up either, it tracks changes over time and branches, which is crucial if you ever want to be part of a team

It was pretty janky & often caused more problems in the long run; had to fix more than a few systems that were installed that way back in the day

Dash Galaxy, without a doubt. But to this day I still have no clue 😆

We were broke and only had a couple games for the NES so kept coming back to this trying to figure out what you're supposed to do; still resentful of my dad trading Castlevania in for this garbage... 😤

I've never been able to get that working properly, would be nice if it did; solodev'ing I struggle to regularly post updates to a single socials site let alone keep up with all of them 😢

Lou's Lagoon is a good one with kids, I play with my 4y old and read the dialog to her

Looks great! And here I am still stuck on 0.14 😆

No AI here either 💪

CachyOS is great but it's really dependent on the age of your hardware, especially on AMD chips; I actually found it slower on my Zen 2 laptop than vanilla Fedora

But Bazzite deserves a shoutout too - by far the easiest distro to get up and running, especially for Nvidia GPU's

For non steam games Lutris, while not perfect, does have a lot of community maintained scripts and runners for getting other games running without too much complexity

It's not as hard as it seems, but definitely understand the difficulty moving a lot of established processes over. But comes with some real benefits too when you really get into the Linux-y way of doing things, stuff like Vulkan (not DX) by default, containerized builds...

Some good recommendations, but doesn't address one big, derpy elephant in the room: Windows

100% of my gamedev work is in Linux (Fedora) and it's pretty straightforward to setup toolchains to cross compiling to Win (or, less easily, Mac) without needing to touch that US slop

I'm starting to wonder if the surveys are bugged again; I used to get these pretty regularly but haven't seen one on any Linux system in my household (mine, wife's, kids) in over a year now. The only one I've seen was one when I briefly booted into the old Win10 partition a few months ago

Nice job! gamepad support was (is) a huge headache for me. Watch out for keyboards that self identify as a gamepad (some Ducky's do this) 😆

I do this on Discord

Working on getting a blog of some sort going where I can safely channel my urges to write long monologues on highly specific topics 😆

My favourite is Star Citizen: live grenade teleports back to your hand after being thrown

Verdict so far: "I like this game, it's the best!"

I definitely feel your pain with shitty hardware vendor support; it was the single biggest headache I dealt with as a firmware engineer and is a big reason so many IoT devices are running vulnerable, outdated firmware