I bought a copy of windows specifically to avoid this kind of hassle. I’m not regretting my decision, even if Canonical ends up having the good sense to not drag gaming-on-linux back into the bad old days of yore.
If enough games support it in the future, I’ll happily write over my windows drive with SteamOS https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown but for now I’m glad to not be stressing about playing games
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will get maintenance updates through until 2023 and urgent security updates until 2028. I think everyone can let out that breath they were holding.
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This would sort of be like saying it’s okay to ditch Shakespeare because he didn’t write in .epub format, so we just need to move with the times and drop pre-20th-century literature.
There’s lots of games, including fairly recent ones, that are 32-bit and are unlikely to be re-compiled. You’re okay with these just becoming unplayable?
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Or you could just use a different Linux distro. There’s plenty that don’t look like to drop 32-bit support any time soon.
Also, I’ve found running Windows builds of games on Linux via Proton to be a great experience, and it’s killed any lingering impetus I might have had for eventually setting up a separate Windows machine for gaming.
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Fortunately, Shakespeare’s works are old enough that we can legally repackage them in epub to read them with modern software.
Unfortunately, doing the equivalent for video games is a violation of the DMCA.
Games are kind of a special case in software: where most software becomes irrelevant if it’s not updated so that most people (outside of retro-computing hobbyists) wouldn’t even want to run it, old games still have value. Also, a computer running a game doesn’t need to simultaneously run other software well, which can simplify compatibility issues somewhat. I kinda think the solution here is gaming-specific operating systems (such as Valve’s SteamOS Linux distro - is that still a thing?) which can be booted to run old games, or (for stuff that’s old enough to not need native hardware graphics acceleration) run in a virtual machine.
They won’t be “unplayable”, they just won’t be playable on newer versions of the OS, which is within accepted norms. If you want to play a game written in the Win9x era you find the same thing.
It’s more like saying we can’t move on from parchment scrolls because that’s what the Illiad was written on.
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