How should I do to release game in linux?

[yx961031]

I release my game in linux ...but i want allow players to remove the trouble of downloading love.
what should i do?
Please help me out of an idea?

[Sir_Silver]

Welcome, I think this is what you're looking for.

https://love2d.org/wiki/Game_Distribution

Scroll down and you should find a section on Linux.

[raidho36]

If you want rid Linux players of trouble running your game, provide source code, LÖVE dependency, and a launcher script.

[yx961031]

Welcome, I think this is what you're looking for.

https://love2d.org/wiki/Game_Distribution

Scroll down and you should find a section on Linux.

love-release??

[RagingDave]

I am also interested in this topic. The solution in the wiki is not really satisfying for say a commercial release. You don't want the gamer to download and install the love runtime on its own. Additionally it often may break if love is updated to a new version (e.g. via package manager) but your game still uses the old API.

What i found when researching this some time ago was this issue.

love-release seems to be able to build a deb package but that isn't really sufficient for the variety of distributions today. I'm also pretty sure it doesn't pack the required native libraries (yet). Maybe this project would be a good place to contribute.. I'm really convinced that love needs some native packaging for linux.

[raidho36]

There is an entry explaining how to use Appimage scripts to generate proper Linux packages.

[eliddell]

You're not going to get a bundled release that works correctly for every Linux distribution, and most people releasing commercial games don't even try (in general, they support specific versions of Ubuntu only, and maybe one or two other Debian-descended distros if you're lucky—everyone else is on their own).

That being said, a redistributable Löve game would need to bundle (in addition to liblove itself), the libraries for physfs, devil, libmodplug, libsdl2, libvorbis, mpg123, luajit, and possibly openal. The other dependencies are things like freetype that I would expect to find on any distro with an X server. Collect those, .tar.gz them together, and spin up a couple of VMs or LiveCDs to test out the results on an unmodified system . . . and you'll immediately find that some of those VMs have the wrong set of core packages. The traditional method of dealing with this is to define those distributions as unsupported and call it a day. ;P

The alternative is to create installable packages for various package managers . . . but you're going to have to provide a lot of them if you want to cover more than a handful of people. To provide something that will work for ~90% of Linux users, you're going to need to cover four package formats (and you're going to have to make multiple packages in the two most popular formats). That's why no one does it.

Multi-system packagers like AppImage and FlatPak are generally not popular. For the moment, if you have time to tinker with them, you're better off spending that time compiling additional .debs for older Ubuntu versions, because you'll reach more people that way.

If your game is not commercial, then providing a .love, a startup script, and Löve's package name in the four "root" distributions that have consistent package naming (Debian, Red Hat/Fedora, Arch, and Gentoo) really is the easiest way to go. The users should know how to handle it from there.

(Can't believe I registered just to write this . . .)

[bartbes]

I have actually been working on portable linux binaries in issue #1168, and it seems to work.

[RagingDave]

Thank you guys for all the valuable info. I also found this post while searching for the topic and leave the link here for other people that are interested.

Does anyone know by any chance how steam handles the linux packaging? Is it similar to the Appimage/Flatpak?

[keharriso]

Steam uses a custom runtime: steam-runtime.
Here is a guide I found to bundle the Steam runtime with your app:
http://jorgen.tjer.no/post/2014/05/28/s ... out-steam/