But it's a homogenous platform instead of the mad set of different driver versions/-implementations, desktop environments, windowing protocols, audio protocols, etc. that is colloquially referred to as the GNU/Linux desktop. If Google brought out a stadia console with one consistent OS image, hardware, and driver, it might become easier for devs to support it.
Indeed, good point. I too heard that the consoles are buggy. I think it's mainly a problem of the team not having spent time on fixing them. Note that consoles also are a much larger share of the market than GNU/Linux, so they are more likely to put focus on fixing the bugs in the future. For GNU/Linux though, such a task is insurmountable.
Last generation consoles are really far behind today’s PCs. Like not comparably. Sure you can optimize them a ton since they are all mostly the same, but at some point you hit the limits.
All abstracted by available open source libraries, notably libSDL. Besides, Windowing is a laughably trivial part of a game and audio isn't that much more complex when it comes to the OS interface.
The decision to port/not port to desktop Linux is not a technical one when the renderer has already been ported to Vulkan and the rest of the game already compiles on a POSIX-like platform.
On AMD the GPU driver stack is unlikely to be materially different from Stadia, I doubt Google is using anything else than (possibly customized/patched) amdgpu+mesa.
This year alone I had two different bugs with my GPU drivers. First in the Laptop with AMD graphics where the screen would be black on resuming after suspend. After updating I'm not getting the bug any more.
Then I got another bug on the desktop with a builtin Intel GPU. Those are usually regarded as the ones with the best driver support on Linux, but that didn't save me. After waking up after it has went to sleep, sometimes, that means often, parts of the screen would flicker. It happened directly after the update from Ubuntu 20.04 to 20.10, or kernel 5.4 to 5.8. Now I've manually installed 5.10 and the bug is gone, but without my manual intervention the bug would have continued for months.
Nothing is bug free. But overall experience with AMD is very good for me. And you should always use the latest kernel if you want to avoid stuff like that.
