Switching to Linux

The last week I spent a lot of time switching my Windows development machine over to Linux. Microsoft is ending support, and arbitrarily decided that my CPU isn’t suitable for Windows 11. So this was kind of a necessity. Long story short, I have switched to Kubuntu, a Linux Desktop envrionment that I have used in the past. And yes, it can also run games! The ones I play the most perform surprisingly well through Steam with Proton.

Of course, this necessitated some extra work to migrate everything from my Windows box, not least Project Z-Com and its development environment. I’m still working on fixing defects, but I have all the essentials working: a clang toolchain for compilation, additional vcpkg configuration, and CMake presets. It was relatively easy to get everything to compile, but I haven’t exercised the full resource generation pipeline yet. And there are some rendering bugs that still need to be fixed. But overall I’m quite happy with the results so far.

Unfortunately, this meant that I’m not getting to where I wanted to be by the end of September. But I’ve learned a thing or two about mistakes in my rendering pipeline set up after switching to Linux. So there are at least some improvements to the game thanks to that.