DuckStation may remove Linux support because of Arch Linux

So, if you've been following what's going on with DuckStation, recently, you'll know that the developer, Stenzek, has been going through it.

Last year, Stenzek changed the license of DuckStation from the GNU Public License v3 to, ultimately, the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license. Technically, not a free and open source license, though it is still a collaborative one.

Why the change? Well, Stenzek says it's because there had been quote "certain other parties violated the old license, by not attributing and stripping my copyright."

Going on to say, quote "Packagers being collateral damage was a beneficial side-effect, considering they don't clearly mark their versions as modified (also a GPL requirement), break functionality, and expect upstream to provide support."

And, hey, Stenzek can do what he wants with the project as he obtained the blessing of most of the contributors and re-wrote the parts of the codebase that objected to his license change.

But it sounds like there have been a few broken packages being distributed through distro repositories. This isn't the first time, either.

Back in February, OBS threatened to sue Fedora because their Flatpak build of the broadcast software was so broken that users were demanding support... but OBS could do nothing the solve the issue.

So now we come to this week, when Stenzek made another decision that has drawn some ire, this time in a direct move aimed at killing off unofficial Linux packages altogether.

He's removed the official PKGBUILD files from the DuckStation repo along with a rather threatening message:

I originally provided [these PKGBUILD scripts as] an alternative to the broken AUR packages.

However, it seems that Arch users would rather use broken packages and keep complaining to me instead of their packager. I specifically forbid packages for DuckStation (see README.md), and there's no way to request removal of these packages without handing my details over to a ristribution I want nothing to do with.

If DuckStation's dev team incorporated, they could have the broken, unofficial builds of DuckStation removed from the AUR without having to give out too many personal details. But that's another whole ordeal.

The cmake script specifically checks the environment to see if it's Arch Linux and, if it is, it will fail with a fatal error. Given the license change last year, removing this check results in a derivative work and it's therefore prohibited to be redistributed.

He's also removed other files that specify dependencies and packaging instructions. He goes on to say:

So this is step one. Next step will be removing Linux support entirely, because I'm sick of the headaches and hacks for an operating system that only compromises 2% of the userbase, and I don't even use myself. But I'm hoping the Linux community will be reasonable, because as someone giving up my free time and not being compensated in any way, I shouldn't have to deal with this.

Just grep the source for "wayland" and you'll see what I mean.

I can't say I blame him, here. While I don't condone his chosen path to correcting the issues he's encountering with AUR packagers and Arch Linux users, I definitely understand his frustration.

And while the packagers incompetence/user ire can is a very specific and niche complaint, his response is much more understandable than the likes of Special K developer Kaldaien.

DuckStation is still packaged by the developers for Linux and it's still available through FlatHub. As far as I'm aware, that's the only official way to get DuckStation for Linux.

And it's worth reiterating that, at least for the time being, they're not removing Linux support. But who knows what's going to happen in the long run.

Meanwhile, it wouldn't be the end of the world if they did. There are other PSX emulators for Linux that offer varying levels of compatibility (though not many).

I'd also love to interview Stenzek if he's interested!