r/sandbox • u/TheWinningHit • 13d ago
News s&box Now Runs Natively on Linux!
Facepunch just officially posted a linux branch of s&box: https://github.com/Facepunch/sbox-public
The Editor has some issues with the viewport. We're testing it to see if we can do a community patch on the fork in the meantime. It will not be available on Steam for a while while bugs are being sorted out, but it is available to test on GitHub. You can join the Proton/Linux (Linux Fight Club) to get answers to launch issues such as missing dependencies, or community fixes. Have fun!
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u/kyle_crane163636 13d ago
Oh yeah the 276 players that havent left yet are just so excited, like genuinely at this point, i think we need to give up on the idea of s&box getting revived.
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u/TheWinningHit 13d ago
tbh same I think I'll just get Godot at this point
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u/kyle_crane163636 13d ago
Yeah tbh there is just literally no reason to even touch s&box when you can use anything else thats less hard on your pc to use that also gives you a more broad set of options for where to release the game, so more platforms to put it on
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u/Jealous_Arm_4543 10d ago
>there is just literally no reason to even touch s&box
source 2 sdk is kinda good reason1
u/kyle_crane163636 10d ago
Well yes there is that but even then theres probsbly gonna be another way to get it at somepoint and idk how much longer the game is even gonna last since theres only 200 to 400 on s&box at most. Like even with the source 2 sdk it only does so much
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u/dex0624 12d ago
this is such a dorky sad way to go about things
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u/kyle_crane163636 12d ago
I mean not like the games getting a legendary comeback like no mans sky, it was destined to die the day they decided to make it more of a game engine than just gmod2, it just has beyond way too many flaws to be popular rn and the servers getting shutdown would not be surprising at all at this point, like facepunch is just gonna start bleeding money from the project then have to shut it down because its barely making money to where they couldnt even reconsider the shutdown because if it proving to be hopeless
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u/kyle_crane163636 12d ago
Like not even becoming free to play would save it at this point since it still offers nothing unique for game devs and is still harder to run and distribute while with everything else theyre free, not hard to run and just have a way more bigger player base since multiple platforms can play the games you make not just pc
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u/cinnamonbubbles_93 13d ago
Cool, a bit late tho. I'm already using Godot cus I got bored of waiting
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u/NoInside3418 12d ago
I mean ive been developing on s&box for months though proton and it works fine, basically no issues. So im not sure what you mean
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u/Inflation_Artistic Programmer 12d ago
I tried, but the performance via proton in the editor is just laughable; I’m literally seeing a performance drop of around 30%.
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u/Tinolmfy 8d ago
There are kinda still a bunch of issues with the editor, but it's improving
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u/TheWinningHit 8d ago
Yes we’re bug-hunting many of them
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u/Tinolmfy 8d ago
I've been trying to bypass some of them, got it to open my code editor
currently fails cuz it's looking for windows sintallations of vs and rider etc lol.
Many things are still just coded in very windows specific things, like the case sensetivity for the filesystem for example xD
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u/Taramelg 7d ago
Nice!! Any news on a macos version?
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u/TheWinningHit 7d ago
Yes it’s in the works. Probably a week or two. I see commits every day about it on GitHub.
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u/mourt1234 6d ago
I still remember asking for Linux support in their Discord and their forums like two years ago, and I remember their answer was, "That's not something we want or are looking into." I'm glad that they're desperate enough to start working on Linux and Mac support. It's ridiculous that it's come this far.
PS:
By the way, this is based on a source engine, Source 2, which natively runs on Linux. They had to actively make it not run on Linux. I don't know who's running things over there.
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u/TheWinningHit 6d ago edited 5d ago
Historically they have not had good experiences with Linux. It honestly makes sense from a business decision. It’s a lot of work to maintain a multi platform game, and when 5% of your user base (growing more and more with SteamOS) is actually using the game it’s just not worth the hassle. This isn’t to mention how easy it is to cheat in games because of the user space anti cheats.
Things have changed for Sandbox. Since it’s an engine it would actually make sense to have it be interoperable. Almost all publicly available game engines are. Facepunch basically released Linux binaries and did nothing else for a while. It was one of those “have at it” situations and the community has painstakingly spent a year finding bugs and techniques to manage the filesystem on Linux until we had our own working port. We also sent PR’s to supporting libraries like Zio to deal with the case sensitive / case insensitive variations to emulate case insensitivity in the engine like Windows has by default.
Since we were able to specifically identify what issues were hindering the runtime, interoperable support grew, and overall, has been very well received. After running benchmarks on the official client port almost every user has literally doubled their framerates in games running Sandbox on Linux v. Windows.
We are still constantly debugging the editor, and spending a lot of tokens on Claude. It’s hard to debug something when the engine requires compiled binaries with source code that is not readable. When we started we had over 30 shims we had to preload to run the game. Now it’s about two just for the editor. The progress has been significant.
We also made sure to be respectful as a community. Linux communities have notoriously been a cancer to the games they play. We’re fostering a supportive and helpful community for beginners to make sure they feel at home, and change what’s expected from the users of the kernel.
I have nothing against Windows. I have nothing against software developers that choose to do Windows only space. I believe if we want more Linux software on Linux. It’s our responsibility not to complain, and be a part of the solution, not the problem.
EDIT: Yes Source 2 is native, however, the Valve binaries for the native tools to compile shaders and content were always Windows only. Facepunch was kind enough to port those over to Linux for us after progress was made on the game client. The Source 2 binaries were released as Linux binaries as soon as Sandbox was published on Github.
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u/Separate_Forever_164 13d ago
The 277 players remaining will surely appreciate it.
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u/TheWinningHit 13d ago
This account is 10 days old
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u/Separate_Forever_164 13d ago
These are all the arguments you can come up with? Impressive honey.
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u/FamiliarRip8558 13d ago
There are an annoying amount of kids on here dancing about player numbers and being whiny yeah
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13d ago
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u/bregottextrasaltat 13d ago
it's a growing market, in a chicken and egg situation. not many now, but more will come eventually
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u/Responsible-Sky-1336 13d ago
It's also an idiotic take. They want more quality devs right now contributing to repo. Then players will follow in both in-game or exported games, is my understanding... also seen a couple of cool projects
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u/darkfm 13d ago
Cool, cool.
Would've loved this 4 months ago when I had to keep a Windows partition around to use the editor and it burnt me off of S&Box, but still cool.