this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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Duckstation(one of the most popular PS1 Emulators) dev plans on eventually dropping Linux support due to Linux users, especially Arch Linux users. (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 day ago by RmDebArc_5@piefed.zip to c/emulation@lemmy.ml
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cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/46825035

Commit.

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[–] purplerabbit@beehaw.org 17 points 1 day ago

This is yet another example of someone being exhausted by the free and open source software community and specifically the Linux part of that community. At one point, we're gonna need to take a long look at our communities and wonder why the fuck is it that this keeps happening? The amount of shit that maintainers have to deal with constantly is a massive issue. We have a cultural problem, one that we seemingly refuse to acknowledge.

Recently, a project called Kapitano got abandoned for pretty much the same reasons. Some kernel maintainers left. There was the whole Asahi Linux debacle. With Asahi Lina, notably, basically quitting Linux development altogether from what I understand at this point.

We keep seeing burnouts, people giving up in frustration, getting harassed and so on. This is not okay. How many times does it need to happen before we finally decide that enough is enough?

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 36 points 1 day ago (4 children)

This comment by woelkchen on the original thread adds some context worth reading imo.

[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 14 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

This developer appears to have accepted contributions from over 100 other people prior to having a change of heart about the GPL and ~~unilaterally~~ switching the project to a non-free license (CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives).

~~Somehow I doubt that all of the other contributors actually agreed to that license change 🤔~~

Bonus 🤡-points for making a bunch of unrelated changes to source code in the "Misc: Update copyright headers" commit.

edit: i stand corrected, thanks to @LiveLM@lemmy.zip i see the developer wrote:

I have the approval of prior contributors, and if I did somehow miss you, then please advise me so I can rewrite that code. I didn't spend several weekends rewriting various parts for no reason.

It's odd they didn't mention that in the commit where they changed the license.

🥂 to whoever carries on development of the last GPL version, and/or develops other free software emulators. and 🤌 to people continuing to contribute to this one after it became non-free.

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 4 points 13 hours ago

Somehow I doubt that all of the other contributors actually agreed to that license change 🤔

It seems he did in fact get their permission, and rewrote code he couldn't relicense

[–] huf@hexbear.net 14 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

heh, i've seen almost exactly this break a dev before. it was the ion3 dev, tuomo valkonnen. he was probably never entirely OK, but eventually he ragequit opensource, installed windows, deleted all his opensource projects and went incommunicado.

what pushed him over the edge was distros shipping packages of somewhat older versions of his windowmanager (so, not updating their packages as soon as he released a new stable version) and then users filing bugreports for bugs he'd already fixed.

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 4 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

I totally get the frustration of getting pointless bug reports.
I've seen many repos with a "you must reproduce your issue on the version we release here to report" policy, I wonder if that could be a solution.
Maybe together with a GitHub bot to scan logs posted on the issues and inform the reporter about that...

[–] huf@hexbear.net 4 points 12 hours ago

he had the policy, he just couldnt deal with the idiots who refused to read it

[–] onlooker@lemmy.ml 6 points 19 hours ago

Much appreciated. The author's comment for that commit does not paint the full picture.

[–] OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world 4 points 19 hours ago

The comment about analogies is so good.

[–] circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

2% market share

Overall maybe (although even then, I think it is somewhat higher than that), but I'd bet money that usage is higher among people who emulate. The Steam Deck is a big part of that.

[–] ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 day ago

Overall it's actually huge, significantly more than unix or NT based systems.

Desktop share alone is up to 5% this month in the US. Mobile phone share is over 60%, server share over 80%, supercomputer share is 100% of the 500 most powerful.

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Surprised to hear that with the popularity of Retroarch on the Steam Deck

[–] RmDebArc_5@piefed.zip 40 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

AFAIK retroarch uses swanstation, a hard fork specifically for retroarch created in 2024 when duckstation switched from GPL to a source available license. Also retroarch alternatively has the beetle core which is also a pretty good ps1 emulator

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 12 points 1 day ago

Did not realize swanstation was not the same as Duckstation! In my experience Beetle is good for accuracy but does not run well on lower end systems.

[–] procapra@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So then, really, swanstation is better anyway.

[–] RmDebArc_5@piefed.zip 3 points 19 hours ago

Well, swanstation doesn’t work standalone and some people have said it performs worse, but it’s not like you need a very powerful system anyway

[–] afaix@lemmy.world -3 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (2 children)

Retroarch also uses his code illegally, they copied the code and removed his copyright info from it. That's a big part of his beef.

[–] Muehe@lemmy.ml 5 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

That's simply untrue, duckstation changed license from GPL3 to CC on September 1st 2024, while swanstation retains the original GPL3 license from September 11th 2019.

So the beef is that they kept using the code as they were before the license change, which is their right under the original GPL3 license.

~~If anything is legally questionable here it is the duckstation re-licensing to CC because the author of duckstation is not the author of PRs made before the change to CC, thus they might not have the legal right to change the license to those parts of the code without the assent of the individual PR authors (in most jurisdictions I'm aware of at least). I didn't see any Contributor License Agreement in the repo, which would be the usual way to acquire this assent.~~

Edit: Context somebody posted upthread. They rewrote parts of the code and got some contributors to agree to the license change. Remains unclear if that covers everything even to the author apparently, but fair enough I guess.

[–] afaix@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

The question is not just the license, it’s the copyright notice at the top of each file that has information on who authored the file and when, retroarch removed the information and replaced with their own, you are not allowed to do this under gpl

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 16 hours ago

My understanding is that they forked it after he had a different, earlier crashout about their retroarch core and handling user support. He changed the entire license to prevent them from continuing to use his code to make a core. Then they hard forked from before the license change and made the swanstation core. So not illegal, but spiteful as all hell.

That said, forking it illegally wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility for the retroarch devs. It's entirely possible I don't have accurate info on the order of events etc.

But I'll be real, while I care about these devs as people and wish they would just get some community members to act as filters for support requests (seems to be the leading cause of dev burnout)... emulator dev drama isn't worth getting wrapped up in.

[–] veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They use Arch btw!

[–] harrys_balzac@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 day ago

I think Arch would be more popular if more people stated that they use it. Every chance they get. I'm sure that wouldn't be annoying.