I shipped a tiny game on Steam developed entirely in GNU/Linux with Windows/MacOS/Linux builds all produced from within GNU/Linux without virtualization of other OSes.
MINGW covered the Windows build, clang/osxcross for the MacOS build, and plain old gcc for Linux. It's all oldschool autotools+pkg-config dances for the cross-compilation. Plain C and SDL2+OpenGL under the hood, no engine.
It's nice being able to do it all from my preferred GNU/Linux environment, and I was able to at least smoke test the windows builds successfully via WINE. The main shortcoming currently is there's no MacOS WINE-equivalent that's mature enough to run a graphical GPU-accelerated video game AFAIK.
That sounds pretty cool ... as a budding game dev wanting to work along the same lines (no engine, minimal cruft) is there any chance you could post a link to your game? I'd love to know about your processes and dev approaches, etc.
It's nothing to write home about as it was mostly just an experiment to learn some OpenGL, evaluate my ability to ship something GPU-accelerated for the big three desktop OSes built entirely from GNU/Linux, better understand the shortcomings of myself and my lone collaborator when it comes to creating games, all while gaining visibility into the Steam platform and how much exposure one could expect from simply shipping a title on their store without any advertising.
So it's not exactly a fun or good game... as that didn't even make it into the list of priorities. I just kept the scope very small to ensure it could be shipped as a side project with some semblance of polish.
I don't think anything I have to contribute on the subject of processes or approaches should be considered particularly valuable since it's not really a successful game by any relevant measure.
It also feels like desktop operating systems are becoming so hostile towards running arbitrary native programs that unless you're shipping some AAA title pushing all the hardware limits of performance, it might not make sense to bother shipping native executables anymore. For individual indie devs producing small titles, the web might make much more sense, webgl/wasm/webgpu avoids all this untrusted executable friction and modern computers are fast enough to make it work. It's unclear to me how this dovetails with distribution/discovery and earning money via established platforms like Steam though, there's some dust that needs to settle here from what I can see.
MINGW covered the Windows build, clang/osxcross for the MacOS build, and plain old gcc for Linux. It's all oldschool autotools+pkg-config dances for the cross-compilation. Plain C and SDL2+OpenGL under the hood, no engine.
It's nice being able to do it all from my preferred GNU/Linux environment, and I was able to at least smoke test the windows builds successfully via WINE. The main shortcoming currently is there's no MacOS WINE-equivalent that's mature enough to run a graphical GPU-accelerated video game AFAIK.