By "Linux first", I mean developing primary on Linux, and porting to Windows, which I gather is flip-flopped from typical practice. The game has been out for a few weeks now. Given the title, I don't think it will be surprising to hear I had more technical issues with the Windows port during the last two weeks of development. The key takeaway is next time I will test on Windows more frequently. Testing on all ports frequently is good advice in general, though.
I'm seeing more people giving Linux a try, which I'm expecting means more indie game developers will pay closer attention to Linux. If that's you, here are a few experiences I'd like to share.
Workflow: Building the Windows port reminded me why I switched to Linux in the first place. Frequent notification pop-ups, updates, anti-virus warnings, CoPilot pop-ups, and so on lead to too many distractions. None of these, by themselves, would have been too bad, but added together my overall experience was frustrating. To be fair, if I used Windows more frequently then these interruptions would be spread out over a longer time frame. Still, I when I turn on my Linux system, it boots up and I'm ready to go to work.
Peripheral Testing: I bought an off-brand XBox controller to test gamepad support. To get it to work on Linux, I had to edit the driver source code. This was probably a combination of poor luck and poor research. Linux has come a long way since I started using it, but there are still hiccups.
Anti-virus: For a while I ran into constant crashes that left no stack trace. Eventually I noticed the executable disappeared entirely. Anti-virus had deleted it! I ended up disabling anti-virus completely. I'm sure there's a more graceful solution, but since I use the Windows PC strictly for building my own Windows apps, I'm not concerned about viruses. I can turn anti-virus back on and run a scan manually. It doesn't need to run 24/7.
Steam Deck: I don't think anyone will be surprised to hear I had no trouble at all building a Steam Deck port.
Bash Scripts and Tools: Bash scripts helped me automate a lot of tedious tasks. In particular, coupled with ImageMagick, I had tools to help me build and manipulate sprite sheets, organize game data files, generate physical steam keys to give away at conventions, and more. Admittedly, I'm out of the loop with Windows PowerShell. Still, the terminal emulator proved to be a valuable tool.
