Posted February 01, 2020 by murks
Ahoi there fellow penguins!
Ever since I have used Löve it bothered me that Linux builds were more difficult to distribute than Windows or Mac builds. That situation may have changed now.
What could be done in the past was essentially to ship a plain .love file and hope that the users distribution had the appropriate Löve version installed, which was less than ideal. At some point a way to ship AppImages appeared which I could never get to work as it seems to depend on tooling only available on Ubuntu.
I recently noticed that a new way got documented and it's currently called "unstable", meaning that the Löve developers are not yet confident that it works everywhere. It is much simpler than AppImage and pretty similar to how Windows and OSX distribution works in that the game is shipped together with Löve and the most important dependencies. Since Löve is relatively small, less than 5 MB gzipped, shipping it is not a big deal.
Because this method is still pretty new I wanted to test it with this tiny game before making Linux builds for all my games.
This is where you can help!
It would be very nice of you if you could try the game and tell me whether it works. And especially if it doesn't work.
Thank you very much for your help!
murks
P.S.: This is the method I used to package the game: https://love2d.org/wiki/Game_Distribution#Unstable_Method_For_Linux