DirectX 10, 11, and 12 all came out in the last 10 years. All had significant improvements over each previous one. MS has spent millions on making windows the high end gaming platform.
But in the 10 years before that, DirectX went from idea to version 9 (which was pretty good). Their PC game development almost stopped 10 years ago. Ever wonder where Age of Empires and Halo on Windows went? Xbox needed more resources.
This is very true. They've made some claims in the past about putting effort into PC gaming but now that the Xbox brand is struggling a bit vs. Sony maybe they're more serious about messing with the Windows PC platform.
1. Distributions should allow parallel installation of different library versions. so-files are already versioned, so this shouldn't really be all that difficult. That said, this doesn't help if you depend on specific versions of non-library files, like executables or headers.
2. Use docker, or something like docker, to formalize binding a binary to a particular version of a particular distro.
I don't know about Desura, but Steam doesn't actually solve the problem.
As far as distribution is concerned, Steam provides a way to get the files to the computer, but doesn't provide a consistent environment for them to run in. To pick two random examples, Portal 2 on Linux links against 20 system libraries, whilst Shadowrun Hong Kong links against 39. Even the Unity-based SUPERHOT links against 38.
Okay. I did more digging and you're more right than I thought. They do bundle a sort of mini-distribution of a particular set of libraries.
Some important libraries not included include libGL(X), libpthread, libm, libdl, and libc. The reason for not bundling GL(X) is obvious - you have to use the GL libraries that match the graphics drivers you're using. I'm not sure about the rest, though. libc does sometimes have breaking changes.
The bundles are maintained by Steam rather than by individual games. I'm not sure what happens if game A requires one version of a library and game B requires an incompatible version. It doesn't look like that would work out well.
The libraries you mentioned are designed so that all changes made are backward compatible. All of the ones that you mentioned excluding libGL are provided by glibc, which is known for backward compatibility.
As for the incompatible versions being required, that would be handled by SONAME versioning, so it should work out fine. If there are somehow conflicts within a SONAME version due to poor planning, there is always the option of putting them in different paths and telling the ELF interpreter to look at paths based on what the game needs.
