Linux Compatibility

[CatTanker]

Someone had to say it!

Presently, the editor itself does not support Linux. It uses a windows-specific runtime and has items such as WinForms in use.
While wine (+ mono) is able to make certain elements run on linux, dotnet 7 is expected to support linux there are no dotnet 7 runtime dependencies for wine (at least accessibly through winetricks), so it is unable to run the editor.

While the updater is less important, as it will likely be updated through a mod's cncnet client rather by a developer rather than an individual user, having the editor support linux (at least through linux compatibility) would be extremely useful.

Given how FA2 can be run through wine, it would be sad to see it's replacement be restricted to Windows.

[Rampastring]

Nothing in WAE's core functionality relies on Windows.

• .NET 7 can run on Linux
• MonoGame can run on Linux
• IIRC all referenced libraries can also run on Linux

Currently WAE just uses the WindowsDX versions of MonoGame and Rampastring.XNAUI. You could most likely switch those to Linux versions, change a few lines in the code (WinForms is only used for the crash / exception handler) and then successfully compile WAE for Linux. Maybe some Linux dev could eventually give it a shot.

I don't know if MonoGame on Linux would automatically convert the depth rendering shader written in MS HLSL to an OpenGL compatible format though.

Linux compatibility was the reason why I wrote a custom file browser instead of using Windows' one btw.