http://www.happypenguin.org/

If you find that a particular distro refuses by all means to launch your application, make a specific version for that distro, and use a bash script to launch the correct executable (no need for awful java or similar. And by the way it's not guaranteed the user will have Java installed, while 99.9999% of any decent distro out there comes with bash shell).

If you are going to do distro-specific binaries, the Right Way to Do It is to build an RPM or deb package. E.g. some of the Humble Bundle games do this.

I'll be the devil's advocate, and say "no, you should not support Linux", the reason being that it does not likely make sense from an economic piont of view. And, sadly, that is what counts if you want to survive.

Linux has a desktop market share of around 1.5%, give or take maybe 0.1%, over all distributions. Windows has a desktop market share of around 90%, the rest being for everyone else (MacOS being the biggest competitor with around 7%).
Add to that the fact that many of those Linux systems will be either low end systems or over a decade old, that comes from the fact that a lot of "low cost" PCs and a lot of "donation to the 3rd world" machines are equipped with Linux, which is both free and runs with low minimum requirements. So, if your game is somewhat "demanding", the actual customer share will be yet a lot lower.

But let's stay optimistic. All Linux PCs are perfectly suitable to run your game, and 90% of the people running Linux will actually buy your game. There's hardly ever a pirate among them. Also, your game will run on every distro without any modifications or trouble.

On the other hand, there are somewhat over a billion PCs in existence on the planet, but typical AAA titles sell only around 100 million copies. So, let's assume that these tittles run on pretty much every PC in existence, since they are so awesome. Everybody has them, even on their work PC. In other words, roughly 90% of all Windows owner are scum.

Which means: of 100 copies, 89 will be pirated by the evil Windows scum, 10 will be bought by the insignificant few honest Windows users, and 1 will be bought by a Linux user.
And that's the point. Look where the money comes from.

Now, consider that maintaining 2 platforms is at least 20-30% more development work initially, and it requires twice as much maintenance, testing, and customer support (permanently!). And then, consider that "90% of all Linux users are honest" might be a bit too optimistic, too.

In other words, you're doubling (optimistically) your expenses to get an additional 10%. That just doesn't make sense.

[color="#1c2837"]"low end systems or over a decade old"
[color="#1c2837"]I strongly disagree. My PC is a high-end PC from 2 years ago.

Maybe so, but honestly who cares. That is your computer and maybe your friends. My Linux computer is a modern one as well, so what.
A lot of Linux systems (and I daresay the major part!) are of the "One Laptop per Child" type (and similar programs), or simply of the "it's cheaper to send my rubbish to the 3rd world than to dispose of it here" kind, which has been a very, very popular strategy for many years. All of those have their disks formatted and Linux (usually Ubuntu) installed.

It's not much different than with getting rid of your old car, except you don't format your car's harddisk first. Hey, no car can possibly be so bad that you couldn't ship it to the 3rd world (where they'll drive it another 10-20 years), and you even get a few bucks or so out of it, as opposed to paying a few hundred for disposal.

[color="#1c2837"]

As well, Linux market-share ranges from 1.5% to 3% on the desktop.[/quote]The sources that I am aware of, including for example Wikipedia's article disagree with your opinion, but even so it would not matter. 1.5% or 3% is no difference. It is still diminuishingly small.

Even if it had a share of 20%, it would still hardly be worthwile. Linux support means (mostly due to the many different distros and versions) an awful lot of maintenance trouble, so if it was to be worthwhile, it had better be the bigger share, not the smaller.

I've been contributing to a (what I consider major, ca. 80k downloads per month) cross-platform FOSS project for half a decade. The Windows support boils down to some Russian or Chinese guy forgetting to set the right character encoding about once per month. Inevitably you occasionally encounter someone being too stupid to download a zip file or being too stupid to read, but that is rare, and every now and then someone wonders why saving stuff inside C:\Program Files fails under Windows 7. Sigh. But... that's about it.
Linux support has "uh... xyz does not work on Blah Linux with foo-bar-0.2.7.1, it used to work with foo-bar-0.2.7.0-a3" on a regular basis, or "using gnome-terminal instead of xterm makes everything explode", and includes things like "why does it use 100% CPU when idle" and "got a 2 second delay when pressing a key" to which honestly nobody has an answer. And then, there is the "does not work with [never head of], trying to [never heard of] and [no idea what they are talking about]" thing which is not entirely uncommon either.

That's ok as long as you do it for fun in your free time, because when you get too bored of it, you can always raise the middle finger and do something more fun like play Age of Empires. After all, people don't pay you anyway, so hey... relax. It's all good.

However, if you are trying to make a living from something (that is, if your job and maybe a few other people's jobs and lives depend on it), things look very, very different. This is a nightmare.
If your living depends on it, you really want to make sure that you put the major part of your time into the things that give you the biggest returns.