this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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So, you were refuting the "supported everywhere" bit. I'm not going to argue with that.
But I will point out that there is a difference between a format that is good for interchange and a format that is good for a game to internally use for rapid loading. I mean, games store things in a lot of ways that you wouldn't want to use for interchange. Games will have textures compressed in texture formats that can be sent straight to the video card, but are relatively space-inefficient; you'd want to use PNG or JPEG or something like that for interchange. You'll often use ZIP to bundle multiple files together; it's not necessarily because it's an ideal archive format, but because it provides indexed access to individual archive elements. Many games use WAV or other uncompressed audio formats that are cheap to load but not terribly space-efficient.