Comment by ecshafer 2 days ago
Targeting DirectX and Win32 has become targeting Linux with how good Wine/Proton have gotten. I am able to play brand new games with no Linux support absolutely perfectly through proton. These games run better than games that had linux support actually ran on linux.
Valve has a containerized Linux runtime (ala flatpak) to solve this issue for native Linux titles: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steamrt/...
Same with warhammer, where the developers are claimed to make an actual effort to support Linux with native binaries, but the windows version are more stable than the native Linux version. Ironically.
When I played Hollow Knight some years ago on my Steam Deck, I had to switch to the Windows version under Proton because the Linux native version was giving me random graphical glitches that made it impossible to see what was going on until I moved to a different screen and came back.
You're assuming no game studio would test their windows executable on proton, just because they develop on Windows. If there's non-trivial market share to capture by being "Deck verified" I don't see why that would be the case. Game devs develop on Windows for PlayStation, Switch, mobile etc. At least with proton they don't even need to cross compile.
Microsoft test on and make considerations for Proton for a bunch of their releases. Sony do too. Cyberpunk has specific graphics presets, Baldurs Gate 3 has a native executable, indie games often do too.
There's outliers, it'd be fair to say EA don't give a damn. But a lot do and you can't handwave away Microsoft and Sony as small fish either.
I wouldn't go that far, I would suggest that any game studio interested in the next 10 years of PC gaming will need to at least start doing testing through Proton/Wine to ensure there's no clear/prominent bugs. It doesn't take a lot of vocal users to elevate or kill a game, and Linux usage has passed that mark at this point... Generally seismic shifts in politics are around the 8% mark in terms of overall population, and Linux usage in the Steam survey is close to 4% and some other metrics have Linux usage over 6%.
Literally half the gaming/hardware focused channels I watch have run at least one, if not several Linux Gaming videos and tests this past year... mostly in the past 4 months and mostly praising the state of Linux gaming. It's not going away.
> Thus making Linux irrelevant as target to game studios. For them DirectX and Win32 is what matters
I don't think so. I rather do believe that many game developers would actually love to give a more native approach for writing GNU/Linux games a try (to make this point more plausible: game developers are very used to game-console-native SDKs).
But what these game developers really demand is a very stable user-space API for everything that is necessary for writing games, which will work reliably on basically every GNU/Linux distribution, and will be supported for at least 20 years.
Like they were making native Linux clients before?
And studios definitely check out their games running on Steam Decks via Proton now, so that's good.
Ironically, Win32 has sometimes become more universal than native Linux binaries. For example, Baldur's Gate 3 released a native Linux version only supported on the Steam Deck, whereas the Proton version is verified for Linux almost everywhere. Win32 became the stable Linux gaming ABI.