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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

Even if it's not, performance gap is not significant to use Windows. Gaming on Linux never has been better.

Exactly. Gaming performance is not a good reason to switch to Linux. But there are many other good reasons (for instance no ads and telemetry, and no continuous nagging to use Edge).

Being able to get a respectable gaming experience will for many be the reason that they can stay in the OS that they prefer for other reasons.

Playing games developed and sold for Windows on Linux never has been better.

While playing games developed and sold for Android/NDK or developed and sold for GNU/Linux isn't really a thing.

A solid 20% of games in my steam library have Linux versions and many (tens of them!) were built for Linux first. Its way more common for indie/smaller dev strategy games though. Also have you seen the android gaming market cap? Depending who you trust most numbers I've seen have double the number of players on Android and iOS then Windows, Mac, and Linux combined and 3-5x the revenue.

Given the 2% from usual reports on Linux gaming versus the rest of gamming world, not really.

I was saying for games I own. Not gamers I know. Either way Linux and MacOS have been growing thanks to the increased compatibility through proton, wine, and whiskey and when has increased compatibility ever been bad for the consumer? If I was to play a game or do my taxes why should I be forced to buy a Windows computer is I own a Mac? If I want to write programs or run LLMs why should I be forced to struggle through some obscure arcane Linux distro if I have a perfectly functional windows machine?

And I was talking about how little relevance of Steam on Linux has for worldwide share of gamers, let alone game consoles and mobile devices, being forced to emulate Windows games, and Valve's lack of success in making GNU/Linux native games, as proven by Proton being a thing, and SteamOS Machines market failure.

Proton will never stop being a requirement for the large ecosystem of Valve's gaming library.

Good to see MS gaming lock-in crumbling despite all the efforts of lock-in proponents for the opposite.

It isn't crumbling when Steam/Proton is emulating Windows games, it is being reinforced as what game studios should care about.

Apparently the lessons from OS/2 weren't learned in due time.

It is crumbling clearly, because idea of lock-in was to prevent using non Windows systems to run games. And it's not working out due to technology doing wonders translating lock-in graphics APIs into open ones with good performance.

Using APIs for lock-in is an old anti-competitive trick, so it's fun to see it failing for gaming.

Windows game developers couldn't care less, Valve takes over all the porting costs, while Windows focused game studios get all the money, with increased sales, without caring one second about GNU/Linux.

A Phyrric victory if there was one.

Lock-in was MS's game here, not game developers'. MS used game developers' reliance on DirectX to make getting games outside of MS systems harder / more costly due to the need for extra porting. Does it make it more clear? So what Valve did is a smart knight move that breaks MS lock-in.

As long as it emulates Windows and DirectX, they have achieved nothing, specially when SteamDeck clones running Windows 11 take over, as expected during 2024.

Now had they managed to convince said studios to write native GNU/Linux games, or to port their Android/NDK games into GNU/Linux, I would have agreed Valve managed something.

No point to repeat the same thing. Your "achieved nothing" is an empty argument.

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