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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

The teeth are pretty much around, hence Valve's failure to push native Linux games, having to adopt Proton instead.

This didn't need Microsoft's teeth to fail. There isn't a single "Linux" that game devs can build for. The kernel ABI isn't sufficient to run games, and Linux doesn't have any other stable ABI. The APIs are fragmented across distros, and the ABIs get broken regularly.

The reality is that for applications with visuals better than vt100, the Win32+DirectX ABI is more stable and portable across Linux distros than anything else that Linux distros offer.

Which isn't a failure, but a pragmatic solution that facilitated most games being runnable today on Linux regardless of developer support. That's with good performance, mind you.

For concrete examples, check out https://www.protondb.com/

That's a success.

that is not native

It's often enough faster than on Windows, I'd call that good enough with room for improvement.

And?

Maybe the fact that we have all these games running on Linux now, and as a result more gamers running Linux, developers will be more incentivized to consider native support for Linux too.

Regardless, "native" is not the end-goal here. Consider Wine/Proton as an implementation of Windows libraries on Linux. Even if all binaries are not ELF-binaries, it's still not emulation or anything like that. :)

Why should they be incentivized to do anything, Valve takes care of the work, they can keep targeting good old Windows/DirectX as always.

OS/2 lesson has not yet been learnt.

Regardless if the game is using Wine or not, when the exceedingly growing Linux customerbase start complaining about bugs while running the game on their Steam Decks, the developers will notice. It doesn't matter if the game was supposed to be running on Microsoft Windows ™ with Bill Gate's blessings. If this is how a significant number of customers want to run the game, the developers should listen.

If the devs then choose to improve "Wine compatibility" or rebuild for Linux doesn't matter, as long as it's a working product on Linux.

Valve will notice, devs couldn't care less.

I'll hold on to my optimism.

Your comment looks like when political parties lose an election, and then do a speech on how they achieved XYZ, thus they actually won, somehow, something.

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