You know WINE exists 25 years though. During this time, Windows still has 95% market share ( https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey )

You could also think that, because of WINE, Windows is first class and then they check Linux with Wine.

Depends on the perspective.

PS. Yes, steam detects Wine

Sure, my point is though that it's only in the past few months when Proton was released that the compatibility was good enough it actually mattered to game developers and players.

By making Linux compatible with Windows games it gets rid of that objection "I'd move to Linux if it weren't for my games" which was the remaining objection for a LOT of people.

Because Steam tracks WINE that's a very good thing, so they can detect players who bought their games to play it on Linux.

This helps encourage Linux native gaming growth, because developers can see the chunk of Linux players rising as more get rid of Windows because they no longer have that remaining obstacle.

I'm not sure that this does encourage native Linux game development. Why bother putting in the porting work for 0.1% of potential users when someone else might do the work for me via Wine/Proton.

I used to think the same way about native first and forcing devs to adopt Linux. The whole "No Tux, no bucks" thing (which has had pretty much zero impact since it's not enough bucks). But, over the years, and especially with Proton being so good with Steam, I've completely switched. If Linux gaming is to be a thing, then there needs to be an adoption first perspective.

So, yeah... maybe that means most devs will just say "my Linux support is just it runs on Proton probably, good luck!" but the thing is... there are games on Linux now. Lots of them. Lots of good ones. I was playing The Witness last night by just pushing play on Steam. No winecfg or winetools or separate DriveC Steam installation. No messing with drivers. I pressed play, the game loaded, I played it. I've repeated this loop in the last few months with most of the games in my library. Endless Legend is back in my rotation again. All of the dumb anime Japanese games where they don't even know Linux is a thing that exists suddenly work. It's glorious.

Wine/Proton may be the lazy way to develop for Linux and might not give people the coveted title of Linux exclusive gamer, but it's working really well if all you care about is playing games and not installing Windows.

Compatibility is a stepping stone to increasing the 0.8% (actual numbers) Linux population on Steam to higher numbers. If 2% or even 10% of users were Linux-based then developers would have second thoughts about choosing DirectX over Vulkan for example when it makes it more difficult for them to reach those customers.

Also the "no tux no bucks" philosophy many Linux users take in avoiding paying for non-native games.

People keep forgetting that game consoles have their own 3D APIs.

Contrary to FOSS folks, professional game studios aren't religious about APIs, as long as there is money to be made.

> Have you not seen Steam Play these last few months? Because of Proton the majority of the top 250 highest rated games now run fine on Linux.

Whilst this is cool I think it may also, sadly, be commercially irrelevant. Why bother worrying about Linux compatibility when only a tiny (i.e., somewhere between 0% and 1%) number of players/purchasers will run your game on Linux?

Perhaps because you will earn way way more money by making your game cross platform given the 3 consoles and 3 pc platforms that exist and once you have committed to such linux support might only take 1% of your effort.

Correct. If your game can't cope with Linux "fragmentation" (most of which is already abstracted away by Steam, so the remaining "fragmentation" is with hardware, which is the same problem you have with Windows), then you're in for a world of hurt if you try to port to a console with its far-from-ordinary hardware and programming APIs and such.

Porting to consoles is much easier than Linux, as each console is a very fixed platform. In my (limited) experience, middleware like Unity works better on consoles than it does on Linux.

Why should I get excited about decent compatibility when I can stick with perfect compatibility? Linux gaming doesn't suck compared to linux gaming 5 years ago. It's still crap compared to Windows.

You’re coming at this from the perspective of someone who wants to set up a PC primarily in order to play games, and probably wants to try out every game under the sun. Of course, you’ll install Windows.

Try instead coming at the question from the perspective of someone who already has a Linux workstation (e.g. for work) and wants to do as little as possible in order to play a few games—maybe the ones their friends are trying to get them to play as a member of a team. Windows isn’t worth it here: you wouldn’t use it for anything else (so every time you boot into it, you probably have to spend two hours installing updates), and booting into Windows would also prevent you from multitasking to the Linux apps you rely on. Compatibility shims, if decent, are far more interesting to this audience.

People who own a Linux workstation at home and just want to play a few games is vastly outnumbered by people who own a Windows desktop at hone and just want to play a few games. Probably at least 100 to 1. And the former group, with the “almost works” compatibility, will be a much bigger maintenance burden per customer.

Heck, I’d bet money that the Linux casual gaming crowd you described is also heavily outnumbered by people who have a dedicated Windows gaming PC (e.g. me, Mac user otherwise).

You're neglecting the crowd that have Windows at home and want to stop using it also. If gamers can have the exact same UX on Linux then that's one of the biggest obstacles to switching solved.

Like me. I will hug windows 7 goodbye on my way to Neon OSville, with redoubled hope my sim City 3k and rct2 may now work without having to be in a VM

"People who own a Linux workstation at home and just want to play a few games" make up a disproportionately large amount of the developer-base for pretty much any software, though, including games. It doesn't matter if none of your users care about a particular feature, if a fair number of your own devs do.

There are lots of developers pretty happy with macOS and Windows at home.

Yeah, but for a piece of software to acquire Linux support, you don’t need the majority of its developers to own a Linux workstation and want to use the software with it; you just need a non-negligible amount (i.e. enough developers with the spare man-hours to get the work done.)

Sometimes, in fact, it only takes one or two developers. I can’t think of a good Linux example here, but I know of a good few projects (Dolphin, for example) where the macOS target is supported entirely by the one or two developers on the team who use macOS.

Quite true, my comment was more against the typical HN remark that "developers" only use GNU/Linux, as if the software for the two biggest desktop environments would appear out of thin air.

In my case, it's because it removes the one thing left that tempts me back toward Windows. I'm significantly more productive on a proper Unix-like OS (like Linux), and it's wonderful to not have to dual-boot or maintain a second PC if I want to take a break and fire up some game or other. Between the native ports and the growing library of reasonably-Proton-compatible games, I feel that pull less and less.

> Have you not seen Steam Play these last few months? Because of Proton the majority of the top 250 highest rated games now run fine on Linux.

Put me in the skeptical camp, I've been hearing the same line with wine support for nearly 2 decades and never found it to be remotely true.

I've had enough trouble getting the actual linux supported games to work. Some work with gnome+wayland, others only work in gnome+xorg, some silently fail, some just freeze, open source AMD drivers still crash the whole machine, etc.

Proton only got announced in the past few months. You can view on ProtonDB reports from actual users and what drivers/hardware they use.

Linux Gaming might not suck anymore but all combinations of Linux the desktop operating system, that I tried certainly do. Both windows 10 and macOS are so much nicer, more stable and consistent that it is not even funny. Just the other day installing a pip package froze Firefox on Ubuntu for >30 seconds.

That is especially true if you are forced to use professionally maintained Linux without root access.

> Check out ProtonDB

You almost convinced me so I checked out ProtonDB, and found out you're overstating things.

Only 50% of games are rated "gold+", and most of those are native Linux versions. Most Windows-only games have issues.

https://www.protondb.com/