I'm less about trying to imply that Linux is "crushing" Windows and more about it being seen as a viable option (i.e. " not a million miles away").

I think I'm against out of hand dismissal, which your post and the post I responded to are without qualification or balance.

I didn't intend "shortcut" as derogative (bad word choice :)); rather, given the limited resources of game development, it may make Linux ports possible (as opposed to native ports, which take significantly more resources). John Carmack actually supports this approach.

My criticism is that while there is the impression/hope that at some point the "emulation" will be completed, based on my experience (with Wine and ReactOS), it never will - it's a virtually infinite amount of new hacks/tweaks/small additions.

My conclusion is it a type of work that will require continuous employment of (development resources), and will be more of a workaround, than a solution. (regarding the "crush", this was actually in reference to an ancestor post)

Including native ports in the discussion, or excluding them, is a tricky discussion, which I consider separate - my points were about Wine/Proton specifically.

I actually do play games, but even if my O/S is Linux (and essentially all the games are on Steam), I still run games in a VM.