Linux interop is maturing fast thanks to a games console

It's good to see an assumption I had, be validated. The assumption was that Linux would struggle to make a dent in the desktop market until it managed to make a tempting proposition for gamers. Projects like WINE tried, but there's just not enough you can do only with open-source contributors, with such a massive undertaking. I'm happy that a big company is finally backing this effort and with nvidia open-sourcing their gpu kernel modules, I'd say exciting times are up ahead :)

It's great that Valve is willing to pay them for it. It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary, but I can live with that.

As someone who has just switched to Linux gaming, I've got to say it's working great. Maybe it's slightly less stable, but not by much, and performance is excellent.

it was a good article :) plus I've been a register fan since the slashdot days, I like y'all's style!

It's interesting how this is just like how when Linux started being used in super computers we saw a similar creeping feature improvement for everyone else.

I think that will always be one of the strongest points of Linux, the variety of different areas improvements can come from.

It's interesting to see Apple basically imitating this with their porting toolkit. The net result is game developers being presented with two growing ecosystems for the same game simply by ensuring they stay compatible with both. With their VR stuff coming out soon, there could be a big push to get some games going there.

Either way, if you are a game developer, ensuring the games work fine via proton and Apple's porting kit should be a no-brainer. Basically, it should just work mostly without too much effort. All you need to do is a bit of Q&A and maybe avoiding to use some stuff that is problematic or coming up with some workarounds for those things. Neither ecosystem is very big. But at the same time, growing your market by a few percent is always nice. It's big enough that not supporting that is becoming an odd choice to make.

I've been using Steam on my Manjaro laptop for some casual gaming. The setup was pretty easy and I'm able to run most of my steam library. I'm not much of a gamer but I've bought some things over the years. And most of those things stopped working on macs. My guess is that Valve is starting to see a lot of Linux users with steam accounts that don't own a Steam Deck. It wouldn't surprise me if that's actually most of their Linux users.

As for OSS, Wine is basically very successful thanks to efforts like this. Most successful OSS projects need active users and, like it or not, the private sector tends to be by far the largest stakeholder in these projects. Wine as a hobby project was basically a bit of a niche thing. They got a lot of amazing stuff done of course. But it was kind of a bit of a pain to set it up and use it and progress was slow. Also support for a lot of games was a bit lacking and very dependent on the community chasing that. Steam makes this super easy and they made huge progress with getting a lot of games working. More importantly, they are big enough that game developers themselves now care about compatibility. And that's of course more commercial users.