Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Microsoft has finally realized that its animus toward projects like Wine and pre-acquisition Mono was ultimately unproductive, and a net negative for Microsoft itself. I still don't trust MS's motives in general, but I think they at least recognize that Wine/Proton helps make the Win32 and DirectX APIs a sort of de-facto cross-platform standard when it comes to things like desktop gaming, and that this is a g…
>that Wine/Proton helps make the Win32 and DirectX APIs a sort of de-facto cross-platform standard when it comes to things like desktop gaming, and that this is a good thing for them. I'm not sure if it benefits microsoft in the long term, because the "backwards compatibility" features of Wine need to be implemented in Windows already as a part of the system. So in the long run wine/proton/mono will implement windows…
Sometimes running old software atop Wine on Windows is the easiest - or even only - option to have said old software work on new Windows.