More people playing on Linux may bring the interest of developers to create a Linux version for their games. More developers familiarizing or liking Linux may mean more native Linux versions. This way there is no need to use wine/proton middle-man software. Proton may work wonderful but there’s still the fact that there is a middle-man software, and will never be as optimize it can be. Games often have bugs and are release unfinished, imagine bringing more things in between, more points of breaking.
On the other hand Linux is known for breaking compatibility with old games and putting a layer like WINE in-between can make games work as intended even long after a non-maintained native version broke. In fact WINE often runs old Windows games better than even newer version of Windows itself.
Linux is known for breaking compatibility with old games
Which ones exactly? I recently played the DOOM 3 Linux version and it worked after swapping out LibGL. If you ship Linux game with the Steam or a flatpak runtime they’ll probably run in 10 years still. Whereas you might already run into problems updating Windows 10 to 11…
Try playing some old Loki releases or stuff like UT2004. Sure, there might be work-arounds, but the likelihood to be able to run the original Windows release in WINE with minimal tinkering is much higher.
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I don’t think nativity is a great concern these days. Everything works well with proton. It’s a total shift
Native clients are nice to haves and are great for weird old GPUs that don’t support Vulkan, but as you’re saying they’re probably pointless in about 95% of cases since most people run systems capable of running Proton with DXVK.
Still, there will probably come a time when Microsoft drops Windows 10 support and vendors making software for Windows 11 will be forced to opt into some of the security virtualization features Win 11 offers that could cause issues for Proton. The GPU virtualization features could be overcome with native Vulkan support, but some of the memory virtualization and potential future measures may warrant the existence of native Linux clients.
This is the first I’m hearing of Win 11 virtualization. Does it offer any real benefits or is it simply more bloat and needless complexity?
I know personally that I have no intention to move beyond 10. I was already very much against 10 as an OS. 11 might very well be like 8 where people simply refuse to migrate. Every other version turns out to be a broken mess nobody wanted. That’s what I’m expecting out of 11. At the very least I’m guessing that software like what you’re mentioning will make it too bloated and complex to operate on enough hardware as to make it something to dismiss.
I agree for older titles, no real point in porting them over anymore with Proton being as good as it is for those. But for new titles it is a good idea to design the tech-stack to be multi-platform compatible (ideally even multi-arch) and Linux is a good test-case for that. This will make the software much more maintainable in the longer run, which is vital as gaming is becoming more of a service and less of a release and forget sort of thing.
Not having to rely on proton is definitely much better and preferable.
From what I heard all of Russia is in the process of switching to Linux. This can only encourage more software to be written with it in mind
Eh, I still prefer native ports. Proton is a total game changer, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t work on everything. One example would be Skyrim. You can get it working on Linux, yes, but there is so much tinkering involved. Doubly so if you’re on a laptop and have Optimus, which complicates things even further.
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