"Jonathan N. Little" wrote:

VanguardLH wrote:

The author started talking about Steam on Linux which could now
detect the native OS platform to know which game titles to present.
Steam represents about 78% of the marketshare for computer games. I
saw something about them using a compatibility shim to run Windows
games on Linux platforms eliminating the need to run Steam and the
Windows games inside of WINE.

No all Steam games on Linux are Windows games running in WINE, many
are truly ported. I've got the Borderland games and they are ports
not running in WINE. Proton and WINE just extend selection for old
games avoiding the need to port.

And does that somehow lopside the bias of game count to make native
Linux games far exceed those native games available on Windows? Of
course not. A game that had been ported to be a native Linux app is
obviously no longer a Windows app. A ported Windows game becomes a
native Linux game. The count of Linux games, whether native or ported
to make native, are still meager compared to the count of native games
on Windows.

Steam Play (Steam for Linux) detects the platform for the game probably
via a manifest for the game specifying its native platform. If it's a
native Linux game, it just loads it in Linux. If a Windows game, it
uses its WINE variant (aka Proton) to run the Windows game in that
emulator running atop Linux.

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/2...ows-only-games

The confirmed list of Windows-only games that are compatible atop
Steam's Proton variant of is small. That's just the ones that Steam has
confirmed are compatible.

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Proton

has a hyperlink pointing to a list of app manifests/mappings for 100+
compatible Windows games. There's also a link to user-reported game
compatibility.

Proton converts the DX 10/11 calls to Vulkan to help keep game
performance similar to the Windows game when ran native on Windows.
That is dependent on the available of proprietary Linux drivers for
video hardware, the efficiency in coding the Linux video driver, and
compatibility of the Linux driver provided by the video maker to run on
other Linux variants (most don't list just Linux but some variant as
supported).

Regardless of the workarounds, they still don't alter which are native
Linux games and which are native Windows games, and the huge disparity
in counts between them. As noted, you can run Linux stuff on Windows,
but that doesn't magically mutate them into native Windows apps. Linux
marketshare floats around 2%, so obviously the game authors are going to
target the market that has the biggest ROI. That's not Linux.

I'm not a Windows proselytizer or Linux defender. I believe in using
the platform that best suits the task. Sorry, I still don't see Linux
as the best choice for a gaming platform.