Thanks, I missed that!

Valve tried that in 2014 with the Steam Machines. There were an increasing number of native Linux ports since then, but many of those "native" ports used a Wine wrapper, and as soon as Steam Machines died down because nobody was buying them because there were so few games available for Linux, the native ports stopped coming.

Over the years, those native ports have broken down and stopped being playable on Linux because libraries these games depend on have made breaking changes since. I regularly buy games from GOG and Itch, and I've needed to manually patch a surprising number of native games.

Meanwhile, Wine just works, and importantly, keeps working. It often works better than Native ports that developers poorly optimize. Wine is native, too. It's a translation layer; it translates DirectX calls to Vulkan with DXVK, and Win32 syscalls to Unix syscalls with Wine, and so on. It's not emulation; it's translation, which does not necessitate performance cost. In fact, some engines do such a bad job of writing Vulkan calls (Unity) that DXVK does a better job of translating from DirectX to Vulkan than the engine does of writing native Linux Vulkan calls.

Yes, I like when developers provide native Linux ports, and one of my favorite developers does. However, one of this developer's ports has broken over time due to a very innocuous issue, and it's difficult to fix because the engine is EOL. I needed to patch it manually to get it to work.

Or I could have just run it in Wine with no tinkering needed.

The fact is, Wine has made Linux that much more viable in a very short period of time. It isn't like Wine has convinced developers to take their software off Linux; they weren't giving us anything to begin with. Us Linux users have nowhere to go but up, and Wine has proven to be a very successful way of making Linux ever more relevant among developers. The amount of Native ports has remained quite constant over time: https://boilingsteam.com/what-happened-to-the-native-linux-zealots/#yet-linux-native-builds-have-survived

Celebrate developers when they provide native builds. Celebrate developers when they test their games on Proton before updating the game. Both of these developers are supporting Linux in a meaningful way.

Even if Windows does switch to a subscription model, it's not just gonna die off. It has captured a massive portion of the desktop market after all, but it may encourage more users to check out Linux.

So, Linux will probably continue to grow in these coming years.

you might have some issues with some games not working but you can find the libraries like you said. i expect issues with some games not working down the road, even with windows years later some games dont work without doing some manual work. My main point is that native is key since the game is made for linux in mind, settling for wine or something is sort of like a second class citizen support. if people dont push for this then devs will settle with a non native version.

At the point the primary business model becomes "stream Windows via the cloud" ala (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365) instead of software running on your hardware it's not really a desktop OS anymore.

My point is that this and software as a service in general, is where MS is headed. I don't think they want a future as a desktop OS. They see their future as being a service.

And they especially see consumer support as a blight; seeing as customers would One and Done rather than Enterprise "Please support us forever and a song & dance".

The thing is, Wine's backward compatibility is better than even Windows in some cases. Those games that don't work on Windows without tinkering have a decent chance of working in Wine. Wine is so good nowadays that it's not unusual to find it outperforming and providing a more stable experience than a native Linux build.

Putting that aside, though, which developers are you talking about? If you're talking about indies all the way up to AA developers, they don't generally get a choice in how good their Linux support is or if they support it at all; that's up to the engine they use. If they're using Unity, it will probably be a worse experience than using Wine. And the thing is, some of these developers do a poor job of supporting Linux over time anyway. They might forget to update the Linux build but keep their Windows build up to date. And they usually never fix Linux builds that have broken over time. Linux users are usually second-class citizens even if they get a native build.

AAA developers were never interested in spending the money on supporting Linux properly in the first place, and nothing has changed.

The dedicated developers still support Linux natively if their engine lets them, and they'll test it, they'll fix bugs when they pop up, and they'll keep it up-to-date. But even developers like that have begun to question whether it's worth it: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/08/heart-of-the-machine-from-arcen-games-dropping-native-linux-for-proton/

"Well, I mean, that’s kind of how I feel, is that it’s not a good look.

Ultimately it comes down to who supports that platform better: unity or Valve? The answer is hands down Valve.

If that were to change, it’s not a big deal to add native linux support back. This is the first game I’ve done in the last decade without said support, and it feels odd."

Why develop a native Linux version if it will result in a worse experience than Proton?

Proton meets all other developers where they are. It's a lot easier for developers to just test if it works, report a bug for someone else to fix if it doesn't, and wait until it's fixed to push a new update. And most developers don't even do that.

Now, there is one obvious drawback to not having a native Linux version: it's harder to install and play a Windows game on any other platform than Steam. So it's very Steam-centric. That's just because other platforms like GOG aren't willing to invest the time or money Valve has in creating a client that lets you play through Proton/Wine, and don't test it like they do.

Many more Linux games are now playable through Proton/Wine than are available natively; hell, 99% of the games I play don't have native Linux versions and I wouldn't expect them to. That's just where Linux gaming has moved, and it's why the mythical GOG Galaxy client for Linux that will surely materialize someday needs to have support for it. I don't think we've lost much, to be honest, especially compared to what we've gained.

Would I prefer native builds? Absolutely. I just wish it weren't a worse experience than Proton.

As much as I hate to say it, I'm in a similar boat. I love GOG and I love DRM-free but I've come around to loving Steam as well over the past year... I'm also going to be moving to Linux after Windows 10 dies (though I'll still probably need a dual boot setup for some titles).

Steam has solid Linux support, they have a means of buying games that is easy for me (prepaid wallet cards, since I don't have a credit card) and they actively maintain their client in really big ways. The fact that GOG pretty much ignores Linux, is only purchasable via methods I can't regularly use, and the fact that Galaxy is borderline a dead product, it really is pushing me to spend a lot more time with my Steam library.

I still love GOG's DRM-free stance, I love owning what I buy here and I love backing up my favorites for extra peace of mind, but those factors really have pushed me toward Steam and it kinda sucks. I used to be one of the biggest advocates for GOG but there just comes a point where it's difficult to keep defending them if they don't want to care about things like that. Don't get me wrong, I'm still absolutely planning to buy from GOG and try to obtain DRM-free copies of all of my favorite games (even if I already have them on Steam) but it's just difficult because such a freedom-respecting platform refuses to acknowledge a freedom-respecting OS, payment methods and so forth. It's frustrating, to say the least.

Surprisingly less than you think; especially with a recent Wine, especially with Vulkan support, and especially with Wayland support, and especially with Nvidia begrudgingly supporting the platform, even!

I’ve tried to get Galaxy to work in Linux and it has never worked for me.

What distro are you using?
I had the same issue with bottles. Tried to install it for an hour (maybe less) before I said - screw this, I'm done spending an entire day just to figure out how and why a program does not work. - and went back to playing Singleplayer games offline via heroic.

Did not even try Wine.

Unfortunately, Bottles is broken by default. You need to move all your game files inside of the ~/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles (etc.) directory for it to see them, or you need to use Flatseal to give Bottles permission to access all of your files. You'd never figure that out because the error messages suggest there's something wrong with Wine itself. More info here: https://docs.usebottles.com/flatpak/expose-directories

Lutris and Heroic are easier ways of using Wine for now.

Oh gross, Flatpaks. Same result with a repo install?

The last time I tried to install Bottles from the AUR was several years ago, and it didn't work very well then.

Managing Wine dependencies is probably one of the best use cases for Flatpak, as it's a lot harder to do on any distribution's repositories (even Arch doesn't have all the right ffmpeg dependencies). Problem is, there is no way for a Flatpak program to ask the user, "Hey, can I have access to your filesystem so I can play your games?" Developers need to configure the permissions beforehand, and Bottles takes a conservative approach, leaving it up to the user to decide what permissions it should have.

Lutris' Flatpak package, on the other hand, takes everything that might be conceivably needed.

That being said, I've tried Bottles after I managed to get it working and I definitely like it. Being able to install dependencies you normally would with Winetricks into the bottle is super easy, and there are lots of options I regularly use. I don't like it as much as Lutris, though.

it is also a numbers game.

At the last count, there is 120M active acounts on Steam. The latest hardware survey has Linux at 1.76%. This means about 2.1M Linux users.

If we give gOg the same proprtional distribution, but a 10% of the user base (gOg has no offical numbers, but when publishers / developers have divulged sales figures, they then to be around there, and makes it easy for me to calulate so late in the evening), meaning that gOg would have 12M active users, take 1.76% from that leaving 210K Linux users.