[mariusor]

Sadly I don't see that happening. Game devs have gotten used to having their cake and eating it too by developing for Windows and using Proton as a crutch to get the the Steam OS certification too. flibitijibibo was right: linux porters have probably gone out of business.

[Gigachad]

Releasing an actual Linux binary doesn't really matter that much. Proton is just a better experience. Even when games did include a linux build you were usually better off telling Steam to run the Windows one in Proton because it just ran faster with less bugs. A Windows binary is just more portable, more stable long term, and a better experience.

What we actually need is developers testing their games on Proton to make sure they run well day, releasing graphics presets that run well on the hardware, and simply not blocking Linux through anti cheat.

[mariusor]

> A Windows binary is just more portable, more stable long term, and a better experience.

I must preface this by saying that I'm not a game dev, but the Steam Runtime SDK has been offering stable versioned targets for linux for close to a decade now. Porting to one of them shouldn't be more difficult than porting to any other console specific SDK.

[sedatk]

> A Windows binary is just more portable

How the turntables…

[fooker]

Windows API and ABI has always been more portable than anything else. This is why Microsoft is a tech giant. You can take a windows binary from 1995 (actually even older) and run it reliably today.

If it doesn't run and you are a commercial client, Microsoft will implement a compatibility hack for you in the latest windows code so your thing from 1995 will work.

There is no parallel to this in the tech world so far. Linux gets around this by requiring you to recompile things, but recompiling old code along with old compilers and old libraries and all their dependencies is a nightmare.

[sedatk]

Sure, I know all that, but it’s ironic to me that Unix, which was boasted as the epitome of portability once with C, POSIX, X11, X/Open and whatnot, actually struggles with backwards compatibility while Microsoft, the notorious developer of a closed-source, locked-in platform, has managed to become the key to portability :)

[fluoridation]

That's source-level portability, while this is binary portability. Even early on, MS put in lots of effort to ensure that old applications kept working.