The problem with WINE / Proton / etc, which too many people constantly refuse to acknowledge, is that it's simply not good enough to have even MOST of your games work in it. People being able to switch to it is an all or nothing deal, and when WINE's track record for AAA titles with sales in the tens of millions is as poor as it is, that's just not going to happen.
To take an easy example: anything on Bethesda's current engine. (Blame the game developers all you want if that makes you feel better about it, but it doesn't change the outcome). Fallout 4 sold *12 million* copies on day one alone... in 2015. And it's still rated *Garbage* on WINE, 4 years later. So it's great for you if all YOUR games work in WINE, or you only play Linux-native titles. But saying things like "90% of the top 100 games work in Proton now, so Linux gaming is finally here!" is just hopelessly false, regardless of how much we would LIKE it to be true.
You can't just look at the math naively (or wilfully deceptively), because what that 90% (not the real number BTW, just convenient to illustrate the point) really means is that even someone with only a handful of games very rapidly reaches a point where they only have a single-digit percentage chance of being able to use WINE without having to dual-boot for at least one game - and as long as that number is non-zero, switching just isn't going to happen.
It doesn't help that the WINE devs' response to someone producing a DX compatibility layer vastly superior to theirs, by himself and in literally a tenth of the time WINE has had, was basically "He's doing it wrong, we have our own plan and ours will be better". History rather strongly contradicts that stance, and even if it is then given their track record most of us will be dead by the time they ever get there. :P
I'd LOVE to be able to drop Windows (especially with 7 now just months from EOL, and Spyware10 about to become the only option) but for all that even this current "still less than 1%" is genuinely a significant uptick proportionally, doing so just isn't viable for me the same as it isn't for more than a tiny fraction of gamers, even if they're aware of Linux in the first place. That "Anything less than ALL my games is no different to NONE of them" problem is why it's not going to get better than 1% for a very long time, even with the resources that Valve and the community are putting into it and the fact that the situation has actually improved greatly in the last year.
Leave a comment: