WineConf Likely Over But There May Be A Proton / Gaming Developer Conference

[sophisticles]

I think there are a number of factors:

1) People don't have the time or the money to go to conferences.
2) Covid showed people how useless many in-person meetings actually are, you can accomplish much of the same thing while sitting at home and saving money.
3) This is the one I think is the biggest reason, there just isn't as much interest in WINE as some think there is.

To me WINE has been one of the dumbest things about Linux. Think about the implications, diehard Linux users take the view that Microsoft is evil, Windows sucks, open source is great, GPL rules, Linux is the best and then they follow with "I want to run closed source, proprietary Windows software on Linux".

You can't have it both ways, if you want to run Windows software, then use Windows.

What makes Windows such a great platform is Direct X, which allows developers to quickly create full featured software; if the WINE developers had spent half the time creating a similar API for Linux that they spent trying to screw Microsoft by creating an emulator to run DX software on Linux, then Linux today would be in a much better place.

[Nozo]

What makes Windows such a great platform is Direct X, which allows developers to quickly create full featured software; if the WINE developers had spent half the time creating a similar API for Linux that they spent trying to screw Microsoft by creating an emulator to run DX software on Linux, then Linux today would be in a much better place.

Wine covers much more than Linux, it covers UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems in general, including the BSDs and Solaris, if the Wine developers had decided to create an alternative API to OpenGL and DirectX it wouldn't have made any sense in the first place, if you want DirectX, you already have DirectX, if you want OpenGL, you already have OpenGL. Why duplicate efforts?

A new graphics API would also require GPU manufacturers to support it, which they clearly would have refused to do, because you wouldn't even know if that API had come to fruition in the first place. There are OpenGL and Vulkan software that is Windows-only as well.

[sophisticles]

Wine covers much more than Linux, it covers UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems in general, including the BSDs and Solaris, if the Wine developers had decided to create an alternative API to OpenGL and DirectX it wouldn't have made any sense in the first place, if you want DirectX, you already have DirectX, if you want OpenGL, you already have OpenGL. Why duplicate efforts?

A new graphics API would also require GPU manufacturers to support it, which they clearly would have refused to do, because you wouldn't even know if that API had come to fruition in the first place. There are OpenGL and Vulkan software that is Windows-only as well.

Direct X is not a graphics specific API, Direct 3D is.

Direct X is an all encompassing API that includes Direct Sound, Direct Compute, Direct 3D, Direct Input:

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/directx/directx_components.htm

https://developer.nvidia.com/directcompute

Direct X is the Microsoft gem that makes Windows a much better platform than any *Nix.

On Linux you have a kludge to try and replace it, Open GL in place of Direct 3D, Open CL in place of Direct Compute, SDL for some of the others, but they are no replacement for Direct X.

I think if someone was to create an all-encompassing API for Linux like DX is for Windows, Linux adoption would be much greater than it is now.

[smitty3268]

To me WINE has been one of the dumbest things about Linux. Think about the implications, diehard Linux users take the view that Microsoft is evil, Windows sucks, open source is great, GPL rules, Linux is the best and then they follow with "I want to run closed source, proprietary Windows software on Linux".

A lot of linux users don't care about any of that junk.

Regardless, WINE has long been strongly aligned with getting windows apps working on Macs as much as on linux. A lot of the money came from Crossover Office.

[DMJC]

On Linux you have a kludge to try and replace it, Open GL in place of Direct 3D, Open CL in place of Direct Compute, SDL for some of the others, but they are no replacement for Direct X.

I think if someone was to create an all-encompassing API for Linux like DX is for Windows, Linux adoption would be much greater than it is now.

LibSDL is literally that API. It covers sound/input/network/graphics/image loading. It's a one stop shop for everything you need to write a game and it's actively maintained by professional game developers. Hell Loki even developed a patching/update distribution framework. The problem with Linux gaming is the same it's always been. Industry perception of marketshare and lack of support from middleware vendors. It's slowly been getting better but it hasn't reached a tipping point yet. We still don't have a Linux viewer/converter for most 3D formats (SAP Deep Exploration was amazing on Windows 20 years ago). Blender has an insanely huge plugin library, but that's not the same thing. The artist tools on Linux are also a bit lacking. There's some really good model viewers on Windows geared around texturing which can turn light maps/glow maps/shadow maps/bump maps/textures on/off as layers, and auto-reload the textures when the application gets focus, and those tools simply don't exist on Linux.