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Comment by mschuster91

18 days ago

> I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it.

Microsoft can't do shit against WINE/Proton legally, as long as either project steers clear of misappropriated source code and some forms of reverse engineering (Europe's regulations are much more relaxed than in the US).

The problem at the core is that Linux (or to be more accurately, the ecosystem around it) lacks a stable set of APIs, or even commonly agreed-upon standards in the first place, as every distribution has "their" way of doing things and only the kernel has an explicit "we don't break userspace" commitment. I distinctly remember a glibc upgrade that went wrong about a decade and a half ago where I had to spend a whole night getting my server even back to usable (thank God I had eventually managed to coerce the system into downloading a statically compiled busybox...).

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mschuster91

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pjmlp  18 days ago

They surely can, and Valve got lucky UWP didn't took off as they feared.

Microsoft can easily do another go at it.

That is the problem building castles on other vendor platforms.

As reminder,

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/127475-valve-confirms-ste...

  • jwcooper  18 days ago

    Microsoft is going the opposite of what you're suggesting. Their games are coming to Steam, Playstation and Switch. Also, their game division isn't exactly thriving right now. They have a ton of studios, but they are not selling hardware very well right now.

    The more that time goes on, and the more entrenched steamOS/Proton becomes, they will not have any sort of easy time trying to lock-in to Windows. Even now in the earliest days of steamOS, there is blow-back when a game does not support the Steam Deck (which means Proton).

    • pjmlp  18 days ago

      Playstation and Switch, for sure.

      Steam, not on detriment of Windows, how can they allow something like SteamOS to put Windows to shame, with their own APIs?

      I can bet on them changing that, lets see who's got deeper pockets.

      2 replies →

  • lukevp  18 days ago

    Games aren’t going to suddenly start targeting only updated copies of windows 11 though… if they target even win 10 then they need to be API compatible with what’s currently there in windows. It doesn’t matter what new stuff comes out. Just like how we had to keep using ie6 compatible code for ages for the 5% of people still on windows xp even though it kept us from using modern web tech for everyone else.

  • mschuster91  18 days ago

    > They surely can, and Valve got lucky UWP didn't took off as they feared.

    So what, assuming it had taken off it would just be yet another set of crap APIs to develop wrappers for.