As you said, easier/better to target Win32 and just use Proton.
It's also funny because it kinda became true on another level as "Win32 Is Only Stable on Linux". It's easier to run old games and softwares (XP era and earlier) with Proton under Linux than on current Windows 10/11
> It's also funny because it kinda became true on another level as "Win32 Is Only Stable on Linux". It's easier to run old games and softwares (XP era and earlier) with Proton under Linux than on current Windows 10/11
Yeah, I'm gonna call that out as suspicious. Maybe on a few select titles, but the Wine database shows tons of titles that still won't run above "Silver"; all of which run just fine on newer versions of Windows. The older games that Windows can't run are usually due to some insanely intrusive DRM solution which also wouldn't run on Wine.
And this isn't me as some Windows fanboy, my comment history clearly shows I'm a Linux user; but that statement is just ridiculous on its face.
The Wine database is mostly dead for anything gaming related and it only cares about whatever DLLs are bundled with Wine. Nowadays people use at least DXVK and VKD3D-Proton (and most likely also some Microsoft media codecs) which improve compatibility considerably but are not part of Wine itself.
All gaming related checking is now on ProtonDB (pretty much everything that works on ProtonDB also works on Wine/Wine-staging with DXVK and VKD3D-Proton, this is how i play all of my GOG games - of which i have hundreds - for example).
In fact DXVK is so good that people use it to play Windows games... on Windows[0] and AFAIK it was how Intel Arc users played pretty much anything pre-DX12 for a while because Intel's own implementation was too slow/buggy.
[0] Actually this is how i decided it is time to ditch Windows a few years ago: i tried to play a D3D9 game on my Windows 10 PC and had various visual glitches - then threw the DXVK DLLs in the game's directory and everything worked fine. After a couple more occasions of this i decided that if i'm using DXVK for games on Windows might as well use it under the proper environment.
Ok, fine. List ten games that work better (not equal, or equivalently; better) with your aforementioned configuration on Linux than on Windows 10/11 and I'll actively go test each one of them and post the results on YouTube.
I can just about guarantee they will all run fine.
That is pointless, even if the games run fine on your computer it doesn't mean anything, you'd just be lucky enough. It'd be the same as responding with "it works on my PC" whenever someone says they have a problem with a game or other software on their PC - sure, nice for you but that doesn't mean anything aside from being possible to not have issues with some hardware and software configuations.
Also it'd be worthless to even try that, i made the switch almost three years ago and not only the software stack has changed a lot since then (IIRC Windows 11 didn't even exist), there is even a new discrete GPU vendor out. Today's comparison would not be representative at all.
And finally i never commented on how things performed[0] (i am assuming it is performance you have in mind with the "work better" as you mention that this "work" has to be "not equal but better" - anything else would be too vague to matter) - especially since the situation that made me decide DXVK was good was actually making the games i tried to play actually work regardless of performance (i happened to have some screenshots from a game i had issues with since i tried to report the bug in hopes the developer fixes it - they didn't - and this is the result i was getting [0][1][2]. Dropping DXVK in - under Windows - fixed all of those). FWIW in my experience performance was more or less the same (i did some testing with various games on Steam between Linux and Windows 10 after i installed Linux, some games performed better, others worse but the difference was miniscule that i only noticed with tools like mangohud on Linux and RTSS on Windows), which was great as i'd switch even if it was always slightly slower because i dislike Windows' UX, so that was a nice "bonus". But that isn't relevant to the experience i had anyway.
[0] Except that part about Intel Arc, but that was widespread knowledge when these GPUs came out, you can find several YouTube videos about the issues they had and some used DXVK to avoid them - BTW Intel kept improving their drivers, so even if you tried to replicate the results nowadays you wouldn't get the same results.
> pretty much everything that works on ProtonDB also works on Wine/Wine-staging with DXVK and VKD3D-Proton, this is how i play all of my GOG games - of which i have hundreds - for example
I found this usually to be true, but there are exception. For example I can't get Disco Elysium to work with Wine no matter what I try, but it's reported as working on ProtonDB. I've encountered some other exceptions too.
> There was the famous "Win32 Is The Only Stable ABI on Linux"
This has been a common saying for a long time. IIRC even before Valve made Steam available for Linux, the main Overgrowth developer who had Linux versions of some of their games break over time eventually mentioned (in a blog post) that you should just use Wine with their games as it is more likely to be stable.
(this may or may not have to do with the Linux version of their older game, Lugaru, using OSS - though at least the demo did run a few years ago when i tried it with a wrapper... and after removing/messing around with a bunch of .so files)
There was the famous "Win32 Is The Only Stable ABI on Linux" article last year which pretty much about this https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
As you said, easier/better to target Win32 and just use Proton.
It's also funny because it kinda became true on another level as "Win32 Is Only Stable on Linux". It's easier to run old games and softwares (XP era and earlier) with Proton under Linux than on current Windows 10/11