There is a chicken/egg problem.

We should be happy it has a solution.

I would not call being dependent on Windows games a solution.

The file format and APIs used are irrelevant as long as the games work. The games work and that is all that matter.

Not when it is a castle on Microsoft's kingdom.

Sorry but that makes no sense, there is nothing in "Microsoft's kingdom" here, Wine -as you certainly know- is independent. The most Microsoft can do is change the API in backwards incompatible ways - but that'd affect Windows too, so there is little incentive to do that (and attempts such as Metro/UWP/etc to change the core ways of working with Windows didn't prove popular with most gamedevs).

And even if Microsoft does that, it isn't any different than the 2394923th time a library breaks its API on Linux - Linux as an operating system isn't some monolithic project, it is a combination of hundreds of separate projects that for the most part work together like -sometimes misshapen- bricks on a wall. Wine/Proton is just another of those bricks (and history has shown that it tends to be among the more stable ones).

So there is Linux gaming, you’re saying.

No there isn't.

What is there are Linux users playing Windows games.

There used to be one, sadly the likes of Loki Entertainment are now gone.

a) The vast, overwhelming majority of regular gamers who could potentially be convinced to try gaming on Linux truly do not give a shit about whatever line you're trying to draw here.

b) Driving widespread adoption of gaming on Linux is a chicken and egg problem---without a significant market of Linux gamers, developers and publishers have no reason to publish native versions of their games on Linux, and without games to play, nobody is going to install Linux on their gaming system. Proton directly solves the latter problem, and may indirectly solve the former when Linux sees widespread adoption by gamers.

What do you call a game that plays natively on Linux?

Not a windows game.

And what game would that be? OpenTTD?

Except those games don't run on GNU/Linux without Proton, providing an Windows implementation.

Amiga games running on UAE on GNU/Linux are still Amiga games.

I don’t really see what the difference is. If they run well, what does it matter?

Sure but not everyone is using desktop for gaming.

And yet, without the software for Linux gaming, there is no Linux gaming.

Very hard to falsify such a statement.

Software written for Windows, running with a translation layer on GNU/Linux.

The translation layer doesn’t really matter though, does it? If a user installs a game and it runs the same, the user doesn’t care about the translation layer inbetween. If installing and running a game on Linux is the same as running it on windows, there’s no reason to prefer one over the other for gaming.

It certainly does, because it allows game studios to keep ignoring GNU/Linux, even when they happen to have Android/Linux games written with the NDK, it is a Valve's problem.

With better performance than on Windows

Maybe in rare cases with few compatible games.

In some cases.

is there a point somewhere in this statement?

Not the parent or grandparent poster and not a gamer.

The echo in my mind from the statement was along the following lines:

I can do everything at work remotely from my Linux laptop as they use Microsoft365/Sharepoint/Teams/Outlook and all. I can just log in via Chromium and noone knows any different with one exception: the finance portal. I have to be on an employer owned Windows PC to do that one thing as it is the last 'native program' needed. Moral: enterprise-ish stuff is happening via the Web browser.

Steam et al financing WINE/Proton and generally hammering all the sharp edges out of the compatibility layer for running Windows software on Linux. Moral: Complex Windows native software can be run under Linux.

So, at some point in the future, does Microsoft just phase out Windows? Replace it with a really well engineered Linux with compatibility environment for legacy software?

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish/Exterminate? They already begun the Embrace phase: WSL.

The smartest Extend phase they could do would probably be a "Windows" GUI on top of Linux kernel, possibly with some customized locked-down systemd, to replace the aging X and the mess Wayland created. If it gets to be at least as functional as Win11 is, it will instantly wipe out the other two alternatives - Exterminate.

Check how many Linux contributors are on Microsoft's paycheck, including systemd author and some Rust people also related to Rust on Linux kernel efforts.

Microsoft already has their own distro.

And they don't need to bother with anything else, Valve with Proton, makes Windows, Visual Studio and DirectX the way to go for the large majority of game studios.

WSL on Windows, alongside Virtualization framework on macOS, are the Year of Desktop Linux, regarding the latops I can actually buy on a random shopping mall computer store.

Games work just fine through Proton already, except when they require kernel level anticheat. I'm fairly certain OP is just one of the purists who think it's not done "proper" until it's a Linux native port, which I wholeheartedly disagree with.

Why should Microsoft bother, when they have Visual Studio and Windows licenses that game studios gladly pay for?

So no point to make then, cool, I can get back to playing games then

Make sure to use MAME as well, those arcade games are also Linux, apparently.

1. Nobody said anything about Windows games being Linux games. We were talking about Linux gaming, which is gaming on Linux. Which - yeah - emulators also contribute to

2. Above being said, translation is not emulation and has much less overhead So many pointless semantics to dismiss something genuinely good and useful

Translation is one form of emulation, because GNU/Linux still isn't Windows, at the end of the day.

No, it is not. Right there in the name of WINE.