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Why bother making native releases when Valve/Proton will take care of it? Who wants the headache of supporting another build and directly supporting N flavors of Linux distributions?

When it comes to games, Linux has an OS/2 problem.

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Steam runtime already gives developers a single target rather than having to support different distros individually.

If Steam Deck, the new Steam Machine etc take a significant part of market share, I think it will be more enticing for game developer to release a native version for Linux. Providing a native version should still be more robust and performant.

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> still be more robust

Why? The only stable ABI on Linux is Win32.

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And still why should normal people go to Linux over Windows? Linux support is still not that great from OEMs and for the unwashed masses your local Best Buy or Apple Store.
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Have you read the article? There's real frustration with Windows. It's so bad that my 15 year old, who only really uses his computer to launch Steam, asked me to help him install Linux. He had heard about Bazzite and already knew his gpu would be compatible. He gets about 20 fps more on Linux and can choose when updates are applied. There's no forced online login, ads in the OS or copilot prompts. His browser doesn't revert to Edge.

He doesn't really want to care but Microsoft's decisions have made their main product into an annoyance.

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And people would be less frustrated with Linux?
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Some people, myself included, are already less frustrated with Linux. Which means it is likely that other people would be less frustrated if they tried Linux. Not 100% of them, of course, but some for sure.
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Yes, as I explained. He's happy with it. He doesn't care about the OS just wants it to launch programs like it's supposed to.
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