@gamingonlinux Both have their own strengths and weaknesses. The reality of game dev is that we're going to see less native ports now that proton has become so good. For end users the result is more games to play on linux so it's hard to complain.

@gamingonlinux People still are angry that there is no KDE/Qt version of somethingsomething. We're still in 2004 and "interface/framework purism" still is the thing holding back the linux desktop. :blobcat_praise:

@gamingonlinux Honestly I prefer native just because it encourages support for the ecossystem. But I forgot how many years I've used wine, so zero problems running games on proton and between a game not working and running under proton the decision is not a hard one.

@gamingonlinux Native development to a common target with multiple abstraction layers is fine with me, Developer choice on the common target is a good thing.

My preference is obviously for Linux native with a "WinTon"* layer would be the direction I would encourage.

But if it plays near to better then dev spec, I could care less if you wrote it originally to run on a ZX speccy.

*Note to #Valve: Humbly Suggest Marsalis as name.

@gamingonlinux oooof. It's about as tiresome as arguing over distros.

@gamingonlinux We've always had trouble with the native builds for our games. They work, sure, but there's a megaton of extra work needed to debug platform specific issues, like wireless controllers compatibility for example, and that's while using a popular game engine. With Proton, we make one version, and it works exactly the same on both systems, which is better for us, the developers, as well as for our players. Proton is a win/win situation.

@gamingonlinux I guess that's what most people who actually play games feel about console VS PC. Just pick what work best for you and have fun, there's no need to justify that your purchase is better than others.

@gamingonlinux I think encouraging developers to provide native Linux builds is important, but there are definitely some technical details which we need to figure out on our side first.

Hopefully, with the growing popularity of containerized packaging formats (like Flatpak), this may eventually be solved.