It's weird because Unreal Engine 4 is actually pretty well supported on Linux. I wrote a substantial projection art piece recently that used a ton of low level UE4 features, including native C++ modules, and it all worked flawlessly on Linux[0]
All this fracturing means for end users is more rootkit launchers to install and less games for linux users.
I guess it's not a fair comparison though, since you can't really subscribe to steam. So I regret saying anything.
Has anyone tried that model? "Pay us $30/mo and play whatever you want."
Of course, the games are specific to the publisher or the partnerships the platform has.
Valve even has linux kernel devs around who fix bugs in drivers for gaming hardware.
Steam may have been a monopoly but it was a pretty good one for the end user.
All my Windows exclusive games appear side by side with my native Linux games. I no longer have to have wine installed and maintain a separate Windows (in wine) Steam installation.
I'd love to see a technical teardown.
I think this isn’t true.
Although more Linux distros aren’t shipping full x86 images anymore, I don’t think that actually impacts x86 support on AMD64 setups. Some limited amount of x86 packages continue to be provided for running Wine and legacy proprietary software.
macOS is killing the ability to run 32 bit code at all. There’s not much of a true technical reason to do this that I’m aware of, it’s a decision similar to Windows disallowing 16 bit software in 64 bit Windows.
Under Linux AMD64 not only can you run 32 bit software, you can still create 16 bit code segments as well. No vm8086, but it can still be used for emulating old Windows applications.