I hope Linux with this Proton compatibility layer doesn't go the way of OS/2 of being so easy to run Windows games that nobody writes Linux ports anymore and as a consequence the performance and overall experience is never as good.
It doesn't help that the Linux ecosystem makes it really difficult to build truly portable truly native binaries.
Static builds? Well, that will work... But wait, you want OpenGL or Vulkan? You'll need a dynamic linker to load system .so's, as that's the standard API available to interact with these APIs on Linux. Want to load dynamic libraries? Well, you'll need to ship a dynamic ELF [1]. Shipping a dynamic ELF with glibc now? Hope you don't intend to run on NixOS or Alpine or any distribution that has an old glibc. Maybe also ship ld-linux.so, all of /lib you depend on and a wrapper shellscript that sequences startup accordingly via that ld-linux.so. That will work, but you still need to load the system OpenGL or Vulkan .so's. Have fun implementing that to work well on every distribution! Remember to respect terms of GPL/LGPL software you now ship. Oh, and I hope you don't use Qt.
Maybe you want to use flatpak? Well, better explain to your users that they need to install and configure it, and make sure whatever proprietary Nvidia drivers they have are also properly flatpak'd. What about the alternatives, something like AppImage/Snap? Those just don't work on Alpine and other non-glibc distributions. Whoops.
Pick an audio API. Pulseaudio? Some people don't run it. ALSA? Good luck, some people run Pulseaudio with ALSA emulation disabled. OSS? Dead, unless someone runs padsp. Pray your users don't run JACK. You'll probably end up on OpenAL, which is now proprietary and/or has an LGPL fork (remember you now have to let users re-link against any other version of OpenAL!).
I sometimes make games and other small interactive demos. I run Linux, and want to send builds to friends also running Linux. The easiest way to distribute these is to build and ship a .exe on a Windows build host and get my friends to run it on Wine, that just works everywhere out of the box. And the .exe's end up smaller and launch faster, too!
Honestly I'd argue the opposite: that because Linux Desktop is such a fragmented mess of a non-platform, "native" ports are likely to work at least as badly if not worse than those running on a compatibility layer. There's even some anecdotal evidence that this is the case with games that do have native ports and running the Windows version in proton being a better experience.
The compatibility layer for the linux native games is the steam-runtime though.
So fragmentation of the distributions matters to a much lesser degree already.
For me it had the effect of me being able to run Linux at home almost exclusively. and to be able to game occasionally with friends.
Tabletop simulator/ teriforming mars/ lords of water deep and a bunch of other games just work.
Getting that Linux percentage up should help the platform. I don’t want to go use my older machine and it’s non Linux. So I seek out desktop applications to drive Linux use up.
I don't see why it wouldn't have that effect. The obvious path to follow for gaming companies is write for windows and make sure it runs fine under proton.
