I vehemently disagree with sentiment expressed in the article. Sure, on the surface the work done Valve does significantly improve the state of Linux gaming. But this is not Linux gaming. This is Windows gaming under Linux. We need to think about the long-term effects, about maintaining a healthy ecosystem. I cannot imagine how delegating Linux and Vulkan to be a long-term emulator of DX12 and Win is supposed to be healthy. What about platform autonomy? Shouldn’t we strive towards a future where Vulkan is a strong, independent API with its own voice and not just an interface for emulating DX12? And one where game developers actively want to support Linux as first class citizen and not just make Windows games and putting all the burden of compatibility on the maintainers of the emulation layer.

The worst outcome of this is that the market share and quality of Vulkan implementations will diminish. WebGPU is a strong upcoming API contender on the mobile side, which IMO has a good chance of displacing Vulkan for many applications. And if DXVK works that well on Linux, more developers might end up choosing DX12 and only supporting Windows. Giving up autonomy and becoming a subordinate of a different technology stack is never a good idea. I mean, if this is the way how the Linux community wants to play, then why not make it official and just scrap Vulkan and have a DX-compatible API in place with IHV drivers?