Steamdeck compatibility could take a huge leap forward with ULWGL-launcher, a universal game compatibility tool and collaborative effort between Glorious Eggroll, Lutris, Bottles, and Heroic Launcher!
I'm actually kind of surprised that they're all working together at all. Normally they all wanna have it done their own way and it ends up just being another random project, that everybody loves until the next person creates another project because they want it done another way.
Yes and no. I could hop on to a 50 year old Unix machine and operate it pretty much the way I use my contemporary Linux computer, thanks to the standard Unix tools being both great and ancient.
There's a lot of projects to help get Windows games working better on Linux, and this effort is basically all those projects coming together to work on making the 'ultimate' project that will make it easier than ever to game on Linux! :D
Can it pre-load shader cache like steam games does? Because that's a big plus to running games on the higher half of the graphics demand side. Otherwise you'll still need games to be steam in order to get the best performance.
Yeah. Good point. The problem I see with that is that SOMEONE has to store the shader caches that you download. With some games, it's megabytes and some games it's gigabytes. Also, the shaders are different for different hardware configurations. Who is going to not only store, but share all of this data when only a small portion of people donate to FOSS? Steam, gets a portion of the sale, and moving people to Linux is a far sight goal that they are monetarily incentivized to help towards.
Well the interesting part of this is that they will collaborate on the engine but the frontend will still be independent.
I think this is a sound strategy (if I understood it well) as the key differentiators remain but the hard parts (running the damn things) become collaborative.
This also IMO helps a lot user experience, as dealing with broken scripts, mysterious wine settings and keeping up with version changes makes playing a game a big ordeal compared with other platforms (In some cases like old games, it can be worse).