> None of us are running *nix or MacOS for the sake of gaming
This is true, but also irrelevant.
A lot of people are using Linux as their daily driver, and dual boot is not convenient. So wine is very welcome, and I think proton is amazing, you should try it again (i didn't encounter any strange fonts or aliasing like you're describing on games ran with proton via steam). I've been gaming on Linux for the past year and i'm impressed by steam's work here.
Hey, I mean, let me say, I'm happy to hear this, but again, I feel like it's irrelevant to myself personally that this even exists.
Without 100% compatibility, I'm not really interested in something that may run half, or even 75% of my games. I play games to relax. I make games for a living.
So all I want, personally, is to pop any disc in my console or hit a shortcut on my desktop and just have it work, every time, out of the box.
I know this isn't everyone, but it does hopefully explain a little better why WINE will always be 'irrelevant' to myself.
Personally, I think it's the graphics card cost that really prevents me from considering it at all, especially as if I was bothered with PC gaming again, I'd be getting a Vive, also for development's sake.
Dual booting isn't just inconvenient. It is buggy and randomly unreliable. It is an ILoveLucy farce where a line has been drawn down the middle of the apartment and each side is supposed to share the TV. I really get angry when I see sob stories about linux from people whose only experience is a failed attempt to dual boot a dell laptop.
If you want to use both go with a VM, preferably a windows VM running within a linux box.
Ya. Unsupported hardware is unsupported. If it doesn't work then it doesn't, but consistently works or doesn't over time. Dual booting is randomly inconsistent. One of the OS's gets an update, or does something to a drive partition, and suddenly all the other OSs on the drive stop working.
I setup dual boot for my PC in 2009 and haven't had any issues. Granted, it's pre-UEFI, the Linux side is Gentoo (with grub 1.x on the /boot partition) and the Windows side on 7. No updates from either of those in the last decade have stepped on the other.
That said, at work we have to use Ubuntu, and my god the kernel update for that is a nightmare. I can totally see how it would wreck a dual setup when it's successful at wrecking single OS setups.
Another upside to running VMs, is when really old games just do not work reliably anymore... run them in a VM for the OS they were released on. (You might have to get some old drivers from unsavory sources though and pray.)
That is a specific limitation due to MBR, and only because windows fails to recognize that there are other OSes in the world. If you use uefi, none of that happens.
This is true, but also irrelevant.
A lot of people are using Linux as their daily driver, and dual boot is not convenient. So wine is very welcome, and I think proton is amazing, you should try it again (i didn't encounter any strange fonts or aliasing like you're describing on games ran with proton via steam). I've been gaming on Linux for the past year and i'm impressed by steam's work here.