Valve has confirmed the rumours that were discussed here on SoylentNews earlier.
Today, Monday, August 21, Valve has released a new beta steam client for linux. It includes a modified distribution of Wine, called Proton, to provide compatibility with Windows game titles. This goes hand-in-hand with an ongoing testing effort of the entire Steam catalog, in order to identify games that currently work great in this compatibility environment, and find and address issues for the ones that don't. (includes a list of 27 initial games supported for beta)
We will be enabling more titles in the near future as testing results and development efforts progress; in the meantime, enthusiast users are also able to try playing non-whitelisted games using an override switch in the Steam client. Going forward, users can vote for their favorite games to be considered for Steam Play using platform wishlisting.
To make this happen, 2 years ago, Valve started funding/supporting development efforts of Proton and DXVK (the Direct3D 11 implementation based on Vulkan.) Modifications to Wine are submitted upstream if they're compatible with the goals and requirements of the larger Wine project; as a result, Wine users have been benefiting from parts of this work for over a year now.
Also reported on GamingOnLinux.
(Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:46PM
Hopefully this helps bring games that were developed in Vulkan to actually run in Linux when the developers just randomly decided not to support Linux for some stupid reason. (looking at you Doom 2016...)
I'm also hoping the Proton version of Wine that Valve is developing might not open the Linux partition up to windows security issues like Wine does.