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Submitted via IRC for Fnord666
Valve appears to be working on a set of "compatibility tools," called Steam Play, that would allow at least some Windows-based titles to run on Linux-based SteamOS systems.
Yesterday, Reddit users noticed that Steam's GUI files (as captured by SteamDB's Steam Tracker) include a hidden section with unused text related to the unannounced Steam Play system. According to that text, "Steam Play will automatically install compatibility tools that allow you to play games from your library that were built for other operating systems."
Other unused text in the that GUI file suggests Steam Play will offer official compatibility with "supported tiles" while also letting users test compatibility for "games in your library that have not been verified with a supported compatibility tool." That latter use comes with a warning that "this may not work as expected, and can cause issues with your games, including crashes and breaking save games."
Tools that let users run Windows apps in Linux are nothing new; Wine has existed for decades, after all. But an "official" Steam-based compatibility tool, with the resources and backing of Valve behind it, could have a huge impact on the Linux development space that could reach well beyond games. Assuming it worked for a wide range of titles, the Steam Play system could also help ameliorate one of SteamOS' biggest failings—namely, the relative lack of compatible games when compared to Windows.
With all that said, some caution is warranted before getting too excited about these possibilities. For one, we don't know what specific form Steam Play will take. Valve could simply be preparing a wrapper that lets users run existing emulation tools like Wine and DOSBox on top of SteamOS without actively advancing the state of that emulation directly.
(Score: 3, Informative) by forkazoo on Friday August 17 2018, @04:38AM
SteamOS was never really about Linux. It was about hurting the Windows Store. Valve saw the Store as a threat to Steam, so they suddenly got Linux religion. Except that they didn't really have a lot of internal experience with Linux. They just sort of assumed that if they started pushing Linux, they were big enough that everybody would adopt it with them. That ego didn't turn out to be justified. It basically surprised them to learn that there was a large community of people who already loved Linux, like web serving, VFX, etc., that were already quite happy with it and didn't need anything from Valve. And they were equally surprised to learn that the community of people who didn't care about Linux were quite happy with Windows or Mac and also didn't really need anything from Valve. Which left Valve with a lot of press releases, and a lot of people standing around wondering what problems Valve was actually going to be solving.
You saw a bunch of talks at Gamedev conferences from Valve developers who had spent their whole career writing code for Windows about how to write code for Linux, as if they thought they had some sort of insight. They mainly just had ego, and a massively inflated sense of self importance. And at the end of the day, Valve didn't really like anything about Linux, per se. It was never a technical solution for them. It was a business decision to fight Microsoft and Windows 10. Linux just wasn't under the control of a direct competitor. But it wasn't as if XFS made games more fun, or game engines needed to be able to ship dynamically loadable kernel modules, or the game industry was crying out for a platform with better symlink support than WinNT's festering rotbrained implementation. No unique Linux feature was ever really at play in the strategy -- just the general unfeature of not being a Microsoft thing. And merely not being one other specific thing isn't actually a specific reason to use Linux.
As for why it's hard to run Windows apps on Linux... Look at Wine. You can read the bug tracker to see the difficulties they have implementing the Win32 related API's. It's all open source, so none of that is secret if you want to dig around for a bit. There's not really that much demand among Linux users for native binformat support for .exe's in the kernel. Linux users mainly run Linux software, which is why they use Linux. Adding more support for Windows software doesn't make Linux better at being Linux - it just makes it more like Windows. But there's already an OS that's really good at being Windows. Namely, Windows. So if I really need to run Windows software, I'll probably just use that.