Back in 2019 (in the times before time stopped meaning anything), I wrote a blog post about the importance of native Linux releases in which I lamented on the increasing reliance on compatibility software like Proton to handle Linux gaming. I was concerned that this would create unhealthy dependencies on a select few players in the Linux ecosystem and effectively eliminate consumer protections for Linux gamers and cause long-term ecosystem harm.
At the time, my rather doomerist perspective was that within a few years Linux gaming would regress and we'd end up losing on the momentum that we gained after Valve's initial Linux push.
Now, there have been a few instances where I have managed to go "I told you so!" during the years since. For example, the anti-cheat story has not been the greatest and in some cases games which were Steam Deck verified have had their "support" withdrawn after they introduced blocks to Linux clients. And in general, the Deck Verified program is flawed in the sense that it puts the responsibility for verification on Valve and seemingly comes with no guarantee of continued support.
But in spite of this, the Linux gaming ecosystem has not died, and in fact the Steam Deck is continuing to go strong and many developers continue to support it even in native form. Some developers have unfortunately stopped offering native support, but Proton is in practice making an increasing number of games available to Linux users. In the end even I ended up revisiting my policy for my livestreams to make concessions to playing games via Proton, and so far the experience has been good. We've been able to enjoy great games such as Balatro, Hades and Armored Core VI and other playthrough games are on my backlog as well.
The Linux game development and support ecosystem has also seen other, unrelated boosts and I have been happily following many game devs' journeys to adopting the Godot engine for their future games. This benefits naturally the game devs themselves, as they are able to take on less risk from Unity and Epic, but also the Linux users, since Godot has first-class support for both development on Linux and for Linux.
So, obviously at least to some extent I can admit that my predictions from half a decade ago were wrong. This prompted me to introspect on what exactly my platform is about and what I ought to be advocating for. After all, there is little point in fighting the last war, so it's much better to just admit I was wrong and go from there.
But now we have bigger problems
The years since 2019 have shown that in the grand scheme of things native Linux games measure fairly low on the crises of the world.
In the year of our lord 2025, we see war on European soil. Billionaires are having sociopathic breakdowns on social media they bought, pandering to literal nazis just to desperately have at least somebody cheer for them. The Unites States has gone full oligarchy and conducting trade war mainly on their former allies and setting up purges and camps for the disloyals and undesirables. Markets have lost the last shred of their touch with reality, pumping endless money into creation of fancy versions of predictive text or abstracted cryptocoin ponzi schemes, with literally no other basis other than the stocks going up the more people buy them. Meanwhile we are filling the internet with industrial quantities of plausible-sounding text at the expense of accuracy and stealing and crashing the commons to make said plausible-sounding text appear more plausible, with little regard to the "intelligence" part of "artificial intelligence". We're doing the information age equivalent of book burnings and deprioritizing learning and understanding in exchange for quick answers that sounds about right and content that trends towards vacuous mediocrity. We're barely even talking about things like the climate, because a crisis after crisis is drowning it out.
It's pretty easy to feel disheartened and small in the face of all of the absolute fucking nonsense and reckless stupidity aimed at securing a short-term win at the expense of any long-term plan.
Concepts of a plan
So, what is a random Linux gaming advocate to do? Clearly this is the bigger fight and I want to fight it, instead of focusing on merely whining about a niche concern of Linux games being native or not. Do I have a clear plan of how I am going to do this? Absolutely not. Not only do I have much less time on my hands than I did back in 2019, with full-time work and all, but the monsters we're fighting against aren't windmills anymore.
I do have a few general ideas though, vague and underdeveloped.
I am no political scientist, I hold no degree in social philosophy. Nor am I an economist, of neither the honest kind nor a lying grifter.
I can barely keep up with everything that's going on where I live.
Hell, it even took me an unreasonably long time to book a dentist appointment. God, I hope I didn't mess up my teeth too, that would suck.
What I think, ultimately, I was driving at back in 2019 is user autonomy. Big tech companies have shown us that they are not worthy of our trust. Sometimes they do good things, but at the end of the day they are prone to problems of hierarchy. All it takes is one person to lose their marbles and things go wrong really fast. They also have little to no courage or morals of their own, bending the knee to anybody they have to if it makes the next quarter results look a bit better.
I think it's this dependence on the tech billionaires and their empires that I ought to strike at. After all, maybe I know a couple of things about tech, what with the computer science degree and all.
I think the form of my attack will be that of showing how I can reduce my dependence on them. I already host my own livestreams and VODs. My social media presence is largely on the Fediverse. My email is on a fairly small German email hosting service. Maybe by doing what I do will help guide people away from the mega-corporations and their control.
Maybe I can try to pass on some things I have learned and help people become able to create and maintain their own software tech and online presence, so that they need to rely less on tech-bros that wish to invent the tightly controlled, rental version of everything, but worse.
At the very least I hope I can build and maintain a community of people where we can just be us and feel okay.
I don't think I can devote my life to advocacy, I don't even know how well I can turn these ideas into concrete actions. Maybe I will just post this blog post and do absolutely nothing else of note for the next 6 months.
But what the hell, let's give it a shot.