I'm glad to see the steamdeck coming out later this month, and am excited by its unprecedented openness for a device like this. Unfortunately I am not very optimistic about its prospects for commercial success as it's pretty hard to understand who its audience is and everybody I've discussed this with has shared this skepticism (though none of these people are gaming industry experts by any means).

While I hope we are wrong about this, the prospect of a high profile commercial failure of the steamdeck has me speculating about the possibility that valve will, at some point, "give up" on proton. This has gotten me thinking a lot more about something I was already concerned about, how easy is it to maintain proton?

I'm pretty ignorant here, and I'm opening this thread because my own ability to assess this is extremely limited. On one hand, I have anecdotally observed that most issues that keep games from running properly are what I would categorize as "OS, wine issues", missing DLL's, improper DLL versions, registry misconfiguration, that sort of thing. I see problems that are obvious issues that affect dxvk less often, though certainly they pop up. DX11 seems pretty reliable at this point, but DX12 is still quite unstable.

Another consideration is how much MS can make breaking changes (or non-backward compatible additions) to DX11 and DX12. Obviously these would require modifications to dxvk, but would be difficult for MS to deploy for the same reasons.

So, this is an open question for anyone more deeply involved with proton and dxvk: how maintainable do you think this really is? If valve completely bails on the concept of linux gaming, to what degree do you think the existing community can keep linux a viable option for gaming? dxvk itself looks like it has a truck factor of 1 or 2, which on one hand is discouraging because there probably aren't many experts, but on another is very encouraging because it suggests it might not have taken a monumental effort to get this far.