native and "not native" categories
lucinos Oct 5, 2014
I see only topics only about native and wine (as "not native"). This sounds strange to me. I am a linux user for 10 years and I never used wine for gaming, but I have been using emulators (dosbox) and other means (scummvm) for the old games. So I think we should distinguish some categories about this (I am not proposing this as topic tree in the forum but also I see that current tree is not make huge sense especially as wine gaming is going to shrink. I have used wine only to execute some windows programs and for this I even find wine better than windows as windows are no longer compatible with windows! So I see wine will stay important and also be used as a technology to even officially support older games. In the long run I think wine is not about the end user imitating windows but a technology that publishers should take advantage to support their products to linux. If a game is more than a couple of years old (so it is not expected to be messed up by updates) and is playable by wine a publisher who is not taking advantage is an idiot.

so about the categories that I begun talking.

a) open source/free games
obviously these are usually "native" in linux

b) independent implementations of the engines
this usually is the second best-case scenario (the best-case is open source). A great collection is scummvm

c) emulators
dosbox is what I used and may be the most important but there are for many other (old) platforms too. wine should not be counted as an emulator.

d) browser games
these are not exactly "native" or "not native" to any platform. Still they are usually as playable in linux as in windows.

e) wine
in practice usually means is that there is no officially support by publisher.

f) officially supported by publisher
what "native" in facts usually means is that it is officially supported. The end user cares only about who support it and how well does it play on his hardware. whether there is wine, eon or "real native" engine is not really in his concern.

for the naggers about porting technologies: games that are already developed can only be expecting to be "ported" and already belong to the past. Linux as a future gaming platform should only concerned about future technologies and future games. That means that what we need is good linux game engines and developers that choose these game engines.
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