this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
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DXVK was the last (IMO) major key in enabling proper Linux gaming.
Here's a short interview with the creator of DXVK.
Prior to this Wine was able to run some simple Windows applications, but games (which heavily rely on GPU acceleration) lagged quite a bit behind since DirectX is a Windows exclusive graphics API. Instead, on Linux we have Vulkan which is similarly feature rich, but an open standard. DXVK translates DirectX API calls to Vulkan, which GPUs on Linux can understand, similar to how Wine translates Windows syscalls to the Linux alternatives. Even though Wine existed for a long time, DXVK's development started quite a bit later.
To be absolutely clear, wine could run many games just fine, I was playing WOW, Starcraft 2, and many others perfectly. However, Directx 11 was new, and wine had a harder time with itml. DXVK Was created specificially to run DX11 Games in WINE, and is amazing, but it wasn't just "some simple applications" at the time
What a thoughtful and concise overview of the situation. Thank you.