Quite a number of you pointed me to a post on Phoronix about how Gallium3D developers have managed to get Microsoft's DirectX 10/11 onto Linux. Surely game support must follow ...

... no.

Here's a quote to get you going:

As said in the commit, "The primary goal is to realize Gallium's promise of multiple API support, and provide an API that can be easily implemented with just a very thin wrapper over Gallium, instead of the enormous amount of complex code needed for OpenGL. The secondary goal is to run Windows Direct3D 10/11 games on Linux using Wine."

See, the bit there that caught my eye was the reference to Direct3D. See, while it's true that the graphics in DirectX games is indeed handled by Direct3D, there's a lot more going on in games than just the graphics ... there's sound, file access, network access, access to peripherals and so on. This stuff goes above and beyond just plain graphics. That's why DirectX is made up of stuff like DirectSound and DirectInput.

In fact, swapping out Direct3D for OpenGL can and is done in games - heck, some games even let you swap between APIs in the game options screen.

Bottom line, getting some simple DirectX 11 demos running on Linux is a long, long way off from getting games running on the platform. Sure, it's cool, and sure, it kinda nice those using Linux hope that one day Linux will be Windows (just not made by Microsoft), but there's history to consider. Wine has been around for years, and the list of stuff that will run on an out-of-the-box install of Wine with little or no tinkering is impressive. But after nearly 20 years there's no guarantee that anything that's not already listed as working will ever work.

Thoughts?