shaddim: Recently,
GOL's Liam saw the light and recommends now WINE and other pragmatic approaches instead of "native" porting (after defending the
opposite pretty long) as way to go for linux gaming.
Maybe motivated by the continous reports
on broken OpenGL,
porting problems and stagnating
linux user shares.
Time to remember on the reasonable GOG wish for the
support of WINE as platform (or even
ReactOS).
On the surface it looks like an about face in 3 days, but really it seems more like one post could have been called "We shouldn't accept bad quality" and the other "Who cares how we get good quality." Both of which are kind of obvious things to say and don't necessarily war with one another.
He might have initially blamed Wine style porting for low quality, but changed his mind as to its potential(without any examples, just optimism), but what he isn't doing is recommending it as a strategy. He is taking a more agnostic viewpoint as to not caring how something ends up on Linux, and being more willing to hope that compatibility layers and emulation can provide satisfactory results.
Personally I think Wine is really fascinating, useful tech that makes a lot of practical sense when talking about wanting to bring over past and existing content. While I don't particularly like it as a long term solution, saying it works as back porting solution, is pretty safe. The bigger debate is how much of a role does it play in future porting vs back porting. Should developers lean on Wine tech when something like the UT4 engine is available for native deployments on all popular targets?