There are games I have that don't run on even Windows 10 but work flawlessly in Wine/Proton.

The amazing work the Wine team and Valve have done can't be understated.

> And the entire Quake series runs very well on Linux+Proton as well. In other words, I’m not sure why this is impressive on Microsoft’s part.

Something funny about this statement considering what Proton is.

I know what you’re trying to say. That Proton IS Windows at some level. And so MS gets some credit for that. But they don’t.

A lot of actual work went into Proton and into making games work therein.

MS is a slow, lumbering, monoculture that has lacked innovation and creativity for a very long time. I don’t see how freezing APIs or keeping old APIs around (mostly through versioned DLL hell) as some grand accomplishment.

A lot of work went into Proton, yes. But the work was to get Proton working. Not individual games. So MS should get all of the credit that Quake still runs today, and Proton should get all the credit to get Windows app to run under Linux.

Building a stable base enough that porting to another foundation just works DOES deserve credit and pretending otherwise is extremely silly.

The page was blank when MS wrote upon it.

If Windows would not have the amazing backwards compatibility it has, then would Quake still run on Proton, if it would not run on Windows today? And if so, how much effort would have the Proton team had to invest to make that happen?

My guess is, an impossibly high effort that would benefit Quake, but perhaps not other games of that era.

Microsoft is the reason Quake works on Proton still today.

Why would we need to run Quake on Proton? It's been open source since 1999. Nobody needs to run the original binaries anymore.