Philip Rebohle, DXVK's founding developer, stated in an interview that he started the project "to get one specific game to work". Later, he explained in a forum post that he was a bit of a Nier fanboy, and that it was a relatively simple game to use as a test subject for DXVK.
Rebohle was later contacted and hired by Valve. Wine already had a D3D11 compatibility layer, but it wasn't nearly as far ahead as DXVK at the time. It's fair to say that Linux gaming wouldn't exist in its current form if not for one guy's appreciation for Nier Automata. Rebohle still works at Valve, currently conributing to VKD3D-Proton.
Yes, it runs flawlessly. It was the first game that was made to run on DXVK.
And yes, the ~~Year~~ Age Of The Linux Desktop is already here. Unless you have to use Adobe products, or play a game with some incompatible anti-cheat trojan, there are very few barriers to switching to Linux full-time.
Depending on your profession a small team just proved that you can even fly as high as it gonna gets.
More often than not the main problem is how our education system is set up, teaching certain topics like CAD or image manipulation with specific software from companies which "invest in education" (i.e. pay Universities and educators to create future customers for them). Adobe and Autodesk are the biggest dicks in this regard, but also Apple.
Back to games, the general rule by now is "if it is on Steam and doesn't have the worst anti-cheat, it usually works". Outside of Steam you may have to tinker a little bit, but Heroic and Lutris make this easier by the week. The biggest problems more often than not are the god damn third-party launchers.
I'm a sysadmin at a university. Fortunately we never used Adobe, and recently ditched Autodesk and Unity for Blender and Godot. Still on Windows, but I'll take what I can get.
Can confirm, Iβm just hitting my first year of using Tumbleweed as my main OS after giving up on Microsoft. It plays almost everything without issue. The very few things I boot into Windows for are games that I want to use Autohotkey with, old games that donβt work well with Proton, or VR.
if you are using ahk for things like macros, xbindkeys is your friend! It allows you to bind any command to a key or combo.
if you're on wayland there's no real alternative, as usual.
On wayland, switch to ydotool (the port of xdotool)
Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out. Most of my AHK scripts are simple, not really macros, just adding toggles to keys or remapping stuff, like putting mouse buttons on a keyboard key, or remapping WASD to ESDF for games that don't support key remapping. I messed around with some key remappers for Linux about 9 months ago but I couldn't find anything that worked well in the game I was playing (Dyson Sphere Project). That's almost certainly due to my ignorance. I really need to learn python.
There's also good guides to adding all the quality of life mods available for Nier Automata onto the Linux version.