When we expected the year of Linux Gaming in 2022, most of us were thinking about the Steam Deck. Turns out it may not be the biggest story yet. There’s a Google for Games Developer Summit planned for March 15 and Stadia will introduce some kind of Windows emulator to run Windows games on Linux.

How to write a Windows emulator for Linux from scratch – Marcin Undak, Senior Software Engineer

This talk will dish out a detailed overview of the technology behind Google’s solution for running unmodified Windows games on Stadia.

This is a deep technical walkthrough of some of the core concepts with the goal of allowing curious programmers to better understand such technologies and potentially build their own.

Source: https://stadia.dev/blog/join-stadia-at-the-google-for-games-developer-summit-on-march-15/

One of the major issues with Stadia so far was they had too few games and it apparently required native ports to Linux to make games work. Many of us have been wondering for a while why Stadia could not use something like Proton - and they may just have done that, while it seems they have built their own solution. I guess we will know more details in just a few more days.

Who is Marcin Undak, by the way? He is working in Canada for Stadia, and has a long experience as a graphics engine programmer, with previous roles at Ubisoft, Unreal Engine, and finally a Porting lead at Stadia for 2 years and a half now. He announces his talk on Linked in and there’s an interesting exchange of comments:

Turns out someone from The Forge Interactive has been working with Marcin Undak on this very project:

The Forge? A little googling around reveals that they are a think-tank building custom engine and rending solutions (cross-platforms). They do open-source work and The-Forge on GitHub is a cross-platform rendering framework:

https://github.com/ConfettiFX/The-Forge

So there’s not just Google folks working on this kind of solution. And it seems to be completely outside of the work done by Collabora, Codeweavers and related developers.

Note that while most of us are probably not using Cloud Gaming solutions, its usage is certainly increasing as pointed out by our Linux Gaming survey last year - check it out!