Wine will run DirectX9. I don't think it goes any higher than that. And I'm not sure about hardware acceleration.

If you're targeting Linux I'd really recommend just porting to OpenGL. If you want portability then you gotta make sure your code is structured in a way that's portable. Abstract your rendering, input, audio, etc from your game.

I know it's a matter of opinion but I like OpenGL a lot more than DirectX. That being said I usually end up using DirectX anyway because I'm hoping to get a job making games targeting the Windows platform.

le sigh...

With more desktop users of Unix and mobiles DirectX will lose ground to OpenGL.

We've been hearing that from the open-source community for years, and there have been small gains and losses over time but no real significant shift -- I'll believe it when I actually see it happen.

I'm not sure that I like the idea of a 3D API being co-opted in an OS war here. Truth is that is if > 90% of a target market are on the same platform then you don't actually need an open standards API at all; you can use something quite proprietary and still get a result. That's real freedom - freedom to choose what works best for your project and what actually helps you to get stuff done without being constrained by artificial limitations such as "will it be portable?"

I likewise don't believe that desktop Unix is ever going to happen. There's an awful habit of infighting that is deeply embedded in Unix culture, has bubbled over into open source communities (which seem to have become more about Unix than they are about open source) and results in a splintered, fragmented set of platforms, multiple forks, multiple different and incompatible ways of accomplishing the same end result, each striving towards their own particular vision of technical perfection (it's an interesting exercise to compare that with the evolution of GL extensions). That's not conducive to widespread uptake; you spend more time trying to nail down a moving target than you spend actually getting productive work done. It's ironic, and particularly telling, that the major success of Unix uptake (outside of specialist/server areas) has been in a locked-down environment where you get what you're given and have to learn to be happy with it.

M$ is losing popularity but I doubt it will be Linux that takes the place of Windows if M$ goes under. I love the GNU community to death, but it's a sandbox. End users want completed products. If M$ gives up the desktop OS struggle their place will be taken by some other company that stands on he shoulders of giants (steals GNU work) and charges enormous sums of cash for defective and/or corporate-interest driven products.

Oops, did I talk bad about someone?

I've read a trustful statistics for Switzerland in a newspaper ~1-2 years ago which showed MS market share to have dropped to ~78%. If I remeber correctly this was only
for desktop and servers, not even including mobiles.
The're are also some online sites stating that Linux has a share of ~1%, hahaha now this must be outdated by ~10 years at least.

online statistics tend to count web browser usage shares, not marketshare or number of installations. Since the vast majority of Linux devices today are in the embedded and server markets they simply don't show up in the browser statistics. (Nor does machines that happen to run any good adblock browser plugin that also blocks the stat trackers)

M$ is losing popularity but I doubt it will be Linux that takes the place of Windows if M$ goes under. I love the GNU community to death, but it's a sandbox. End users want completed products. If M$ gives up the desktop OS struggle their place will be taken by some other company that stands on he shoulders of giants (steals GNU work) and charges enormous sums of cash for defective and/or corporate-interest driven products.

Normally this is the sort of forum where we can have an adult discussion about a Microsoft product without having to insert a dollar sign into their name. Perhaps you could help keep it that way? Pretty please?