Baŝto

Factorio supports macOS and Linux so well because there has always been someone at Wube who actively uses these platforms and is willing to take on the burden of supporting it.

[…]

Factorio has supported Wayland since 1.1.77, but it needs to be explicitly enabled by setting SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland in your environment. For Factorio 2.0 I added a dropdown to select your preference in the GUI

[…]

Many of you might not be aware that Factorio has support for saving your game in the background, without freezing while it does so. This feature is tucked away in the hidden settings and only works on macOS and Linux.

• https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-408

Yes, “just”. DXVK as well as WineD3D try to support any game, even those who have native Linux versions. There were games in the past who dropped their Linux port (Rocket League), so it makes somewhat sense. There are/were also games who did not have cross platform multiplayer and you’d need to play the Windows version if you wanted to play with Windows gamers. Generally WineD3D (OpenGL, Vulkan) and DXVK (Vulkan) aren’t a Linux specific things, they just translate from Direct3D to OpenGL/Vulkan running on Wine, but that would work on Windows/ReactOS as well. Windows has OpenGL/Vulkan support. There are already Windows gamers who use such translation layers to play older games if it works better than Windows’ built-in backward compatibility. Even if OpenGL gets dropped by GPU drivers and even though Vulkan isn’t backwards compatible to OpenGL, it’s possible to write general OpenGL drivers who use Vulkan instead of implementing it per GPU. But another possibility would be to play a game that just has Direct3D/OpenGL support on Vulkan-only device with a translation layer like DXVK. Another factor would be games who have incomplete ports or simply games who have buggy ports.