Valve just released the beta of their new Steam Play with Proton for Linux, an API based on WINE designed to make your Windows games playable on Linux without the need for multiple Steam installations or convoluted hacks with WINE.
This could mark the beginning of a new age of Linux, (Or at least Linux gaming.) as it aims to make usability of the platform far better than what we've been seeing.
Valve seems to have finally acknowledged the catch 22 of making Linux gaming mainstream. Developers don't want to bother with games for a platform where there is no played base, and usere's don't want to move to a platform where their games won't run!
Proton is aiming to fix this by bringing most or all of Windows games to Linux without any extra work by the user. While getting Steam to update was a chore, getting Steam Play working was one option in the Settings menu. After that, it was just like installing any other game. (With an extra box to click for non-officially supported games.)
While it's a beta, and only a tiny handful of games are supported at the moment, this is a big deal, and not just for games.
Proton is based on WINE and, like WINE, is open source! This means that, on top of having actual paid devs working on it (as opposed to WINE's volunteer developers, many of whom likely work on the project in their spare time), the Steam hacker and developer community can pitch in to make the system more usable. On top of that, many of the improvements made to Proton wile likely be able to feed back into WINE, and vice-versa, making usability of Windows applications, and thereby ease of transition to Linux, better than ever!
This could very will be the thing that make Linux, as a whole, more usable and mainstream for the average user. Especially with Microsoft's increasingly questionable practices.
(Sorry about the news article. If you couldn't tell, this is exciting to me.)
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