Before I begin, I would just like to acknowledge several key individuals who helped me find all of this information: Ilya Olevsky, Gianfranco Berardi, and Gerry Jo Jellestad. You guys rock! There are languages and frameworks that try to abstract over the differences between operating systems, but those abstractions are not perfect. If you write a non-trivial program then it is very likely you will encounter bugs that only manifest themselves on a subset of target platforms, that you will have to write platform specific code to perform some operation that your framwork does not provide a cross-platform interface for or that you will want/need to use a library outside your framework that requires platform-specific techniques to interface with your framework. You are right about a “native Linux” game not requiring an emulator. Most games played on Linux use either Proton or Wine. The games that are played with Proton or Wine are compiled to run on Windows. However, as a result of optimizations Proton and Wine make, and the fact that Linux just has less processes running it in general means that often Linux can run these games better than Windows.