WINE, CodeWeavers, Mesa, Red Hat, and plenty of others have been pumping money into the Linux graphics subsystems for a very long time. It's cool that Valve wa

WINE, CodeWeavers, Mesa, Red Hat, and plenty of others have been pumping money into the Linux graphics subsystems for a very long time. It's cool that Valve was able to use its considerable wealth to build a business off of it. But they came in at a pretty opportune time. Windows support had gotten a boost from .NET going open source as well as other stuff MS began to relax about. It also helped that OpenGL was put to rest and there was a new graphics API that could reasonably emulate DirectX. I don't know much about the backstory of Mesa, but it's pretty cool tech that has been developing for a long time.