Full disclosure I'm not a programmer but it seems clear to me that Vulkan is the future. Benchmark has been good (equal to DX12), there are alot companies invested in it, it's open source and it's crossplatform. That's not to say that Vulkan has to prove itself to DX12, I think DX12 emerged as result of Mantle which is where core of Vulkan is from.
Imagine whole industry using it, it would make porting games from PC to console and vice versa easier.

We are at war with Microsoft, us gamers, it's our interest against theirs. If we stand by and watch as Microsoft promote DX12 we will lose. Many consumers already don't care about privacy issue that is plaguing software (e.g Windows 10). So they will treat Vulkan as a afterthought.
We have to inform them of why they shouldn't and nail the message well.

Create a hashtag on social medias, make petition, upload video etc.
Youtubers with lots suscribers can be a enormous power for us to win, same for gaming sites.
Our message? Vulkan is the future and also telling W XP, 7 and 8 users to not change to W10.

Microsoft does not care about us, so we should have zero reasons to care about them. Windows 10 was not free, we paid a price for it - our privacy.

I don't think Vulkan should be only api for developers to use, OpenGL is still there. But I don't want to see old DX or DX12 being used because if that is used then possibility of games being ported to Linux and Mac and from PC to console will be the same in future. Companies will most likely not port a game because DX12 is not crossplatform.

And what are you talking about? DX12 and Vulkan are similar and both of them have proven to give better performance than previous APIs with AAA games. Vulkan with Doom (previously Opengl) and DX12 with Quantum break (previously DX11). Way you word it "in some cases" makes it seem like Vulkan is a hit and miss when from what I have heard and read Vulkan works well if properly implemented.

Even if Vulkan did not give you more performance than DX11, 9 or 10 why would it not be a magic bullet if it would make porting of games easier? Porting that would have been more work with any DX API if the platform they want to port to is not Xbox or Windows.

Precicely. It doesn't make sense for most developers to use Vulkan or DX12 directly unless they're purposefully writing a large complex game engine really. It's just extra effort for no gain for such types of projects IMHO. It makes total sense for big game engines like Source, Unreal and others that are licensed to 3rd parties, at which point the developer licensing the engine can take advantage of it with less effort than doing it all from the ground up themselves. Also makes sense for the big AAA studios developing such engines. OpenGL and DX11 and older will be around for some time to come though and probably remain the primary APIs used for a while yet. The list of games using DX12 currently is bigger than Vulkan but still pretty small compared to the number of games out there and coming out, showing that devs largely are focused mostly still on DX11 and to a far lesser degree OpenGL.

In 2/3/5 years things might be different but that remains to be seen. I do want to see big studios shift to Vulkan and away from DX12 though for their games and their licensable engines.

I agree and am 100% in favor of OpenGL in cases where it's better match for developers than Vulkan. But the issue is not if developers use OpenGL or Vulkan but if the api they chose is crossplatform. Crossplatform is the core of why I am so strongly for Vulkan destroying DX12. If DX12 became crossplatform in a week from now I would no longer care about Vulkan and instead observe the healthy competition between Vulkan and DX12. but that, and excuse me for caps locking, ... WILL NOT HAPPEN.

Indeed, I feel the same way as well. It makes more sense both for the greater good, for consumers and for companies if there is a single unified standardized API that works on everything and is well designed, or to work together to design such an API if one doesn't exist. Proprietary APIs are only ever created either because nothing exists that meets the needs of the person creating the API, or if the creator thinks they can create an API that people will love and come to rely upon of which they alone completely control and decide what it will run on and thus have the opportunity to create vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in including platform specific APIs harm consumers and harm competition in the marketplace.

When I develop software I always avoid proprietary APIs, and if I were developing 3D software I'd use OpenGL personally because that's the lowest common denominator out there. There are pros and cons to any choice of course, but the pros of OpenGL and/or Vulkan far outweigh the cons in a generalized sense IMHO.

Yeah, I can't see DX12 becoming cross-platform outside of Microsoft's own ecosystem. In order for that to happen they would have to personally see it as advantageous to themselves in terms that matter to them. That has happened with a few things over time but they are rare isolated anomalies compared to Microsoft's normal way of doing things which is embrace and extend, and vendor lock-in tactics.

Cross-platform is cute and all but it's definitely overrated IMHO, at least for "AAA" devs.

Using platform specific API has never really been an "real" issue for AAA developers/publishers, PS3 and XBox were as different as can be and PS3 was a pain develop for yet, it didn't prevent most of the AAA games to be released for both platform.

It's all a question of market share and ROI, you can have games use platform specific API, as proprietary and locked down as can be; if the market share is sufficient the game will appear on multiple platform anyway; on the other side even if a game uses fully multi-platform API, if the publishers consider that it's not worth it to release the game on another platform they won't.

It's might be important for Indies but those probably already uses Unity or other similar multi-platform engines.

If anything, nowadays, I would say that the thing that Linus is missing the most is not DX12... it's Denuvo.

Publishers have a DRM that sorta work for a couple of months; it most probably don't motivate them to create a loop hole by releasing their games on a platform on which this DRM/Anti-Tamper mechanism doesn't exists.

It's like saying that having tons of incompatible Web technologies is not an issue, and HTML standards are not needed. That's wrong. It's always an issue. They do use it, because crooked vendors like MS and Sony force lock-in in their throats, but it's not "not an issue". It's a drain on resources and time. You can simply view it as tax on developers. Nothing comes for free, and need to support multiple APIs has its clear costs. Ask engine developers how much time is wasted on supporting incompatible backend, instead of using standard APIs.

And saying, Unity and Co. will handle it only masks the issue, since that tax is simply shifted to engine developers, but it's still there, and it translates into slower development (of the engine), more bugs and so on. The bottom line - lock-in is crooked, and vendors who push it are despicable for doing it.

I'm aware market share matters and have pointed that out in a previous post. So for now developers will, if they care about sales, go with Vulkan over DX12 for pc.
Moving on to Denuvo, yes, that needs to be taken care of too. But that's what most of us are already doing by using GOG when we can over platforms that bundle drm with the games.

Bring Ciri back being a main character.

Edit: typo

https://trello.com/c/RjQTpvwo/784-vulkan-support-for-sm4-features
https://trello.com/c/j1osB9SS/787-vulkan-support-for-sm5-features
https://trello.com/c/Cf0btpIb/785-vulkan-support-for-parallel-rendering-deferred-contexts
https://trello.com/c/yBXenTgw/801-vulkan-on-linux

or not

Cool story bro!

It's cool story for a bro who cannot trust a company anymore. =(

Indeed, very cool. I had to even go put a sweater on.

Hope GOG and CDPR eventually make a Linux version of Witcher 3 and put it out here. It's kind of baffling why they haven't. DRM Free gaming on a (DRM) Free platform? It's a match made in heaven. Or should be.

I have bought and played the first two games, and would very much like to play the third too, but won't buy it until it's available for Linux. It would just be tossing money out the window(s) otherwise.