RE:Did Valve succeed where Wine and Transgaming and others ulti
Since Wine (
Wine
Is
Not and
Emulator) is a utility for running Windoze programs on non-Windoze operating systems (like Linux) and most don't run that smoothly - if at all, it would appear that what Valve is doing, is trying to port games to their Valve OS (a Linux derivitive) by allowing coders and developers to work on a subset of their Direct3D to OpenGL translator by making the translation layer available to the Linux community.
If enough developers decide to play with it and remove some of the hardcoded stuff and modify the code it should, over time, make it easier to port games to Linux. The number of Indie games now available for Linux is growing all the time (mind you most of these are built for Linux), so with this layer put to the developer community-at-large, one of the first things you might notice is more Windoze games being ported to Linux, it will just depend on whether any take Valve up on the challenge.
As for TNG, the ability to get the hardcoded source components out and modify the code to run on Linux won't be earth-shattering news, and the part broken out of Valve's Direct3D 9c API is only a subset and will require a lot of work by the development community.