Not my area of expertise, but I'm pretty sure you're talking out of your ass. The application is looking for certain resources. If those resources are provided by something in userland or the kernel isn't really the application's problem.
Your main issue in running things like games is going to be GPU drivers. Since those aren't very open, you are going to be at the mercy of whatever OS Nvidia/AMD/Intel feel like supporting.
My understanding is AMD generally supports open source initiatives directly (OpenGL, Mesa). Nvidia hands you a proprietary binary and says "this is for Linux, good luck." AMD is more philosophically open source. You kind of get the feeling that Nvidia's Linux support is maybe more a side effect of the data center / AI business where Linux is industry standard.
Gigabyte 4080, I've had that with an AMD card also but that was an entirely different issue with actual breaking drivers for AMD. I've mentioned here before but to make it short: my hw combination apparently caused random driver crashes, no matter what distro. I even deleted my old Arch setup I have had to years to no avail. Put in an old GTX I still had laying about-> worked. So I got an nvidia card to replace my old Vega.
Easiest approach is to find a distro that has solid and reliable support for Proton, I think. Mesa is another factor to possibly to check on too.
There's a bunch of other details I'm coming across in a couple of redditthreads. It wouldn't be very sensible to try and cover everything mentioned in my own comment.
Worth noting that on a cursory glance at recent opinions, it does indeed seem like AMD typically more widely reliable on Linux than nVidia.
The issue is Nvidia itself. There are drivers that are open source and are delivered with the OS if you want to. Those suck though since they don't have the optimisation. If nvidia said they would go for open source drivers(they have open sourced some stuff recently with hopefully more to come) they could be put in the kernel like with AMD. And when they are open source people can earlier accommodate software for it.
Currently nvidia runs best on x11 which is slowly being replaced by wayland. Nvidia and wayland don't work well together and that's mostly because nvidia doesn't care to add functions that would help it. If it was open source people could make pull requests with patches for it. But alas, we're not there yet. IMHO and my personal experience nvidia works on Linux, just not as fancy as AMD.
For non-driver stuff if you were going to ask, "what if we just put a layer between the application and kernel and convert all the calls?" That's basically what WINE is.
Not my area of expertise, but I'm pretty sure you're talking out of your ass. The application is looking for certain resources. If those resources are provided by something in userland or the kernel isn't really the application's problem.
Your main issue in running things like games is going to be GPU drivers. Since those aren't very open, you are going to be at the mercy of whatever OS Nvidia/AMD/Intel feel like supporting.
My understanding is AMD generally supports open source initiatives directly (OpenGL, Mesa). Nvidia hands you a proprietary binary and says "this is for Linux, good luck." AMD is more philosophically open source. You kind of get the feeling that Nvidia's Linux support is maybe more a side effect of the data center / AI business where Linux is industry standard.
Got an RTX, it has rarely has issues but even those are negligible for me at least.
Gigabyte 4080, I've had that with an AMD card also but that was an entirely different issue with actual breaking drivers for AMD. I've mentioned here before but to make it short: my hw combination apparently caused random driver crashes, no matter what distro. I even deleted my old Arch setup I have had to years to no avail. Put in an old GTX I still had laying about-> worked. So I got an nvidia card to replace my old Vega.
I've got an Nvidia GPU rip
This is why I run Windows on heads, and then people say I'm an idiot. Meanwhile, their GPU doesn't work.
So why can't a Linux distro be written to accomodate those drivers?
Easiest approach is to find a distro that has solid and reliable support for Proton, I think. Mesa is another factor to possibly to check on too.
There's a bunch of other details I'm coming across in a couple of reddit threads. It wouldn't be very sensible to try and cover everything mentioned in my own comment.
Worth noting that on a cursory glance at recent opinions, it does indeed seem like AMD typically more widely reliable on Linux than nVidia.
The issue is Nvidia itself. There are drivers that are open source and are delivered with the OS if you want to. Those suck though since they don't have the optimisation. If nvidia said they would go for open source drivers(they have open sourced some stuff recently with hopefully more to come) they could be put in the kernel like with AMD. And when they are open source people can earlier accommodate software for it.
Currently nvidia runs best on x11 which is slowly being replaced by wayland. Nvidia and wayland don't work well together and that's mostly because nvidia doesn't care to add functions that would help it. If it was open source people could make pull requests with patches for it. But alas, we're not there yet. IMHO and my personal experience nvidia works on Linux, just not as fancy as AMD.
That's beyond me and you're probably at least partially right about kernel architecture coming in to play.
You might find this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS
For non-driver stuff if you were going to ask, "what if we just put a layer between the application and kernel and convert all the calls?" That's basically what WINE is.
Edit: This is a bit closer to what you were asking for, but I'd never heard of it before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longene
tl;dr: It's been tried but either died off or isn't fully functional after decades.