“Apple has created a new Game Porting Toolkit that’s similar to the work Valve has done with Proton and the Steam Deck. It’s powered by source code from CrossOver, a Wine-based solution for running Windows games on macOS. Apple’s tool will instantly translate Windows games to run on macOS, allowing developers to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game.”
The new software will allow Mac users* (see edit) to play ‘Windows games’ on their Apple silicon (M1/M2) devices. With development, this has the potential to bring gaming to Apple.
*EDIT: The Game Porting Toolkit is designed for developers to see how their game performs on Apple silicone to entice devs to create native ports. Thanks to commenters for pointing out this distinction. The CrossOver project on which it is built, I believe, is designed for end-users to run software on their Mac clients.
And the year of Linux desktop is happening any day now. I remain skeptical that this is enough to get any real gaming user base on Mac but I’m all for being proven wrong over time.
The Steam Deck runs Linux and is fairly mainstream, so if by “year of the Linux desktop” you mean “year of the Linux gaming platform”, that already happened.