Vulkan's lower-level access certainly allows performance concerns to become the domain of the engine rather than the driver. Games standardizing on a few big engines seems to be doing more for linux than when operating systems standardize on a few big APIs (which is necessary but not sufficient).

Coupled with other recent news (the AMDGPU effort, 900-series firmware for kernel 4.6, ..) i'm cautiously optimistic about the future for 3D on linux - but mostly i'm cautiously optimistic at the cross-vendor adoption of Vulkan. Today a lot of enablement comes via vendor-specific tech (LiquidVR/GameWorks), and Vulkan has kept the scope open for extensions just like OpenGL did. I hope the industry has learned to avoid fragmentation after some of the horror stories from early DirectX[1].

--

1. "The pixel shaders of Shader Model 1.0 were extremely specific to NVIDIA's hardware. There was no attempt made whatsoever at abstracting NVIDIA's hardware; SM 1.0 was just whatever the GeForce 3 did." -- http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/88055

OS X isn't getting Vulkan (as far as I can tell). Apple's pushing Metal instead.