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Proton 5.0, a package to run Windows games on Linux

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Re: Proton 5.0, a package to run Windows games on Linux

#11
post #5

As a 20 or so year long linux as a desktop user, I've had my hopes up so many times that more people would embrace Linux. It's always been about the games, largely. Hell we had id's stuff running, and there was even a company porting Blizzard stuff if I remember right. This is the first time I've been genuinely enthused that "it's happenening", and I cannot be more thankful to the Wine team and Valve.

I would say it used to be about games. But now many people use laptops and Linux has pretty terrible support for most of them. It often "works", but you'll usually have some issue with bluetooth or wifi or the trackpad, and good luck getting anywhere near as good battery life as Windows or Mac.

Re: Proton 5.0, a package to run Windows games on Linux

#12

One thing I've always wondered is how much "per-game fine-tuning" Proton requires. I know for some console emulators, it's not uncommon to require some per-game profiles that tweak the emulation for better compatibility for that specific game. Heck, even GPU firmware updates will mention specific games in the patch notes.[0] Is this necessary for something like Proton? [0] https://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/1567…

ProtonDB can give you a good idea of how well games work without tuning.

http://protondb.com

Re: Proton 5.0, a package to run Windows games on Linux

#13
post #5

As a 20 or so year long linux as a desktop user, I've had my hopes up so many times that more people would embrace Linux. It's always been about the games, largely. Hell we had id's stuff running, and there was even a company porting Blizzard stuff if I remember right. This is the first time I've been genuinely enthused that "it's happenening", and I cannot be more thankful to the Wine team and Valve.

It's not only games. The Wayland/X/Nvidia fiasco is killin me. To use Wayland and gestures I need to basically ignore the graphics card and run everything via integrated. I love Linux but I also love when things just work and I don't have the time or energy to use my computer as a foss/Linux zealot ideology battleground.

Many experienced Linux users just avoid any Nvidia hardware at this point. Of course you might be trying to reuse existing hardware, but anything new you can just buy with AMD or Intel.

Re: Proton 5.0, a package to run Windows games on Linux

#14
post #4

I can’t be the only one who put Linux on his home desktop to discourage gaming... darn you valve.

Why do you want to discourage gaming? And who do you want to discourage?

Idk about him, but I spend absurd amounts of time gaming when it's too easily accessible. I get hooked, enter a flow state, and waste a day or accidentally stay up until morning managing my colony in rimworld or something.

I moved recently, and my current setup isn't conductive to that kind of gaming; I'm limited to games I don't hate playing on a controller. Which, fortunately, are the games that I don't get hooked on in the same way

Re: Proton 5.0, a package to run Windows games on Linux

#16

One thing I've always wondered is how much "per-game fine-tuning" Proton requires. I know for some console emulators, it's not uncommon to require some per-game profiles that tweak the emulation for better compatibility for that specific game. Heck, even GPU firmware updates will mention specific games in the patch notes.[0] Is this necessary for something like Proton? [0] https://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/1567…

It seems so for some games, at least Skyrim [1].

But reading through the GitHub "Game Compatibility" issues [2], I get the impression that most problems are due to graphics card and audio drivers, not game-specific irregularities.

[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/4

[2] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/labels/Game%20compat...

Re: Proton 5.0, a package to run Windows games on Linux

#17
I'm guessing this doesn't work on arm64 as, classically, wine is not an emulator.. Been trying many different ways to get gaming to work on my Jetson Nano

- moonlight-embedded (works, kinda janky though, and the only GPU vps provider that I've used which works is paperspace, and I'd rather not spend about a dollar an hour to play games this way, plus paperspace's west servers are in norcal and I'm in socal so the latency is just enough for certain games to not be that fun to play)

- using qemu + virtgl to run the nvidia geforce now android app (still figuring this one out)

- anbox + geforce now (anbox flat out didn't work)

- parsec (wouldn't start)

Re: Proton 5.0, a package to run Windows games on Linux

#19
post #5

As a 20 or so year long linux as a desktop user, I've had my hopes up so many times that more people would embrace Linux. It's always been about the games, largely. Hell we had id's stuff running, and there was even a company porting Blizzard stuff if I remember right. This is the first time I've been genuinely enthused that "it's happenening", and I cannot be more thankful to the Wine team and Valve.

Even if I was a linux desktop user otherwise, I’d still prefer booting to a windows partition just to never have to wonder if the drivers are eating 5% of my FPS, or if that recent crash maybe doesn’t happen to everyone and it’s just me seeing it on Linux.

Games (of the normal kind) are pretty special in that you literally aren’t doing anything else simultaneously, and you are probably running them long enough that a reboot to run them isn’t a massive overhead.

Once in the games I won’t notice that I’m in Windows anyway.

Games these days are tightly coupled to the latest drivers. Both Nvidia and AMD mention which issues they fixed or improved for which games on their driver release notes.

(All of this post assumes that playing games means recent AAA games. Older games, smaller indie games, or non perf sensitive games obviously are a completely different story)

Re: Proton 5.0, a package to run Windows games on Linux

#20
post #5

As a 20 or so year long linux as a desktop user, I've had my hopes up so many times that more people would embrace Linux. It's always been about the games, largely. Hell we had id's stuff running, and there was even a company porting Blizzard stuff if I remember right. This is the first time I've been genuinely enthused that "it's happenening", and I cannot be more thankful to the Wine team and Valve.

I would say it used to be about games. But now many people use laptops and Linux has pretty terrible support for most of them. It often "works", but you'll usually have some issue with bluetooth or wifi or the trackpad, and good luck getting anywhere near as good battery life as Windows or Mac.

My 12 years experience with HP laptops is no issues with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, touchpad but, according to kernel releases, brightness control keys not working (workaround: hotkeys to run xbacklight, not every week) or shutdown is actually a reboot (workaround: hold down the power button when it starts rebooting, maybe 2 or 3 times per year.) Not ideal but I still trade those inconveniences with working on Windows, which I do on a few Windows servers of customers that are running some Windows only programs.
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