Live data from Hacker News

Valve's Proton Has Brought 6000 Windows Games to Linux So Far

boilingsteam.com

1–10 of 319 posts

Re: Valve's Proton Has Brought 6000 Windows Games to Linux So Far

#3
post #2

How can I tell if a game is playable via Proton versus being natively supported?

I believe natively supported games still receive the "Steamplay" icon, whereas proton-supported games will show the Windows icon, but will install and run on Linux. (assuming proton is configure)

Re: Valve's Proton Has Brought 6000 Windows Games to Linux So Far

#4
post #2

How can I tell if a game is playable via Proton versus being natively supported?

I believe natively supported games still receive the "Steamplay" icon, whereas proton-supported games will show the Windows icon, but will install and run on Linux. (assuming proton is configure)

So how do you know if a game with only the Windows icon is supported (via Proton)?

Re: Valve's Proton Has Brought 6000 Windows Games to Linux So Far

#6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe natively supported games still receive the "Steamplay" icon, whereas proton-supported games will show the Windows icon, but will install and run on Linux. (assuming proton is configure)

So how do you know if a game with only the Windows icon is supported (via Proton)?

www.protondb.com

Re: Valve's Proton Has Brought 6000 Windows Games to Linux So Far

#8
Proton has been a game changer for me: after many years on Linux only I ended up building a gaming rig a few years ago as I wanted to get back into gaming.The plan was to dual boot and only use Windows for gaming, but in practice rebooting all the time is just too much of a pain so I was using Windows almost exclusively there, with all the related frustrations. About 6 months ago I got myself a new SSD and made a fresh install of Linux with steam and Proton and I've been amazed a the performance and game support. Of course not all games work out of the box (and some not at all), but I haven't had to boot to Windows in months. And for the games I play the frame rate is at least as good as what I used to have on Windows (on a couple of games I do get occasional drops, but nothing too distracting). I play a lot of Assetto Corsa Competizione and my G27 steering wheel even worked out of the box!

Re: Valve's Proton Has Brought 6000 Windows Games to Linux So Far

#9
post #5
post #2

How can I tell if a game is playable via Proton versus being natively supported?

You can check for individual games or run a check against your whole steam library (by authenticating with Steam) at ProtonDB [1]. [1] www.protondb.com

That's very useful, thank you.

EDIT: Clickable: https://www.protondb.com

Re: Valve's Proton Has Brought 6000 Windows Games to Linux So Far

#10
I hadn't heard of Proton before and the article doesn't explain. Here's what the GitHub repo for it says [1]:

> Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system. It uses Wine to facilitate this.

My question is, what's the "secret sauce"? If this is in fact that much more successful than Wine, what's different? Is Valve putting lots of dev time into it? Or is it just pre-configured for ease of use?

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

Post reply on HN