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

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

#11

Post by strombofulous »

tgb wrote: post #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 o…

It's valve putting a lot of dev time into it. Part of that dev time was spent on making it pre-configured for ease of use

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

#12

Post by danielscrubs »

The only things these things teach me is that "Platinum - It runs perfectly" is that ProtonDB creators clearly have a different view on perfect.

"Doom Eternal runs perfectly - it just have some pink flickering every minute!"

"runs perfectly - it just closes when you try to start it."

"runs perfectly - multiplayer doesn't work though."

Microsoft can change DirectX whenever they want, that goalpost is always going to change to suit them, so why even play them at their game?

Create a standard, ask Unity and Unreal Engine to support it, take a smaller cut when buying the Linux version on Steam.

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

#13

Post by [deleted] »

danielscrubs wrote: post #12

The only things these things teach me is that "Platinum - It runs perfectly" is that ProtonDB creators clearly have a different view on perfect. "Doom Eternal runs perfectly - it just have some pink flickering every minute!" "runs perfectly - it just closes when you try to start it." "runs perfectly - multiplayer doesn't work though." Microsoft can change DirectX whenever they want, that goalpost is always going to c…

[deleted]

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

#14

Post by m4rtink »

tgb wrote: post #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 o…

To me it seems like a kind of Wine staging, with patches not ready to be merged into the Wine mainline, yet could make some game run or run better.

Over time as the code is proven in production and/or is cleaned up to upstream standards, it can be merged to upstream Wine, reducing the difference.

Also IIRC there are some other pieces that are not (yet?) part of Wine, that are distributed with it, such as the various DirectX->Vulkan translation layers.

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

#15

Post by chaorace »

Proton has been fantastic for me, it finally gave me what I needed to reclaim my Windows partition and go full-on Arch! In some cases, running the Windows version inside Proton has actually worked out better for me than the native port (Dead Cells, for example. The native port crashes the Steam overlay and lacks Steam Controller support, but running the Windows version in Proton is seamless)

I highly encourage you guys to check out the tech making this possible: DXVK. It's incredible what you can do with these lower level APIs. I'm not sure if this is the right word, but "meta shader pipelines" like this are absolutely the way of the future in emulation. See also: Dolphin Ubershaders.

Ubershaders: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/

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

#16

Post by ekianjo »

tgb wrote: post #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 o…

It's Wine + DXVK (including D9VK since they merged together) + ESync with a different Wine environment for each game. Valve also helped Codeweavers developers to implement controllers support thru Wine.

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

#17

Post by bayesianbot »

tgb wrote: post #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 o…

I'd be really surprised if there wasn't fixes and configs for a lot of games in Proton, but also that now you at least can install and run Windows games on Linux from Steam. Before Proton, even when I owned a Windows game, I had to pirate it to run it through Wine.

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

#18

Post by ekianjo »

chaorace wrote: post #15

Proton has been fantastic for me, it finally gave me what I needed to reclaim my Windows partition and go full-on Arch! In some cases, running the Windows version inside Proton has actually worked out better for me than the native port (Dead Cells, for example. The native port crashes the Steam overlay and lacks Steam Controller support, but running the Windows version in Proton is seamless) I highly encourage you gu…

DXVK also works on Windows, to translate DX11 calls to Vulkan and pipe them thru the graphics card's own Vulkan driver.

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVYprONeDtY

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

#19

Post by bsharitt »

I don't have a lot of of super current AAA titles, so most of my games that didn't already work on Linux(most of what I buy) already worked on Wine. But with the Proton integration, I do appreciate that I don't have to run a separate Wine instance of steam and instead running my Windows games is far more transparent. I guess the only minor downside is that since the whole process is so transparent it makes it a bit more jarring when I do come across a game that doesn't work.

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

#20

Post by rataerix »

tgb wrote: post #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 o…

It's alot more convenient then wine as it's built into steam. You could get a lot of games working on wine before but setup could be a bit of a pain. With Proton you just install and play on steam like you would with a native Linux game.
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