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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

#21

Post by joerickard »

strombofulous wrote: post #11
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

Yes, it will also use a known good version of wine for a particular game. Switching versions manually to find one that worked for old or newer games had been a headache; that work is now done by proton.

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

#22

Post by Lewton »

Proton worked decently for VR last I tried 6 months ago. But I started it up again recently and everything is broken now, partially due to steam updates and partially due to updates to Unity. The entire reason I moved to Linux was because I loathe forced updates >:(

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

#23

Post by hutzlibu »

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…

I share your criticism, but just "Create a standard" is maybe a bit hard to do. Game devs need a market. The linux market is not really the biggest one, neither in numbers, nor in money. It only became a bit relevant, because Valve used linux, to threaten Microsoft, as they tried to get a big cut of game sales, with their own market. So good for linux, yes, but the normal linux game market is still quite uninteresting (mildly put) for publishers.

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

#24

Post by TehCorwiz »

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…

>> Microsoft can change DirectX whenever they want

They really can't. Software that uses DirectX will require a specific version of DirectX in order to have the correct ABI so that it can dynamically link against the DirectX libraries. Those versions and therefor ABIs are set-in-stone. Not to mention that a huge cross-section of the DirectX software library also distributed the required version of DirectX with the software.

Microsoft can change any FUTURE version of DirectX, but the deployed versions in the wild are out there and can't be changed.

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

#25

Post by Zhyl »

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…

In addition to the what others have said (DXVK, pre-configured WINE, D9VK), the Steam client integration is also a MASSIVE quality of life boost and a serious lowering of the barrier to entry.

With Proton, the Windows versions of games appear in your library [1] and you just click to download and install [2]. And then that's it! No faff, no managing wine versions. If someone is intending to play a whitelisted game then for all intents and purposes their UX is exactly the same as playing the game on Windows - which is to say "very straightforward".

[1] By default only whitelisted games appear. While this whitelist is expanding, it's also possible to enable Proton to automatically run for all non-native games.

[2] A warning window will pop up to inform the user that a compatibility layer is being used, but otherwise it's identical.

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

#27

Post by ekianjo »

Lewton wrote: post #22

Proton worked decently for VR last I tried 6 months ago. But I started it up again recently and everything is broken now, partially due to steam updates and partially due to updates to Unity. The entire reason I moved to Linux was because I loathe forced updates >:(

Sadly if you are into VR the only real viable OS right now is Windows...

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

#28

Post by chungus »

Amazing, you can buy a triple A title and have it just work out of the box. I'm so happy with Valve's support for linux. And of course the thousands of hours of work that have gone into Wine. It's becoming a more reliable experience to play old windows games using wine than trying to run them on windows 10.

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

#29

Post by fakeSocialMedia »

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…

Linux server is so perfect, I don't understand why desktop has so many problems.

I suppose that's a different topic.

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

#30

Post by w0utert »

Is anyone using Linux + Proton for in-home streaming?

I'm seriously considering to completely ditch Windows 10 and move my gaming to PS4/5 + Linux/Proton, but I still want to be able to stream games from the game PC to the steam link in the living room. Does this work just as well with Linux/Proton as Windows?

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