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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

#112
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 >:(

Same. I'm hoping that Valve's commitment to do a Linux-native release of Half-Life: Alyx is at least a commitment to get an end-to-end working VR experience on Linux sooner than later.

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

#114
post #52

Yesterday I played civ6 with 4 people on 3 operating systems. The Mac user couldn't fullscreen the game and had weird rendering artifacts. One of the windows users had the game take 10x as long to load as it should have (commparing to mac/Linux/windows on vaguely similar hardware) The other windows user kept dropping. Note that we were all sitting at the same kitchen table, with reasonably good wifi. Linux worked fla…

What distro are you using for Linux? Civ 6 is literally the only reason I keep my Windows partition and I can't get civ 6 to work with Proton.

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

#115
post #105
post #84

Now, the kickers behind the headlines (that nobody told me up front): 1. The majority of the games do not support multiplayer on Linux, due to dependency on Windows-specific anticheat software. 2. Many, many of the games themselves aren't totally stable on Linux. So, expect a crash or two at critical gameplay moments. That said, Proton is a great effort and it's great they're pushing Linux forward.

> The majority of the games do not support multiplayer on Linux, due to dependency on Windows-specific anticheat software. Definitely not majority. Maybe majority of the top 10-20 most popular/most cheated games? The very long tail of games works with multiplayer splendidly There have been reports that Valve is collaborating with EAC to improve Proton support: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/apparently-valve-a…

I wouldn't oversell protondb since it's based on user submitted reports. I've tried multiple games that were rated platinum, but wouldn't launch or had other graphical issues that made them unplayable. Luckily the issues usually present themselves before you reach the 2 hour refund time limit.

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

#116
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I don't agree. Linux has been "ready" for my usecase for more than a decade. There's pros and cons to each certainly, but I find Linux much more pleasant to use than Windows, and I like actually being in control of and able to modify the software I run. Until I can do that, Windows is not ready for me :)

Right. But the point is the vast, vast (non-HNer) use case is not in favor of Linux. For every 1 Linux-on-the-desktop person, there are what, 1M others?

I don't know if API stability is a barrier to adoption or not, but I was just explaining my experience with both platforms. For me, I don't much care how many people use Linux; I just want to use my computer how I like to, and Linux suits my needs best.

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

#117

IMHO "emulating" the (fairly small) subset of the traditional Win32 and DirectX APIs required for typical games might even make sense on Windows itself, should Microsoft one day decide to deprecate Win32 in favour of something more "modern" (heavy air-quotes). The window creation and input event handling of Win32, together with D3D9 and D3D11 (the really popular versions of D3D), and whatever is the current audio API…

>"emulating" the (fairly small) subset of the traditional Win32 and DirectX APIs required for typical games might even make sense on Windows itself, should Microsoft one day decide to deprecate

I recently tried to run some WinXP-era games on modern hardware, and had absolutely no luck on Windows 10.

However some of the games ran fine on Wine (and 64-bit Linux).

The only downside I see to emulation is latency, but for many games this doesn't matter, and it's worthy to keep them runnable like this.

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

#118
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Create a standard, ask Unity and Unreal Engine to support it It's called Vulkan, I believe. Or, you know, OpenGL even. Doesn't change the fact that it's the developer who will have to support it. Also doesn't change the fact that the developers _won't_ support it because of the same reasons that they don't now: it's not commercially viable. DirectX is not the problem.

Graphics is not the primary problem. The DirectX family of APIs also supports audio, input, networking, and other useful things that are in many ways far more difficult to make work across all platforms, at least historically. So in some sense, DirectX's existence changes the economic equation, which does make it part of the problem.

> The DirectX family of APIs also supports audio, input, networking,

These APIs were deprecated for more than a decade. DirectSound since cca 2008, DirectInput since 2002, DirectPlay since 2004.

The APIs that are left under DirectX umbrella are Direct2D, Direct3D, DXCore (adapter enumeration), DirectWrite (font rendering) and DirectXMath.

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

#119

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 fre…

In other discussion someone pointed out about passing a gpu to a windows kvm[1] and getting the output back to linux[2]. I never tried but seems really promising, might try it someday

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22905390#22906984

[2] https://looking-glass.hostfission.com

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

#120
post #52

Yesterday I played civ6 with 4 people on 3 operating systems. The Mac user couldn't fullscreen the game and had weird rendering artifacts. One of the windows users had the game take 10x as long to load as it should have (commparing to mac/Linux/windows on vaguely similar hardware) The other windows user kept dropping. Note that we were all sitting at the same kitchen table, with reasonably good wifi. Linux worked fla…

What distro are you using for Linux? Civ 6 is literally the only reason I keep my Windows partition and I can't get civ 6 to work with Proton.

Arch.

I just checked and it turns out it's running natively not via proton.

Not sure if any of this will be news to you, but for generally debugging:

If you run `steam` from a command line, and then launch civ 6 (or any game) from steam, it will print any errors to the terminal. Chances are it's some sort of missing dependency.

I was told by someone else that I might need to set launch options to `LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 %command%`, for whatever reason I didn't need to, but you might try that.

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