Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

boilingsteam.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 319 posts

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

#181

Post by Miraste »

babuskov wrote: post #172
chungus wrote: post #28

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.

It sure is amazing currently, but I fear in the long run nobody would even bother to make native Linux versions anymore. It's such an easy out for developers. Why bother when people will make it work on Proton somehow and you don't have to promise anything nor do Linux support.

Ideally games would have native Linux versions. Practically, no one did this before Wine/Proton because the Linux market is so small and bug-prone, so the choices are Proton or no games at all.

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

#182

Post by nwallin »

m463 wrote: post #175
babuskov wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sure is amazing currently, but I fear in the long run nobody would even bother to make native Linux versions anymore. It's such an easy out for developers. Why bother when people will make it work on Proton somehow and you don't have to promise anything nor do Linux support.

Having tried to write interesting applications for linux, I should ask -- what does "native linux" mean? This is a serious question, and I don't know if it has an answer. For example, it was easier for me to use pygame, which is based on SDL (simple directmedia layer), which is based on porting windows code.

> which is based on SDL (simple directmedia layer), which is based on porting windows code.

Huh?

Building on top of SDL is probably the easiest way to make a game native on all platforms. There's nothing Windows specific about it.

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

#183

Post by farias0 »

na85 wrote: post #178
wtetzner wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all games are about "beating" something.

Can you name one game, electronic or otherwise, that doesn't involve "beating" something, whether it's the other player, the rules, or even just random chance (dice rolls)? I honestly can't think of any. If there are no goals (and goals imply obstacles to be overcome in pursuit of them) then you've got a toy, not a game.

They may not be "games", but titles like Gone Home are still video games, they aren't about "beating" something, and they aren't simply toys either.

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

#184

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

nihil75 wrote: post #109

Hate to be that guy but nobody mentioned it - Lets not forget Proton is a wrapper for Wine, and we're here today thanks to many many years of community effort.

Not just Wine. Mainly DXVK and related projects are what enabled the latest boom.

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

#185

Post by cferr »

Miraste wrote: post #179
wlesieutre wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine recently got a workstation with a threadripper processor, and apparently some games have so much trouble with the core count (lookin' at you, Far Cry) that you have to reboot into "game mode" with a substantial number of cores disabled. But some other enterprising threadripper user worked around that by stuffing the game in a Linux VM to avoid the rebooting. Crazy to think that a Windows game would p…

Funny, but not very fair: presumably a Windows VM with the lower core count would work as well.

It may, but then you would need to purchase two Windows licenses if you want to keep the host OS Windows.

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

#186

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

resplin wrote: post #150
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hope that I never see the "Have disk" button again. The Linux way of distributing hardware drivers is so much easier. As for usage, linux on the desktop is between .5% and 2% market share. And there reason to suspect that Linux usage is undercounted. https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share... https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/268237/global-market-sha..…

> The Linux way of distributing hardware drivers is so much easier.

You mean having to recompile them whenever there's a new kernel because the developers consider a stable driver ABI to be abhorrent?

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

#187

Post by depressedpanda »

Miraste wrote: post #179
wlesieutre wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine recently got a workstation with a threadripper processor, and apparently some games have so much trouble with the core count (lookin' at you, Far Cry) that you have to reboot into "game mode" with a substantial number of cores disabled. But some other enterprising threadripper user worked around that by stuffing the game in a Linux VM to avoid the rebooting. Crazy to think that a Windows game would p…

Funny, but not very fair: presumably a Windows VM with the lower core count would work as well.

Wouldn't that entail having an extra Windows license in order to be able to run the VM after the activation grace period has passed?

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

#188

Post by srajabi »

MattRix wrote: post #137
pmarreck wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong but anticheat engines, the way I believe they are currently designed, use their proximity to the actual hardware and OS to work, and the layer of abstraction introduced by Vulkan ruins this. What if the anticheat model was changed to one that detects statistically-improbable scoring (basically, a scientific model)? And triggering that would require some sort of skill verification, almost like…

There should be a very small percentage of exceptional players. If you allow everyone who cheats to play, even if they're only playing at the peak, it will break the balance of everything. The top tier games will suck because half the players are cheaters, and the lower tier games will be filled with aimbot smurfs on their way up. Unfortunately pretty soon we are going to enter a world where the cheats can be deep le…

In that circumstance if we had really good auto match making, does it matter? In a competitive environment I don't care if I'm vs.'ing a bot or a human as long as I'm matched with the intent of 50% win rate.

Of course with current cheating the issue is not deep learning based agents but seeing through walls or aim assisting. Those just ruin the enjoyment of the game. Similarly I loathe vs'ing an AI that uses the same methods.

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

#189

Post by iso1631 »

na85 wrote: post #178
wtetzner wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all games are about "beating" something.

Can you name one game, electronic or otherwise, that doesn't involve "beating" something, whether it's the other player, the rules, or even just random chance (dice rolls)? I honestly can't think of any. If there are no goals (and goals imply obstacles to be overcome in pursuit of them) then you've got a toy, not a game.

You said yourself, Cities Skylines

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

#190

Post by na85 »

farias0 wrote: post #183
na85 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name one game, electronic or otherwise, that doesn't involve "beating" something, whether it's the other player, the rules, or even just random chance (dice rolls)? I honestly can't think of any. If there are no goals (and goals imply obstacles to be overcome in pursuit of them) then you've got a toy, not a game.

They may not be "games", but titles like Gone Home are still video games, they aren't about "beating" something, and they aren't simply toys either.

>They may not be "games", but titles like Gone Home are still video games

They may not be games, but they're still games? I think whether or not Gone Home can be considered a game is highly debatable. I haven't tried it, but it seems that the elements that make a game a game are missing.

That it's available on Steam is completely orthogonal to whether or not it's a game.

Post reply on HN