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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

#191

Post by na85 »

iso1631 wrote: post #189
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.

You said yourself, Cities Skylines

I've definitely seen it argued that SimCity-alikes (and The Sims) are not games. Whether nor not this is true is IMHO beyond the scope of HN comments.

Suppose it's a game: Cities Skylines is open-ended and has no formal win condition, but you can certainly lose. Your city can go bankrupt, etc.

You're playing against the simulator algorithms. If you succeed then you've beaten those algorithms.

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

#193

Post by _ofdw »

runjake wrote: 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.

I feel like Proton is Valve's bid to free themselves of their dependency on Windows, so I like to think #1 will change in time as the publishers come around to the idea that Windows is slowly but surely losing its position as the only viable gaming platform.

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

#194

Post by 29athrowaway »

xrendan wrote: post #114
gpm wrote: 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.

Civ 6 has a native port to Linux. Why do you need Windows?

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

#195

Post by tvb12 »

pkaye wrote: post #161
bozzcl wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to add something to this: and when a newly launched AAA game doesn't work, the community won't stop until it does. My own personal examples: Halo MCC and Doom Eternal. They wouldn't launch out-of-the-box, but people just wouldn't stop trying. The GitHub issues for these games were enormous, full of information and people trying things. It's pretty encouraging.

Where on GitHub is this discussion?

If you go to protondb.com and search for the game, there's a link under the title for "GitHub Issue Search". I suspect that's where you'll find the discussions. Here's the issue for MCC. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/2907

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

#196

Post by Maken »

Miraste wrote: post #181
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.

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.

I think the major change was Steam and the Steam runtime rather than Proton, which solved the library fragmentation problem. Since then we have seen a considerable amount of same-day releases and native ports on Linux.

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

#197

Post by farias0 »

na85 wrote: post #190
farias0 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The expression "video game" came to be understood as much more than "games played through a video system". Even titles like Skyrim, RDR2 and Uncharted thrive much more on the role playing fantasy or on the narrative than on beating a system. These aren't just dressings anymore, like the medieval motifs on Chess, they are the reason we play those games. So yeah, the word "game" expanded its meaning, this kind of thing happens with language.

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

#198

Post by coldpie »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #186
resplin wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't think I've ever compiled a driver. So no, I don't think that's what they meant.

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

#199

Post by cferr »

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…

Ditto here. My wife's PC, for example, is now running OpenSUSE full time. She used to dual boot with Windows 10, primarily for games, but she would spend most of her computing time using Windows just because of the game inconvenience. Now pretty much everything she plays 'just works' with Proton, and she has no need for Windows.

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

#200

Post by skohan »

hutzlibu wrote: post #23
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 uninterestin…

The thing is it's not that hard to write cross-platform games. Compatibility layers like SDL2 make it easy to target a platform agnostic system interface. Vulkan enables high performance graphics on most platforms.
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