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Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

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Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#121

Post by podiki »

k__ wrote: post #6
ThaDood wrote: post #4

Proton is the reason I moved from a Windows + MacOS machine to GNU/Linux full time. I understand the concern that some hardcore enthusiasts might have about it making devs lazy when it comes to developing native ports but to be honest I don't care. I am just glad to have a simple method of gaming on GNU/Linux. Proton plus Lutris and the slew other tools that have come out in recent years has made the transition to GN…

How good does this work with things like Oculus Quest, SteamVR, etc.? Are there any performance implications?

There will tend to be at least a little performance difference from Windows, but personally haven't tested it. I have an Index and it works great [0], though I really need a GPU upgrade (which is impossible these days, as others here noted). I only play on Linux so can't compare to Windows, but besides some little things not being supported like passthrough camera, base station power management (though you can do it through your phone), it works without any fuss.

[0] https://boilingsteam.com/the-valve-index-on-linux-on-a-min-s...

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#123

Post by markjgx »

ThaDood wrote: post #4

Proton is the reason I moved from a Windows + MacOS machine to GNU/Linux full time. I understand the concern that some hardcore enthusiasts might have about it making devs lazy when it comes to developing native ports but to be honest I don't care. I am just glad to have a simple method of gaming on GNU/Linux. Proton plus Lutris and the slew other tools that have come out in recent years has made the transition to GN…

I choose to irrationally support Linux, because I like Linux. There is literally no financial incentive for me to do so. We were recently debugging a newer build on Linux, which was inexplicitly crashing on a players machine, while running great in the testing environment. This was causing a major headache as the game needed to ship that day.

We had another Linux volunteer test it out on his mostly vanilla Ubuntu setup, and it worked great. Ended up creating a chart of all the available testing configurations, e.g. comparing drivers across all the available environments. The supposed blame ended up being a statically linked library on his system. Funny thing is the tester who was crashing was enjoying the game in Proton while I was debugging the Linux build.

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#124

Post by tpmx »

Zhyl wrote: post #111
tpmx wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of this is open source? I'd expect everything, including the per-game details? (Not asking you to do research on demand, just in case you already know...)

Not sure about the per-game config, but the Proton is definitely open source [0], as are DXVK [1] and D9VK [2]. Steam Play is part of the Steam client, so is proprietary. ProtonDB isn't open source but does data dumps to github regularly [3]. [0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/ [1] https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk [2] https://github.com/Joshua-Ashton/d9vk [3] https://github.com/bdefore/protondb-data

Thanks!

I guess it somehow makes sense for Valve to keep the per-game tweaks private. With all of that money they're printing though, I sure wish they could feel that they could afford to be less defensive.

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#125

Post by rebuilder »

sandworm101 wrote: post #59
neogodless wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making devs lazy when it comes to developing native ports Is this first order thinking? Whereas second order thinking might be "with Proton enabling an order of magnitude more users that enjoy PC gaming to move to Linux, studios might consider improving the PC gaming experience further with more native ports/testing directly on Linux?" I don't know if that's how things could play out, but it seems logical to me.

Because Proton creates a dangerous market pressure. The linux+proton user is the ideal customer for a game developer: someone paying full price but to whom you owe absolutely no obligations. Bug reports from Proton users can be safely ignored. They should feel lucky if the game even started under their not-supported hack of an operating system. But those who purchase a native linux client (KSP, Factorio, Prison Archi…

Frankly, if you don't care about your customers, you can ignore all their bug reports. Whether they're on a supported platform or not doesn't seem like it would matter much. The real question is whether there are enough Proton-using customers to warrant paying attention to their woes.

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#126

Post by shultays »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #119
phone8675309 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VAC doesn't work fine. For the last 18 months, TF2 has been infested with aimbots that make the game unplayable on any public server. That doesn't mean it should be more invasive, but it doesn't work fine.

Considering the complete lack of attention TF2 gets from valve I wouldn't consider it a fair reflection of VAC's effectiveness. It had been infested for ages before a media outcry about the bigoted chat spam finally spurred valve into action, yet all they did was ban f2p accounts from using chat.

I don't play CS that much but afaik aimbots are there as well. I know that it has manual reports/user review systems so I imagine VAC is not effective as an automated tool

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#127

Post by mstipetic »

I don't understand the comments saying it's disincentivising developers from developing for linux. They would never do it otherwise. Proton is great and since PopOS is here I'm finally able to switch to linux completely and am super happy about it. Things will only get better from here

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#128

Post by rhn_mk1 »

Zhyl wrote: post #72
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #64

The title is disingenious. Proton is meant to be an improvement over Wine. Did none of those 7000 games work on Wine already? If I fork Proton as Neutron and add support for 1 game, no one will say "Neutron has enabled 7001 games". It enabled only 1.

>Did none of those 7000 games work on Wine already? Not on Steam, and not without user time investment. Steam Play (which uses Proton) allows the Steam client to only show games that are known to run well on Linux, automatically installs and configures a Wine prefix for them and then launches them _as if they were native Linux games_. No mess, no fuss. If I were to put Linux with Steam Play enabled in from of a Windo…

I would agree if the article was saying "7000 games enabled in Steam", but it's not:

> we are very close to 7000 Windows games confirmed to be working out of the box with Proton on Linux.

A better point of comparison for the actual claim would be Wine-launcher or CrossOver or some other Wine wrapper. As it is, the base for comparison used is "nothing worked before"

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#129

Post by Nojlk »

sandworm101 wrote: post #92
cacois wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, if proton is creating a much larger linux gamer market (its on of the big reasons I switched to linux as my daily driver), might this new market not soon be able to exert pressure on developers for first-class linux ports? Bit of a potential chicken and egg problem with developers supporting linux natively that proton might help solve.

>> for first-class linux ports? I don't want ports. I want proper linux clients developed alongside the other clients, which is relatively easy under tools like unity. Every developer gives lip service to "maybe linux later" but they never do it. If they aren't doing cross-platform development from day one there is next to zero chance of them doing it later in the dev cycle when such things are far more expensive. Wh…

It's been 30 years. This was nothing but a pipedream before Proton came along. It's probably still a pipedream, but at least we'll be able to play more games on Linux now. Don't let perfect get in the way of good.

There's never going to be a mass exodus to Linux. People have been promising the year of the Linux desktop for as long as Linux has been a thing. It's time to find a way to coexist, and Proton is so far one of the best solutions for gaming.

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