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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

#171
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is still no functional VR media player for linux, none of the Windows ones work with Proton and the official SteamVR Media Player has no linux release.

Not sure what you mean, but there is the open source vr-video-player [0] that works with YouTube, can put flat games on a virtual big screen, etc. Works great. [0] https://git.dec05eba.com/vr-video-player/about/

Uh! Never found this one despite extensive googling. I'll install it and report back.

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

#172
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My Valve Index works fine for me (both native and Proton), as long as I keep SteamVR on the linux_v1.14 branch. It does have some issues keeping up sometimes, but that's probably mostly my ancient GPU (AMD RX480).

The RX 480 is far from ancient and is probably one of the best cards that I've used. When I RMA'd my RX 5700XT (which still crashes after RMA), this thing was a champ. This card is still king for 1080p gaming and can handle 1440p too.

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

#173
post #28

Proton is neat for sure, but unfortunately modern anti-cheat solutions expect Windows and will not allow Linux clients to connect. There's also a few games that I expected to work but simply won't launch for me, like Elder Scrolls Online. I'm a fan of the Linux desktop, but for me the easiest solution is to have a dedicated Linux PC (right now an XPS 13 Developer) and a Windows machine for playing video games. I don'…

At least for now, Squad and BF4 are working flawlessly in Proton inc. anti-cheat for me.

Can’t say the same for many other anti-cheat games though.

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

#175
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also from several game devs I've talked to, not only is the market share negligible, the bug reports aren't. Common sentiment was that Linux was ~1% of their sales but a third of complaints.

I know this sounds silly, but would you be able to confirm that this is based on actual conversations that you've personally had with game developers about projects they've personally worked on? There have been rumours stoked especially by tweets from the Planetary Annihilation developer that he has since retracted/clarified but these still seem to fuel a lot of negative perceptions of Linux support that aren't seen…

yes it was from actually talking to several indie game devs, I'm not familiar with the Planetary Annihilation case.

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

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try running it through proton, you might be surprised.

What happens?

Not sure, I haven't tried, but Proton is basically just Wine with better hardware acceleration support so I imagine it'll run fine.

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a streaming service with a Linux backend is more likely than another Steam machine push. One of the biggest problems with Stadia and the like is that you have to buy another copy of the game whereas Steam already knows what you own and will let you play it locally.

Strictly speaking, Stadia is "a streaming service with a Linux backend", but I think Steam could do it better than how Google's gone about it. The issue would be that Valve would need to renegotiate it's distribution deals to include streaming rights in addition to providing user downloads, and many publishers would drag their feet on allowing that, based on how publishers made noise and opted out of nVidia's Windows…

FWIW: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming

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

#179
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this sounds silly, but would you be able to confirm that this is based on actual conversations that you've personally had with game developers about projects they've personally worked on? There have been rumours stoked especially by tweets from the Planetary Annihilation developer that he has since retracted/clarified but these still seem to fuel a lot of negative perceptions of Linux support that aren't seen…

yes it was from actually talking to several indie game devs, I'm not familiar with the Planetary Annihilation case.

That's fair. I know it's more likely that this is the case on HN, but there's been multiple times on Reddit when I've asked people to elaborate and it turns out that when they say "I've spoken to Devs" they actually mean "I read a comment on Reddit" or "I saw a tweet that said it".

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

#180
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think we need to get out of the habit of calling game developers 'Lazy', especially for an industry that is famous, notorious even, for overwork and crunching. I think it would be fairer to say that it doesn't get prioritised, especially over anti-features such as microtransactions, DRM or things of that ilk. Calling them lazy is disrespectful, hurtful and betrays a lack of understanding of the development p…

To not enable a feature that EAC explicitly provides and would allow people to use a product, and that requires almost no additional work (since it's not linux support in general, just EAC linux support), I consider to be lazy. Although, it's probably a mgmt decision, not a dev decision. I understand linux support takes time and it usually isn't worth it. But this is just flipping a switch from what I've heard.

I think flipping the flag is likely not the only amount of work. Support will at the very least involve customer support, legal, marketing, sales etc. Dev effort to enable is likely not a factor in their reasoning to not support the platform.

Even then, I would be reluctant to call it institutional laziness. Businesses strive for efficiency. Can not doing a high cost thing be called laziness? Sure, but I think it's still disingenuous and misrepresents the issue.

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