Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by jandrese » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 7:11 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #199

zelon88 wrote: post #132

I LOVE Proton. About 85% of my Windows games just... work. And probably 75% of the 15% that fail initially only require a little tweaking to make work. My only complaints are that steam uses arbitrary numbers instead of human readable labels for emulated AppData folders. It can be time consuming to locate a save game file. Also Streaming cross platform isn't a pleasant experience yet but it's getting better and I rea…

It's even worse with Workshop items (on the various occasions where you need to make edits or otherwise troubleshoot 'em), since you need not only the game's AppID, but an even longer numeric ID for the Workshop item itself. Luckily this is the same as the one in the item's URL for its Workshop page, but it's still annoying to have to copy and paste that into something just to see it (if doing it through the Steam cl…

Workshop is one of those places where Proton doesn't work so well in my experience. I end up with lots of crashes and failure to start when trying to enable workshop mods in most games.

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

#222

Post by ubercow13 » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 7:11 PM UTC

markjgx wrote: post #123

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 set…

Did you consider requiring Steam Linux Runtime? The most recent versions use containers so that even glibc will be a fixed version.

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

#223

Post by glsdfgkjsklfj » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 7:12 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #188

tapoxi wrote: 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'…

Modern "anti-cheat" solutions are invasive rootkits. I have no interest in running that on my computer for that purpose. I wish they'd invest more in server side AI instead to handle this, but it's much easier for them to simply put more malware on the client side. Some developers aren't even denying that it's nasty, but excuse it with "no one cares anyway" or "we already could snoop on you, so don't complain if we m…

not sure why you are downvoted. You speak the truth, and as usual get downvoted without a reply.

multiplayer game have the choices: a) ship game with malware/trojan to try to prevent cheats, or b) open up for cheats (even if client side only, like see trhu walls)

Most popular games chose option A (and still fail preventing both client side and remote hacks)

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

#224

Post by unethical_ban » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 7:12 PM UTC

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…

Alternative outcome: At least some developers who are passionate about helping users who ask for help may look into issues with games crashing on proton.

I get your concern but I think it's a form of "perfect being the enemy of good". Your stance boils down to "don't enable effective workarounds to play non-linux programs on linux" because there is a chance it will reduce the already rare motivation for devs to make native builds on Linux.

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

#225

Post by Arnavion » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

ebegnwgnen wrote: post #50

Kees_Veel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The games I mean. I guess I'm in the wrong topic here, but if you play those games, you implicitly have to trust their secret code on your network. User account and all. Obviously most here have done that a long time ago and don't even give it a second thought. This is normal in these times of Windows and Facebooks, but I still care.

I believe Valve is working on Flatpak sandboxing for games. If this happen that would be one more reason to game on Linux instead of Windows. It's not as good as open source but let's be real, you'll never get AAA open source games. Games don't need to access personal data (such as contact, phone number, photos, files, private messages, etc.) so with strong sandboxing I guess it could be a okay solution privacy-wise

I already run Steam in Docker for this reason, with its own home directory mounted as a subdirectory of my real one. Even before games swiping my homedir I was worried about Steam wiping my homedir, as it's already done once in the past. [1]

Though ironically that means I can't use the new Proton runtime thing ("Soldier runtime" I think?) that sandboxes games via user namespaces, because my distro doesn't build the kernel with userns support so it would require me to give the Docker container more privileges.

[1]: https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671

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

#226

Post by jandrese » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #188

tapoxi wrote: 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'…

Modern "anti-cheat" solutions are invasive rootkits. I have no interest in running that on my computer for that purpose. I wish they'd invest more in server side AI instead to handle this, but it's much easier for them to simply put more malware on the client side. Some developers aren't even denying that it's nasty, but excuse it with "no one cares anyway" or "we already could snoop on you, so don't complain if we m…

Cheats themselves are basically rootkits, and you can't beat a rootkit when you are running on top of it. Anti-cheat pretty much has to be like this.

Server side enforcement is not only heavy, but has much of the same problems as the client side. It's running on a layer even higher than the client side anti-cheat. How can you tell if someone is running an aimbot or just has good aim? Sure if they do something outright impossible you could ban them, but heuristic approaches are going to have problems with false positives as well as false negatives.

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

#227

Post by babypuncher » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 7:20 PM UTC

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…

Frankly I believe Proton is better for the longevity of these games on Linux. It's not uncommon for native Linux versions of games to break over time, or become a hassle to use as they rely on old unmaintained libraries.

Win32/Proton is almost like a framework game developers can target and not have to worry about OS specifics.

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

#228

Post by przmk » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 7:24 PM UTC

MrFoof wrote: post #141

zelon88 wrote: post #132

I LOVE Proton. About 85% of my Windows games just... work. And probably 75% of the 15% that fail initially only require a little tweaking to make work. My only complaints are that steam uses arbitrary numbers instead of human readable labels for emulated AppData folders. It can be time consuming to locate a save game file. Also Streaming cross platform isn't a pleasant experience yet but it's getting better and I rea…

Doesn't address the core issue, but... IIRC, the folders that contain a Steam UserIDs save game data are named after the game's Steam AppID. You can look them up here ( https://steamdb.info/apps/ ). I admit it's certainly not a solution to the discoverability problem when navigating a filesystem, as there are over 100,000 AppIDs and growing at this point.

You could also use [Protontricks](https://github.com/Matoking/protontricks) as such :

  protontricks -s

and it will return anything that matches the search query with its appid like :

  Found the following games:
  Grand Theft Auto V (271590)

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

#229

Post by babypuncher » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 7:28 PM UTC

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…

I think the opposite might end up being true. With a critical mass of users on Proton, developers end up being pressured to make sure their games work properly in it. When a substantial number of their users have a problem running a new version of their game, even on an unsupported platform, they tend to do something about it. There have been a few instances of this happening already for some high profile games.

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

#230

Post by ascagnel_ » Fri, Mar 05, 2021, 7:31 PM UTC

throwaway3699 wrote: post #178

ascagnel_ wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Interesting. I wonder if Valve is building this so third parties can do the capital-intensive work of building up/out hardware (given that they're listing GeForce NOW as the only supported client), or if they're also intending to enter the market themselves.