Valve Introduces Proton Next • Hacker News Board

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#221

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 9:35 AM UTC

xdfgh1112 wrote: post #145

firecall wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Steam brand and mindshare is second to none in my experience. My tweener kids will preference Steam over all other platforms. They would rather buy/re-buy, or pay more for a game on Steam than use another game launcher. Their are games that are free to play with Xbox game pass, but they would rather buy and play them under Steam. They have negative views on Epic, Ubisoft and so on. Blizzard/Battle.net aren't even…

> Their are games that are free to play with Xbox game pass, but they would rather buy and play them under Steam. Why though?

A couple more reasons:

- Steam supports Linux and even for games that don't, Steam lets you pretend they do by automatically launching them via Proton. Sure, you can run other game stores through Wine/Proton but Steam makes this so damned convenient.

- I (and I assume most people posting here) have enough disposable income that game prices are mostly irrelevant and especially for indies I don't mind throwing them some more cash.

- I simply don't want to juggle multiple proprietary launchers. If anyone wants to get me off of Steam, build and open gaming ecosystem instead of trying to grift of more of the same.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#222

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 9:40 AM UTC

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #197

t00 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only potential contender for me would be GOG but their Linux support discourages any steps towards it. Steam all the way for now!

I loved GoG idea, but their resistance to steam deck and linux just lost me. I play everything on the Deck now, so they literally lost me as a customer. Which makes me angry, because I find insane that my 1000 games Steam library is fully locked when i'm playing one game, but we are 4 now...

> Which makes me angry, because I find insane that my 1000 games Steam library is fully locked when i'm playing one game, but we are 4 now...

FWIW, many games can be launched directly without Steam. There's also [0] for the rest depending on how you view things you might as well pirate the games at that pint.

[0] https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#223

Post by _Cr15py_ » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 9:40 AM UTC

PrivateButts wrote: post #105

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #53

I want to buy a SteamDeck. But I don't think I have the spare hours. After work, taking care of the kids, and housework I _might_ have 1 spare hour a day to sit down with the wife. I'd rather watch something on TV with her. To have any kind of free time I have to stay up till 1am! I could bring the SteamDeck when I bring the kids to the park, but that just feels like I'm cheating the kids. I work from home. 8am-9am g…

My wife loves the Steam Deck, mainly because I've been playing more games in the living room at night, instead of playing games in my office. Being in the same room as one another, even if we're doing different things, works pretty good for us. It's also gotten them back into PC games, as they have more access to games through family sharing and the Deck does a great job of taking care of most of the fiddly bits of p…

This is exactly where we are at home. Some nights after all the kids are in bed and the day is over we will watch a movie or TV. Other nights we have the Steam Deck up and running... my wife isn't really a gamer but she likes to watch engaging games - while reading books - so it works out pretty well.

It just comes down to dividing time effectively. I will admit that is always going to be different for everybody, but we have found it works. :-)

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#224

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 9:43 AM UTC

kranke155 wrote: post #170

dvt wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With Steam, the brand respect they have is five-stars! It's so funny how this works. I remember when Steam came out (I was in HS) and it was extremely controversial. Everyone, and I mean everyone, hated it. "I need to start ANOTHER application to run my game?" It was slow, clunky, buggy, and basically a piece of garbage. It also started the anti-consumer aggressive software DRM trend (you basically couldn't share g…

Steam was 100% visionary. After Steam I realised everything would go online - I kept telling my dad to stop buying DVDs because I told him it would all become online and discs would be pointless. Turns out it was like 10 years too early. That just shows you how early Valve was.

Except I'm not sure you were right. There is no online video service analogous to Steam where you can buy movies and then watch them forever or even while offline. It's all just streaming with a catalogue of titles that can be removed at any time.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#225

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 10:13 AM UTC

rob74 wrote: post #78

manchmalscott wrote: post #19

Valve's continual focus on Linux (SteamOS 1.0 was released eight years ago) is honestly incredible, Proton even sometimes works better than native Linux builds. Truly nobody else (in the gaming space) is doing it like Valve are. I saw a talk[1] from a KDE dev talking about features Valve sponsored to be added to KDE Plasma and it's things that are useful for everyone outside the context of the steam deck. The only th…

My own experience with Proton has been a bit more spotty, maybe because I tried it with some really old games that are not that well tested? Bioshock 1 crashed several times, then I got it to work with some hints from ProtonDB, Bioshock 2 worked "out of the box", Batman: Arkham City (which I bought years ago and never actually got around to playing) didn't work, and I wasn't motivated enough to fiddle with the settin…

> Bioshock 1 crashed several times, then I got it to work with some hints from ProtonDB

Bioshock is a tricky one because it runs very close to the virtual address space limit (2GiB) and Wine + in-process graphics drivers add just enough overhead to make push it over the edge in more cases than on Windows. This isn't purely a Wine/Proton issue though and can also cause crashes on Windows for the game. For Bioshock it is enough to set the large address aware flag so that it can use the full 4GiB 32-bit virtual address space.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#226

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 10:17 AM UTC

polishdude20 wrote: post #102

manchmalscott wrote: post #19

Valve's continual focus on Linux (SteamOS 1.0 was released eight years ago) is honestly incredible, Proton even sometimes works better than native Linux builds. Truly nobody else (in the gaming space) is doing it like Valve are. I saw a talk[1] from a KDE dev talking about features Valve sponsored to be added to KDE Plasma and it's things that are useful for everyone outside the context of the steam deck. The only th…

It makes sense from a survival perspective. Microsoft has their own game store, apple too. If you want to sell games to people, you need a way to play them and not be at risk of being shut down by the big players.

Right, if anything and Valve's Linux commitment isn't really there 100%. E.g. SteamVR on Linux is still a mess with no updates for ages. Alyx came to Linux long after the Windows release and has had pretty much no bugfixes since. Probably more due to Valve's management model where things don't get done if no one is specifically interested in them than an overall focus but still...

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#227

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 10:23 AM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #211

musicale wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. An emulator is a system which implements another system's functionality so as to serve as a usable replacement. Examples include in-circuit emulators for hardware components, or software emulators for game system hardware. In each case, the emulator is a usable replacement for the original system. 2. WINE reimplements the functionality of Windows, as exposed by the Windows ABI, as software running on Linux. 3. The…

From the source: https://www.winehq.org/ > Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, & BSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and me…

Except it isn't true. Wine does absolutely do a lot more than just direct API call translation (the systems are too different for that) - otherwise there weren't a whole heap of processes (wineserver, explorer.exe, etc.) needed to run any single program trough Wine.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#228

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 10:33 AM UTC

Rebelgecko wrote: post #160

ACS_Solver wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The initial release of Proton felt like magic to me. I tried many games with Wine across many years, from versions well before Wine 1.0 to 4.0, I also tried CodeWeavers something (Crossover?) when that was a thing. A few games worked very well, for example I remember running a newly-released Civ4 almost seamlessly. But most games didn't. Some would be playable but with graphical or audio glitches, performance or stab…

>Then Proton came and, almost overnight I haven't been able to find any info to confirm but I have a sneaking suspicion that Proton builds heavily on Codeweaver's Crossover. The vast majority of commits in the Proton repo come from Codeweavers employees

I think the biggest change was bundling (and funding the development of) DXVK which the Wine developers were too stubborn to adobt over their own wrapper.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#229

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 10:45 AM UTC

kilolima wrote: post #203

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the end of the day you are using a DRM front end (steam) I take it you don't use Steam. Yes, Steam is DRM, but it's the most non-intrusive DRM to have ever existed. You can play your games offline. There are no "false positive" errors when it comes to copy protection. No activation limits. I've done at least 5 system overhauls since Steam came out, and I've never had it tell me "Sorry, you can't reinstall that g…

It's not just DRM, it's also an advertising profile and software usage monitoring application. Recording the number of hours I play a game or which game is about as invasive as when the Patriot Act tried to go after public library patron records. GOG provides offline archive installers. A web browser can be used to both browse the GOG catalog and download updates. An app store's walled garden mimicking that behavior…

> As for mods, some GOG games can't access the steam workshop recently. This is bad for the longetivity of the game and it's success, and of course for modders and players.

While I do use Steam myself I think that part needs a lot more attention so that Valve is pushed to allow you do download content from the Workshop without a client or login. Perhaps some day the law will recognize that kind of network effect abuse as anti-competitive behavior.

> And I believe that there is still a steam runtime that games check for, even if launching outside of Steam.

It is up to the game, but yes many of them do need Steam or something that looks like Steam [0] running.

[0] https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#230

Post by account42 » Thu, Nov 24, 2022, 10:58 AM UTC

musha68k wrote: post #183

themoonisachees wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically anything recent but not the latest components will work well. If you want hassle-free then going with amd everything is the most efficient IMO. I'm running a ryzen 3600 and a radeon rx5700xt, and i've not had any driver issues, be it with x11 or wayland. I've been playing a bunch of games from my library but there are still some games that aren't compatible (for ex. Vermintide 2 has non-compatible anticheat…

Interesting point about VR. I guess the sets and controllers are married even more so to the Windows APIs and will incur stark penalty on immersion for even slightest lag (due to API translation)? A bummer for sure. I also honestly was leaning more towards buying a used RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 from one of the (ex) Ethereum miners. I actually played through Cyberpunk 2077 on Geforce Now "RTX 3080" and am definitely spoil…

> Interesting point about VR. I guess the sets and controllers are married even more so to the Windows APIs and will incur stark penalty on immersion for even slightest lag (due to API translation)?

Its mostly that Valve doesn't seem to be too interested in polishing VR on Linux. They ported SteamVR and eventually ported Alyx but neither has seen any significant update on Linux for ages. It all kinda works but ... not great.

Other non-Valve headsets will probably have even more problems.