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Valve Introduces Proton Next

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Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#231

Post by account42 »

musha68k wrote: post #192
terribleperson wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go with wired networking or be careful about your choice of WiFi hardware. Some wireless chipsets have poor Linux support, but there are usually lists of good ones and bad ones. When it comes to graphics, AMD GPUs Vega or newer work incredibly well on Linux. NVidia has a fairly substantial lead in GPU performance, but they have poor Linux support and appear to be actively working to make their hardware a bad deal. Mo…

Thanks for the thorough answer, especially insightful with regards to CPU, chipsets and on the peripheral fronts. To be honest I'm still aching for that realtime RT + DLSS fix without being dependent on GFN "PRO" all without having to go all retrograde to Microsoft world. Not too interested in any RGB hardware luckily. I'll play with PC Part Picker for a bit again :) now that I know that in general things seemingly s…

> Not too interested in any RGB hardware luckily.

It's still a concern if you just want to turn the damned lights off since they come default now with so many components and many default to full on unicorn puke.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#232

Post by poulpy123 »

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...

The steam deck is a steam machine, supporting it means supporting their direct and much more successful competitor. I understand the feeling since I have also gog games and a deck, I also understand why they don't want to do it

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#233

Post by poulpy123 »

dvt wrote: post #148
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…

> 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…

You're right, fortunately for steam all the rest of the gaming world became worst than having steam. Now the choice isn't between renting a game with DRM and needing another application to work or owning your game that you could copy , give or lend but between the former and the same + worse shit added like needing a second software or having exclusive

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#234

Post by account42 »

eggsome wrote: post #98
musha68k wrote: post #55

Due to Proton I feel like coming back to PC gaming after almost 20 years, great stewardship by Valve there. The last "rig" I built was for Doom 3 after which I'd never bothered with keeping a NTFS partition again. Apple silicon just doesn't seem to get to the levels needed for a state-of-the-art Cyberpunk 2077 experience even on pricier high-end Macs. I'm also still not willing to buy any "next-gen" consoles for the…

For GPU: AMD (but not _too_ cutting edge is the easy answer here). Any of the Radeon 6000 series will work well out of the box with recent open source kernels. CPU wize Intel/AMD does not matter.

> but not _too_ cutting edge is the easy answer here

If you are comfortable with building the drivers (Kernel/Mesa) from yourself, then cutting edge GPUs are usually fine too. E.g. Navi 2 support was all there on release day but perhaps not yet in all distros. Not saying that this should be reasonable for everyone but we are on a tech forum.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#235

Post by fileeditview »

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.

Even more so now it is not pointless to own some nice CDs or DVDs.. You do not need internet connection.. just put it in the player and go.. still way easier than any spotify integration in modern hifi equipment that I have seen.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#236

Post by poulpy123 »

nocsi wrote: post #166
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…

SteamDeck is hit or miss and is really more for tinkerers. Similar to you, I have limited time and have probably gamed on PS5/Nintendo Switch probably 90% of the time. There’s something about playing on a steam deck being unwieldy and having the fans come on obnoxiously every 20 seconds. My arms hurt holding it up and to be able to play portably, you need the foresight to enable offline mode for games. It really feel…

Hmm no, steam deck works out of the box for the things that they says work out of the box. The only time I had to change something was for getting an alternative control layout but it was for an unrated game and it was 2 clicks

Being much more open than for example the switch, it is a bit more complex to use, but I don't think it's a problem for anyone here, even with a severe lack of time and motivation.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#237

Post by poulpy123 »

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…

Just sell your children, it will give you time and enough money for 2 steam deck and a lot of games

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#238

Post by account42 »

opan wrote: post #38
mattbee wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is. And I noticed quite early on: the Steam games which had problems were the ones with native Linux ports - wonky display settings, or controller not recognised or something like that. The fix is always to tell it to "force" a version of Proton, which caused Steam to go and download the Win32 build instead.

I get the feeling people hit a bad game or two and stopped checking, so I just want to say native ports actually work fine in my experience, both before and after Proton's birth. Terraria, Garry's Mod, Valve's own titles, and Starbound should all work fine to name a few. I fear we'll get fewer proper native ports because of Proton, so it's hard for me to get excited about it. Especially with how it seems to be on by…

I'm pretty sure we are already getting fewer native ports than we would have without Proton. It's hard to say for sure because ports were already getting rarer when the Steam Machine hype died but there hasn't really been a noticeable uptick with the Deck and that seems to be doing much better than Plan A ever did.

> I have heard some old ports were actually just shipping their game with wine

For straight up Wine wrappers there are/were only a handful. But many ports use some kind of wrapper for at least the graphics parts instead of reengineering their renderer and Proton has a chance of performing better there. There are also a lot of Unity Linux exports where the game devs probably don't even have any setup to test the Linux version or ability to deal with Linux bug reports. And even for ports from those who should know what they are doing (e.g. Feral) things do get abandoned and port issues never fixed (e.g. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided just crashes for me before getting to the menu).

So I can somewhat see why people don't want to bother when Proton works quite well most of the time but still I don't think its good for the long term future of Linux gaming to depend on being able to run Windows games. Anti-cheat is already a problem for Multiplayer and you can bet that these kind of invasive technologies will be used more and more at least by big publishers.

Pushing the Linux platform forward also requires interest from developers targetting it. We saw some positive effects here with e.g. Feral reporting bugs and even submitting patches to Mesa for in-progress ports. Currently Valve pours a lot of resources into doing the needed work (at least in some areas) but we can't rely on them remaining interested forever.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#239

Post by nurettin »

I remember using Wine to play pretty much any game on linux back in the early 2000s, even before 64bit was a thing. We had wine hacks, we had a rudimentary dx9 compatibility layer, we had hardware acceleration, and we could just pirate crossover over torrent or dc++ for that one pesky microsoft game that won't load. (of course we don't do that anymore!)

I feel like Proton is just a repackaging of what we already had, which is the culmination of the hard work of the Wine team for the past 20 years, coupled with an online distribution system which could take back your "digital assets" at any time.

    We reserve the right, but are not obligated, to remove, disable or suspend your or any user's access to any Content or the Services, at any time and without notice
Reference: https://store.steampowered.com/eula/471710_eula_0

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#240

Post by KronisLV »

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…

> 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.

A while back, I actually did a blog post about using Linux as my daily driver for a week, including gaming: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-... (you can ctrl+f "Running games and ProtonDB" if you want)

Clearly not all games work well or even launch successfully, but the situation is way better than it used to be a few years ago regardless! A part of it is the fact that game engines now do cross platform pretty well (pretty much any popular engine out there does Linux export as well with very few issues, though supporting it might be a different question), and Proton is also a good initiative for all the other titles.

Also, the ProtonDB site is useful if you want to check against your Steam library, or a particular title in general: https://www.protondb.com/ It's probably the first place that you should check out when you want to see whether you could play the games you like on Linux.

Even the current GPU drivers are typically serviceable, apart from the whole open source vs proprietary driver debate (which some might choose to overlook, whereas others wouldn't), though curiously I haven't found an alternative to AMD Software for tweaking how my GPU works on Linux, unfortunately. I mention CoreCtrl as one passable option in that blog post, but it's rather barebones.

Here's hoping that things only continue to improve and we don't get caught up with too much bad press or superstitions and put a positive spin on things where possible: https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/linux-users-provide-mor...

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