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5 years ago Valve released Proton

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Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#31

Post by gjsman-1000 »

crickey wrote: post #27
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you statically linked GTK, possibly Xorg, and more into a ludicrous bundle size, you’d still be screwed. As for “just get the libs,” that’s hilariously easier said than done. Try my example - it’s enough to make an engineer cry.

https://www.x.org/wiki/Releases/ https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/linux/ I mean it will probably not be painless and other applications u run might break* but xorg is relativly stable. Liba are out there are free to get. Usually people are arguing that the conveniences isnt there not that its not possible. * if u dont sandbox this a bit with custom lib paths

I didn’t dispute that it isn’t possible.

What I am disputing is how this comes off to a game developer; 5 years from now, heck, 2 years from now when their games require library surgery to keep running... that’s just an awful experience.

That is not what a developer would consider a stable ABI. They could look into Flatpak - but look at what’s trending on Hacker News today - a rant against Flatpak.

Win32 over Proton is the winner for them; all other proposed solutions are hilariously naive and optimistic to what game development requires. No game developer is ever going to individually package, and consistently repackage, their game for 20 distributions. That’s never going to happen.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#33

Post by jhbadger »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #8
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #3

I don't know how common it is, but the AI War developers posted recently about their new game & said Steam recommended they drop their Linux port, saying that just relying on Proton would be better performing & a better use of time. I'm very curious how widespread this advice is. It's a little sad & ironic to me if Proton is now entrenching Windows as the only target platform. I'm hoping this wasn't blanket advice Va…

>Steam recommended they drop their Linux port, saying that just relying on Proton would be better performing & a better use of time. I'm very curious how widespread this advice is. It's a little sad & ironic to me if Proton is now entrenching Windows as the only target platform. Very. Win32 ABI is the most stable and rock solid compared to the messy moving target of the Linux world, so recommending it is not entrench…

It will be interesting to see if the Win32 ABI survives as a standard into the future beyond the point that Windows itself will continue to run it in in the same sense that commodity PCs are still based on the IBM PC architecture even years after IBM itself stopped making PCs.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#34

Post by acomjean »

ndjdjfjfj wrote: post #14
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #3

I don't know how common it is, but the AI War developers posted recently about their new game & said Steam recommended they drop their Linux port, saying that just relying on Proton would be better performing & a better use of time. I'm very curious how widespread this advice is. It's a little sad & ironic to me if Proton is now entrenching Windows as the only target platform. I'm hoping this wasn't blanket advice Va…

> relying on Proton would be better performing I tried Overwatch 2 with Proton and performance was abysmal. My computer seemed to be melting and FPS was jumping all over the place. It does 144fps on Windows 11 without sweating (same PC).

I have a notebook (Nvidia 10xx something gpu), 8th gen intel I think. It gets plenty warm playing games, but the games play fine on PopOS. The fact that they run is pretty great.

But I think of the steam deck which is basically a Linux PC. Its lowerer spec, low power, but it seems to run pretty well without terrible battery life.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#35

Post by crickey »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #31
crickey wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.x.org/wiki/Releases/ https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/linux/ I mean it will probably not be painless and other applications u run might break* but xorg is relativly stable. Liba are out there are free to get. Usually people are arguing that the conveniences isnt there not that its not possible. * if u dont sandbox this a bit with custom lib paths

I didn’t dispute that it isn’t possible. What I am disputing is how this comes off to a game developer; 5 years from now, heck, 2 years from now when their games require library surgery to keep running... that’s just an awful experience. That is not what a developer would consider a stable ABI. They could look into Flatpak - but look at what’s trending on Hacker News today - a rant against Flatpak. Win32 over Proton…

Well u sure made an effort to exclaim how hard it would be. If a developer had an install guide with links to dependencies or mirrors to those dependencies it wouldnt be very hard as they should have internally for their dev/ testing. Do windows devs not track their dependencies? Relying only on Win32 ? Whos the naive one ?

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#36

Post by mistrial9 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #13
mistrial9 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you have first-hand knowledge of the structure of the code base that ports to both Linux and Windows for this particular game?

Valve and others have explained it already why in general terms that apply to all games on the native vs emulated situation, no need to go into the pedantic details of one specific game.

as a framework author and C++ coder, the code base structure is not "excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning." -- certainly not for you in any case, by your own statement

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#37

Post by sebazzz »

I run winesapOS[0] which is based on SteamOS and was able to repurpose an old Toshiba notebook for my kids, running Freddy Fish* and other games. Windows 10 doesn't run smoothly (even though it came with Windows 10) and I'm not going to run anything older than that.

Steam also makes it very easy to switch between Proton versions. If version X doesn't work, perhaps version X-1 or X+1 does work, or even the experimental version.

* Yes, ScummVM is available for Linux but the Steam Linux distribution included an old ScummVM which wasn't able to load some libraries. Running the Windows version through an compatibility layer was easier than modifying shell files to run the latest ScummVM through flatpak.

[0]: https://github.com/LukeShortCloud/winesapOS

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#39

Post by saltcured »

COGlory wrote: post #7
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #3

I don't know how common it is, but the AI War developers posted recently about their new game & said Steam recommended they drop their Linux port, saying that just relying on Proton would be better performing & a better use of time. I'm very curious how widespread this advice is. It's a little sad & ironic to me if Proton is now entrenching Windows as the only target platform. I'm hoping this wasn't blanket advice Va…

Proton almost always runs better than Linux native. Windows is the only stable ABI on Linux, now.

Proton leads to some bizarre behaviors though. My worst experience is on a surplus "mobile workstation" with Optimus graphics. It has a pretty robust Intel quad-core and one of their better iGPUs as well as an NVIDIA Quadro M5000M which has decent VRAM and should compare almost to a GTX 1650.

The packages pulled in by steam define a bunch of vulkan providers which then confuses steam. Many games won't even launch and you have to manually kill off a bunch of steam worker processes to even successfully shutdown and restart steam. You can't uninstall the package due to dependencies, so instead have to manually move/rename some files under /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/ to only leave the one for NVIDIA.

Then, games launch but have very inconsistent performance. I don't know if this is because Optimus is competing with the game for PCIe bandwidth, or something else still going awry with the driver stack.

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