Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

5 years ago Valve released Proton

gamingonlinux.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 260 posts

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#41

Post by runjake »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #15
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Is it still called win32 nowadays? Because that name has existed for a very long time now, and early win32 stuff doesn't even run on windows without sysWOW64 stuff. I'm sure some versioning more granular than windows version names exists, but the extent of my windows knowledge is occasionally reading newoldthing.

IIRC, it's called the Windows API now, with Win64 being the active variant on modern Windows. It is essentially Win32 with 64-bit additions.

The Win32/low-level Windows programmers I know still just refer to it as "Win32", though.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#42

Post by memefrog »

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…

>Win32 ABI is the most stable and rock solid compared to the messy moving target of the Linux world,

Blatant lie bordering on disinformation.

The only reason it is a "stable ABI" is that every dev of every windows program bundles every library with their program. You could do the same thing on Linux and the stability "story" would be exactly the same, or in fact even better on Linux because Win32 isnt actually stable and the Linux system call ABI is.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#43

Post by abtinf »

It’s been many years since I was current on the state of cross platform gaming.

Is it possible that proton could become the de facto target platform?

That is, if a developer builds to ensure that their game works correctly under proton, then will it also work correctly under windows? So by just ensuring it works under proton, which seems to be minimal effort, do they get access to the expanded market for “free”?

Do any of the consoles support proton, so that the only barrier to releasing a game are the legal agreements?

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#44

Post by memefrog »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #19
crickey wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only because of the nature of dynamic linking. Have a statically linked executable and you should be fine. Not that it should be an issue to get old software to run you simply need to download the dependent lib versions. Anyone who sais this i feel hasnt worked very much with software, not that you should need to thats up to the one distributing the executable

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.

No video game has any use for GTK+.

XLib is tiny by modern standards.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#45

Post by memefrog »

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…

There is no "library surgery". This is EXACTLY what people are forced to do on Windows already: bundle all dependencies.

>No game developer is ever going to individually package, and consistently repackage, their game for 20 distributions. That’s never going to happen.

Nobody has suggested they should.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#47

Post by tmccrary55 »

abtinf wrote: post #43

It’s been many years since I was current on the state of cross platform gaming. Is it possible that proton could become the de facto target platform? That is, if a developer builds to ensure that their game works correctly under proton, then will it also work correctly under windows? So by just ensuring it works under proton, which seems to be minimal effort, do they get access to the expanded market for “free”? Do a…

Microsoft definitely wouldn't let that happen.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#49

Post by slikrick »

johnny22 wrote: post #25
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the topic of GE, anyone try his custom Fedora distro, Nobara[1] and has any feedback on it? Is it daily-drivable on a laptop without any issues, and stable long term without any breakages? Not just for gaming, but for daily entertainment and productivity task of those with one distro for everything? I tried installing it a while back and found the default installer partitioning much more janky and messed up GRUB m…

I've only heard good things about it, but i see no reason to use it. making fedora do what it does is easy enough.

"Easy enough" sure, you keep up with all those patches, manually, on your own system, then say it.

This site literally can't not be pretentious

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#50

Post by memefrog »

ShamelessC wrote: post #6
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…

Do you want more games to be played on Linux or not? Because we've been trying the whole "please target native Linux" thing for awhile now and it simply isn't appealing enough to ever work. Evangelism is useless in the face of results.

>Do you want more games to be played on Linux or not?

This is meaningless if you change the definition of "on Linux" to mean "on Windows".

Post reply on HN