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5 years ago Valve released Proton

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Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#201

Post by johnnyanmac »

stetrain wrote: post #29
mschuster91 wrote: post #26

One thing that I'd love to see is a Proton version for M1/M2 Apple Silicon... UTM is the only thing that runs x86 VMs and for whatever reason its QEMU guest tool drivers are all completely buggy and everything is dog slow (and of course, Windows refusing to load unsigned drivers on Win7 x64 makes trying out different drivers pretty much impossible).

Yep, if Apple could get over their stubbornness and work with Valve on this it would be fantastic for customers of both companies. Apple has done some work with their game porting toolkit to support certain flavors of DirectX games with a combo of Wine and Rosetta. But this isn’t officially pitched as tool for end users to run Windows games.

I mean, they made an entirely new architecture just to keep their vertical integration running. Stubborness is basically in the DNA of the company. They still have enough draw that they can get away with it, so I guess they were pulling off "Valves" before Valve got popular (minus the whole "open source" moniker of course. but then again, Valve didn't exactly care about FOSS per se; just a smart move for independence when you're not yet a billion dollar corportation).

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#202

Post by johnnyanmac »

adhamsalama wrote: post #117
MBCook wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if Apple could get over their stubbornness and work with Valve Maybe Value should give more an 10% of a thought to the Mac and make Steam not be terrible on the Mac first. They don’t care about the Mac. They only care about Linux because it lets them ship the Steam Deck and have a hedge against MS. The Mac is worse than an afterthought.

Why would Valve do this for a trillion-dollar walled-garden?

Because they "put customers first"? That seems to be the PR that people feel had them invest in Linux, but they forget it was more of a desperation move in a time where Windows may have been trying to strongarm 3rd party game stores out.

Very smart to leverage that failure of Steam Machine into a portable form factor. A bit ugly and clearly some cut corners, but the price saved on no Windows license speaks for itself.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#203

Post by johnnyanmac »

Zhyl wrote: post #63

When Proton came out I had multiple people on HN going on quite long rants about how Linux would never be viable for gaming. One multi-million-unit-selling handheld gaming system later and I don't see those arguments much anymore.

I never particularly doubted Linux working for gaming, but I'm not sure if a compatibility layer to the actual dominant platform is really the long term win to celebrate here. Great for customers, but a ticking time bomb for the FOSS crowd (aside from Steam being proprietary ofc. More talking about the Microsoft dependency).

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#204

Post by ardaria »

sph wrote: post #146
stevepike wrote: post #4

Proton has earned steam my business forever. I haven't booted into Windows in over a year.

I hate DRM, I hate monopolies, I welcome competition, but if one builds a massive empire by just creating a bonafide good platform, single-handedly making open source desktop better, with good customer support and treating users with respect, they deserve the money honestly. If one day I manage to build a billion dollar empire, my sole inspiration on how to conduct business is Gabe Newell. [1] Which is exactly the th…

I won't say that epic didn't delivered for the gamers. UE5 is honestly a technology marvel and bring so much values for players. I don't even talk about lumen/nanite but all the others tools made for developers to push the limits of what is doable in a game, at runtime. With UE5.3 we even get more productivity tools, which means we can deliver faster or bigger.

Don't get me wrong, many features are experimental since 4.26 but getting them production ready is the game changer.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#206

Post by hanniabu »

dcgudeman wrote: post #147
hanniabu wrote: post #62

I really wish the linux community would polish off the UX for ubuntu so it's more attractive and usable for mainstream

If you think that UX polish is the reason why "mainstream" people use microsoft/apple products over linux you are really deluding yourself.

If you make it polished, it will be usable to more people. More users equal more of their favorite apps being made for linux.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#207

Post by memefrog »

becurious wrote: post #151
memefrog wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

No, they don’t. They may bundle additional DLLs but all those DLLs call the win32 APIs.

And? All of the shared objects you bundle on Linux will eventually call system calls to do anything.

What does "no they don't" mean? People absolutely do bundle all their dependencies on Windows that aren't part of the stable platform guaranteed to be around forever.

On Linux the part of the stable platform guaranteed to be around forever the system call ABI.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#208

Post by memefrog »

brigade wrote: post #159
memefrog wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Windows is the opposite: the only stable ABI is the dynamically linked user space ABI. ... to the kernel. So not the opposite at all. In fact exactly the same.

No. The userspace/kernel boundary is explicitly not stable on Windows, and binaries that try to use that interface have broken when it changed.

That is completely irrelevant to the discussion. The point is that both systems have very stable ABIs. Windows has a somewhat higher-level stable ABI, but as a result it is a much wider surface to keep compatible, it breaks much more often, it requires a lot more hacks to keep it stable over time (program-specific hacks kept around for decades), etc.

This is the point of difference: the layer at which each is stable. NOT whether Linux is stable.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#209

Post by memefrog »

Macha wrote: post #187
brigade wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The userspace/kernel boundary is explicitly not stable on Windows, and binaries that try to use that interface have broken when it changed.

This is true for basically ever OS other than Linux, as the Golang developers learned the hard way on macOS and BSD.

which is why the Linux approach is superior: it has a stable ABI that is language-agnostic.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#210

Post by ElectricalUnion »

majewsky wrote: post #158
outcoldman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying, that it is actually a good experience to run Linux on the gaming laptop instead of Windows with Proton? I already have Steam Deck, and love it. But if I want to play games in better resolution, I might boot my Windows Laptop. Have not tried Linux with Proton. On Linux laptop I have a NVIDIA some kind of 3xxx series card.

> it is actually a good experience to run Linux on the gaming laptop instead of Windows Not a laptop, but I am livestreaming games from a Linux desktop. In the roughly two years since I've started doing this on a regular basis, I have played 23 games on stream using Steam Proton. My experience matches what Steam Deck owners told me about compatibility. It's not been completely glitchless, but all the problems I ran i…

A surprisingly big number of anti-cheat games work on Proton:

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

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