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5 years ago Valve released Proton

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Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#241

Post by yencabulator »

MBCook wrote: post #176
adhamsalama wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why release a crappy product on Mac and leave it that way for over a decade? Don’t know. But that’s what they’ve done. If I were Apple, I wouldn’t partner with someone who clearly didn’t give 2 shits about my platform. (In reality Value doesn’t need Apple. And Apple would never partner anyway, they don’t do that)

Valve often does things because a person employed by Valve wanted to do that thing. And then that person moves on to other things. You don't need any grander explanation for "Valve ported the Steam launcher to OS X and now barely maintains it".

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#242

Post by yencabulator »

mschuster91 wrote: post #169
e12e wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the Apple tax, though? They have their own store to think of.

That is only a thing on i(Pad)OS. There's nothing to my knowledge preventing anyone from running their own app store on macOS - Steam purchases work fine, the entire Adobe suite does, as do Macports and Homebrew.

But Apple has proved that they will enforce their walled garden if and when they feel like it. Any company building a thriving profitable ecosystem inside Apple's walled garden is at risk of the owner of the garden starting to tax them.

It's a little like licensing Enterprise software from Oracle. You know they'll be looking for reasons to you sue you. You may be able to avoid it, but you know it's in their style.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#243

Post by yencabulator »

kaba0 wrote: post #227
sph wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is great for both the non-techie layman and the computer wiz. Those that complain are the majority on people you frequent on HN which know enough shell commands to be dangerous but couldn't unfuck a broken fstab. Which is fine, mind you, just pointing out that most people that are NOT in tech would find Linux very usable, if not more usable than Windows.

Well, there are a few areas where Linux desktop is as bad as ever: accessibility and security.

For what it's worth, ChromeOS is Linux+Wayland and does both of those pretty well. It's worth studying.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#244

Post by solardev »

hhmc wrote: post #229
solardev wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI Steam has a ton of legit resellers with their own sales. The keys all activate on Steam. Isthereanydeal.com Valve will be fine :)

FWIW many game developers would genuinely rather you pirate the game than buy keys on the ‘grey market’ sites. If you’re not going to pay anyone who deserves it, you might as well just not pay anyone..

The link I posted goes to the non gray market ones. https://www.pcgamer.com/pc-game-storefronts-compared-what-yo...

It's not the shady sites that resell free or international keys, etc. I specifically didn't link to those (they're easy to find, but of questionable ethicality and usability).

FWIW if the dev offers a Steam key on their own site, I'd just buy it that way. But otherwise if it's Steam or one of those authorized resellers, there's no reason to prefer Steam itself. GMG, Humble, Fanatical, etc. have great deals that let me try games I otherwise wouldn't bother with. If they turn out good, usually there's in app purchases and cosmetics I'm happy to support. IMHO this is a good form of price differentiation, letting the base game be widely available for people to buy but selling supporter packs and cosmetics for people who really like it.

(P2W is a different story)

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#245

Post by kaba0 »

yencabulator wrote: post #243
kaba0 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are a few areas where Linux desktop is as bad as ever: accessibility and security.

For what it's worth, ChromeOS is Linux+Wayland and does both of those pretty well. It's worth studying.

It’s definitely better than “gnu+linux”, but Android is currently the most secure and usable linux distro hands down, and in my opinion it is just very sad that it is so hard to even run an android app on linux.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#246

Post by akyuu »

gumballindie wrote: post #102
stetrain wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not switch to linux though? You know there's some real cool hardware available out there that looks and feels way better than a mac, and battery aside, can do a lot more, is upgradeable and not locked in. Just a thought.

Could you list some examples of such hardware? I'm interested.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#247

Post by m_0x »

happymellon wrote: post #230
igor_akhmetov wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JetBrains, while maybe not comparable in size, is still private.

JetBrains earns my respect by letting you actually purchase the application, and still download it 5 years later. I have purchased updates to IntelliJ, but it is good to know that I don't have to, and my access won't be restricted.

Wait what? Holy maccaroni you're right!

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

So I don't HAVE TO pay the license every year! That's good to know if I ever have to reduce my bills.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#248

Post by stetrain »

MBCook wrote: post #90
stetrain wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I’ll credit both sides with the stubbornness. Apple had many years of poor integrated GPUs (arguably Intel’s fault) and even mediocre dedicated GPU options (due to a rift with NVidia).

Apple also fully dropped 32-bit support, breaking a lot of older games that had been ported to Mac on Steam.

Even Windows running on ARM has emulation for 32-bit x86 apps.

On Valve’s side they gave very little love to the Steam client on Mac and didn’t bother to update their own games (Half Life, Portal, Counterstrike, etc) to 64-bit to keep them working on Macs.

The biggest thing that has changed is now Apple ships much better GPU power even in its cheapest Macs. They still aren’t equivalent to dedicated gaming PCs but are plenty to run a huge library of casual and older games, if only there were a convenient and well-maintained path to running them.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#249

Post by thewataccount »

yencabulator wrote: post #240
thewataccount wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used linux as my desktop for 2+ years. The games I play like CSGO work very well*, you have a steamdeck so you know how game support especially with anti cheat is. However, I've had many bugs. Nvidia on linux is painful. Just linux things - I get a bar at the top of the game when starting sometimes and have to change my resolution back and forth to fix it, I've had to restart pipewire to get my audio to reappear…

> Linux is not smooth, ESPECIALLY with nvidia. Let's assign blame to Nvidia, though. It's their drivers that are crap, it's their decision to keep their hardware so heavily NDA'd that others can't write good drivers for it.

> Let's assign blame to Nvidia, though.

I'm not going to excuse Nvidia - their driver is buggy and they're still missing DLSS3. Many of the problems I had were nvidia specific, especially anything touching wayland.

However my audio issues, or a bug where if you click the selection of applications when you alt+tab would lock gnome up and you'd have to kill the application from the terminal - those were not nvidia specific AFAIK.

I've also heard of non-smooth experiences from AMD hardware.

I don't think it's fair to recommend linux to anyone who would be scared off by the terminal.

I'm not at all saying it can't be relatively smooth sailing though, especially without a rolling os.

Re: 5 years ago Valve released Proton

#250

Post by satvikpendem »

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 like Steam too but at the end of the day I'll buy games wherever they are cheapest. I don't care about multiple platforms like apparently some people do, GOG Galaxy solves that problem cleanly by making all my games from every platform show up in one interface. I also don't use features like achievements so I don't really care beyond just being able to play the game.
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