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Linux interop is maturing fast thanks to a games console

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Re: Linux interop is maturing fast thanks to a games console

#51

Post by em-bee »

danielheath wrote: post #49
arp242 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wine has worked surprisingly well for a long time, well before Valve got involved, although compatibility was never perfect of course (and still isn't!) I don't think they had to "fix 1000s of tiny little bugs that break games". Codeweavers has been selling commercial Wine-based solutions for a long time. It's easy to offer a better experience if you also own the actual storefront; that was kind of my point. And as I…

I used wine for many years. "Semi-usable half-working project" was entirely my experience; nearly everything I tried to run had at least one weird bug. The proton work is open source (and readily installable without using the storefront), so you can actually just look and see that they did, in fact, fix many little bugs that break games - perhaps only many hundreds, rather than thousands.

proton [..] is [...] readily installable without using the storefront

last time i tried that, i could not figure out how. any pointers?

Re: Linux interop is maturing fast thanks to a games console

#52

Post by phowat »

kibwen wrote: post #30

Windows is enshittifying so rapidly that I firmly believe that, if Valve really wanted to, they could eat Microsoft's lunch when it comes to the non-enterprise desktop market, which is almost exclusively gamers these days. Fortunately for Microsoft, Valve seems content to officially position and market SteamOS as just for its handheld, even though it's entirely possible to run it on other hardware.

I don't know. Developing on Windows 11 + wsl has been a suprisingly good dx for me. Much better than my previous MacOS experience. I understand developers who stay in the Apple ecosystem due to the unbeatable laptop hardware in the macbooks, but software wise most of them would be surprised with the current state on the windows side.

Re: Linux interop is maturing fast thanks to a games console

#53

Post by mcv »

robertlagrant wrote: post #19
mcv wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great that Valve is willing to pay them for it. It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary, but I can live with that. As someone who has just switched to Linux gaming, I've got to say it's working great. Maybe it's slightly less stable, but not by much, and performance is excellent.

> It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary, but I can live with that. People getting paid is a good thing.

But only because it is necessary. It would be better if we could be independent from commercial considerations.

Re: Linux interop is maturing fast thanks to a games console

#54

Post by em-bee »

mcv wrote: post #4
zem wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just to be pedantic, the valve devs are absolutely open source contributors, they just happen to be paid to do it.

It's great that Valve is willing to pay them for it. It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary, but I can live with that. As someone who has just switched to Linux gaming, I've got to say it's working great. Maybe it's slightly less stable, but not by much, and performance is excellent.

It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary

by now the linux ecosystem has received to much commercial investment to separate out what is community effort and what is not, but i believe that most of the polish that went into linux desktop applications and interfaces have some commercial investment in them.

the problem is that for most volunteers 90% of usability is good enough. if it works for me, my work is done. on the other hand the imperfect is almost necessary to attract contributors. a perfectly working application is more likely to attract users but less contributors. and as soon as contributors work on something it becomes imperfect again.

this is not to say that contributors mess things up, on the contrary, but most do just enough work to make it work for them, leaving the work to polish it up for other users to someone else. and i think that is perfectly fine. contributors should not be expected to do work that is of no benefit for themselves. the benefit of a polished application is almost always for non-contributing end users, which in turn is almost always a commercial interest.

Re: Linux interop is maturing fast thanks to a games console

#55

Post by robertlagrant »

mcv wrote: post #53
robertlagrant wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary, but I can live with that. People getting paid is a good thing.

But only because it is necessary. It would be better if we could be independent from commercial considerations.

I don't know what that means. It would be better if everything were free?

Re: Linux interop is maturing fast thanks to a games console

#56

Post by mcv »

robertlagrant wrote: post #55
mcv wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But only because it is necessary. It would be better if we could be independent from commercial considerations.

I don't know what that means. It would be better if everything were free?

Well, yes. But what I mean is that it would have been nice if hobbyists were able to accomplish this without needing the help from a commercial entity.

I'm a bit at a loss why some people here prefer commercialised open source over community-driven open source. I mean, I'll take it, and Valve did an amazing job, but there have been plenty of attempts to make this work before Valve stepped in, and it just didn't work that well back then, and it would have been nice if we didn't have to rely on Valve for this.

Re: Linux interop is maturing fast thanks to a games console

#57

Post by red-iron-pine »

Lotta users == lotta bug reports, complaints, and motivated people.

Great example is CP2077, which just got a 2.0 release, and naturally has a lot of issues, with a few that are related to Linux. The one I got was related to not detected the keyboard well via Proton Experimental.

There was a workaround up on steam discussion boards in like < 1 week, and it's getting plenty of attention.

Re: Linux interop is maturing fast thanks to a games console

#58

Post by zdware »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #57

Lotta users == lotta bug reports, complaints, and motivated people. Great example is CP2077, which just got a 2.0 release, and naturally has a lot of issues, with a few that are related to Linux. The one I got was related to not detected the keyboard well via Proton Experimental. There was a workaround up on steam discussion boards in like < 1 week, and it's getting plenty of attention.

Ha! The hex/exe patch! Had to do the same thing. This issue also sent me down the path of downloading cutter and trying to reverse engineering/interpret the .exe.

Re: Linux interop is maturing fast thanks to a games console

#59

Post by eigenspace »

arp242 wrote: post #14
dininski wrote: post #2

It's good to see an assumption I had, be validated. The assumption was that Linux would struggle to make a dent in the desktop market until it managed to make a tempting proposition for gamers. Projects like WINE tried, but there's just not enough you can do only with open-source contributors, with such a massive undertaking. I'm happy that a big company is finally backing this effort and with nvidia open-sourcing th…

> Projects like WINE tried, but there's just not enough you can do only with open-source contributors, with such a massive undertaking. Proton is basically just Wine, right? Aside from that CodeWeavers has been doing commercial Wine development for a long time. Almost all of Wine already existed before Valve got involved. Yes, they help out too, and that's great, but people are hugely over-crediting Valve (and here,…

Proton is not just WINE. It is a bundle of many open source technologies including WINE. Proton was a major step forward in the consolidation and simplification of running Windows games on Linux. It also included a ton of upstream contributions to all the bundled technology by full time paid Valve employees.

Re: Linux interop is maturing fast thanks to a games console

#60

Post by packetlost »

phowat wrote: post #52
kibwen wrote: post #30

Windows is enshittifying so rapidly that I firmly believe that, if Valve really wanted to, they could eat Microsoft's lunch when it comes to the non-enterprise desktop market, which is almost exclusively gamers these days. Fortunately for Microsoft, Valve seems content to officially position and market SteamOS as just for its handheld, even though it's entirely possible to run it on other hardware.

I don't know. Developing on Windows 11 + wsl has been a suprisingly good dx for me. Much better than my previous MacOS experience. I understand developers who stay in the Apple ecosystem due to the unbeatable laptop hardware in the macbooks, but software wise most of them would be surprised with the current state on the windows side.

> Developing on Windows 11 + wsl has been a suprisingly good dx for me. Much better than my previous MacOS experience.

I don't know what kind of development you're doing, but this does not match my experience at all.

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