Valve Rolls Out Wine-based "Proton" For Running Windows Games On Linux

[moilami]

This is fantastic news! Now Valve just needs to admit that proton is in fact an emulator and that the whole entire point of it is to achieve compatibility with Windows. Once that logical milestone is reached, then Valve should tell the Wine leaders to go fuck themselves while they make proton the official upstream codebase. As long as proton considers wine as upstream to it it will be limited by the fact that wine devs refuse to admit that it is an emulator and cannot possibly ever achieve good compatibility. This is a good step, finally a competent company forks wine! But they still need to make proton officially the upstream and they need to admit pubicly that it is an emulator and then they can proceed to strive for compatibility. Wines only concern is to implement the external interfaces windows exposes and they give a fuck about how they behave or whether their implementation could ever achieve compatibility. As long as they can write a unit test that checks for it's existence that's good enough for them even though an interface that doesn't behave right is pretty much worthless, they don't care as long as it exists and a unit test can show it. Proton desperately needs to be made upstream to wine, but only if Valve will admit that it is an emulator and will proceed to strive for compatibility.

How about sending email to Nevil and asking nicely Then this ages old war about is Wine an emulator or not can be concluded

[duby229]

How about sending email to Nevil and asking nicely Then this ages old war about is Wine an emulator or not can be concluded

He's a doucebag, moron and a liar that should be made to go fuck himself. We've been waiting for wine to acheive good compatibility for almost 20 years all because he doesn't give a shit about compatibility. He should be forced to retire immediately.

EDIT: I mean wines very own -name- is an admition they don't give a shit that it doesn't work.

[dimko]

Very nice
The process for linux as gaming platform got a huge boost in the last months and now steam integrates these efforts finally.
I hope they add an option to use pre-installed wine and dxvk binaries (I use gentoo).

there is variable that allows you to use native libraries. I am guessing that it will also be available with this proton thingy...(fellow gentoo user here...)

[Guest]

No it's not, especially with in-house engines, most developers are incompetent that's why most games run so poor (even on Windows).

Not really. Some games run poorly on Windows for the same reason they aren't available for Linux at all – market share. Most games these days are developed for consoles first. Windows as a gaming platform is an afterthought to most developers while Linux isn't even considered.

[perpetually high]

Unofficial compatibility list started by the community (found this on Hacker News, but it's posted on the GitHub issues page as well):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gid=2086525177

[dimko]

nobody is stopping you from paying developers to port their game to linux

Which we do buy buying their games?

[schmidtbag]

This is exciting - I may finally be able to ditch Windows on my gaming PC.

Just to clarify:
When downloading and playing games via Proton, does Steam's statistics system count that as a Linux or Windows download/play?

Anyway, this is fantastic news. I think we should also all be grateful that Valve has put so much development toward Wine, too.

EDIT:
Also, I suspect next month's Linux usage stats will rise significantly.

[Melcar]

This is huge. Not sure if it will be beneficial in the long run for Linux, but for end users and Valve it will be great.

[dimko]

I think we should all mark the 21st of August as the linux gaming new of the year!

Let us not forget this day.

Yeah, day when developers stopped doing native ports...

[Danniello]

When downloading and playing games via Proton, does Steam's statistics system count that as a Linux or Windows download/play?

Yes, it will count as Linux.

Also, I suspect next month's Linux usage stats will rise significantly.

No idea how Steam hardware survey reports are processed by Valve but survey raw data collected by win32 Steam started via Wine already clearly indicate in couple places that Steam has been started via wine.

For example data collected by Valve from the last my survey:
Manufacturer: The Wine Project
Model: Wine
Operating system: Windows 7 (64-bit)
Wine version: wine-3.11 (Staging)

So it depends how Valve was processed it... Add to Windows? Or Linux? Or "Other"? Or reject completely as "false data"?

If they were adding it to Linux (like they should) - then Linux percentage probably will increase but not much. If they rejected such data in the past - perhaps Linux will gain quite big increase in statistics - perhaps even more than 1% usage!