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

[ssam]

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

I thought the survey does does not run on the beta version of the client. If everyone switches to beta to enable Proton, then the usage stats could go down.

[edoantonioco]

goodbye native linux games

[raonlinux]

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

We should stop complaining for native ports, Steam from linux has 5 years ago that was released, at the end we didn't have too many games native on linux . I don't call native one, the ports that made aspyr, feral or vp. They use some translating library but native one we didn't have (name one AAA game, not indie one).
Now developers of video game have so many tools, of course we wish they use vulkan and that way release for linux it will be easier than doing on DX.
But right now we were loosing a lot of tracks, looks aspyr or feral, they didn't release so many games as before for some reason. So at the end I prefer have options to play video games than have nothing, without need to boot windows or pci passthrought and someone make it easier just install and play.
That is the reason maybe we didn't have port of The Witcher 3, complaining about the port they released for The Witcher 2. But now we have DXVK, that allow me to play the witcher 3, almost perfect some glitches that some graphics doesn't appear on the screen (that way make difficult to kill a monster). But if this solve and patched those games with less bugs or glitches, they are doing great.
Right now videos games that are release on windows have so many bugs, the industry of video games/software change a lot.

[AsuMagic]

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.

Hahaha, for a second I thought you were being serious.
... right?

[Particle]

Last night I installed Steam beta so that I could try Steam Play. I then tried DOOM (2016), but it won't launch. I added the flag to make it start in Vulkan instead, but it also failed to launch. Discouraged, I tried DOOM (original) since that is also on the official support list. It doesn't run either. *shrug* I guess it's still in beta for a reason. I'm sure they'll work out these issues eventually.

I would rather enjoy PUBG support at some point. It's basically the only reason I still carry Windows. I spend the rest of my time on Debian.

[duby229]

Hahaha, for a second I thought you were being serious.
... right?

Of course I am, let me just quote myself here...

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.

The point I was trying to make is that wine won't admit that it is an emulator and they have never cared about striving for compatibility. The only thing wine devs care about is implementing interfaces and they couldn't possibly care any less if they actually behave the same way as the windows implementation does or not.

If the proton devs admit that it is indeed an emulator then they can begin striving for compatibility at which point it should definitely be made upstream to wine.

[schmidtbag]

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

If Valve is smart about this, Proton should increase native ports. Think of it like this:
A lot of people (myself included) still use Windows only because of a handful of games that haven't yet been ported. If enough of the top 100 selling games end up being compatible on Linux, that should help convince most people who still dual boot to use Linux more often, or even full-time. When this happens, I'm sure we might see the Linux usage statistics increase above Mac levels. At that point, Linux becomes much more of a viable market for game devs to deliberately target.
Meanwhile, Valve gets a certain % of every sale of a game. By the time Linux's marketshare becomes significant enough, Valve could increase their cut of the sale by 5% whenever a Windows game ends up on the Proton whitelist and is bought/played in Linux. Any game that is Linux-native would decrease Valve's cut by 5% (again, if bought/played in Linux). The idea behind this is "We (Valve) put in all the dirty work to get your game available to more consumers, so we expect more compensation. If you want to see better profits, you must port the game natively". If the game is popular enough, the amount of money the devs lose to Valve would hopefully be enough of an incentive where they'll do a native port themselves.

[Particle]

The point I was trying to make is that wine won't admit that it is an emulator and they have never cared about striving for compatibility. The only thing wine devs care about is implementing interfaces and they couldn't possibly care any less if they actually behave the same way as the windows implementation does or not.

If the proton devs admit that it is indeed an emulator then they can begin striving for compatibility at which point it should definitely be made upstream to wine.

I don't think "admit" is the right word. There isn't some kind of historied conspiracy where Valve refuses to say Proton is a compatibility layer. You're hung up on some sort of ideological thing.

Additionally, Valve is already sending their work upstream to the WINE project where applicable, so the entire objection is kind of moot.

[eydee]

Last night I installed Steam beta so that I could try Steam Play. I then tried DOOM (2016), but it won't launch. I added the flag to make it start in Vulkan instead, but it also failed to launch. Discouraged, I tried DOOM (original) since that is also on the official support list. It doesn't run either. *shrug* I guess it's still in beta for a reason. I'm sure they'll work out these issues eventually.

I would rather enjoy PUBG support at some point. It's basically the only reason I still carry Windows. I spend the rest of my time on Debian.

You used NTFS, weren't you. It doesn't work with default configuration at the moment. You might have success if mounting it with your own uid and gid.

[duby229]

I don't think "admit" is the right word. There isn't some kind of historied conspiracy where Valve refuses to say Proton is a compatibility layer. You're hung up on some sort of ideological thing.

Additionally, Valve is already sending their work upstream to the WINE project where applicable, so the entire objection is kind of moot.

That's not quite completely true. The wine devs are picking through those patches. I think the proton devs should tell wine exactly where to shove it, and if the wine devs want those improvements then they should fork proton to get them. Proton should be made upstream to wine and not the other way around because wine has already proven for the last 20 years they don't care at all about compatibility. Of course this whole stance hinges on whether or not the proton devs will admit that it is an emulator and strive achieve compatibility or not. If compatibility is their goal then they cannot be a downstream of wine because wine will break it every single release. It -must- be upstream in order to prevent wine from breaking it.