While I appreciate the efforts Valve puts into improving WINE/Proton, lets not forget that they are standing on the shoulders of giants and gaming with WINE was not that bad before the integration in Steam either.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Gaming with Wine was decidedly far worse before Valve started pumping money into it. Back before Proton was officially announced, there was a silent acceleration in Wine compatibility, getting better a rate we weren't used to, and it's in large part due to Valve partnering with CodeWeavers.
I think the point isn't to say Valve's help isn't appreciated, but to give a little reminder to share some gratefulness with the amazing people developing Wine before Valve got involved as well. It was and is an impressive piece of software in its own right. :)
That doesn't mean Valve wasn't a complete game changer. The fact that they managed to make a handheld Linux gaming device popular among gamers rather than just open source fanatics is impressive as hell, and we're all better off.
Oh of course, but I was particularly addressing "gaming with WINE was not that bad before the integration in Steam either", because it really wasn't great, as important and foundational as it was.
I mean, enthusiasts made it work. Compared to nothing, it's a hell of a lot better. PlayOnLinux was also popular.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "that bad". It has certainly gotten a lot better, nobody is denying that.
Yeah, that's not necessarily the case. Did it kind of work? Sure, if you knew what you were doing. Was it at all the seamless experience that Proton is now? No.
What? I've exclusively used Linux since 2006 and gaming outside of retro emulation was absolute trash until proton. Of course WINE and code weavers were doing great work but it was overly complicated to use and the compatibility was abysmal.
Let’s not forget that Valve released a Linux port for TF2 in 2012, released their native client in 2013, released SteamOS in 2013 and in the end ported nearly all their games to linux. It didn’t start with Proton.
But Humble Bundle pushed ports before that, because games had to have a Linux port in order to get into the bundle.
I am on Linux even longer than you and native Linux gaming was not trash at all, it worked great, just the selection of games was very small (edit: before Steam was even a thing on Linux). WINE was always a bit hit or miss, but once you got something working, it was usually ok. Sure Proton made it more convenient, but it was more of an gradual improvement than the quantum leap some people claim it to be.
Going from a miniscule library of games that could work (I remember Linux Steam back before Proton having almost nothing of note) to opening up something pretty close to the entire Windows library and running Linux on Valve/Steam's own handheld console for their games is indeed a quantum leap. That's what Proton has done for Linux gaming. It may have gotten there eventually just with Wine and community contributions, but it would have taken possibly quite a few years longer to get there without Proton.
I think that is very subjective to the types of games you are interested in. For me Steam before Proton had so many native (indie) games that I literally couldn't find the time to play all of those I was interested in.
So you agree that your interpretation was very subjective, and many people didn't have the ease that you had?
No, because going from thousands of games to play to even more that you will never have the time to play is not a quantum leap.
If you had said Proton/DXVK made it finally possible to play a few triple A games I would have agreed. Still not a quantum leap though.
Most people want to play aaa games by your own argument gaming on Linux before proton wasn't easy you just happen to really like indie games but most people aren't like you
I've tried three times to fully convert my gaming rig to Linux, sticking with the effort at least 3 solid months minimum each time. The first time was back in 2015. Only a small subset of my Steam Library worked, despite all of my best efforts hacking on bottles, and there was no way I could stick with it if I intended to play anything with friends. Community aside, Valve and Feral were leading the charge, but I could not stick with it.
My second attempt was around 2019. Almost half my library ran, some in need of care and feeding, others barely functional, but running nonetheless. This was primarily due to my curation efforts of trying to make sure the games I bought offered some slim hope of compatibility. Wine was still a very inexact science, so attempts to get things running outside of native ports or Valve games was a poor facsimile. WineDB representation of compatibility layers was a wide gradient of colors, with most AAA titles still squarely in silver territory or worse. Anything with anti-cheat was a fool's errand.
My rig's now been on Linux for 4 months solid, and the state of Linux gaming is nothing close to what it used to be. The state of EAC support thanks to Steam Deck represents a quantum leap all its own, and that wouldn't have happened without Proton. The overwhelming majority of my Steam Library runs with no effort, each game running nearly as good or better than it did on Windows. This shift did not feel incremental.
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Ah, good ole "your opinion is subjective, but mine is absolute".
The quantum leap for linux gaming was that one guy who wanted to make nier automata work and developed dxvk.
I would probably agree to that more than for Proton, but the truth is also that DXVK's further development was largely funded by Valve.
Yes, they just started to pay who already worked on all that stuff and had the know how. They paid CodeWeavers to work on proton, started to pay the DXVK person, I’m not sure if the D9VK fork person was paid but I think so, paid the FNA person.
Though DXVK wouldn’t be possible without Vulkan and Valve was involved in Vulkan since the beginning. They also pay people to work on linux drivers since 2014.
The results were fine, but the work to get there was quite bad quite often.
UX polish is one of those things that just isn't as fun to do, and isn't as rewarding either. So pumping a bunch of money into it is going to go a long way towards making all the other hard work come out better.
I think their efforts are more for bringing gaming on Linux to more mainstream attention. Not knowing you can game on Linux is a major factor for a lot of people in not switching.
Please don't spread misinformation Valve does not put in effort, they paid people to make Proton, it's the community that makes the code NOT VALVE. A simple github chart can tell you everything.
They directly hired people to work on it... how else would you describe "putting efforts into" when a company does it?
Please don't credit me for writing this comment. It was my hands I employed that did the typing
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I didn't even know that Proton was Wine, until somewhere else pointed it out here on Lemmy... (granted, I am not a proton user, that's why my lack of context was there, but I follow the Chinese retro handhelds community so that's why I knew why Proton is awesome).
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I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what Proton actually brought to Linux gaming.
I had been running Linux exclusively for some moths in 2013-2014, and trying to get games to work on Linux felt like this : Wine is likely able to run it if you can found the right configuration, but good luck with that. I think the only game I managed to run without issues was Civilization 4, so I rolled back on Windows some time later.
Of course, Valve contributed to Wine, and projects like dxvk and others are major achievements (if a team effort), but that's not their main contribution. Valve understood that gamers may be somewhat more tech-litterate than other people, but that making games work on Linux should be easy. And that's what Proton was made for.
Nowadays, most games I buy on Steam work out of the box. I sometimes forget to check protondb before buying a games, and I rarely had an issue. Even if in 2018 you had to tinker a bit, you rarely needed more than to choose the correct Proton version (big up to Glorious Eggroll).
I think it's symptomatic of the situation of the Linux Desktop : technically, it's where it needs to be. But there is still a gap in accessibility and easiness. Tinkering is nice, but you should not have to do it to have something that works.
Not only that but they helped reach critical mass to drive adoption, and used their dominance in the industry to push studios to work with us, instead of against us.
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That's great and all, but the Wine devs deserve much more credit. Proton is just like the icing on top.
Are you kidding? Proton is much, much more than "icing on top".
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I feel like attributing this to Valve is really disrespectful to the folks who developed wine for decades (and more recently also Vulkan). The real game changer is Vulkan, which made Linux graphics to be competitive with DirectX. (OpenGL interfaces to DirectX was simply not competitive)
You're right. So many people to thank here. One thing you cannot deny is that Valve is one of few companies that loves gaming on Linux and it deserves a huge credit.
Valve does not love gaming, they refuse to listen to TF2 fans, they never build games, they brought out studios, criminal cases, Antitrust lawsuit and branding loyal fanbase that keeps defending Valve awful actions in gaming. This is not love, this is toxic community and a toxic company aiming to be profitable at all cost.
Show us on the doll where Valve hurt you.
i guess was on the tf2 lmao, almost like it was a choice of the devs to not work on that spaghetti not valve, because that's how valve works, the devs do what they want
The kickoff meeting for Vulkan was hosted by Valve. Like everything it’s not only Valve, but they had their fingers in this too. Valve is just one of the companies/groups that is pushing linux ports and vulkan support.
Valve is mostly moving interests of big game companies with steam machines and steam deck. Steam machines flopped, but initially they made companies consider ports. The success of steam deck will likely result into them paying more attention to not break wine/proton.
At least initially this was mostly DXVK though, which is a project that was secretly funded by Valve after it showed some promising initial results. Edit: but I agree that WINE deserves more credit.
as someone else said, it's a "standing on the shoulders of giants" moment for Valve
I feel like attributing this to Valve
What exactly do you mean by "this"? The post is about the 5 year anniversary of Proton. Also, why do you consider crediting the developers of Wine disrespectful? I just can't follow.
Of course Proton wouldn't have been possible without all the many years of work that went into the Wine project in the first place, and everyone who contributed to Wine should be applauded for their effort. Valve has funded a lot of extra work though to get things like DXVK and VKD3D-Proton for the translation from Direct3D to Vulkan into a state where performance can be really great! Valve also funds work on Linux graphics drivers, Linux kernel work and the list goes on.
Thank you. I found this post disrespectful, and insulting. Valve have started contributing to a long running project. Which is great, but there has been tremendous work over the years before valve, and even still
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I would not be using linux (at least not exclusively) if it weren't for proton. Many thanks 🙏
Proton made me uninstall my dual-boot windows-steam-launcher
I am getting a MacBook for work reason (my work required MacOS-only app, not my choice). I would prefer to only have 1 laptop if I could. So should I pay extra for higher model (more GPU cores) and use it for gaming? (I Mostly play racing game and single player RPG). Or would I better off by getting the base model MacBook pro, and a mediocre PC with the money left over (~$700)?
I've never owned nor used MacOS before.
Thanks.
Gaming on Mac is a bit of a new territory. You can install Linux on modern Macs through Asahi Linux, but most games don't work on it yet since it's still somewhat experimental.
If you want to stick with MacOS, there's a sort of Proton for it called Game Porting Toolkit. You may want to look at some benchmarks on it.
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Oh those memories, playing Commandos 2 on an old Laptop running Lubuntu in the summer of 2016. The wine setup worked strangely easy. But yeah, Proton accelerated everything immensely!
Are there still more people with VR headsets than Linux gamers on the steam survey?
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