[HN Gopher] Valve Introduces Proton Next
___________________________________________________________________
Valve Introduces Proton Next
Author : WallyFunk
Score : 249 points
Date : 2022-11-23 17:47 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (linuxgamingcentral.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (linuxgamingcentral.com)
| SahAssar wrote:
| Is there something substantially new here or is this just a beta
| branch of the regular proton?
| impulser_ wrote:
| Why doesn't Apple put this much effort into bring MacOS into the
| same realm as Windows in terms of gaming?
|
| You would think they would invest more money and time taking away
| one of the last major advantages of Windows vs. MacOS.
|
| Microsoft obviously sees gaming as one of the big advantages to
| Windows, hence why they have been buying up gaming studios and
| combining Xbox and Windows into the one gaming platform.
| IshKebab wrote:
| They probably would prefer to parlay iPhone games to Mac, then
| they have tight control over them and can offer things
| Microsoft can't.
| musicale wrote:
| >Why doesn't Apple put this much effort into bring MacOS into
| the same realm as Windows in terms of gaming?
|
| I don't speak for Apple, but their bread and butter is the
| zillions of App Store games, so the business incentive is
| clearly to move those developers and games onto macOS so that
| Apple gets a cut of every game sale and in-app purchase.
| Moreover, those games are already optimized for Metal and Apple
| silicon. They already work well on modest hardware running on
| batteries.
|
| In a sense it's a very clever strategy: Apple completely
| sidesteps the "PC game" market, which has largely left Apple
| behind, and creates its own "App Store game" market - a huge
| collection of games, all of which are optimized for Apple APIs
| and silicon, and which make billions of dollars for Apple
| through App Store commissions. Moreover, those games run across
| iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV. Apple also avoids potentially
| unflattering GPU and game performance comparisons (especially
| with compatibility layers like WINE) - the hardware fades into
| the background, which is something Apple likes.
|
| From the user perspective though? Many Mac users would still
| like to be able to run PC games (especially ones that aren't in
| the iOS or macOS App Stores) out of the box, and this would be
| served by developing a high-quality version of Proton (or
| equivalent) for macOS. And they'd also like Steam to work well
| out of the box. Making this happen would be a drop in Apple's
| bucket, and probably wouldn't reduce App Store sales. And it
| might help with hardware sales for students and others who
| might be on the fence due to certain Windows games not running
| on macOS.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Gamepass is a gift and a curse, on one hand, it makes Windows
| gaming dirt cheap. But it also makes Linux Gaming like this
| pointless.
|
| If half the games I want to play are locked to Gamepass, I'm not
| having fun with Linux. Now, if Gamepass could run on Photon, we
| can talk.
| MikeMaven wrote:
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Can someone please summarize this rather than giving a one
| sentence blurb about why you love proton, as that is only
| tangentially relevant.
| fhd2 wrote:
| It basically means you can now try the upcoming release, not
| just stable vs experimental, which is the choice we had so far.
| You can select it on a per-game basis, so if things don't work
| in stable you can select next.
| LegitShady wrote:
| proton now has an opt-in beta build
| ShamelessC wrote:
| It did before- one of the many reasons the article is so
| confusing.
| LegitShady wrote:
| proton's beta build now has a cool name, I guess?
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| I had to go figure out what Proton is:
|
| "Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows
| games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux
| operating system. It uses Wine to facilitate this."
|
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton
| psychphysic wrote:
| It's witchcraft is what it is.
| skywal_l wrote:
| You can learn some of the spells here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33156727.
| johnxie wrote:
| It has come a long way. When running through Proton, the game
| and all its middleware are supported seamlessly. Take a look at
| https://www.protondb.com
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| It's Steam's downstream fork of Wine, which is not an emulator.
| musicale wrote:
| 1. An emulator is a system which implements another system's
| functionality so as to serve as a usable replacement.
| Examples include in-circuit emulators for hardware
| components, or software emulators for game system hardware.
| In each case, the emulator is a usable replacement for the
| original system.
|
| 2. WINE reimplements the functionality of Windows, as exposed
| by the Windows ABI, as software running on Linux.
|
| 3. The combination of WINE and Linux is in fact a usable
| replacement for Windows.
|
| 4. Which means that WINE running on Linux conforms to the
| above definition of an emulator for the Windows system.
|
| 5. Therefore, WINE running on Linux certainly is an emulator
| for the Windows system.
|
| QED
| Asooka wrote:
| Wine is not an emulator, therefore if your definition of an
| emulator brands Wine as an emulator, your definition is
| wrong. :)
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| It may not be an emulator in a highly specific &
| technical sense used by and useful to a small group of
| experts. It is an emulator in the general and widely-
| recognized sense of "software that runs software
| originally intended for a different, incompatible
| system."
|
| You see this all the time when a jargon word enters the
| general non-specialist vocabulary. It doesn't make either
| usage wrong, though it can be confusing sometimes if the
| contexts can be difficult to distinguish. In this case
| that's unlikely so just give it up please.
|
| Honestly the quirk where that is its name could be a
| really useful entry point for educating non-specialist
| readers on the different technical approaches used to
| solve this problem! I never see that though, this is only
| ever used as a wellackshully on internet forums. It
| sucks.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Quick, do "GNU is not Unix" next!
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Proton is just a UI/service/convenience layer for Wine, right? So
| when there's specific fixes for games, are those actually Wine
| updates?
| kubik369 wrote:
| No, Proton is Valve's fork of wine.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Why does Proton have so many Wine dependencies?
|
| > Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows
| games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux
| operating system. It uses Wine to facilitate this.
| jandrese wrote:
| Because it is built on top of Wine. The difference is when
| you try to run a game on just Wine you'll often have to do
| some fiddling on the command line or in configuration files
| to get the thing to work, if at all. Proton is much less
| fiddly. Stuff more often than not just works from clicking
| start.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| Importantly, Proton also integrates DXVK. I don't know the
| details too well but I think DXVK is responsible for a large
| part of Proton's "it just works" and it's a separate project
| from Wine. You can configure Wine to use DXVK but in Proton
| everything is preconfigured so you never have to think about
| them as different components.
| ydlr wrote:
| Thanks to proton, I have completely forgotten how to configure
| wine prefixes.
| hypothesis wrote:
| Is this unique to Proton? There seems like quite a few game
| managers on Linux nowadays, none require knowing much of Wine.
| dudeinhawaii wrote:
| Proton was instrumental in my move from Windows to Linux. With
| over 400 games in my back catalog, I didn't want to lose
| thousands of dollars not to mention thousands of hours on games
| which I enjoy.
|
| Thus far, 92% of games have ran flawlessly for me on Fedora (4
| failures in the last 50). The main issues have been related to
| games that have kernel mode drivers for copy protection or other
| exotic types of anti-cheat. Perhaps most amazing (to me anyway)
| is the fact that mods and workshop items work perfectly. In most
| cases, I could pop open a saved game and continue on Linux,
| custom mods included.
|
| Performance-wise, I haven't noticed a difference but I generally
| run very modern hardware which works better with the DirectX to
| Vulcan implementation. I also swapped to an AMD chip/gpu when
| moving to Linux and I think that removed the headaches that
| people often have with Nvidia drivers. Overall, it's been
| fantastic.
| skywal_l wrote:
| Do you mind giving us the name of those 4 games failing on
| proton?
| dotancohen wrote:
| I would rather have the names of the 46 games that did work!
| overlordalex wrote:
| If you're curious, ProtonDB is the place to check if the
| game you're interested in is supported (and how well).
|
| You can also just browse and see what is supported. Here is
| the list sorted by the highest user ratings:
| https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=userScore
| jandrese wrote:
| Some notable Linux gaming failures for me:
|
| Roblox. Kids really wanted me on this but I've never been
| able to get it to work. Technically not on Steam/Proton, but
| a notable failure.
|
| Eador: It runs but the graphics are completely garbled.
|
| Anything VR: No luck at all getting QuestLink working on
| Linux.
|
| Several games don't like later versions of Proton and I have
| to force them on older versions. This isn't a huge problem
| except that it it an annoying amount of fiddling to figure
| out which version is working.
| inyorgroove wrote:
| Grapejuice [1] works excellent for me with Roblox, simply
| launch games from browser just like windows. Super easy to
| install if you are on Arch [2] as well.
|
| [1]: https://gitlab.com/brinkervii/grapejuice
|
| [2]: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/grapejuice
| javawizard wrote:
| At risk of picking nits, 4 failures in 50 would be 92% :)
| dudeinhawaii wrote:
| Haha, just spotted that myself, thanks :)
| musicale wrote:
| I wouldn't mind it if someone made a version of Proton that ran
| on macOS.
| climb_stealth wrote:
| I wish they would sell the Steam Deck in Australia. Does anyone
| know whether you can buy one overseas and use it anyway?
| SXX wrote:
| Basically it's normal PC so you can even just install Windows
| there (but it will degrade overall experience). So there is
| absolutely no lock-ins and you can use hardware any way you
| like.
| [deleted]
| climb_stealth wrote:
| That makes sense from a hardware point of view. I was
| wondering whether there would be issues using a Steam account
| from an unsupported country.
|
| It requires a Steam account in a supported country to order.
| But after receiving it, can you log in to an account from a
| different country? Technically it should be doable. But there
| might be some policy that stops it from working.
| SXX wrote:
| I didn't manage to get one myself, but friend of mine use
| Steamdeck he ordered through UK in Turkey just fine.
| Obviously you can't buy one in Turkey.
| 91edec wrote:
| You can buy a Steam deck from any country and use your
| account, the deck isn't account locked. For example my
| friend bought a deck in the UK, moved to America and
| changed his region then came back to pick it up. We were
| both able to log into the device UK & US.
| jackvalentine wrote:
| Yes, I got mine from an eBay reseller shipped to Australia for
| a bit of a markup and it works fine - only 'foreign' thing I
| noticed was on the KDE desktop the date format was american
| which is obviously a single setting change and you're done.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Can proton be used to run other windows software well under
| Linux? I would KILL to have desktop-excel in xubuntu.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| Excel and Word in Office 2016 work pretty well in Crossover. (I
| don't know about the newer versions.)
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| If you restrict yourself to older office versions like e.g.
| 2013, they should be working fine with vanilla wine. At least I
| remember running Word seamlessly on my gnome desktop. I even
| created a ,,desktop" file so I could double click on word files
| to fire up Word.
|
| I recommend using the ,,play4linux" fronted to wine which makes
| it rather easy to install and maintain windows applications and
| games.
| trelane wrote:
| If you're looking for applications, CodeWeavers' Crossover
| Office is the place to go. If you _actually_ can 't afford it,
| you can use plain WINE. But Crossover is nicer, has support,
| and funds WINE development, since CodeWeavers sends their
| patches upstream.
|
| https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
| gkhartman wrote:
| Will desktop excel actually run smoothly on this? It's been
| ages since I've tried, but I didn't have much luck in the
| past.
|
| I'd really love to ditch my windows machine, but my employer
| makes use of excel plugins that only run on the desktop
| version.
| trelane wrote:
| Looks like it's changed a lot. It looks like it was good
| until about 2010, then it stopped working. Might also be
| why they apparently renamed it to "Crossover" from
| "Crossover Office." Guess I'm really out of date here. :)
|
| Wait, maybe I was looking at _Mac_ compatibility. It looks
| like 365 runs decently on Linux.
|
| They have a site you can check compatibility at: https://ww
| w.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsof... is
| the page for MS Office 365.
|
| You can download a free trial and see if it works.
| openmapsguy wrote:
| You're looking for wine https://www.winehq.org/. Proton is
| built on top of wine.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| A reminder once again that Proton only exists because, for all
| the benefits of Linux, making a native Linux port is a massive
| mess. The community calling for developers to make native ports
| often forget that Linux's userland stability and consistency is
| simply not at the level developers expect or need for a quality
| port.
|
| Until the day arrives when you can install a game on, say, Fedora
| 37 that was initially developed against, say, Ubuntu 16.04 or
| Fedora 26, it is not happening. Win32 is by far the most
| consistent and widely-supported API on Linux right now, which is
| a damning indictment of Linux, not game developers who don't
| support it. Even macOS has way better backwards compatibility and
| consistency than Linux does, but developers are scared to touch
| that. If macOS isn't good enough for developers, native Linux
| ports are a pipe dream.
| trelane wrote:
| I've yet to have a game not work because I was using the wrong
| distro.
| Yuioup wrote:
| Really? I have nothing but problems trying to play native
| Linux games. 99% don't even launch.
|
| Proton is a much better experience.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I am talking about native Linux ports and people who complain
| about the lack of native ports instead of, at best, Proton
| ports.
| trelane wrote:
| I am also talking about native ports. I preferentially buy
| Linux native ports.
| irusensei wrote:
| I thought this was something really new. TBH you can probably
| take advantage of many of these new features by using one of the
| Glorious Eggroll releases. It's nice that it can be used from the
| interface though.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| This seems to be in between stable and experimental, which is
| in turn usually behind the GE builds.
| LeSaucy wrote:
| It is incredible how well proton works on the steam deck.
| irusensei wrote:
| Also works very well on a full AMD laptop I own. Running
| Fedora.
|
| I often play FFXIV with it. Not verified. It's ironic that the
| game runs perfectly on Proton but the main source of problems
| and incompatibilities is the launcher which uses MSHTML for
| wathever reason. Proton GE seems to have fixed the issue with
| the launcher but game patches sometimes break it.
| mattbee wrote:
| It really is.
|
| And I noticed quite early on: the Steam games which had
| problems were the ones _with_ native Linux ports - wonky
| display settings, or controller not recognised or something
| like that. The fix is always to tell it to "force" a version
| of Proton, which caused Steam to go and download the Win32
| build instead.
| opan wrote:
| I get the feeling people hit a bad game or two and stopped
| checking, so I just want to say native ports actually work
| fine in my experience, both before and after Proton's birth.
| Terraria, Garry's Mod, Valve's own titles, and Starbound
| should all work fine to name a few.
|
| I fear we'll get fewer proper native ports because of Proton,
| so it's hard for me to get excited about it. Especially with
| how it seems to be on by default and work sort of invisibly,
| it's like they want to hide from people if they're playing a
| native game or not. I don't even think it's a malicious move,
| more like the common sin of trying to appeal to the lowest
| common denominator at the cost of the older advanced users.
|
| I have heard some old ports were actually just shipping their
| game with wine, so for those Proton is probably an
| improvement, but some games (indie especially) actually made
| proper ports years ago and I think we ought to use them and
| recognize their efforts.
| mattbee wrote:
| I'm sure there are lots of working Linux ports! I was just
| saying that when I _did_ have a problem with a game on my
| Deck, disabling the Linux port fixed it.
|
| Where are the compromises for a developer in using Proton?
| There's one binary for them to ship (and update), they get
| to use industry-standard tools, and Valve makes sure it
| works on other platforms for free.
|
| Surely the result is more games you can run on a Linux
| system?
|
| Or rather - nobody cares when Windows leans on layers of
| backwards-compatibility to run a binary perfectly, why does
| anyone care when Linux does the same?
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Looking over the Linux ecosystem, I would say that Linux
| itself has far more blame for the lack of native ports than
| the developers do. Developing for Linux is complicated,
| requires constant intervention, has frequent compatibility
| gotchas, has little "best practices" established, among
| other issues. Games are complicated things - name one
| native Linux port that works just fine on Fedora 37 when it
| was built for Ubuntu 16.04. Unless it got recently updated
| or is only a simple 2D Game, odds are not in your favor.
|
| For an example of this, read Mike Rose about the game
| _Defenders._ Linux was 0.8% of sales, but over 50% of
| technical complaints. Whereas, if they dumped it for a
| Proton build, the onus is no longer on them for a working
| Linux build or for compatibility issues on Linux - its way
| easier to just say YMMV.
|
| Blaming developers for the lack of native games is like the
| pot calling the kettle black. Until Linux becomes a decent
| platform to build for, developers aren't interested in
| rewriting major parts of their games every time the Linux
| community has a new idea. The lack of native games, I would
| argue, is more a failure of Linux than a failure of game
| developers.
|
| Whether we like it or not, this lack of stability in Linux
| and the ability to just fork every time you don't like
| something, has led to Win32 becoming the common API for
| Linux. You build for Windows and Vulkan, and specifically
| test your game against Proton, and you can run on almost
| any Linux distribution that supports Proton without banging
| your head into a wall, or doing frequent patching every
| year.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I think flatpak/appimage/snap are good for similar
| reasons... If you're developing commercially supported
| applications and want to support Linux as well as Windows
| and Mac, it's a pretty natural target. Less (although not
| none) issues with the host OS depending on what your
| application does.
|
| Yeah, it means a lot of duplicate libraries, but it also
| means things will work... and aside from games, not aware
| of many that install more than a couple one-off
| applications to work with.
| ip26 wrote:
| What a mirror world this is, where Win32 (via Proton) is the
| best & most stable Linux ABI.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| As one of my buddies put it, 'it is basically magic'. I agree.
| Compared to manual fiddling, it is amazing. For the proton work
| alone, Steam got a lot of goodwill from me.
| Shared404 wrote:
| Same here.
|
| I almost went to GOG, but Proton pulled me back to Steam very
| quickly.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| GOG has a place in my heart. I still try to throw them
| money every so often, but I will admit that at this point
| Steam won when it comes to a platform as a whole. GOG can
| still manage, but they will need to secure non-DRM for
| popular games, which may be a taller order. Divinity was
| great, but it is such a rarity these days.
| bagels wrote:
| Still no pubg, afik :(
| nyadesu wrote:
| Is it related to steam deck's anti-cheat support?
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Okay, but what does it actually do?
| manchmalscott wrote:
| Valve's continual focus on Linux (SteamOS 1.0 was released
| _eight_ years ago) is honestly incredible, Proton even sometimes
| works better than native Linux builds. Truly nobody else (in the
| gaming space) is doing it like Valve are. I saw a talk[1] from a
| KDE dev talking about features Valve sponsored to be added to KDE
| Plasma and it 's things that are useful for everyone outside the
| context of the steam deck.
|
| The only thing that doesn't really work I've noticed is when
| games have an online component, whether it's like easy anti cheat
| which I've heard _should_ be just flipping a switch to enable but
| I haven 't seen anyone actually do that, or some weirdness
| happening with whatever the new Microsoft Flight Simulator is
| doing that makes it seemingly a 50/50 coin toss as to whether
| it'll run with the exact same settings.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0gEIeFgDX0
| polishdude20 wrote:
| It makes sense from a survival perspective. Microsoft has their
| own game store, apple too. If you want to sell games to people,
| you need a way to play them and not be at risk of being shut
| down by the big players.
| smeagull wrote:
| I have a incredibly well specced Mac from work that I could use
| for gaming, but Linux support on steam is so far ahead that I
| don't bother anymore - it's a pain to figure out what games are
| supported on Mac - something I no longer even bother to check
| on Linux.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Proton works better than native windows builds. In some cases
| it actually fixes bugs in the windows version
| smeagull wrote:
| It's also true for support of old games. I could use a VM
| with a flaky version of Windows XP (which I have done, and it
| always crashes) OR I could use wine and have no issues.
| andrepd wrote:
| Proton is literally what made me permanently go from dual-
| booting Windows to going Linux full time. I can play all games
| I care to play with excellent performance on Linux. It's pretty
| amazing. Kudos to the Wine and Proton team.
| zamalek wrote:
| I watched a talk by GabeN _years_ ago, where he explained his
| business philosophy (which also had to do with his exit from
| Microsoft). It was strikingly simple: treat your customers
| well. Supporting Linux is treating his customers well (even if
| the majority of customers don 't understand that... yet).
| MikusR wrote:
| > treat your customers well
|
| That's why it took a lawsuit to get refund support for Steam.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| That lawsuit specifically had to do with meeting Australian
| guidelines. I personally have had zero complaints with the
| Steam refund system here in America.
| girvo wrote:
| They didn't have a refund system initially.
| bombcar wrote:
| Valve's customers are the studios.
|
| Only half-sarcastically.
| chairmanwow1 wrote:
| Not really. More like hostage to distribution. If you
| list your game on Steam, you can't list your game for a
| cheaper price anywhere else on the internet.
|
| People put up with that because they still come out ahead
| by listing on Steam.
| IshKebab wrote:
| In fairness Steam's prices are very reasonable. I imagine
| there are ways around it anyway.
| ip26 wrote:
| If his customers don't feel they are being treated well (e.g.
| they don't understand, and won't for years) then does it
| really fall under that principle?
| Teever wrote:
| Needless pedantism.
| ip26 wrote:
| If I explained to you that Musk's decision to buy Tesla
| was founded on his principle of _"make the requirements
| less dumb"_ , would it be pedantry to inquire what I
| meant?
| zamalek wrote:
| This is more along the lines of Apple having (at least
| historically) being pro-privacy before the problem became
| common knowledge.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Yet fleecing game developers with 30% cut on sales at the
| same time. It's a soft big cushion to talk profound thoughts
| from. Reminds me of billionaires giving advice like "you just
| have to believe and work hard"... yeah, but that's a low
| baseline you have to have anyways.
| neura wrote:
| How do you think they got to where they are? by not
| believing and not working hard? Valve has been working at
| what they do for longer than some people commenting here
| have been alive. Steam has been around for 19 years.
|
| Do you believe developers should be able to use something a
| company has spent the last 19 years investing in and
| building... for free or cheap? Is there a competitor in the
| market that would bring them as much exposure while not
| charging as much? The only thing I can think of are
| platforms like EGS, where they basically pay people to sell
| their games on there, so they can grow the platform.
|
| I haven't done the math myself, but I'm guessing indie
| developers would be hard pressed to make the same money
| without using Steam as they do using Steam, even with the
| "fleecing" you're talking about.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| Sales through the store, yes.
|
| You're welcome to sell Steam keys on your own website, and
| Valve won't take any cut at all, while still providing the
| same services as a purchase through the store.
|
| See https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys , at
| face value, it's a completely reasonable policy.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| If only Apple and Google could do the same.
| Keyframe wrote:
| That's actually quite good and impressive. I haven't
| realized that.
| neura wrote:
| Still comes back to "can you sell enough keys on your own
| to make up for the amount of sales you get through Steam,
| even after the 30%?" It's great if you think you have a
| hot game or product that will be sought after by a large
| enough audience vs people seeing a game show up in their
| feed or on sale or a friend is playing it or however it
| ends up in front of you on Steam, a game that maybe
| you've never heard of before and now you're going to buy
| it.
| worble wrote:
| This is a really good power play - the idea being that if
| you can get more eyes than Steam can through your own
| store, go ahead, keep the money.
|
| But if you're getting the sale because of Steam itself,
| then we get the cut.
|
| You can still debate whether 30% is fair even if Steam
| are providing the discoverability but still, it's a solid
| policy and they're putting their money where their mouth
| is.
| manchmalscott wrote:
| It totally makes business sense for them to not have to
| depend on Microsoft (who have their own gaming business) for
| their customers to play games, we all win when consumers have
| meaningful alternatives.
| firecall wrote:
| The Steam brand and mindshare is second to none in my
| experience.
|
| My tweener kids will preference Steam over all other
| platforms. They would rather buy/re-buy, or pay more for a
| game on Steam than use another game launcher.
|
| Their are games that are free to play with Xbox game pass,
| but they would rather buy and play them under Steam.
|
| They have negative views on Epic, Ubisoft and so on.
| Blizzard/Battle.net aren't even on their radar.
|
| They are mostly indifferent to MS/Xbox Store.
|
| With Steam, the brand respect they have is five-stars!
| christophilus wrote:
| It's well earned. Steam is BS-free relative to the others
| on your list. Steam could degrade significantly in quality
| and customer satisfaction and still handily beat that lot.
| denkmoon wrote:
| I'm the same, as a 30-something. Steam is so much better
| and Gabe has fostered my undying loyalty. He'd have to
| shoot my dog to stop me using Steam.
| xdfgh1112 wrote:
| > Their are games that are free to play with Xbox game
| pass, but they would rather buy and play them under Steam.
|
| Why though?
| gatonegro wrote:
| > _treat your customers well. Supporting Linux is treating
| his customers well._
|
| It's really won me over, I can say that much. When I was
| using Windows, I favoured buying games from GOG over Steam
| whenever possible. DRM and all that.
|
| Ever since I moved to Linux, it's been the opposite. GOG
| couldn't care less about Linux compatibility, and while you
| _can_ get their stuff going through some combination of Wine
| /Lutris scripts, the experience I get with Steam is so much
| better.
| the-smug-one wrote:
| I'm sure GOG would care if they had more resources. Valve's
| push into Linux is because Microsoft is making a big push
| towards there being a single walled garden store:
| Microsoft's. Valve is doing this ultimately to benefit
| themselves. That's of course the case with GOG too, but GOG
| has very little money to put into any sort of Linux push so
| they have to lean on Valve's investments.
| boudin wrote:
| I wouldn't put GOG in the same basket as other stores like
| EGS though, they did make some efforts and officially
| packaged and distributed games for Linux quite early. It's
| not the same effort as Valve but it's still to their credit
| (I'm saying that as a Linux user).
|
| Nowdays, Heroic Game Launcher is the easiest option to play
| GOG games though (as well as EGS ones)
| https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
| mhh__ wrote:
| Forget native Linux, it's more stable than native windows for
| me on a few games (and sometimes faster because of windows FS
| horribleness)
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| If it was Google instead of Valve, those projects would been
| killed approximately 47 times already.
| viraptor wrote:
| It's a bit more than flipping a switch with the anti cheat.
| Those are absurd systems which use every a bit of trickery on
| Windows to both detect any manipulation and hide themselves
| from being interfered with. They both load up as Windows
| drivers and check for things like enforced driver signature.
| Steam will need either perfect compatibility with everything
| they do, or EAC and others will need to cooperate to provide
| SteamOS-specific versions.
|
| It's in EAC interest to _not_ work on wine out of the box,
| otherwise it would be too easy to work around.
| SXX wrote:
| Basically Valve already partnered with anti-cheat developers
| and enabling their support on Linux is in fact just flipping
| of a switch.
|
| Unfortunately this switch need to be flipped by developers /
| publishers of particular game and they dont cooperate too
| well.
| Thaxll wrote:
| It's not just flipping the switch, this is none sense.
|
| That means now the dev has to officialy support the game on
| this platform and all the problems that comes with it.
|
| On top of that the anti cheat on linux is a joke because
| it's running in user space so serious game won't enable it
| just for that reason.
|
| https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/14907597078411591
| 7...
| smoldesu wrote:
| Couple things to note:
|
| - The developer has no obligation to support the
| platform, Valve provides and pins a working runtime and
| unless the game is redesigned from scratch (see: Final
| Fantasy XIV) it should work in perpetuity.
|
| - Anticheat on Windows is also a joke unless it runs in
| Ring 0, which is literally impossible on platforms like
| Steam Deck (Flatpak Steam only runs in user space for
| security reasons). No self-respecting developer should
| write kernel mode DRM in the first place, though.
|
| - It very well could be as simple as flipping a switch -
| in the case of Apex Legends, the game already ran
| perfectly fine but couldn't connect to servers without
| the anticheat library loading properly. When EA updated
| the anticheat drivers, the game worked fine on Linux
| without any modification.
|
| Of course, nobody has a de-facto obligation to support
| Linux. The larger point is that it's deceptively easy to
| get your game working on 90% of the world's Linux
| systems, much more so than shipping to MacOS or console.
| If all the world's 'serious game[s]' won't run on Linux,
| than that makes it the world's greatest casual gaming
| platform :)
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Maybe Mr Sweeney should focus more on making an anti-
| cheat that actually works, compared to the dumpster-fire
| that is EAC.
|
| Its functioning is spotty-at-best on windows, and when it
| takes issue with _something_ on your system the
| troubleshooting is useless. At least Valorants' anti-
| cheat will tell you what it doesn't like.
| tapoxi wrote:
| The issue is that flipping that EAC switch means you're
| effectively disabling a lot of its checks, which is why not
| many developers want to do it. Maybe this will change as
| the Steam Deck becomes more popular.
| rob74 wrote:
| My own experience with Proton has been a bit more spotty, maybe
| because I tried it with some really old games that are not that
| well tested? Bioshock 1 crashed several times, then I got it to
| work with some hints from ProtonDB, Bioshock 2 worked "out of
| the box", Batman: Arkham City (which I bought years ago and
| never actually got around to playing) didn't work, and I wasn't
| motivated enough to fiddle with the settings long enough to get
| it to run. One way to improve Proton would be to provide a
| possibility to automatically import settings from ProtonDB
| (it's called "DB", but actually it's more of a forum). But if
| you look at ProtonDB, every user seems to have different
| problems and different solutions for these problems, so it's
| hard to see if some kind of consensus has emerged on how to
| best get a game to run.
| kjuulh wrote:
| Happy to see a fix for final fantasy XIV launcher. That thing had
| been an infuriating ordeal.
|
| Kudos to the proton team for supporting such an archaic
| technology.
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| I want to buy a SteamDeck. But I don't think I have the spare
| hours. After work, taking care of the kids, and housework I
| _might_ have 1 spare hour a day to sit down with the wife. I'd
| rather watch something on TV with her. To have any kind of free
| time I have to stay up till 1am!
|
| I could bring the SteamDeck when I bring the kids to the park,
| but that just feels like I'm cheating the kids.
|
| I work from home.
|
| 8am-9am get ready for work/get kids ready for the day
|
| 9am-5pm work
|
| 5pm-8pm doing stuff with the kids
|
| 8pm-9pm eat, get kids ready for bed
|
| 9pm-11pm housework/watch TV
|
| 11pm-midnight miscellaneous stuff to prepare for the next day.
|
| I almost wish I had a commute by train or something. Or a
| housekeeper, or an Au Pair/nanny.
|
| How the fuck do other grownups do it? (I'm 49, and exhausted all
| the time)
| http-teapot wrote:
| Same boat! I picked up a Steam Deck, was desperately looking
| for a multiplayer game I could play 20-30 minutes in the day,
| and found Deep Rock Galactic. I only play when my wife watches
| a TV show or in bed.
| PrivateButts wrote:
| My wife loves the Steam Deck, mainly because I've been playing
| more games in the living room at night, instead of playing
| games in my office. Being in the same room as one another, even
| if we're doing different things, works pretty good for us.
|
| It's also gotten them back into PC games, as they have more
| access to games through family sharing and the Deck does a
| great job of taking care of most of the fiddly bits of playing
| on PC.
|
| I fully expected the deck to be the typical valve hardware
| experience for me. Something that was well built, and very
| neat, but would be gathering dust in a month or two. However, I
| think we've got more usage out of my Deck in 6 months then
| we've gotten out of my Index, Vive, Steam Controller, and Steam
| Link combined.
| girvo wrote:
| I am 32 and don't have kids, so I have more spare time luckily
| -- but the exhaustion for me was originally low iron (unlikely
| unless you have a vegan diet too), and low B12 (which is
| surprisingly common in people on non-vegan diets too!).
| Supplementing iron and drinking more (fortified, here in Aus)
| soy milk solved the exhaustion for me: if you haven't had a
| blood test in a while to check some levels it might be worth
| looking into
| Asooka wrote:
| > How the fuck do other grownups do it?
|
| Wait until the kids are old enough to take care of themselves
| at home. Once they're about 12, they should be more than
| capable of helping with housework a bit, taking care of their
| own affairs, and even going alone to the park with their
| friends.
| weatherlight wrote:
| Sometimes it's fun to cuddle with the kids while you play a
| game that they enjoy.
|
| My 6 and 4 year old love "Tunic" and "Stray."
|
| The Steamdeck is a lot of fun.
| atemerev wrote:
| Of all this, I have chosen not going to work. I work from home
| as a consultant. I don't know how people can possibly live and
| keep their families while going to their office jobs every day.
|
| Since you already working from home, you might want to look for
| something more asynchronous than working 9-5 non-interrupted.
| dark-star wrote:
| The SteamDeck is actually _perfect_ if you only have like one
| hour here and there, since you can just pick it up and continue
| playing from where you left off (suspend /resume works
| flawlessly)...
| Scramblejams wrote:
| You have decided to be an engaged parent! That's awesome. The
| world needs more of that.
|
| The SteamDeck is, as a wise sibling said, not for playing more
| games, but for playing games more. It's really excellent for
| gaming in very small doses as opportunities arise. Find
| yourself waiting for 5 minutes for someone to do something? Hit
| the button, pick up the game right where you left off. When you
| get interrupted, hit the button, it goes right to sleep.
| Perfect for a busy life.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > How the fuck do other grownups do it? (I'm 49, and exhausted
| all the time)
|
| I suppose the answer is "they don't". I've found that I can't
| really commit to any side project any more because my time off
| is not consistent.
|
| Also:
|
| > 5pm-8pm doing stuff with the kids
|
| You're a better parent than me. I have such days, but I can't
| say I spend this much quality time with my child every day.
|
| In any case I have a friend from two previous projects whose
| child is just two weeks older than my toddler, so we compared
| notes regarding this and many other topics.
|
| Summary of what's definitely possible with _one_ child:
|
| -Inviting grandma/pa over - provided they live close enough.
|
| -Scheduled leave from parenting - like one evening a week. The
| other parent takes over.
|
| -Cleaning person. Personally I just get up every hour from my
| office and do some chores. It's not enough, but it helps.
|
| -Nanny.
|
| -One parent as the homemaker.
|
| -Natural tendency to sleep less. I have maybe 7h of sleep ahead
| of me right now but somehow this is fine. Perhaps I'll pay the
| price for this later in life, who knows.
| atemerev wrote:
| "One parent as the homemaker" -- this looks very unfair in
| 2022.
| [deleted]
| milliams wrote:
| How is this different from Proton Experimental?
| bcrescimanno wrote:
| Proton Next - Candidate build for the next major version
| release.
|
| Proton Experimental - "Bleeding edge" builds.
| cybersol wrote:
| So Proton is like Debian, Proton Next is like Debian Testing,
| and Proton Experimental is like Debian Sid. Got it, thanks!
| Dwedit wrote:
| How much of Proton fixes go back to Wine and vice versa?
| tomnipotent wrote:
| CodeWeavers is responsible for upwards of 2/3 of Wine commits.
| A lot of open source projects benefit from similar
| relationships, like Postgres/Crunchy Data.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| Using Proton feels like magic. The fact that you can run games
| made for a totally different OS, which isn't even based on Unix
| or Linux is a big feat in itself.
|
| Valve is just a single company pushing for Linux gaming and the
| results have been excellent.
|
| Linux is the perfect candidate too. Efficient, open, easy to
| modify and adapt. I hope more companies follow Valve and realize
| the true untapped potential of Linux systems.
| kilolima wrote:
| Why is it magic? Wine has been around since forever. It's not
| like Valve wrote most of the underlying code proton runs on.
|
| And what's with all the valve/steam hype from people that
| should know better? At the end of the day you are using a DRM
| front end (steam) that fragments the mod ecosystem and
| obfuscates the process of installing and running the software
| you paid for on your own computer.
| girvo wrote:
| As someone who paid for CodeWeavers/CrossOver back in the day
| and spent far more time fighting WINE configs than I did
| gaming, Proton honestly does feel a bit like magic.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| The initial release of Proton felt like magic to me.
|
| I tried many games with Wine across many years, from versions
| well before Wine 1.0 to 4.0, I also tried CodeWeavers
| something (Crossover?) when that was a thing. A few games
| worked very well, for example I remember running a newly-
| released Civ4 almost seamlessly. But most games didn't. Some
| would be playable but with graphical or audio glitches,
| performance or stability issues. Others wouldn't be playable
| no matter what. Tinkering with dll overrides, wineprefixes
| and all that was often necessary.
|
| Then Proton came and, almost overnight, the Linux gaming
| experience improved more than in the previous fifteen years
| of Wine-based attempts. A few years later now, my default
| expectation has changed to games just working on Linux,
| unless they use a rootkit-style anti-cheat system. Most games
| I played under Proton have worked with native-like quality, I
| could as well be running them on a Windows gaming rig. A few
| games worked with minor issues such as a few seconds of
| garbled audio on startup or slower startup. There's only one
| recent game where I had to give up on Proton, and that game
| is supposed to run well according to ProtonDB, I just
| couldn't it right on my system.
| ip26 wrote:
| Wine didn't get that much beyond "tech demo" level magic for
| many years. Magic for sure, but not of the same grade.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| Wine is amazing too but if you notice, Wine is not as great
| at running Windows apps as Proton is at running Windows
| games. Most games work great with Proton but only a few apps
| work properly with Wine.
|
| > And what's with all the valve/steam hype from people that
| should know better?
|
| In Linus Torvalds' own words: "Valve will save the Linux
| Desktop"
| miohtama wrote:
| Linux and Wine open source ecosystem have always been
| resource constrained. For this reason, they have not been
| able to deliver the polish Proton brings to make the Linux
| gaming available for mass markets.
|
| If DRM locked frontend like Steam is the price to pay for it,
| it is a small price. Eventually their changes get upstreamed
| and it improves the ecosystem overall.
| hypothesis wrote:
| I think it's "magic" in same sense that, say, Ubuntu used to
| be in the beginning. There were other distros too, but none
| did mix it all together for easy of use/polish. So ignore the
| hype and enjoy benefits to the ecosystem.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| Wine gets you 80% of the way there, but that remaining 20%
| that Proton fills in takes it from "awesome technology" to
| "usable product". Everyone is building on the shoulder of
| giants.
| howinteresting wrote:
| Others have already covered Proton being actually usable
| without tweaking compared to Wine. But I want to dispute your
| other point.
|
| Obfuscating usually means to make harder. Steam generally
| makes it easier to download and play games with features like
| automatic updates, remote play and cloud save sync, not
| harder.
| musha68k wrote:
| Due to Proton I feel like coming back to PC gaming after almost
| 20 years, great stewardship by Valve there.
|
| The last "rig" I built was for Doom 3 after which I'd never
| bothered with keeping a NTFS partition again.
|
| Apple silicon just doesn't seem to get to the levels needed for a
| state-of-the-art Cyberpunk 2077 experience even on pricier high-
| end Macs. I'm also still not willing to buy any "next-gen"
| consoles for the first time either (trend of maybe efficient but
| still glorified PC architecture continuing).
|
| Would anyone have a list of well tested Linux + Proton compatible
| components?
|
| Nvidia or AMD? Which drivers are better maintained at this point?
| It would still be cool to run some machine learning workloads for
| fun of course.
|
| Any pointers would be appreciated.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| My current experience on alder lake + Nvidia 30 series isn't
| quite a smooth enough experience to move my non-technical
| fiancee over, but it's close enough that I've considered it.
|
| The AMD drivers are mainlined and they've gotten a lot better
| about stability than where they were a couple years ago. Valve
| has done a lot of compatibility testing/fixes for the steamdeck
| as well.
|
| The Nvidia drivers are also pretty stable and many distros
| provide them out of the box. They're still going to be your
| main choice for ML stuff.
|
| For CPUs both Intel and AMD are extremely well supported. There
| are generally more eyes on the Intel side though.
| eggsome wrote:
| For GPU: AMD (but not _too_ cutting edge is the easy answer
| here). Any of the Radeon 6000 series will work well out of the
| box with recent open source kernels.
|
| CPU wize Intel/AMD does not matter.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| Basically anything recent but not the latest components will
| work well. If you want hassle-free then going with amd
| everything is the most efficient IMO.
|
| I'm running a ryzen 3600 and a radeon rx5700xt, and i've not
| had any driver issues, be it with x11 or wayland. I've been
| playing a bunch of games from my library but there are still
| some games that aren't compatible (for ex. Vermintide 2 has
| non-compatible anticheat) so i keep a spartan windows instal on
| a 128gb ssd for those and VR. VR is a non-starter on linux.
|
| That being said, nvidia has RT cores now, which can do very
| fast matrix multiplication which is advantageous for ML
| workloads (on top of a lot of ml work being optimized for cuda
| cores). Can't speak to their drivers but older cards should be
| safer, especially considering the 40 series hasn't been shown
| to be worth it over used 30 series.
| terribleperson wrote:
| Go with wired networking or be careful about your choice of
| WiFi hardware. Some wireless chipsets have poor Linux support,
| but there are usually lists of good ones and bad ones. When it
| comes to graphics, AMD GPUs Vega or newer work incredibly well
| on Linux. NVidia has a fairly substantial lead in GPU
| performance, but they have poor Linux support and appear to be
| actively working to make their hardware a bad deal. Most
| motherboards have no issues on Linux, but audio and networking
| can be pain points. CPU brand is not an issue with Linux, but
| since your choice of CPU and choice of motherboard are tied
| together, it is something you might have to think about.
| Perhaps pick a price, find AMD and Intel motherboards that
| support the features you want and have good Linux
| compatibility, and then figure out which brand gets you better
| performance at that price with your desired feature set.
|
| Hardware that requires a proprietary windows app to control can
| be a problem - think RGB hardware and fancy gaming mice. There
| is some software to work with these sorts of things and you can
| get Logitech gaming mice working on Linux but it is somewhat
| harder than it should be. Stay away from Razer - their software
| is more troublesome than anyone else's.
|
| Steam has absolutely incredible controller support. It is
| ludicrously good. If you want to play games on PC with a
| controller, hope they're Steam games or at least work well when
| launched through steam.
|
| Use PCPartPicker when you're putting together your build. Their
| website is a wonderful tool for checking compatibility even
| though it's not perfect. If you ask someone for advice on your
| build, being able to give them a PCPartPicker link really
| speeds things up. If you're looking for a place to get advice
| on a build, /r/buildapc is generally decent.
|
| If you're concerned about upgradeability or future-proofing,
| it's not a great time for that on the CPU front. AMD's AM5
| socket just came out and probably has a good few years ahead of
| it, but the first-generation motherboards are awfully expensive
| and you should never buy first gen mobos anyways. It is also
| quite possible they will have poor support for Zen 5 CPUs.
| Intel's LGA 1200 socket is obsolete and current LGA 1700
| motherboards probably won't support anything past the 13th
| generation (Raptor Lake). That said, a new mid or high-end CPU
| is likely to remain useful for many years since popular games
| are somewhat limited by the need to support 9th gen consoles.
| Similar is true for GPUs, but GPU prices are not great at the
| moment though they are better than they have been in the past
| few years.
|
| If you have any other questions let me know.
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