[HN Gopher] 5 years ago Valve released Proton
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5 years ago Valve released Proton
Author : chungus
Score : 211 points
Date : 2023-08-21 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gamingonlinux.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gamingonlinux.com)
| MrDresden wrote:
| Threw my Windows partition away 4 years ago and haven't looked
| back since. Steam has earned my business with their work on
| Proton.
| heyoni wrote:
| I keep windows for 1 reason: call of duty. all those games with
| kernel level anticheats have trouble running on linux
| apparently :\
| gpderetta wrote:
| I have had luck running CoD on a VM with GPU passtrough. It
| is not necessarily less cumbersome than dual booting though.
| heyoni wrote:
| That is my next goal right right after I master NixOS! The
| learning curve is steep for nix itself and I know vfio is
| no walk in the park. I want to make sure if I'm doing
| complicated stuff like that, I can at least roll things
| back to a clean state if they break.
| frio wrote:
| I followed this path too; it all worked, but the magic
| vfio incantations can change kernel to kernel, so there
| was always a fair bit of maintenance involved. I'd use
| Proton for 95% of my games, so whenever I had to fall
| back to vfio/Windows for a game for a while, everything
| would've changed. NixOS made this manageable, but it was
| never pleasant.
|
| Have fun with the project; I'd be curious to know if
| (like me) you end up (sadly!) continuing to dual-boot for
| Windows only games. VFIO seemed like the dream end goal,
| and maybe it's gotten better since 2021, but for me at
| least, it got in the way more often than not.
|
| I have rigged up a non-VFIO VM that boots off the same
| Windows partition though, so that I can log into it and
| run Windows updates once in a while without needing to do
| a full reboot.
| heyoni wrote:
| I'll let you know. My priorities as far as "difficult
| things i desperately need to do" include better note-
| taking (org mode/roam) and learning enough about AI to
| put it to use. VFIO is definitely a dream but with dual
| booting it's also at the bottom of my list.
| deergomoo wrote:
| I picked up a Steam Deck recently and aside from when I've booted
| into the desktop mode to set up some emulators you'd never know
| it was running games through a compatibility layer. Truly
| incredible work from Valve.
|
| Technical impressiveness aside it's a really nice device too--I
| like having something that feels mostly like a console in the "it
| just works" factor, but still allows me to do some fiddling if
| and when I want to.
| haunter wrote:
| 11 years ago today (2012, Aug 21) Valve released CSGO forever
| changing gaming
|
| suka bliat'
| freeflight wrote:
| I'd argue the original mod/1.6 had a much bigger impact on
| gaming than CSGO.
|
| The impact of Steam, as the first digital distribution platform
| for video games, is probably magnitudes bigger again.
|
| Valve was _so far_ ahead of the competition, and still remains
| there to this day.
|
| Which is kind of a miracle, in some alternate timeline we could
| have ended with EA as the patron of PC gaming.
| calderknight wrote:
| Don't look at a calendar, it will be a depressing experience.
| haunter wrote:
| Damn yes my bad
| calderknight wrote:
| Covid years flew past
| baq wrote:
| The days were long though
| asmor wrote:
| to be fair, CSGO was a failure for the first few years of its
| existence. so it's likely you're remembering it best from
| around 2016.
|
| all I know is that I have the operation payback challenge
| coin, but no real memory of those maps. i do wish they'd
| bring back some of the operation maps... (santorini anyone?)
| calderknight wrote:
| As it happens, I was an early adopter. I have my 10-year
| badge just from CSGO. I was SMFC in ~2013 (it was easy at
| that point in time, I get destroyed now).
|
| The game has changed a lot. The original version of CSGO
| wasn't even made by Valve Software. But every map in the
| Active pool is either a totally new map, or is an old one
| that's been re-built from the ground up.
|
| And I have a few skins and a bunch of cases left over from
| back then. They were worth $0.03 each back then. But the
| game has grown 500x so demand has increased while the cases
| actually reduce in supply over time...
| freeflight wrote:
| As far as I remember CSGO did way better than CS:Source,
| which never really caught on until the point where it
| became a bit of a "retro" curiosity.
| sph wrote:
| For the first time. I'm surprised it's been _only_ 11 years. It
| feels like aeons ago since I got my MG2 rank playing
| competitive pretty much every day.
|
| I guess I'll have to brush up my rusty AK one taps again when
| the new Counter Strike comes along.
| NietTim wrote:
| Just went and checked, out of my top 20 games only flight
| simulator and space engineers do not work. I had completely
| missed that proton has come so far...I think this means I can
| finally truly ditch windows on my game/virtualisation machine
| mschuster91 wrote:
| One thing that I'd _love_ to see is a Proton version for M1 /M2
| Apple Silicon... UTM is the only thing that runs x86 VMs and for
| whatever reason its QEMU guest tool drivers are all completely
| buggy and everything is dog slow (and of course, Windows refusing
| to load unsigned drivers on Win7 x64 makes trying out different
| drivers pretty much impossible).
| kcb wrote:
| Blame Apple for not implementing Vulkan on their GPUs. If they
| had a fully compliant Vulkan driver I'm sure gaming on Mac
| would be at parity with Linux very quickly.
| bhj wrote:
| MoltenVK exists. You might also be interested in this thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30755407
| kcb wrote:
| From reading about dev effort to support Mac with DXVK,
| there are certain things Metal/MoltenVK doesn't support
| directly. So current compatibility requires more hacking as
| well as the additional layer of translation to hurt
| performance.
|
| Metal is fine, Vulkan support as well would be ideal.
| shmerl wrote:
| MoltenVK is explicitly not enough for vkd3d-proton. It
| lacks features that are now mandatory for acceptable
| performance. So lack of native Vulkan there is surely a
| deal breaker.
|
| I think VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer is a critical one, and
| there are probably more: https://www.khronos.org/blog/vk-
| ext-descriptor-buffer
|
| And that's Vulkan 1.3 which MoltenVK doesn't support (yet):
| https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/1776
| cyberax wrote:
| Wine already supports running 64-bit binaries on Apple Silicon
| through Rosetta. 32-bit support is being worked on (it's
| experimental).
|
| So Proton should support it eventually.
| kcb wrote:
| The main thing that made Proton possible was the advent of
| DXVK.
| stetrain wrote:
| Yep, if Apple could get over their stubbornness and work with
| Valve on this it would be fantastic for customers of both
| companies.
|
| Apple has done some work with their game porting toolkit to
| support certain flavors of DirectX games with a combo of Wine
| and Rosetta. But this isn't officially pitched as tool for end
| users to run Windows games.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Why not switch to linux though? You know there's some real
| cool hardware available out there that looks and feels way
| better than a mac, and battery aside, can do a lot more, is
| upgradeable and not locked in. Just a thought.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > You know there's some real cool hardware available out
| there that looks and feels way better than a mac
|
| Such as? And does it have Mac keyboard layout? Because it
| is absolutely superior to anything on non-Mac land.
| gumballindie wrote:
| I like the asus proart studiobook. It has the option of a
| 3d display without glasses. Dial doesnt work though, but
| the specs are pretty decent and build quality is great.
| Battery life is shit unless you shutdown some cores and
| apply other scriptable settings. Keyboard feels better
| than any macbook i ever owned, better than the magic
| keyboard. Ram, hdds and wifi card are upgradeable and are
| of pretty good specs. Screen resolution is high, has a
| touchscreen, high refresh rate, usb, thunderbolt and hdmi
| ports, etc.
|
| But you know taste is personal and there are plenty other
| options.
| franga2000 wrote:
| What's different about the mac layout? Looks fairly
| standard to me, even the labels seem the same, apart from
| the trivially remappable
| control/alt/command/meta/whatever keys...
| swozey wrote:
| This is hilariously biased. This is HN, you're not talking
| to people who don't know what Linux is. Hell, a huge
| portion of us are linux engineers of various sorts. You're
| also in a thread literally about a linux app.
|
| Anyway. I would never, ever use Linux as a desktop
| environment over OSX after the experiences I've had with it
| over the last 20+ years. OSX GUI applications absolutely
| blow everything that Linux has out of the water. I don't
| care if we're talking KDE, i3, dwm, cinnamon. The worst
| part about OSX applications is they aren't cheap. Even
| small apps like Soundsource a
| https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/ are usually $30+ but
| they are _fantastic._
|
| The thought of using pipewire and all the configuration
| hell you have to do to it to make it like Soundsource is a
| complete turn off. OSX apps work. They integrate. They look
| great and there are a LOT of them that do pretty unique
| things that I haven't seen in Windows or Linux.
|
| I work on Linux 8 hours a day from OSX and about 30% of my
| time is using Win11 on my gaming desktop.
|
| Also, now that I'm on an m1 max there is no way in the
| world I'm going back to x86 as my productivity machine.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > I would never, ever use Linux as a desktop environment
| over OSX after the experiences I've had with it over the
| last 20+ years.
|
| You probably had enough of it. I'd be sick of it after 20
| years even if it were the shiniest option out there.
| swozey wrote:
| lol You're 100% right. I don't enjoy fixing linux at all
| after work. I used to do the VFIO GPU gaming desktop w/
| linux + windows passthrough but I finally got over it and
| just installed windows on my desktop.
| gumballindie wrote:
| And there's not a single problem with that. Though these
| days you dont need to hack much for gaming.
| augusto-moura wrote:
| This reply is also biased, maybe we had some bad
| experience in the past, but the example you made,
| Pipewire, is one of the things I was stunned that worked
| out of the box. It is relatively recent but it is already
| installed by default on most modern distros, and no
| "configuration hell" required. Linux applications might
| not be as good-looking as most of Apple store ones, but
| most of them sure work.
|
| I'm not saying that you should switch to Linux, you do
| you, and to be honest Linux is not that friendly anyway.
| But that is not reason to stone linux to death, the
| parent comment is not even that offensive for MacOS
| users, it just asks if switching to linux would be an
| option, as an thought
| swozey wrote:
| You didn't spend one millisecond looking at what I'm
| comparing Pipewire to. Of course my post is biased. Any
| Linux user telling me that "Linux does more than OSX" is
| getting my biased reply.
| MBCook wrote:
| > if Apple could get over their stubbornness and work with
| Valve
|
| Maybe Value should give more an 10% of a thought to the Mac
| and make Steam not be terrible on the Mac first.
|
| They don't care about the Mac. They only care about Linux
| because it lets them ship the Steam Deck and have a hedge
| against MS.
|
| The Mac is worse than an afterthought.
| augusto-moura wrote:
| Valve already had Wine on Linux to work with. Although we
| have Wine on Mac now, it is a subpar experience. Aside from
| that, Vulkan on MacOS never received official support from
| Apple
|
| I would say Valve stand on the shoulder of giants with Wine
| and Vulkan, they just had tl connect the dots between the
| two.
|
| If Apple itself would respect its gamer users it could
| spend sometime on these open projects, but knowing Apple,
| if they do anything it would be on a closed-source vendor
| lock-in style
| adhamsalama wrote:
| Why would Valve do this for a trillion-dollar walled-
| garden?
| grug_htmx_dev wrote:
| Mac is just another tightly closed platform, Valve could
| get squeezed from by Apple at any time. There's just no
| reason to invest in it.
|
| If you can afford a Mac, you can afford a Steam Deck.
| sph wrote:
| They did care about Linux, which was an even smaller market
| that doesn't like to spend money and doesn't like closed
| source and DRM. Yet now everybody is singing their praises.
|
| It stands to reason that Steam on Mac is bad in comparison
| because of Apple.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Surely, Apple can sponsor contributions to make it work, as
| Valve does.
| e12e wrote:
| What about the Apple tax, though? They have their own store
| to think of.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| That is only a thing on i(Pad)OS. There's nothing to my
| knowledge preventing anyone from running their own app
| store on macOS - Steam purchases work fine, the entire
| Adobe suite does, as do Macports and Homebrew.
| jshier wrote:
| Apple's Game Porting Toolkit
| (https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10123/) is
| essentially Proton for macOS. However, they've bizarrely
| restricted its use to testing your own games, and don't offer
| it as a general Proton-like solution for playing Windows games
| on macOS. You can't ship a game that uses it.
| idle76 wrote:
| Also check out Glorious Eggroll on Gihub for even better
| performance.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| On the topic of GE, anyone try his custom Fedora distro,
| Nobara[1] and has any feedback on it?
|
| Is it daily-drivable on a laptop without any issues, and stable
| long term without any breakages? Not just for gaming, but for
| daily entertainment and productivity task of those with one
| distro for everything?
|
| I tried installing it a while back and found the default
| installer partitioning much more janky and messed up GRUB
| making my system unbootable, unlike other "Just Works(tm)"
| distros like Ubuntu, EndevourOS or Mint where they worked
| flawless on multi-boot systems.
|
| I'm not knocking it, I can imagine it's tough for a single
| developer to do all that and test everything, it would just be
| cool to know if it's gotten some polish now and how stable it
| is to daily drive.
|
| [1] https://nobaraproject.org/
| johnny22 wrote:
| I've only heard good things about it, but i see no reason to
| use it. making fedora do what it does is easy enough.
| slikrick wrote:
| "Easy enough" sure, you keep up with all those patches,
| manually, on your own system, then say it.
|
| This site literally can't not be pretentious
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> This site literally can't not be pretentious_
|
| Infamous Dropbox comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| johnny22 wrote:
| most of those things other than the codecs and steam from
| rpmfusion just aren't necessary for most folks is all.
|
| I'm not trying to shame folks from using an easy route.
| You read my comment extremely uncharitably.
|
| I do think one should be careful of relying on a project
| with a bus factor of 1 for your OS.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> i see no reason to use it. making fedora do what it does
| is easy enough_
|
| Yes, people working in tech and with free time can do that,
| but many don't want to go down that rabbit hole anymore and
| fiddle with their OS to get it to where Nobara is, and
| would rather go for something that's already preconfigured
| out of the box for the best gaming experience where
| everything is already set and you can immediately start
| installing and playing games after installing the OS,
| similarly to Windows is. That's the whole point of these
| distros.
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| I have it installed on my gaming PC. It is fine
| everdrive wrote:
| I've been running solely on Linux since something like 2015. I
| was primarily on Linux from ~2006 or so, but did switch to
| Windows for a couple of years to play some Windows games. (this
| was before Proton really existed)
|
| I'm probably less technically savvy than a lot of the HN crowd,
| and I just have not ever had a significant problem running linux.
| For sure, I've avoided some problems by being picky about what
| PCs I buy. But for the most part it's been pretty pain free.
| Running Linux full-time has been effortless and easy. And thanks
| to Valve, gaming on Linux gets better every year. I played Elden
| Ring on launch, and on launch, it actually played better than PC.
|
| To the extent that HN types have trouble with Linux, I can only
| imagine it's because they're doing _more_ on their PC than me.
| ie, they have some software or project that just needs to run a
| certain way. For sure, Linux isn't always perfect for that.
| sph wrote:
| Linux is great for both the non-techie layman and the computer
| wiz. Those that complain are the majority on people you
| frequent on HN which know enough shell commands to be dangerous
| but couldn't unfuck a broken fstab.
|
| Which is fine, mind you, just pointing out that most people
| that are NOT in tech would find Linux very usable, if not more
| usable than Windows.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| For someone with a Mac (non Apple Silicon), does it make sense to
| run Linux in a VM in order to play Proton-supporting Steam games?
| SirMaster wrote:
| Proton might be great for the game itself. But something needs to
| be done about anti-cheat.
|
| I only play multi-player games, and when I search ProtonDB none
| of the games I play say they are supported.
|
| Call of Duty, Battlefield 2042, Rainbow 6 Seige, PUGB, Destiny 2
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I don't know how common it is, but the AI War developers posted
| recently about their new game & said Steam recommended they drop
| their Linux port, saying that just relying on Proton would be
| better performing & a better use of time.
|
| I'm very curious how widespread this advice is. It's a little sad
| & ironic to me if Proton is now entrenching Windows as the only
| target platform. I'm hoping this wasn't blanket advice Valve is
| handing out but really something specific to the team.
| stonogo wrote:
| Seems a pretty obvious way to preserve value-add in the face of
| competing game services. GOG and so forth don't have Proton, so
| the simplest moat to build is to curtail native Linux
| development and protect Proton's status as the "default"
| approach to getting games running there.
| olliej wrote:
| I mean that's what Apple has done with "Game Porting Kit" -
| valve has pushed "windows is the platform" to such an extent
| that no one even tries to write portable code for games and
| just targets directx.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| If the devs test with Proton, then I don't see a problem.
| Proton is open source, so the future of games that run well
| with Proton seems secure.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Do you want more games to be played on Linux or not? Because
| we've been trying the whole "please target native Linux" thing
| for awhile now and it simply isn't appealing enough to ever
| work.
|
| Evangelism is useless in the face of results.
| memefrog wrote:
| >Do you want more games to be played on Linux or not?
|
| This is meaningless if you change the definition of "on
| Linux" to mean "on Windows".
| ShamelessC wrote:
| "on Windows" is no longer a worthwhile phrase when it
| simply means "targeting a Linux/Windows shared
| compatibility ABI".
|
| There are more functioning games on Linux than I ever would
| have thought possible because of this (very difficult and
| certainly open source) work that's been done by Wine,
| Proton, Valve and many many more. But of course, someone
| has to find a way to discourage all of that because it
| isn't pure enough or whatever.
| COGlory wrote:
| Proton almost always runs better than Linux native. Windows is
| the only stable ABI on Linux, now.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Arguably, WINE has always been the most stable ABI on Linux.
| Good luck just getting a 5-year-old binary of any desktop
| file manager running on a modern Linux installation.
|
| I'm dead serious. Grab a copy of Nautilus or GNOME Files from
| Ubuntu 16.04; try running it on Ubuntu 22.04. It isn't easy.
| Now imagine a game.
| memefrog wrote:
| Why would you try to run Nautilus from 16.04 on 22.04? It
| was distributed in a way designed to be run on 16.04.
|
| Are you under some weird delusion that you are forced on
| Linux to develop software in one particular way?
| crickey wrote:
| This is only because of the nature of dynamic linking. Have
| a statically linked executable and you should be fine. Not
| that it should be an issue to get old software to run you
| simply need to download the dependent lib versions. Anyone
| who sais this i feel hasnt worked very much with software,
| not that you should need to thats up to the one
| distributing the executable
| brigade wrote:
| What you mean is: the only stable ABI in Linux is the
| Linux kernel's itself.
|
| Windows is the opposite: the only stable ABI is the
| dynamically linked user space ABI. So yes, it's perfectly
| possible to have a stable dynamic ABI across a
| dynamically linked boundary.
| memefrog wrote:
| >Windows is the opposite: the only stable ABI is the
| dynamically linked user space ABI.
|
| ... to the kernel. So not the opposite at all. In fact
| exactly the same.
| brigade wrote:
| No. The userspace/kernel boundary is explicitly _not_
| stable on Windows, and binaries that try to use that
| interface _have_ broken when it changed.
| imtringued wrote:
| There used to be operating systems where the only stable
| interface was glibc.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Unless you statically linked GTK, possibly Xorg, and more
| into a ludicrous bundle size, you'd still be screwed.
|
| As for "just get the libs," that's hilariously easier
| said than done. Try my example - it's enough to make an
| engineer cry.
| crickey wrote:
| https://www.x.org/wiki/Releases/
| https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/linux/ I mean it
| will probably not be painless and other applications u
| run might break* but xorg is relativly stable. Liba are
| out there are free to get. Usually people are arguing
| that the conveniences isnt there not that its not
| possible.
|
| * if u dont sandbox this a bit with custom lib paths
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I didn't dispute that it isn't possible.
|
| What I am disputing is how this comes off to a game
| developer; 5 years from now, heck, 2 years from now when
| their games require library surgery to keep running...
| that's just an awful experience.
|
| That is not what a developer would consider a stable ABI.
| They could look into Flatpak - but look at what's
| trending on Hacker News today - a rant against Flatpak.
|
| Win32 over Proton is the winner for them; all other
| proposed solutions are hilariously naive and optimistic
| to what game development requires. No game developer is
| ever going to individually package, and consistently
| repackage, their game for 20 distributions. That's never
| going to happen.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > No game developer is ever going to individually
| package, and consistently repackage, their game for 20
| distributions.
|
| Nor do they. Steam Linux Runtime exists.
| crickey wrote:
| Well u sure made an effort to exclaim how hard it would
| be. If a developer had an install guide with links to
| dependencies or mirrors to those dependencies it wouldnt
| be very hard as they should have internally for their
| dev/ testing. Do windows devs not track their
| dependencies? Relying only on Win32 ? Whos the naive one
| ?
| memefrog wrote:
| There is no "library surgery". This is EXACTLY what
| people are forced to do on Windows already: bundle all
| dependencies.
|
| >No game developer is ever going to individually package,
| and consistently repackage, their game for 20
| distributions. That's never going to happen.
|
| Nobody has suggested they should.
| filmor wrote:
| Your example doesn't make sense. Linux distributions have
| always had this trade off: Binaries provided through the
| package manager work with the libraries that are provided
| by the same package manager. I have a bunch of older gog
| or Humble Bundle Linux releases of games that still work
| fine on my system because (Windows style) they carry
| around all of their libraries with them. Linking Xorg
| doesn't make sense and applications linked statically
| against libX11 will work perfectly fine even with
| Xwayland.
| memefrog wrote:
| No video game has any use for GTK+.
|
| XLib is tiny by modern standards.
| simion314 wrote:
| >No video game has any use for GTK+
|
| my memory might be wrong but I had issues with native
| linux games that had level editor based on GTK and
| python, could not get them to run after 3 years since
| launch, I do not claim it is impossible just that I could
| not do it with some a few hours effort.
| saltcured wrote:
| Proton leads to some bizarre behaviors though. My worst
| experience is on a surplus "mobile workstation" with Optimus
| graphics. It has a pretty robust Intel quad-core and one of
| their better iGPUs as well as an NVIDIA Quadro M5000M which
| has decent VRAM and should compare almost to a GTX 1650.
|
| The packages pulled in by steam define a bunch of vulkan
| providers which then confuses steam. Many games won't even
| launch and you have to manually kill off a bunch of steam
| worker processes to even successfully shutdown and restart
| steam. You can't uninstall the package due to dependencies,
| so instead have to manually move/rename some files under
| /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/ to only leave the one for NVIDIA.
|
| Then, games launch but have very inconsistent performance. I
| don't know if this is because Optimus is competing with the
| game for PCIe bandwidth, or something else still going awry
| with the driver stack.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Steam recommended they drop their Linux port, saying that
| just relying on Proton would be better performing & a better
| use of time. I'm very curious how widespread this advice is.
| It's a little sad & ironic to me if Proton is now entrenching
| Windows as the only target platform._
|
| Very. Win32 ABI is the most stable and rock solid compared to
| the messy moving target of the Linux world, so recommending it
| is not entrenching Windows, just very good advice to save time
| and resources to target a platform that's alredy known and
| stable, and since the target is fixed and well known, it makes
| it also very easy to emulate on their end for Linux.
|
| As much as FOSS-Linux evangelists hate it, Win32 emulated on
| Linux is better for everyone, than tryin to port games natively
| on Linux, and makes the most business sense of you want the
| same games on Linux.
| jhbadger wrote:
| It will be interesting to see if the Win32 ABI survives as a
| standard into the future beyond the point that Windows itself
| will continue to run it in in the same sense that commodity
| PCs are still based on the IBM PC architecture even years
| after IBM itself stopped making PCs.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| The other technical solution to this problem is flatpak (and
| the others in this space). They vendor the libs (including
| libc) so you avoid the linking issues.
|
| In the gaming world where steam installs apps itself and you
| need the Windows version for commercial viability anyways, it
| does make sense to push them to win32.
|
| Outside of gaming though, I don't really see this being the
| case. You random desktop apps are better off with flatpak and
| distros like Fedora are already moving everything that
| direction. Flathub also has the benefit of allowing devs to
| push to one repo and support multiple distros (again, like
| Steam).
| mistrial9 wrote:
| do you have first-hand knowledge of the structure of the code
| base that ports to both Linux and Windows for this particular
| game?
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Valve and others have explained it already why in general
| terms that apply to all games on the native vs emulated
| situation, no need to go into the pedantic details of one
| specific game.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| as a framework author and C++ coder, the code base
| structure is not "excessively concerned with minor
| details and rules or with displaying academic learning."
| -- certainly not for you in any case, by your own
| statement
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| No need to be snarky and flash your coding street cred to
| make yourself big and make me look dumb.
|
| I'm not the smartest tool in the shed, but I was not
| trying to be snarky and undermine your superiority or
| downplay your question, I was just saying it doesn't
| matter as the end goal is to get Windows games playable
| on Linux, and for that Proton emulation is the way that
| makes sense financially and practically for both
| developers and gamers, so no need to dive into the
| codebases and compare them, just to prove a point that's
| moot from the get-go.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Is it still called win32 nowadays? Because that name has
| existed for a very long time now, and early win32 stuff
| doesn't even run on windows without sysWOW64 stuff. I'm sure
| some versioning more granular than windows version names
| exists, but the extent of my windows knowledge is
| occasionally reading newoldthing.
| runjake wrote:
| IIRC, it's called the Windows API now, with Win64 being the
| active variant on modern Windows. It is essentially Win32
| with 64-bit additions.
|
| The Win32/low-level Windows programmers I know still just
| refer to it as "Win32", though.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| I don't know what the modern ABI is called, I only quoted
| what was in the back of my head so I could be wrong on the
| name but my point still stands.
| memefrog wrote:
| >Win32 ABI is the most stable and rock solid compared to the
| messy moving target of the Linux world,
|
| Blatant lie bordering on disinformation.
|
| The only reason it is a "stable ABI" is that every dev of
| every windows program bundles every library with their
| program. You could do the same thing on Linux and the
| stability "story" would be exactly the same, or in fact even
| better on Linux because Win32 isnt actually stable and the
| Linux system call ABI is.
| becurious wrote:
| No, they don't. They may bundle additional DLLs but all
| those DLLs call the win32 APIs.
| kcb wrote:
| Plenty of games require VC++ redistributable to be
| installed. I have all of them from 2008 to 2022 installed
| right now without issue.
| baq wrote:
| Sad? A bit. Wrong? Not in the slightest. WinAPI is the stable
| Linux ABI now, that's simply the status quo.
| memefrog wrote:
| Repeating this FUD meme over and over again does not make it
| true. Yes we get it. You read an upvoted HN comment once that
| said "Windows API is the stable Linux ABI now" and know you
| can get upvoted if you just repeat it. But it is simply
| false.
| baq wrote:
| My steam deck doesn't need opinions to work. It just does.
| ndjdjfjfj wrote:
| _> relying on Proton would be better performing _
|
| I tried Overwatch 2 with Proton and performance was abysmal. My
| computer seemed to be melting and FPS was jumping all over the
| place.
|
| It does 144fps on Windows 11 without sweating (same PC).
| netbioserror wrote:
| I highly recommend tweaking things like Proton versions (try
| GloriousEggroll for example). I've been playing OW and OW2 on
| Linux for years, had very few issues since the beginning and
| excellent framerates.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Yep. It also really depends on your hardware.
|
| In my experience, I had no problem playing Overwatch 1 at
| 144fps through Proton on my 1050ti.
| acomjean wrote:
| I have a notebook (Nvidia 10xx something gpu), 8th gen intel
| I think. It gets plenty warm playing games, but the games
| play fine on PopOS. The fact that they run is pretty great.
|
| But I think of the steam deck which is basically a Linux PC.
| Its lowerer spec, low power, but it seems to run pretty well
| without terrible battery life.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| GP isn't saying that Linux is faster than Windows; they are
| saying that a Windows app running under Proton under Linux is
| faster than a native Linux app running under Linux.
| vinyl7 wrote:
| Game developers have stated that the support requests they get
| for Linux outweighs the revenue they get from supporting it.
| There are so many distros with different packages/dependencies,
| drivers, package managers etc. that it's very time consuming to
| keep up and not worth it.
| johnny22 wrote:
| Steam has provided their own container runtime for quite some
| time, so the packaging and dpendendies are a lot of a problem
| if you only distribute on steam.
|
| I still prefer they go with the proton approach though.
| taeric wrote:
| I recall seeing similar with major caveats, though. The
| general "make linux support and they will come" crowd is
| clearly too big to be meaningful. That said, there was a
| story of someone that had a bug cut from a linux user that
| commented how it was one of their best support cases ever.
| User was engaged and willing/able to work with them in ways
| that few support cases are.
|
| As such, this is a mixed bag. Actual users that cut support
| issues from random machines will be worth trying to engage
| with. General cries that you should support it with no
| payment in play should likely be ignored, though.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Like many others here have said, Valve has won a loyal customer.
| The impact proton has over linux as desktop is unmeasurable. They
| did open source right, and they will likely benefit massively
| from it.
| hanniabu wrote:
| I really wish the linux community would polish off the UX for
| ubuntu so it's more attractive and usable for mainstream
| barbs wrote:
| I think these days there are other distros that do it better,
| like Pop!_OS
| hanniabu wrote:
| In your opinion how does Pop!_OS it better?
| shmerl wrote:
| You don't need to use Ubuntu. A distro with recent KDE release
| is better.
| ilc wrote:
| I really wish Ubuntu would stop going their own way and work
| with everyone else.
|
| And that's a more general comment than just this.
| dcgudeman wrote:
| If you think that UX polish is the reason why "mainstream"
| people use microsoft/apple products over linux you are really
| deluding yourself.
| mmercedes wrote:
| not a productive comment to call someone deluded without at
| least explaining why. The UX does seem like a significant
| hurdle to maintream adoption to me.
| stevepike wrote:
| Proton has earned steam my business forever. I haven't booted
| into Windows in over a year.
| makomk wrote:
| Valve have funded some good work on the underlying
| compatibility code, but their big contribution was really
| fixing a problem they themselves created. Lots of games expect
| to be able to call back to the Steam client for a license
| check, and this used to require running the Windows version of
| Steam which didn't work well (huge compatibility issues and it
| really didn't like being run at the same time as the Linux
| version). One of the big things enabling easy Linux gaming was
| a Valve-approved way to run Windows games under a compatibility
| layer and have them still connect to the same Linux client used
| to run native games.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| The big problem was directx, not steam_api.dll, which can be
| solved in many ways.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| Valve may have contributed to the issue initially, but can
| you blame them? There wasn't exactly an abundance of Linux
| Support before Valve came along either. Why would they
| support a Linux Steam client and the whole compatibility
| layer when the demand just didn't exist.
|
| Valve becoming big enough to break into the hardware market
| (first Steam Machines and then the Steam Deck) was the first
| time they had any incentive to care about the OS layer. They
| could've made some deal w/ Microsoft but instead went the
| open-source route to the benefit of everyone. Kudos to Valve.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| > but their big contribution was really fixing a problem they
| themselves created.
|
| I think it's a little bit of a stretch to say it's a problem
| they created - they were just a victim of their own success.
| They can't force developers to write games in a particular
| platform, and making games work under Linux is no small task.
|
| It was probably easier to stream games from a Windows
| machine, which was their first approach with Steam Link and
| Steam Machines. It kinda sorta worked, and what they saw was
| enough encouragement to go and build the Steam Deck. On top
| of that, CPUs/GPUs just weren't good enough 10 years ago to
| do what Valve wanted to do.
|
| So I think it's a little unfair to say they "created" this
| problem.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Nice! HDR is the one thing that keeps me booting to windows for
| games, but I am eagerly watching the progress. One day soon!
| heyoni wrote:
| is ray tracing also unsupported on linux?
| badsectoracula wrote:
| For me it is supported better on Linux than on Windows
| because my GPU (RX 5700 XT) does not actually have HW
| raytracing but Mesa has a software fallback for it :-P. If
| nothing else i was able to see what the fuss was all
| about[0][1][2].
|
| Though, well, performance was a tiny bit lacking as you can
| see (i actually had to modify the Quake RTX code to let me
| use lower resolution scale than the official binary allowed
| :-P).
|
| [0] https://i.imgur.com/3XNakAs.png
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/AKJInNg.png
|
| [2] https://i.imgur.com/faagg2Q.png
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Varies from game to game. I know it works in Cyberpunk 2077
| but you need to include some special launch parameters.
| Portal RTX just worked. RTX in Control doesn't work even
| with config changes.
| erinnh wrote:
| Absolutely agree.
|
| I was starting to diversify my store fronts before Valve came
| out with the Deck.
|
| But the release of it and the message it sent (that they take
| this seriously), made me reverse course and now I always buy my
| games on Steam, even if it costs 10 euro more.
| solardev wrote:
| FYI Steam has a ton of legit resellers with their own sales.
| The keys all activate on Steam.
|
| Isthereanydeal.com
|
| Valve will be fine :)
| erinnh wrote:
| Oh, I use those. But even then it's sometimes more
| expensive to buy it on steam than say Uplay or Epic.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| Same. I just hate that so many games I want are exclusive to
| Epic. It's like they're _trying_ to make that store
| unpleasant to use.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> I just hate that so many games I want are exclusive to
| Epic._
|
| I miss the days when PC games weren't tied to some online
| webstore but came on a CD and the only DRM was a CD-key, no
| always online, no proprietary web store, just physical
| media that you could share with your friends.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I got rid of windows decades ago, so Steam has been the number
| one cause for my drop in productivity the last few years. And I
| love it.
| outcoldman wrote:
| Are you saying, that it is actually a good experience to run
| Linux on the gaming laptop instead of Windows with Proton? I
| already have Steam Deck, and love it. But if I want to play
| games in better resolution, I might boot my Windows Laptop.
| Have not tried Linux with Proton. On Linux laptop I have a
| NVIDIA some kind of 3xxx series card.
| shmerl wrote:
| I'm running all my games on Linux on a desktop. Haven't
| touched Windows in years.
| stevepike wrote:
| For me it is. Partly though that's because I boot windows so
| rarely that when I do I have to sit through a whole bunch of
| updates.
|
| I prefer linux to windows generally so the ability to game
| without re-booting is a bonus on top of that. If I preferred
| being in windows I wouldn't run linux just for gaming.
| mhh__ wrote:
| My steam deck has been basically flawless with its software
| with the exception of assetto corsa, because it needs a
| million .net installs.
| majewsky wrote:
| > it is actually a good experience to run Linux on the gaming
| laptop instead of Windows
|
| Not a laptop, but I am livestreaming games from a Linux
| desktop. In the roughly two years since I've started doing
| this on a regular basis, I have played 23 games on stream
| using Steam Proton. My experience matches what Steam Deck
| owners told me about compatibility. It's not been completely
| glitchless, but all the problems I ran into were minor
| graphics glitches. When I buy games, I check protondb.com in
| advance, and it's always either Platinum or Gold for me these
| days.
|
| I will note though that all the games I played were either
| single-player or cooperative multi-player. With competitive
| multi-player, there is an entire can of worms because of
| anti-cheat software. Valve's own anti-cheat should be fine,
| but if the game developer is using a different anti-cheat, it
| usually relies on Windows kernel drivers or some other
| shenanigans that conflicts with Wine in a major way.
| thewataccount wrote:
| I've used linux as my desktop for 2+ years.
|
| The games I play like CSGO work very well*, you have a
| steamdeck so you know how game support especially with anti
| cheat is.
|
| However, I've had many bugs. Nvidia on linux is painful. Just
| linux things - I get a bar at the top of the game when
| starting sometimes and have to change my resolution back and
| forth to fix it, I've had to restart pipewire to get my audio
| to reappear, I've had to replace pulse with pipewire (mid
| game).
|
| Linux is not smooth, ESPECIALLY with nvidia. If the games you
| play are well supported, use AMD graphics, and doesn't tinker
| with their system at all, on a very stable OS - maybe you
| could call it stable?
|
| Also if you want smooth - for the love of god don't use a
| rolling distro. If you check the arch wiki you'll see various
| nvidia/steam/wine/proton issues occur every few weeks. Many
| completely break playing games for several days unless you
| downgrade packages.
|
| tl;dr - I would not recommend linux as a desktop to anyone
| who doesn't mind having their nose in their terminal
| desperately trying to figure out why you have no audio while
| your friends grow tired waiting for you.
|
| The steamdeck specifically is very well managed by valve and
| I'm incredibly impressed that they made it work so well.
| stevepike wrote:
| Mostly agreed to all this.
|
| I've had a better experience since I switched from arch to
| ubuntu. For example steam remote play works w/ my Apple TV
| upstairs. Under arch I couldn't ever get it to work.
|
| I've had mixed experience with AMD vs Nvidia. I bought a
| 5700xt which was way less reliable than my old nvidia
| 980ti, which never once crashed under linux. I upgraded to
| a 6700xt last year and that's been smooth. I'd originally
| bought the AMD card hoping to run Wayland but am still on
| X11.
|
| I'm mostly playing single player games.
| neogodless wrote:
| Gaming on a Linux laptop with AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU was
| pretty good for the 2 months I did it. Not _great_ but
| definitely _good_. Biggest problem was with a AAA game on
| launch day. It actually worked decently, but had a crashing
| bug that was quickly fixed, and the performance was never as
| good as what it was once I switched back to Windows and ran
| that game. Another game had an issue with connecting to
| multiplayer games that I never resolved, but otherwise worked
| as well as Windows (for single player.) Everything else I
| played seemed basically the same as my experience in Windows.
|
| Longer version: https://www.retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm
| nstbayless wrote:
| I found that Elden Ring ran better on Proton on Linux than on
| native Windows on the same device. Loaded faster and ran more
| smoothly. I do not know why.
| heyoni wrote:
| I wonder if that has to do with anticheating mechanisms
| having to do a lot less work on a wine-based windows system
| than a full blown windows install.
| sph wrote:
| In the case of Elden Ring, not really, it was due to DXVK
| (whose developer is sponsored by Valve) having custom
| patches to workaround the weird DirectX streaming logic
| of the game that caused constant frame hiccups.
|
| So, on day 3 or something of release, Linux was the best
| platform to play the newest AAA game.
|
| The year of Linux gaming has been here for a while.
| _kidlike wrote:
| It usually has to do with a translation layer, converting
| DirectX to Vulkan (there are a few different ones,
| depending on the version of DirectX).
|
| And yes, gaming on Linux has been infinitely smoother and
| gets leaps of improvements every year. We're at a point
| where unreleased games already play on Linux, and
| typically with better performance than naively on
| Windows.
|
| Controllers, audio, etc, all play out of the box,
| perfectly, since years now
| ribosometronome wrote:
| There was a while around release for Elden Ring where Valve
| was able to rapidly deploy fixes that resulted in the Steam
| Deck running without stuttering issues that were effecting
| powerful Windows builds.
| https://www.techradar.com/news/steam-deck-plays-elden-
| ring-b...
|
| I'd hope that those issues eventually got resolved on
| Windows too...
| pdpi wrote:
| You're already gaming on linux with Proton on the deck.
| That's pretty much the experience you can expect.
| imtringued wrote:
| People still use windows?
| barbs wrote:
| What do you mean by "better resolution"? In my experience the
| resolution is the same on both OSs
| sph wrote:
| I hate DRM, I hate monopolies, I welcome competition, but if
| one builds a massive empire by just creating a bonafide good
| platform, single-handedly making open source desktop better,
| with _good_ customer support and treating users with respect,
| they deserve the money honestly.
|
| If one day I manage to build a billion dollar empire, my sole
| inspiration on how to conduct business is Gabe Newell. [1]
|
| Which is exactly the thing Epic can't compete on. They can give
| away all the free games they want, but Steam and Valve have
| done much more than offering games on sale.
|
| (I got a 13 year old account on Steam, more than 500 games
| bought, almost $10k spent on the platform. No Windows partition
| for the past 3 years)
|
| ---
|
| 1: I honestly couldn't name anybody else that has kept their
| company private, grown it to such heights and stayed true to
| their founding principles, without selling out to shareholders
| and advertisers for an easy buck.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| With the xbox 360 marketplace shutting down next year, will
| Steam be the longest running digital marketplace? That
| longevity is what earns my trust.
|
| Update: iTunes Store started in April 2003, Steam started
| selling third-party titles in late 2005 (around when the 360
| launched).
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| I haven't booted into Windows since 2009, thanks to Wine.
| Proton certainly expands its compatibility and support though,
| and I'll support any company that supports Linux, and Valve is
| one of the best ones.
| Zhyl wrote:
| When Proton came out I had multiple people on HN going on quite
| long rants about how Linux would never be viable for gaming.
|
| One multi-million-unit-selling handheld gaming system later and I
| don't see those arguments much anymore.
| throwaway89201 wrote:
| It makes for a very boring discussion (and makes this a boring
| comment) to recall some random person who ranted in a way that
| didn't age well. If you're going to make that point, at least
| link to the thread to allow reading some interesting comments
| there instead.
|
| If your memory is about [1], which is the first main topic on
| Proton, the criticism seems quite muted (and otherwise
| downvoted).
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17815892
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| It was a safe prediction to make. Even SEGA couldn't do a
| console anymore, Linux was behind MacOS in games support, all
| app developer companies whined about Linux being unsupportable
| and no market. "The year of the Linux desktop" was a recurring
| joke (still is with the GNOME / Unity churn, Wayland
| switchover, snaps breaking how GUI apps interact with a
| filesystem, and the usual perpetual churn for churn's sake
| making system support and OS upgrades a crapshoot).
| zeta0134 wrote:
| Well this is a topical place to ask this tangent I suppose. My
| GPU is on the fritz and I'm looking to replace it. Has anyone
| gotten SteamVR working decently under Linux through Proton? If
| so, what GPU do you have? It's basically impossible to search for
| information on this, but I really want to _develop_ for VR, and I
| 'd like to not have to boot into Windows to do it
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Proton is a remarkable accomplishment; I never believed it would
| have worked as well as it does. It helps that newer games are
| increasingly based on a couple of engines (Unity in particular)
| but its support for older games is also impressive.
|
| Proton is the basis of Chromebook's experimental Steam games
| support. It works pretty well, as well as Proton itself as far as
| I can tell.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I'd love to go Linux full-time on my gaming machine, but for now
| VR (Beat Saber, primarily) is keeping me tethered to Windows.
| It's no fault of Valve's, though... the blame falls entirely on
| Facebook for insisting on their proprietary Oculus client, not
| supporting Linux with that client, and not doing anything to make
| that client work with Proton/WINE.
| roody15 wrote:
| Playing Baldurs gate three on unbuntu. Haven't booted a windows
| machine at my home now in years!!
| sebazzz wrote:
| I run winesapOS[0] which is based on SteamOS and was able to
| repurpose an old Toshiba notebook for my kids, running Freddy
| Fish* and other games. Windows 10 doesn't run smoothly (even
| though it came with Windows 10) and I'm not going to run anything
| older than that.
|
| Steam also makes it very easy to switch between Proton versions.
| If version X doesn't work, perhaps version X-1 or X+1 does work,
| or even the experimental version.
|
| * Yes, ScummVM is available for Linux but the Steam Linux
| distribution included an old ScummVM which wasn't able to load
| some libraries. Running the Windows version through an
| compatibility layer was easier than modifying shell files to run
| the latest ScummVM through flatpak.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/LukeShortCloud/winesapOS
| abtinf wrote:
| It's been many years since I was current on the state of cross
| platform gaming.
|
| Is it possible that proton could become the de facto target
| platform?
|
| That is, if a developer builds to ensure that their game works
| correctly under proton, then will it also work correctly under
| windows? So by just ensuring it works under proton, which seems
| to be minimal effort, do they get access to the expanded market
| for "free"?
|
| Do any of the consoles support proton, so that the only barrier
| to releasing a game are the legal agreements?
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| Microsoft definitely wouldn't let that happen.
| chongli wrote:
| How will they prevent it?
| erinnh wrote:
| Force the move to their UWP platform even more?
|
| Only release DirectX 13 with UWP support etc.
| SoKamil wrote:
| UWP is dead.
| erinnh wrote:
| Is it?
|
| Not really up to date on Windows stuff, but isn't
| Microsoft only using UWP for all their (new) stuff?
|
| Xbox launcher and all games on it are UWP, aren't they?
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| UWP is dead, and a lot of the people who were pushing
| that weirdly locked in platform have been pushed out of
| the company.
|
| All future stuff is moving to WinUI 3.x (which belongs to
| the same family of C# XAML UI libraries, and Visual
| Studio has a wizard to help you turn your UWP app into a
| real C# app) _and_ the Microsoft Store is no longer
| locked to UWP apps only _and_ WinUI 3.x is officially
| supported on other non-CLR langs (such as calling it from
| C++ or Rust) _and_ WinUI 3.x is coming to non-Windows
| platforms (such as Linux).
|
| Microsoft isn't going to transform all their own apps
| overnight (for simple apps, updating a UWP app to a C#
| WinUI 3.x app buys you nothing), but will happen over
| time as WinUI 3.x-only features are added to those apps.
|
| Microsoft set themselves on this path starting uh, like 5
| years ago? They publicly announced it about 3 years ago.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Well, it's Microsoft, so every 5 years they release a new
| API/framework and declare the old one dead/obsolete. But
| they usually maintain backwards compatibility to their
| credit, and I almost never credit Microsoft with
| anything.
|
| whatever was before MFC (I remember using a Charles
| Petzold book in 1997) --> MFC --> dotNet (many versions)
| --> XAML/WPF --> UWP
|
| and I guess WinUI now.
| sznio wrote:
| Wine on Windows.
| peoplearepeople wrote:
| > Do any of the consoles support proton, so that the only
| barrier to releasing a game are the legal agreements?
|
| Steam deck
| augusto-moura wrote:
| Support for Proton doesn't imply full support on Windows out of
| the box, although it should be easier to fix problems on
| Windows than the other way around.
|
| The thing is, currently, having a game built for Windows
| directly produces a much more performant game on Windows. Wine
| still has some hiccups here and there.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Proton was the missing piece to Linux gaming/desktop. It's also a
| vital part of steam deck. Maybe someday we'll get a standard
| rendering pipeline :/ /s.
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