5 ms·

People up-voting this only to read later and find out what Proton is. I thought WINE was the Windows Emulation Layer on Linux. Although, of course, Wine Is Not

• lucideer 8y ago
  > what Proton is. I thought WINE was the Windows Emulation Layer on Linux Proton is just a fork of WINE[0], with a gaming focus and some Steam-specific compatibility additions. [0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/ https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/
  • __bjoernd 8y ago
    And it works great! I'm using it to run Windows-only games on Linux without issues. (I'm not playing extremely demanding titles, though.)
    • kzrdude 8y ago
      Nice, can you install custom ones or do they need to be from steam?
  • ekianjo 8y ago
    Yeah, more specifically: - DXVK, a translation layer for DX10/11 to Vulkan - ESync - Wine - Proper overlay support within Steam
    • SXX 8y ago
      You forgot another important part: - Official Steamworks support without need to also run Windows version of Steam. Most games on Steam use Steamworks for multiplayer and while there was steam bridge before, but it's wasn't official.
      • ekianjo 8y ago
        Yup, I missed that part. thanks.
  • simonh 8y ago
    I'm a big fan of Porting Kit, a Mac app that has a library of pre-configured Wine wrappers for windows games, the installers for which are usually obtained from GOG or Steam. It worked really well. Currently enjoying Far Cry 2 on my iMac.
    • ekianjo 8y ago
      The equivalent on Linux is Lutris.
• stuxnet79 8y ago
  WINE abstracts away the operating system kernel so it is essentially a process or application VM, which is an emulator. Don't wanna argue semantics but I never understood the recursive acronym. WINE _is_ an emulator.
  • simion314 8y ago
    I am thinking at it from this point of view, say you create a library named libmath and you put a function in it named add. Then someone makes an app that uses your libmath named MathApp. If I reimplemnt libmath myself, then do some trickery to make MathApp use my version did I emulate your library or reimplement it? IMO I reimplemented it and it is very possible that my implementation could be less buggy and faster in some cases.
  • swebs 8y ago
    It's because when most people hear "emulator" they think of hardware emulators, which have a huge performance penalty. WINE is just translating x86 code to x86 code with minimal to no performance loss, so they want to distance themselves from the emulator label.
    • gnode 8y ago
      > translating x86 code to x86 code My understanding is that it doesn't do any of this. Windows programs generally don't make direct syscalls, they're undocumented and only used by Microsoft-written DLLs. Wine provides a re-implementation of these DLLs suitable for Unix-like systems. The code of the program itself is untranslated and runs as-is with no performance loss.
  • yellowapple 8y ago
    I guess if you'd call Java an "emulator", then you could probably do the same for Wine.
  • msla 8y ago
    > WINE abstracts away the operating system kernel WINE is an emulator to the same extent libc is an emulator, then.