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I began gaming for the first time (unless you count playing on my roommates' XBox in college) this past week, mostly for The Witcher 2/3--both on Linux. The Wit

by qchris 6y ago

I began gaming for the first time (unless you count playing on my roommates' XBox in college) this past week, mostly for The Witcher 2/3--both on Linux. The Witcher 3 was never supposed to run on my platform, but somehow Steam and Proton/Wine made that not only possible but actually enjoyable. I know technically they're doing it to make money, but I can't help like feel it's also something of a labor of love as well. It would have been much easier to leave people in my (our?) position behind, so I appreciate the heck out of Valve for putting in the effort. I imagine they're going to have my goodwill for a long time as a result.

johnnyanmac 6y ago
If you want to be cynical, Proton was made from the scraps of a contingency plan that was the Steam Machine. When they realized that Microsoft wasn't going to force their platform onto users, they gave up on Steam Machines and I guess they leveraged the tech to something else.
- sangnoir 6y ago
  That's not being cynical - that's just facts on how and why SteamOS was conceived and developed
- ntauthority 6y ago
  ... and unrelatedly, on the other side, the latest appeasing thing called WSL was made from leftovers of a plan to run Android on Windows Phones, which was dropped when Google refused to allow Play Services run there.
- epicide 6y ago
  Yep, and Post-Its were made from the scraps of what was supposed to be a really strong adhesive. It speaks more to me that they released Proton rather than shelving it after losing the original motive.
- gpderetta 6y ago
  I think that it is a bit more complex than that. Their original plan was for native[1] gaming on Linux. When it proved hard to bootstrap that and seeing that the Steam Machine itself they started looking for options. Wine was already pretty good but DX11 support was bad. I do not know if it was serendipity that DXVK started showing promises around they same time they started looking into wine or whether it was the reason for them focusing into wine in the first place. The rest is history, although the side effect is that it pretty much killed native ports for AAA games on Linux [2]. [1] for some values of native. Many, most, ports are based on internal close source equivalent of wine. [2] I do not really care about native vs proton, but it would be nice if game companies did officially support proton.

by qchris 6y ago

johnnyanmac 6y ago

If you want to be cynical, Proton was made from the scraps of a contingency plan that was the Steam Machine. When they realized that Microsoft wasn't going to force their platform onto users, they gave up on Steam Machines and I guess they leveraged the tech to something else.

sangnoir 6y ago
That's not being cynical - that's just facts on how and why SteamOS was conceived and developed
ntauthority 6y ago
... and unrelatedly, on the other side, the latest appeasing thing called WSL was made from leftovers of a plan to run Android on Windows Phones, which was dropped when Google refused to allow Play Services run there.
epicide 6y ago
Yep, and Post-Its were made from the scraps of what was supposed to be a really strong adhesive. It speaks more to me that they released Proton rather than shelving it after losing the original motive.
gpderetta 6y ago
I think that it is a bit more complex than that. Their original plan was for native[1] gaming on Linux. When it proved hard to bootstrap that and seeing that the Steam Machine itself they started looking for options. Wine was already pretty good but DX11 support was bad. I do not know if it was serendipity that DXVK started showing promises around they same time they started looking into wine or whether it was the reason for them focusing into wine in the first place. The rest is history, although the side effect is that it pretty much killed native ports for AAA games on Linux [2]. [1] for some values of native. Many, most, ports are based on internal close source equivalent of wine. [2] I do not really care about native vs proton, but it would be nice if game companies did officially support proton.