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This is nice and all but they need to fix things like alt-tabbing in an out of a game. Many games just crash. I know it sounds dumb but sometimes when organisin

This is nice and all but they need to fix things like alt-tabbing in an out of a game. Many games just crash. I know it sounds dumb but sometimes when organising a game or using discord you need to alt-tab from the game to the chat app. This almost never happens with Windows unless the games are old. Also performance when streaming via discord or OBS significantly drops the framerate even on games my rig can play at 60FPS (while streaming) at 4k without any problems. Amid Evil for example with start stuttering when streaming in Linux but is 100% fine in Windows. Many people say these games work fine but in my experience they don't. I am normally running with whatever is the latest version of proton valve is bundling with. Generally though this maybe because UHD is a total mess on Linux.

faitswulff 6y ago
This is a workaround, but I use Discord on my phone to avoid having to go afk in games. It works almost as well as the desktop client, for the most part.
coldpie 6y ago
> This is nice and all but they need to fix things like alt-tabbing in an out of a game. This is super hard to get right. It's somewhat wonky on Windows to begin with (we have found plenty of games where it's broken on Windows), and then you have to factor in that X doesn't work the same way, and there are a hundred different window managers, which all work different ways. It should be significantly improved in 5.13, and we're still working on improvements in that area, including in upcoming 5.13 releases.
- WhyNotHugo 6y ago
  > This is super hard to get right. Not _really_. The issue is that games are trying to do god-knows-what when they lose focus. In reality, they just need to ignore this happening. Regular applications handle losing focus just fine, and games would too -- unless you try to do magic funky stuff when you lose focus (my guess is that they do this to work around funky WM issues on window that don't exist on Linux).
  - coldpie 6y ago
    First, sure, if games didn't do complex things, it would be easier to support. But they do. So it is hard. Also, it's much more complicated than that. When running in exclusive fullscreen mode (which almost all fullscreen games did before about 5 years ago), they have to do stuff like restore the original display resolution, tear down their graphics stack, and restore all of that when bringing the window back up. Many games depend on a very particular sequence of window messages during that process, including D3D handling some of those messages on their behalf in certain ways. In the case of non-exclusive or windowed mode games, they may choose to stop reading controller input, stop rendering, stop sending audio, etc. All of that requires correct window notifications in the correct order, and support in Wine for correctly tearing down and restoring all of those things. And all that is just on the Windows side of the equation, you also need to tear down the Linux graphics stack and manage how X thinks about the windows in a way that the window manager will do the right thing for the user, without doing the /wrong/ thing for the app from the Windows perspective. For example if the WM chooses to resize the window when it requests fullscreen mode, at a time when Windows does not, then we have to ignore those messages, or the game will suddenly be rendering at the wrong size (or worse, infinite loop as the WM and the game fight over the window sizes... yeah, that happened[1]). It's a nightmare. I've spent months and months on this stuff, and other devs have spent even more. If it was easy to fix, it would be fixed, I promise you :) [1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/commit/4f590327ab2028aadc6ac5b7c0ac10bd363e3c80 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/commit/4f590327ab2028a...
    - davedx 6y ago
      Thank you for doing this kind of work. That commit is funny -- I've read that there's similar stuff in graphics card drivers too :)
    - rasz 6y ago
      Since its all emulated why even tell the game its alt tabbed in the first place? Just keep it thinking nothing changed, its not like games do special stuff when in the background.
      - 6y ago
WhyNotHugo 6y ago
Yeah. It's not just alt-tabbing, merely losing focus. I've a second monitor where I run discord (and lots of other shit), so if I even focus on it for a second: the game is dead. Generally, you can work around this by configuring wine to use a virtual desktop. The game never picks up its focus-loss.
kevincox 6y ago
From my experience most games work fine when switching away. However I know that Don't Starve Together and some other games really freak out. (I've been lucky enough not to see any crashes though) What I have found is that running games under Wayland (via XWayland) makes a lot of games behave better. I don't know exactly why this is but I suspect they are trying to manipulate a bunch of settings like fullscreen/input grabbing/display resolution which just get ignored by Wayland. So basically the extra restrictions of Wayland stop them from shooting themselves in the foot. On the downside my NVIDIA GPU can't be used on Wayland...
- Karliss 6y ago
  Haven't tried it myself since I switched away from NVIDIA, but supposedly initial support for the NVIDIA specific interface was added in KDE 5.16 and Gnome 3.31 both released last year might not be available if you are on a LTS distro.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    For me the problem is that I have an Optimus laptop (Intel primary GPU with NVIDIA discrete card) which as far as I can tell has no published timeline for driver support, if it will ever come.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    I think Xwayland GPU acceleration won't work with NVIDIA still, though.
  - forest_dweller 6y ago
    It doesn't work. I've tried it on Arch and I have to force gnome to use X via a GDM environment variable IIRC.
himinlomax 6y ago
Well you would have been right 6 months ago, but right now it's absolutely not an issue any more. Even pointer capture works right. Even on multiple monitors. Try it again with a recent Proton.
- coldpie 6y ago
  You can thank Zhiyi Zhang for working on that for the past year or two[1]. I'm very happy to hear it's working well for you. [1] https://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/?a=search&h=HEAD&st=author&s=zhang https://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/?a=search&h=HEAD&st=a...
  - himinlomax 6y ago
    Excellent work, I was really impressed.
ben-schaaf 6y ago
I don't play many non-native games, but I have had many games on Windows crash or behave badly when alt-tabbing. Personally I've found that aspect significantly better on Linux.
- account42 6y ago
  There can sometimes be issues with native games too, altough I agree that the situaton is better (mostly due to not having exclusive fullscreen in the first place). One game I came across was letterboxed on my resolution but would never re-pain the black borders (after initially clearing them). This worked fine until Alt-tabbing out and back in where (with DRI3) the backing memory for the backbuffer would get reallocated and those black borders would now show garbage.

faitswulff 6y ago

This is a workaround, but I use Discord on my phone to avoid having to go afk in games. It works almost as well as the desktop client, for the most part.

coldpie 6y ago

> This is nice and all but they need to fix things like alt-tabbing in an out of a game. This is super hard to get right. It's somewhat wonky on Windows to begin with (we have found plenty of games where it's broken on Windows), and then you have to factor in that X doesn't work the same way, and there are a hundred different window managers, which all work different ways. It should be significantly improved in 5.13, and we're still working on improvements in that area, including in upcoming 5.13 releases.

WhyNotHugo 6y ago
> This is super hard to get right. Not _really_. The issue is that games are trying to do god-knows-what when they lose focus. In reality, they just need to ignore this happening. Regular applications handle losing focus just fine, and games would too -- unless you try to do magic funky stuff when you lose focus (my guess is that they do this to work around funky WM issues on window that don't exist on Linux).
- coldpie 6y ago
  First, sure, if games didn't do complex things, it would be easier to support. But they do. So it is hard. Also, it's much more complicated than that. When running in exclusive fullscreen mode (which almost all fullscreen games did before about 5 years ago), they have to do stuff like restore the original display resolution, tear down their graphics stack, and restore all of that when bringing the window back up. Many games depend on a very particular sequence of window messages during that process, including D3D handling some of those messages on their behalf in certain ways. In the case of non-exclusive or windowed mode games, they may choose to stop reading controller input, stop rendering, stop sending audio, etc. All of that requires correct window notifications in the correct order, and support in Wine for correctly tearing down and restoring all of those things. And all that is just on the Windows side of the equation, you also need to tear down the Linux graphics stack and manage how X thinks about the windows in a way that the window manager will do the right thing for the user, without doing the /wrong/ thing for the app from the Windows perspective. For example if the WM chooses to resize the window when it requests fullscreen mode, at a time when Windows does not, then we have to ignore those messages, or the game will suddenly be rendering at the wrong size (or worse, infinite loop as the WM and the game fight over the window sizes... yeah, that happened[1]). It's a nightmare. I've spent months and months on this stuff, and other devs have spent even more. If it was easy to fix, it would be fixed, I promise you :) [1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/commit/4f590327ab2028aadc6ac5b7c0ac10bd363e3c80 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/commit/4f590327ab2028a...
  - davedx 6y ago
    Thank you for doing this kind of work. That commit is funny -- I've read that there's similar stuff in graphics card drivers too :)
  - rasz 6y ago
    Since its all emulated why even tell the game its alt tabbed in the first place? Just keep it thinking nothing changed, its not like games do special stuff when in the background.
    - 6y ago

WhyNotHugo 6y ago

Yeah. It's not just alt-tabbing, merely losing focus. I've a second monitor where I run discord (and lots of other shit), so if I even focus on it for a second: the game is dead. Generally, you can work around this by configuring wine to use a virtual desktop. The game never picks up its focus-loss.

kevincox 6y ago

From my experience most games work fine when switching away. However I know that Don't Starve Together and some other games really freak out. (I've been lucky enough not to see any crashes though) What I have found is that running games under Wayland (via XWayland) makes a lot of games behave better. I don't know exactly why this is but I suspect they are trying to manipulate a bunch of settings like fullscreen/input grabbing/display resolution which just get ignored by Wayland. So basically the extra restrictions of Wayland stop them from shooting themselves in the foot. On the downside my NVIDIA GPU can't be used on Wayland...

Karliss 6y ago
Haven't tried it myself since I switched away from NVIDIA, but supposedly initial support for the NVIDIA specific interface was added in KDE 5.16 and Gnome 3.31 both released last year might not be available if you are on a LTS distro.
- kevincox 6y ago
  For me the problem is that I have an Optimus laptop (Intel primary GPU with NVIDIA discrete card) which as far as I can tell has no published timeline for driver support, if it will ever come.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  I think Xwayland GPU acceleration won't work with NVIDIA still, though.
- forest_dweller 6y ago
  It doesn't work. I've tried it on Arch and I have to force gnome to use X via a GDM environment variable IIRC.

himinlomax 6y ago

Well you would have been right 6 months ago, but right now it's absolutely not an issue any more. Even pointer capture works right. Even on multiple monitors. Try it again with a recent Proton.

coldpie 6y ago
You can thank Zhiyi Zhang for working on that for the past year or two[1]. I'm very happy to hear it's working well for you. [1] https://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/?a=search&h=HEAD&st=author&s=zhang https://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/?a=search&h=HEAD&st=a...
- himinlomax 6y ago
  Excellent work, I was really impressed.

ben-schaaf 6y ago

I don't play many non-native games, but I have had many games on Windows crash or behave badly when alt-tabbing. Personally I've found that aspect significantly better on Linux.

account42 6y ago
There can sometimes be issues with native games too, altough I agree that the situaton is better (mostly due to not having exclusive fullscreen in the first place). One game I came across was letterboxed on my resolution but would never re-pain the black borders (after initially clearing them). This worked fine until Alt-tabbing out and back in where (with DRI3) the backing memory for the backbuffer would get reallocated and those black borders would now show garbage.