5 ms·

I think their policies have more to do with support costs than anything else. As much as I love playing on Linux and wine, you have to admit there are more tech

by b0rsuk 6y ago

I think their policies have more to do with support costs than anything else. As much as I love playing on Linux and wine, you have to admit there are more technical issues with Linux. People who have low tolerance for glitches and problem solving to get their games working would be up in arms. The last example is Hyper Light Drifter. No matter which forum, the latest threads include several about Linux specific problems. And that's a game with native support. Another game I played recently - an ancient puzzle game "Riven" - seemed to have bad looking problems. I bought it from GOG because I didn't notice it only officially supports Windows and Mac. Very near the end of the installation, you have to click through a couple of errors that say the game didn't install properly (it did well enough). When launching the game, you get a nasty error if you run Riven.exe instead of Launcher_Riven.exe . During the actual gameplay, there is only one rare crash every few hundred attempts at brute forcing one particular puzzle.

CivBase 6y ago
Seems to me like there should be something like a "Docker for games" which uses container tech to create a lightweight, predictable execution environment for video games. I suppose that's kind of what Proton does, although it focuses on emulating a Windows environment in particular.
- e2le 6y ago
  Sounds like something that AppImage is perfectly suited for, given that each application is a one-click executable with automatic updating built-in and can optionally provide a predictable execution environment although it's not a container. In one particular case, I packaged up Mirrors Edge into an AppImage with the AppRun script taking care to setup the environment and WINE. It worked surprisingly well.
  - CivBase 6y ago
    That's awesome! If anyone at Valve is reading, I think this would be an excellent feature for Proton or the Steam client.
    - gen3 6y ago
      They already have something like that. The steam runtime has been in development since at least 2013 now.
- b0rsuk 6y ago
  In all honesty, I ran Riven through wine, and Proton is a wrapper around wine and some other tools to cover the rough edges.

by b0rsuk 6y ago

CivBase 6y ago

Seems to me like there should be something like a "Docker for games" which uses container tech to create a lightweight, predictable execution environment for video games. I suppose that's kind of what Proton does, although it focuses on emulating a Windows environment in particular.

e2le 6y ago
Sounds like something that AppImage is perfectly suited for, given that each application is a one-click executable with automatic updating built-in and can optionally provide a predictable execution environment although it's not a container. In one particular case, I packaged up Mirrors Edge into an AppImage with the AppRun script taking care to setup the environment and WINE. It worked surprisingly well.
- CivBase 6y ago
  That's awesome! If anyone at Valve is reading, I think this would be an excellent feature for Proton or the Steam client.
  - gen3 6y ago
    They already have something like that. The steam runtime has been in development since at least 2013 now.
b0rsuk 6y ago
In all honesty, I ran Riven through wine, and Proton is a wrapper around wine and some other tools to cover the rough edges.