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Valve Introduces Proton Next
- make3 4y agoI wish there was proton for MacOs. We do have access to a number of games, but nowhere as many as on windows
- milliams 4y agoHow is this different from Proton Experimental?
- bcrescimanno 4y agoProton Next - Candidate build for the next major version release. Proton Experimental - "Bleeding edge" builds.
- cybersol 4y agoSo Proton is like Debian, Proton Next is like Debian Testing, and Proton Experimental is like Debian Sid. Got it, thanks!
- jasonpeacock 4y agoI had to go figure out what Proton is: "Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system. It uses Wine to facilitate this." https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton
- johnxie 4y agoIt has come a long way. When running through Proton, the game and all its middleware are supported seamlessly. Take a look at https://www.protondb.com https://www.protondb.com
- psychphysic 4y agoIt's witchcraft is what it is.
- skywal_l 4y agoYou can learn some of the spells here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33156727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33156727.
- SkyMarshal 4y agoIt's Steam's downstream fork of Wine, which is not an emulator.
- musicale 4y ago1. An emulator is a system which implements another system's functionality so as to serve as a usable replacement. Examples include in-circuit emulators for hardware components, or software emulators for game system hardware. In each case, the emulator is a usable replacement for the original system. 2. WINE reimplements the functionality of Windows, as exposed by the Windows ABI, as software running on Linux. 3. The combination of WINE and Linux is in fact a usable replacement for Windows. 4. Which means that WINE running on Linux conforms to the above definition of an emulator for the Windows system. 5. Therefore, WINE running on Linux certainly is an emulator for the Windows system. QED
- xcdzvyn 4y ago#1 defines a compatibility later, rather than an emulator, in my mind. Emulators typically perform some form of translation from the original (completely unsupported) code to something the host can understand. Wine implements PE binary support natively in Linux.
- alasdair_ 4y agoQuick, do "GNU is not Unix" next!
- Asooka 4y agoWine is not an emulator, therefore if your definition of an emulator brands Wine as an emulator, your definition is wrong. :)
- giraffe_lady 4y agoIt may not be an emulator in a highly specific & technical sense used by and useful to a small group of experts. It is an emulator in the general and widely-recognized sense of "software that runs software originally intended for a different, incompatible system." You see this all the time when a jargon word enters the general non-specialist vocabulary. It doesn't make either usage wrong, though it can be confusing sometimes if the contexts can be difficult to distinguish. In this case that's unlikely so just give it up please. Honestly the quirk where that is its name could be a really useful entry point for educating non-specialist readers on the different technical approaches used to solve this problem! I never see that though, this is only ever used as a wellackshully on internet forums. It sucks.
- LeSaucy 4y agoIt is incredible how well proton works on the steam deck.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoAs one of my buddies put it, 'it is basically magic'. I agree. Compared to manual fiddling, it is amazing. For the proton work alone, Steam got a lot of goodwill from me.
- Shared404 4y agoSame here. I almost went to GOG, but Proton pulled me back to Steam very quickly.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoGOG has a place in my heart. I still try to throw them money every so often, but I will admit that at this point Steam won when it comes to a platform as a whole. GOG can still manage, but they will need to secure non-DRM for popular games, which may be a taller order. Divinity was great, but it is such a rarity these days.
- irusensei 4y agoAlso works very well on a full AMD laptop I own. Running Fedora. I often play FFXIV with it. Not verified. It’s ironic that the game runs perfectly on Proton but the main source of problems and incompatibilities is the launcher which uses MSHTML for wathever reason. Proton GE seems to have fixed the issue with the launcher but game patches sometimes break it.
- mattbee 4y agoIt really is. And I noticed quite early on: the Steam games which had problems were the ones with native Linux ports - wonky display settings, or controller not recognised or something like that. The fix is always to tell it to "force" a version of Proton, which caused Steam to go and download the Win32 build instead.
- Dwedit 4y agoHow much of Proton fixes go back to Wine and vice versa?
- tomnipotent 4y agoCodeWeavers is responsible for upwards of 2/3 of Wine commits. A lot of open source projects benefit from similar relationships, like Postgres/Crunchy Data.
- TulliusCicero 4y agoProton is just a UI/service/convenience layer for Wine, right? So when there's specific fixes for games, are those actually Wine updates?
- kubik369 4y agoNo, Proton is Valve's fork of wine.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoWhy does Proton have so many Wine dependencies? > Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system. It uses Wine to facilitate this.
- jandrese 4y agoBecause it is built on top of Wine. The difference is when you try to run a game on just Wine you'll often have to do some fiddling on the command line or in configuration files to get the thing to work, if at all. Proton is much less fiddly. Stuff more often than not just works from clicking start.
- ACS_Solver 4y agoImportantly, Proton also integrates DXVK. I don't know the details too well but I think DXVK is responsible for a large part of Proton's "it just works" and it's a separate project from Wine. You can configure Wine to use DXVK but in Proton everything is preconfigured so you never have to think about them as different components.
- dudeinhawaii 4y agoProton was instrumental in my move from Windows to Linux. With over 400 games in my back catalog, I didn't want to lose thousands of dollars not to mention thousands of hours on games which I enjoy. Thus far, 92% of games have ran flawlessly for me on Fedora (4 failures in the last 50). The main issues have been related to games that have kernel mode drivers for copy protection or other exotic types of anti-cheat. Perhaps most amazing (to me anyway) is the fact that mods and workshop items work perfectly. In most cases, I could pop open a saved game and continue on Linux, custom mods included. Performance-wise, I haven't noticed a difference but I generally run very modern hardware which works better with the DirectX to Vulcan implementation. I also swapped to an AMD chip/gpu when moving to Linux and I think that removed the headaches that people often have with Nvidia drivers. Overall, it's been fantastic.
- javawizard 4y agoAt risk of picking nits, 4 failures in 50 would be 92% :)
- dudeinhawaii 4y agoHaha, just spotted that myself, thanks :)
- skywal_l 4y agoDo you mind giving us the name of those 4 games failing on proton?
- dotancohen 4y agoI would rather have the names of the 46 games that did work!
- overlordalex 4y agoIf you're curious, ProtonDB is the place to check if the game you're interested in is supported (and how well). You can also just browse and see what is supported. Here is the list sorted by the highest user ratings: https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=userScore https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=userScore
- irusensei 4y agoI thought this was something really new. TBH you can probably take advantage of many of these new features by using one of the Glorious Eggroll releases. It’s nice that it can be used from the interface though.
- Nullabillity 4y agoThis seems to be in between stable and experimental, which is in turn usually behind the GE builds.
- bagels 4y agoStill no pubg, afik :(
- manchmalscott 4y agoValve's continual focus on Linux (SteamOS 1.0 was released eight years ago) is honestly incredible, Proton even sometimes works better than native Linux builds. Truly nobody else (in the gaming space) is doing it like Valve are. I saw a talk[1] from a KDE dev talking about features Valve sponsored to be added to KDE Plasma and it's things that are useful for everyone outside the context of the steam deck. The only thing that doesn't really work I've noticed is when games have an online component, whether it's like easy anti cheat which I've heard should be just flipping a switch to enable but I haven't seen anyone actually do that, or some weirdness happening with whatever the new Microsoft Flight Simulator is doing that makes it seemingly a 50/50 coin toss as to whether it'll run with the exact same settings. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0gEIeFgDX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0gEIeFgDX0
- zamalek 4y agoI watched a talk by GabeN years ago, where he explained his business philosophy (which also had to do with his exit from Microsoft). It was strikingly simple: treat your customers well. Supporting Linux is treating his customers well (even if the majority of customers don't understand that... yet).
- manchmalscott 4y agoIt totally makes business sense for them to not have to depend on Microsoft (who have their own gaming business) for their customers to play games, we all win when consumers have meaningful alternatives.
- ip26 4y agoIf his customers don’t feel they are being treated well (e.g. they don’t understand, and won’t for years) then does it really fall under that principle?
- Teever 4y agoNeedless pedantism.
- NayamAmarshe 4y agoUsing Proton feels like magic. The fact that you can run games made for a totally different OS, which isn't even based on Unix or Linux is a big feat in itself. Valve is just a single company pushing for Linux gaming and the results have been excellent. Linux is the perfect candidate too. Efficient, open, easy to modify and adapt. I hope more companies follow Valve and realize the true untapped potential of Linux systems.
- kilolima 4y agoWhy is it magic? Wine has been around since forever. It's not like Valve wrote most of the underlying code proton runs on. And what's with all the valve/steam hype from people that should know better? At the end of the day you are using a DRM front end (steam) that fragments the mod ecosystem and obfuscates the process of installing and running the software you paid for on your own computer.
- ip26 4y agoWine didn’t get that much beyond “tech demo” level magic for many years. Magic for sure, but not of the same grade.
- hypothesis 4y agoI think it’s “magic” in same sense that, say, Ubuntu used to be in the beginning. There were other distros too, but none did mix it all together for easy of use/polish. So ignore the hype and enjoy benefits to the ecosystem.
- miohtama 4y agoLinux and Wine open source ecosystem have always been resource constrained. For this reason, they have not been able to deliver the polish Proton brings to make the Linux gaming available for mass markets. If DRM locked frontend like Steam is the price to pay for it, it is a small price. Eventually their changes get upstreamed and it improves the ecosystem overall.
- tomnipotent 4y agoWine gets you 80% of the way there, but that remaining 20% that Proton fills in takes it from "awesome technology" to "usable product". Everyone is building on the shoulder of giants.
- SahAssar 4y agoIs there something substantially new here or is this just a beta branch of the regular proton?
- ShamelessC 4y agoCan someone please summarize this rather than giving a one sentence blurb about why you love proton, as that is only tangentially relevant.
- fhd2 4y agoIt basically means you can now try the upcoming release, not just stable vs experimental, which is the choice we had so far. You can select it on a per-game basis, so if things don't work in stable you can select next.
- LegitShady 4y agoproton now has an opt-in beta build
- ShamelessC 4y agoIt did before- one of the many reasons the article is so confusing.
- LegitShady 4y agoproton's beta build now has a cool name, I guess?
- ydlr 4y agoThanks to proton, I have completely forgotten how to configure wine prefixes.
- hypothesis 4y agoIs this unique to Proton? There seems like quite a few game managers on Linux nowadays, none require knowing much of Wine.
- boppo1 4y agoCan proton be used to run other windows software well under Linux? I would KILL to have desktop-excel in xubuntu.
- openmapsguy 4y agoYou’re looking for wine https://www.winehq.org/ https://www.winehq.org/. Proton is built on top of wine.
- G3rn0ti 4y agoIf you restrict yourself to older office versions like e.g. 2013, they should be working fine with vanilla wine. At least I remember running Word seamlessly on my gnome desktop. I even created a „desktop“ file so I could double click on word files to fire up Word. I recommend using the „play4linux“ fronted to wine which makes it rather easy to install and maintain windows applications and games.
- trelane 4y agoIf you're looking for applications, CodeWeavers' Crossover Office is the place to go. If you actually can't afford it, you can use plain WINE. But Crossover is nicer, has support, and funds WINE development, since CodeWeavers sends their patches upstream. https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
- gkhartman 4y agoWill desktop excel actually run smoothly on this? It's been ages since I've tried, but I didn't have much luck in the past. I'd really love to ditch my windows machine, but my employer makes use of excel plugins that only run on the desktop version.
- trelane 4y agoLooks like it's changed a lot. It looks like it was good until about 2010, then it stopped working. Might also be why they apparently renamed it to "Crossover" from "Crossover Office." Guess I'm really out of date here. :) Wait, maybe I was looking at _Mac_ compatibility. It looks like 365 runs decently on Linux. They have a site you can check compatibility at: https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsoft-office-365 https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsof... is the page for MS Office 365. You can download a free trial and see if it works.
- climb_stealth 4y agoI wish they would sell the Steam Deck in Australia. Does anyone know whether you can buy one overseas and use it anyway?
- SXX 4y agoBasically it's normal PC so you can even just install Windows there (but it will degrade overall experience). So there is absolutely no lock-ins and you can use hardware any way you like.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- climb_stealth 4y agoThat makes sense from a hardware point of view. I was wondering whether there would be issues using a Steam account from an unsupported country. It requires a Steam account in a supported country to order. But after receiving it, can you log in to an account from a different country? Technically it should be doable. But there might be some policy that stops it from working.
- 91edec 4y agoYou can buy a Steam deck from any country and use your account, the deck isn't account locked. For example my friend bought a deck in the UK, moved to America and changed his region then came back to pick it up. We were both able to log into the device UK & US.
- SXX 4y agoI didn't manage to get one myself, but friend of mine use Steamdeck he ordered through UK in Turkey just fine. Obviously you can't buy one in Turkey.
- jackvalentine 4y agoYes, I got mine from an eBay reseller shipped to Australia for a bit of a markup and it works fine - only ‘foreign’ thing I noticed was on the KDE desktop the date format was american which is obviously a single setting change and you’re done.
- celdon25 4y agoOkay, but what does it actually do?
- msla 4y agoIt's a Windows compatibility layer based on Wine. It allows Windows software to run on Linux without having to run Windows in a VM.
- UI_at_80x24 4y agoI want to buy a SteamDeck. But I don't think I have the spare hours. After work, taking care of the kids, and housework I _might_ have 1 spare hour a day to sit down with the wife. I'd rather watch something on TV with her. To have any kind of free time I have to stay up till 1am! I could bring the SteamDeck when I bring the kids to the park, but that just feels like I'm cheating the kids. I work from home. 8am-9am get ready for work/get kids ready for the day 9am-5pm work 5pm-8pm doing stuff with the kids 8pm-9pm eat, get kids ready for bed 9pm-11pm housework/watch TV 11pm-midnight miscellaneous stuff to prepare for the next day. I almost wish I had a commute by train or something. Or a housekeeper, or an Au Pair/nanny. How the fuck do other grownups do it? (I'm 49, and exhausted all the time)
- weatherlight 4y agoSometimes it's fun to cuddle with the kids while you play a game that they enjoy. My 6 and 4 year old love "Tunic" and "Stray." The Steamdeck is a lot of fun.
- dark-star 4y agoThe SteamDeck is actually perfect if you only have like one hour here and there, since you can just pick it up and continue playing from where you left off (suspend/resume works flawlessly)...
- http-teapot 4y agoSame boat! I picked up a Steam Deck, was desperately looking for a multiplayer game I could play 20-30 minutes in the day, and found Deep Rock Galactic. I only play when my wife watches a TV show or in bed.
- PrivateButts 4y agoMy wife loves the Steam Deck, mainly because I've been playing more games in the living room at night, instead of playing games in my office. Being in the same room as one another, even if we're doing different things, works pretty good for us. It's also gotten them back into PC games, as they have more access to games through family sharing and the Deck does a great job of taking care of most of the fiddly bits of playing on PC. I fully expected the deck to be the typical valve hardware experience for me. Something that was well built, and very neat, but would be gathering dust in a month or two. However, I think we've got more usage out of my Deck in 6 months then we've gotten out of my Index, Vive, Steam Controller, and Steam Link combined.
- musha68k 4y agoDue to Proton I feel like coming back to PC gaming after almost 20 years, great stewardship by Valve there. The last "rig" I built was for Doom 3 after which I'd never bothered with keeping a NTFS partition again. Apple silicon just doesn't seem to get to the levels needed for a state-of-the-art Cyberpunk 2077 experience even on pricier high-end Macs. I'm also still not willing to buy any "next-gen" consoles for the first time either (trend of maybe efficient but still glorified PC architecture continuing). Would anyone have a list of well tested Linux + Proton compatible components? Nvidia or AMD? Which drivers are better maintained at this point? It would still be cool to run some machine learning workloads for fun of course. Any pointers would be appreciated.
- themoonisachees 4y agoBasically anything recent but not the latest components will work well. If you want hassle-free then going with amd everything is the most efficient IMO. I'm running a ryzen 3600 and a radeon rx5700xt, and i've not had any driver issues, be it with x11 or wayland. I've been playing a bunch of games from my library but there are still some games that aren't compatible (for ex. Vermintide 2 has non-compatible anticheat) so i keep a spartan windows instal on a 128gb ssd for those and VR. VR is a non-starter on linux. That being said, nvidia has RT cores now, which can do very fast matrix multiplication which is advantageous for ML workloads (on top of a lot of ml work being optimized for cuda cores). Can't speak to their drivers but older cards should be safer, especially considering the 40 series hasn't been shown to be worth it over used 30 series.
- musha68k 4y agoInteresting point about VR. I guess the sets and controllers are married even more so to the Windows APIs and will incur stark penalty on immersion for even slightest lag (due to API translation)? A bummer for sure. I also honestly was leaning more towards buying a used RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 from one of the (ex) Ethereum miners. I actually played through Cyberpunk 2077 on Geforce Now "RTX 3080" and am definitely spoiled by real time RT and DLSS now.. The compression artifacts and occasional lags and packet loss did become grating after a while though (to me). Biggest issue with GFN though is lack of games (I still don't understand why they can't just support any game on any of their integrated marketplaces. I mean it's me buying them on those platforms then playing them through GFN instances). But I also gather here from multiple answers that AMD apparently should still be the choice on Linux. Maybe I need to wait a bit longer for them to catch up on the realtime RT and ML image reconstruction..
- MikeMaven 4y agoI want to throw some love out for GloriousEggroll and their custom proton distribution as well. Thomas has done fantastic work on Proton and it generally works better for me than the official version. https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom
- gjsman-1000 4y agoA reminder once again that Proton only exists because, for all the benefits of Linux, making a native Linux port is a massive mess. The community calling for developers to make native ports often forget that Linux's userland stability and consistency is simply not at the level developers expect or need for a quality port. Until the day arrives when you can install a game on, say, Fedora 37 that was initially developed against, say, Ubuntu 16.04 or Fedora 26, it is not happening. Win32 is by far the most consistent and widely-supported API on Linux right now, which is a damning indictment of Linux, not game developers who don't support it. Even macOS has way better backwards compatibility and consistency than Linux does, but developers are scared to touch that. If macOS isn't good enough for developers, native Linux ports are a pipe dream.
- trelane 4y agoI've yet to have a game not work because I was using the wrong distro.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoI am talking about native Linux ports and people who complain about the lack of native ports instead of, at best, Proton ports.
- trelane 4y agoI am also talking about native ports. I preferentially buy Linux native ports.
- Yuioup 4y agoReally? I have nothing but problems trying to play native Linux games. 99% don't even launch. Proton is a much better experience.
- account42 4y agoProton would exist even if porting to Linux would be trivial because many games would still not be ported.
- kjuulh 4y agoHappy to see a fix for final fantasy XIV launcher. That thing had been an infuriating ordeal. Kudos to the proton team for supporting such an archaic technology.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 999900000999 4y agoGamepass is a gift and a curse, on one hand, it makes Windows gaming dirt cheap. But it also makes Linux Gaming like this pointless. If half the games I want to play are locked to Gamepass, I'm not having fun with Linux. Now, if Gamepass could run on Photon, we can talk.
- impulser_ 4y agoWhy doesn't Apple put this much effort into bring MacOS into the same realm as Windows in terms of gaming? You would think they would invest more money and time taking away one of the last major advantages of Windows vs. MacOS. Microsoft obviously sees gaming as one of the big advantages to Windows, hence why they have been buying up gaming studios and combining Xbox and Windows into the one gaming platform.
- IshKebab 4y agoThey probably would prefer to parlay iPhone games to Mac, then they have tight control over them and can offer things Microsoft can't.
- musicale 4y ago>Why doesn't Apple put this much effort into bring MacOS into the same realm as Windows in terms of gaming? I don't speak for Apple, but their bread and butter is the zillions of App Store games, so the business incentive is clearly to move those developers and games onto macOS so that Apple gets a cut of every game sale and in-app purchase. Moreover, those games are already optimized for Metal and Apple silicon. They already work well on modest hardware running on batteries. In a sense it's a very clever strategy: Apple completely sidesteps the "PC game" market, which has largely left Apple behind, and creates its own "App Store game" market - a huge collection of games, all of which are optimized for Apple APIs and silicon, and which make billions of dollars for Apple through App Store commissions. Moreover, those games run across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV. Apple also avoids potentially unflattering GPU and game performance comparisons (especially with compatibility layers like WINE) - the hardware fades into the background, which is something Apple likes. From the user perspective though? Many Mac users would still like to be able to run PC games (especially ones that aren't in the iOS or macOS App Stores) out of the box, and this would be served by developing a high-quality version of Proton (or equivalent) for macOS. And they'd also like Steam to work well out of the box. Making this happen would be a drop in Apple's bucket, and probably wouldn't reduce App Store sales. And it might help with hardware sales for students and others who might be on the fence due to certain Windows games not running on macOS.
- stetrain 4y ago
- musicale 4y agoI wouldn't mind it if someone made a version of Proton that ran on macOS.
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- gigatexal 4y agoProton and Wine and the folks behind Lutris and Valve’s work on Steam have allowed me to nuke Windows for good. I’m so happy. I’m gaming on Fedora 36 with Nvidia drivers on i3wm and just won’t ever go back.
- esturk 4y agoFYI, you can get a Steam Deck that doubles as a desktop PC with a dock. Analogous to the Samsung Dex but a lot better. It's essentially a dockable linux computer.
- _Cr15py_ 4y agoI've been out of the loop with Steam for a while. I used it back in the Half-Life, CS Source, and Team Fortress 2 days. However more recently I've been a Stadia user... it just made a lot of sense with a busy life schedule. Grab a controller and sit down on the sofa to play amazing games. With Stadia coming to an end in Jan 2023 I started to look for an alternative... none, for me, came close to what Steam is offering. So I went for a Steam Deck (with a dock) and a PS5 controller. Valve truly is for the gamers.
- nurettin 4y agoI remember using Wine to play pretty much any game on linux back in the early 2000s, even before 64bit was a thing. We had wine hacks, we had a rudimentary dx9 compatibility layer, we had hardware acceleration, and we could just pirate crossover over torrent or dc++ for that one pesky microsoft game that won't load. (of course we don't do that anymore!) I feel like Proton is just a repackaging of what we already had, which is the culmination of the hard work of the Wine team for the past 20 years, coupled with an online distribution system which could take back your "digital assets" at any time. We reserve the right, but are not obligated, to remove, disable or suspend your or any user's access to any Content or the Services, at any time and without notice Reference: https://store.steampowered.com/eula/471710_eula_0 https://store.steampowered.com/eula/471710_eula_0