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I've been using it to try to run Steam, mainly to launch Portal 2 and play with friends. I'm on an Apple Silicon Mac running Ventura. It's a horrible experience

I've been using it to try to run Steam, mainly to launch Portal 2 and play with friends. I'm on an Apple Silicon Mac running Ventura. It's a horrible experience. I have the macOS Steam client, and while it's a steaming pile of garbage UX-wise, it mostly works. But under Wine (or specifically CrossOver), it barely works. Here's what happens when I attempt to run Steam: - It takes around 1 minute to get auto-logged in. The macOS client takes 11 seconds (I just timed them both). - About half of the UI doesn't work. Fonts are missing, so there are buttons with no labels. If you scroll with the mouse, sometimes that locks up the page you're looking at and you can no longer use that page until you quit and restart the app. You can do other things and come back, but that page is dead for you now until the next app restart. - The Library screen works about 5% of the time. The other 95% of the time, it hangs during loading the page with the little Steam icon and the 3 dots under it. In order to play Portal 2 in those cases, I have to go to the store, search for it, click on it to go to its specific page, then click on the play button. - One or all apps will sometimes (about 10% of the time) just abort with no error message or anything. The app window and the macOS process just go away. You might be in the middle of selecting a game in the Steam client, or you might be in the middle of a game (either alone or with a friend) and it just ends. - When playing Portal 2 everything renders fine unless you're looking at it through a Portal. When looking through a Portal, random bits of geometry from around the level are displayed among the correct geometry, some textures are incorrect or missing while others are fine, etc. Just weird drawing problems. Once you pass through the portal, everything is fine. - It mostly plays at 60fps, but very rarely (maybe 1% of the time) starts dropping frames. That part is fairly impressive, honestly. So yeah, there seems to be some happy path for which it works fairly well, and anything off that is just random glitches, hangs, crashes, etc. I'm having a hard time understanding why the HN crowd thinks it's so great. This seems like the main use case, and others have claimed that Valve pays CodeWeavers (who make CrossOver) to make it work with their games, but it barely even works with the Steam client. I'm at a loss to explain it.

capableweb 4y ago
People who use Wine (Proton really) + Steam don't use Wine to run Steam itself, they run the platform native Steam client which manages the Proton installations (multiple versions) for them. So everything is native, up until game launch, then Steam launches the game via Proton (Wine). It works really well, considering what it is doing. I'm playing all sorts of games on Linux and my Steam Deck that I didn't even dream of being able to play before (including playing through Portal 2 on my Steam Deck currently :) ). I'm not alone in this, you can browse a user-sourced DB of experiences over here if you want further proof: https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=popular https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=popular Everything rated gold or above runs really well and you don't experience any problems at all. Silver is mostly working ok, besides some edge-cases or aggressive anti-cheats stopping multiplayer from working.
- account42 4y ago
  Portal 2 has a native Linux port which has been available long before Proton existed.
easton 4y ago
I'm guessing that that has a lot more to do with being on Apple Silicon than anything else. Steam and all the games are compiled for x86, which means it's gotta go through Rosetta and then through Wine. Also, on macOS specifically, no Vulkan support means you have to use MoltenVK to convert the DXVK instructions to Metal, and I don't think MoltenVK has completed the work to convert all the instructions Vulkan uses. I was impressed I could get Windows games running at all, but the experience was pretty bad as you mentioned. Titanfall 2 was real janky, no audio and the graphics were super bugged.
goosedragons 4y ago
The main target of Wine is x86 Linux not ARM macOS. MacOS doesn't support Vulkan and so that version of Wine is missing DXVK and Vkd3d for better game performance and support. It's a completely different experience. Plus with Steam on Linux you don't need to run the Windows version of Steam at all. The native client will let you install Windows games using Proton (Valve's modified Wine essentially) by checking a box. Most stuff works very well and it's how the Steam Deck does it's thing. Some titles actually work better than they do on modern Windows like Jedi Knight II which has 3D acceleration support on Linux through Wine but not Windows 10 native.

capableweb 4y ago

People who use Wine (Proton really) + Steam don't use Wine to run Steam itself, they run the platform native Steam client which manages the Proton installations (multiple versions) for them. So everything is native, up until game launch, then Steam launches the game via Proton (Wine). It works really well, considering what it is doing. I'm playing all sorts of games on Linux and my Steam Deck that I didn't even dream of being able to play before (including playing through Portal 2 on my Steam Deck currently :) ). I'm not alone in this, you can browse a user-sourced DB of experiences over here if you want further proof: https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=popular https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=popular Everything rated gold or above runs really well and you don't experience any problems at all. Silver is mostly working ok, besides some edge-cases or aggressive anti-cheats stopping multiplayer from working.

account42 4y ago
Portal 2 has a native Linux port which has been available long before Proton existed.

easton 4y ago

I'm guessing that that has a lot more to do with being on Apple Silicon than anything else. Steam and all the games are compiled for x86, which means it's gotta go through Rosetta and then through Wine. Also, on macOS specifically, no Vulkan support means you have to use MoltenVK to convert the DXVK instructions to Metal, and I don't think MoltenVK has completed the work to convert all the instructions Vulkan uses. I was impressed I could get Windows games running at all, but the experience was pretty bad as you mentioned. Titanfall 2 was real janky, no audio and the graphics were super bugged.

goosedragons 4y ago

The main target of Wine is x86 Linux not ARM macOS. MacOS doesn't support Vulkan and so that version of Wine is missing DXVK and Vkd3d for better game performance and support. It's a completely different experience. Plus with Steam on Linux you don't need to run the Windows version of Steam at all. The native client will let you install Windows games using Proton (Valve's modified Wine essentially) by checking a box. Most stuff works very well and it's how the Steam Deck does it's thing. Some titles actually work better than they do on modern Windows like Jedi Knight II which has 3D acceleration support on Linux through Wine but not Windows 10 native.