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Wine gets better and better, more and more impressive… And here I am having nothing to use it for, because all the software I run or need is now available for

Wine gets better and better, more and more impressive… And here I am having nothing to use it for, because all the software I run or need is now available for Linux. I guess I should be glad, but it still feels a little sad? All that effort someone puts in, for a seemingly ever-decreasing need?

Gigachad 4y ago
Wine, packaged as proton, is essentially the future of gaming on Linux now. Native ports kind of died out as running the Windows build in Proton works better than the native port which would often break after distro updates. It's also a better way of just getting stuff fixed, if there was a bug in the native linux build, you'd have to pester the developers of the game to fix it, while we can assume the windows build works correct so any issue can be fixed by fixing the open source Wine code. Its remarkable that these days you can reasonably expect that just about every game will work flawlessly running in wine.
- asddubs 4y ago
  >while we can assume the windows build works correct haha
- Arnavion 4y ago
  >Native ports kind of died out as running the Windows build in Proton works better than the native port which would often break after distro updates. >Its remarkable that these days you can reasonably expect that just about every game will work flawlessly running in wine. Almost every Windows game I check on ProtonDB has a non-platinum rating because of things like "game starts on a black screen until you blindly press a key" or "ending cutscene doesnt play" or "mouse acceleration doesn't work" or a billion other broken things. Is the game playable despite these issues? Sure it's playable. But the fact is that when game devs ignore Linux users assuming that Proton exists, then there is no incentive for them to fix these issues. Even a playable game today can become completely unplayable tomorrow because of a game update that works fine on Windows. With a native build you get a guarantee from the dev that they'll fix their Linux issues.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    >With a native build you get a guarantee from the dev that they'll fix their Linux issues. This was very much not my experience, games would often be broken if you didn't use ubuntu, or if they were a few years old. And the company wouldn't care because the contractors who ported it are gone. Often even leaving the linux version out of date. While any issue with the Windows one in wine, eventually basically any issue I encounter gets patched by an active team of open source devs, some funded by valve.
    - Arnavion 4y ago
      >This was very much not my experience >While any issue with the Windows one in wine, eventually basically any issue I encounter gets patched by an active team of open source devs, some funded by valve. We don't need to talk about your experience. Pick any game in ProtonDB that has a Platinum rating and you'll find 10 more that are lower because they have the issues I described. >games would often be broken if you didn't use ubuntu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634584
      - Gigachad 4y ago
        I could go to reddit and see every single game I play is buggy, unusable, and broken on Windows. But when I actually play them I see they are essentially perfect. The internet is great at exposing a million issues you'll never encounter yourself, often with undisclosed details about having mods or some extremely non conventional setup causing the problem. The reality is I game entirely on Linux and everything works perfect for me.
        Arnavion 4y ago
        And the reality is that I game entirely on Linux with a mix of Linux-native and Proton games. The Linux-native games work perfectly and the Proton games all have bugs.
        4y ago
haunter 4y ago
>for a seemingly ever-decreasing need I recommend you to read the "Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux" post. Sums up perfectly why Wine is needed and doing perfectly https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ The TLDR is that easier to make games for Windows (single OS and API) and just maintaining Wine/Proton (works across all distros) than actually making a Linux build too of the game. Huge thread when it was posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
- Arnavion 4y ago
  Game developers would be fine to target a single distro like Ubuntu 22.04. And I say that as someone who does not use Ubuntu, because I run Steam in a docker (podman) container of Ubuntu 22.04. It's a common base container for all "closed-source / not from my distro's repos" software - Steam, Discord, etc. The downside is that you have to mount whatever things you want to share from the host, like X11 socket, PulseAudio socket, D-Bus socket, etc. The upside is that you get to share only the things you want to trust the closed-source software with. The other day people were complaining how Discord made their system slow by scanning for game processes; Discord couldn't do that for me because it doesn't know about any processes other than itself.
  - RussianCow 4y ago
    That sounds really interesting, and I'd love to learn more about this. Did you hack something together yourself to allow you to do this, or are you using some software to manage the containers for you?
    - Arnavion 4y ago
      Hacked it together myself. I have a Containerfile with docker.io/library/ubuntu:22.04 base and a RUN step that installs steam + mesa-vulkan-drivers + some other GL and audio libs + 32-bit versions of those, creates a user with the same UID as my user on the host, and adds it to the input group (for controller support). Then I have a `~/.local/bin/steam` script that runs `podman container run --userns=keep-id` with parameters to pass through `/dev/dri` (for GPU), `/dev/input` (for controller), PulseAudio socket, X11 socket, and an empty directory as the home directory. Every week or so when I reboot my PC for updates, I rebuild the container image with whatever is the latest ubuntu base image and other packages at the time. `~/.local/bin/discord` is the same except it doesn't have the controller and GPU stuff, and it has a pre-processing step to download the Linux binary tarball from their website and unpack it into the home directory. I'd share it but it's part of a big private personal repo. I might separate it out into a GitHub Gist or something later.
ww520 4y ago
Run Notepad++.
nix23 4y ago
Sorry for getting downvoted for using native and probably opensource software, welcome to HN.

Gigachad 4y ago

Wine, packaged as proton, is essentially the future of gaming on Linux now. Native ports kind of died out as running the Windows build in Proton works better than the native port which would often break after distro updates. It's also a better way of just getting stuff fixed, if there was a bug in the native linux build, you'd have to pester the developers of the game to fix it, while we can assume the windows build works correct so any issue can be fixed by fixing the open source Wine code. Its remarkable that these days you can reasonably expect that just about every game will work flawlessly running in wine.

asddubs 4y ago
>while we can assume the windows build works correct haha
Arnavion 4y ago
>Native ports kind of died out as running the Windows build in Proton works better than the native port which would often break after distro updates. >Its remarkable that these days you can reasonably expect that just about every game will work flawlessly running in wine. Almost every Windows game I check on ProtonDB has a non-platinum rating because of things like "game starts on a black screen until you blindly press a key" or "ending cutscene doesnt play" or "mouse acceleration doesn't work" or a billion other broken things. Is the game playable despite these issues? Sure it's playable. But the fact is that when game devs ignore Linux users assuming that Proton exists, then there is no incentive for them to fix these issues. Even a playable game today can become completely unplayable tomorrow because of a game update that works fine on Windows. With a native build you get a guarantee from the dev that they'll fix their Linux issues.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  >With a native build you get a guarantee from the dev that they'll fix their Linux issues. This was very much not my experience, games would often be broken if you didn't use ubuntu, or if they were a few years old. And the company wouldn't care because the contractors who ported it are gone. Often even leaving the linux version out of date. While any issue with the Windows one in wine, eventually basically any issue I encounter gets patched by an active team of open source devs, some funded by valve.
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    >This was very much not my experience >While any issue with the Windows one in wine, eventually basically any issue I encounter gets patched by an active team of open source devs, some funded by valve. We don't need to talk about your experience. Pick any game in ProtonDB that has a Platinum rating and you'll find 10 more that are lower because they have the issues I described. >games would often be broken if you didn't use ubuntu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634584
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      I could go to reddit and see every single game I play is buggy, unusable, and broken on Windows. But when I actually play them I see they are essentially perfect. The internet is great at exposing a million issues you'll never encounter yourself, often with undisclosed details about having mods or some extremely non conventional setup causing the problem. The reality is I game entirely on Linux and everything works perfect for me.
      - Arnavion 4y ago
        And the reality is that I game entirely on Linux with a mix of Linux-native and Proton games. The Linux-native games work perfectly and the Proton games all have bugs.
        4y ago

haunter 4y ago

>for a seemingly ever-decreasing need I recommend you to read the "Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux" post. Sums up perfectly why Wine is needed and doing perfectly https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ The TLDR is that easier to make games for Windows (single OS and API) and just maintaining Wine/Proton (works across all distros) than actually making a Linux build too of the game. Huge thread when it was posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624

Arnavion 4y ago
Game developers would be fine to target a single distro like Ubuntu 22.04. And I say that as someone who does not use Ubuntu, because I run Steam in a docker (podman) container of Ubuntu 22.04. It's a common base container for all "closed-source / not from my distro's repos" software - Steam, Discord, etc. The downside is that you have to mount whatever things you want to share from the host, like X11 socket, PulseAudio socket, D-Bus socket, etc. The upside is that you get to share only the things you want to trust the closed-source software with. The other day people were complaining how Discord made their system slow by scanning for game processes; Discord couldn't do that for me because it doesn't know about any processes other than itself.
- RussianCow 4y ago
  That sounds really interesting, and I'd love to learn more about this. Did you hack something together yourself to allow you to do this, or are you using some software to manage the containers for you?
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    Hacked it together myself. I have a Containerfile with docker.io/library/ubuntu:22.04 base and a RUN step that installs steam + mesa-vulkan-drivers + some other GL and audio libs + 32-bit versions of those, creates a user with the same UID as my user on the host, and adds it to the input group (for controller support). Then I have a `~/.local/bin/steam` script that runs `podman container run --userns=keep-id` with parameters to pass through `/dev/dri` (for GPU), `/dev/input` (for controller), PulseAudio socket, X11 socket, and an empty directory as the home directory. Every week or so when I reboot my PC for updates, I rebuild the container image with whatever is the latest ubuntu base image and other packages at the time. `~/.local/bin/discord` is the same except it doesn't have the controller and GPU stuff, and it has a pre-processing step to download the Linux binary tarball from their website and unpack it into the home directory. I'd share it but it's part of a big private personal repo. I might separate it out into a GitHub Gist or something later.

ww520 4y ago

Run Notepad++.

nix23 4y ago

Sorry for getting downvoted for using native and probably opensource software, welcome to HN.