16 ms·

5 years ago Valve released Proton

308 points by chungus 3y ago

idle76 3y ago
Also check out Glorious Eggroll on Gihub for even better performance.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  On the topic of GE, anyone try his custom Fedora distro, Nobara[1] and has any feedback on it? Is it daily-drivable on a laptop without any issues, and stable long term without any breakages? Not just for gaming, but for daily entertainment and productivity task of those with one distro for everything? I tried installing it a while back and found the default installer partitioning much more janky and messed up GRUB making my system unbootable, unlike other "Just Works™" distros like Ubuntu, EndevourOS or Mint where they worked flawless on multi-boot systems. I'm not knocking it, I can imagine it's tough for a single developer to do all that and test everything, it would just be cool to know if it's gotten some polish now and how stable it is to daily drive. [1] https://nobaraproject.org/ https://nobaraproject.org/
  - johnny22 3y ago
    I've only heard good things about it, but i see no reason to use it. making fedora do what it does is easy enough.
    - slikrick 3y ago
      "Easy enough" sure, you keep up with all those patches, manually, on your own system, then say it. This site literally can't not be pretentious
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        >This site literally can't not be pretentious Infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
      - johnny22 3y ago
        most of those things other than the codecs and steam from rpmfusion just aren't necessary for most folks is all. I'm not trying to shame folks from using an easy route. You read my comment extremely uncharitably. I do think one should be careful of relying on a project with a bus factor of 1 for your OS.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >i see no reason to use it. making fedora do what it does is easy enough Yes, people working in tech and with free time can do that, but many don't want to go down that rabbit hole anymore and fiddle with their OS to get it to where Nobara is, and would rather go for something that's already preconfigured out of the box for the best gaming experience where everything is already set and you can immediately start installing and playing games after installing the OS, similarly to Windows is. That's the whole point of these distros.
      - Glome495 3y ago
        Then they should be using a simpler distro like mint because an install script doesn't change the fact that it's still Fedora which doesn't target new users.
  - oaththrowaway 3y ago
    I have it installed on my gaming PC. It is fine
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
I don't know how common it is, but the AI War developers posted recently about their new game & said Steam recommended they drop their Linux port, saying that just relying on Proton would be better performing & a better use of time. I'm very curious how widespread this advice is. It's a little sad & ironic to me if Proton is now entrenching Windows as the only target platform. I'm hoping this wasn't blanket advice Valve is handing out but really something specific to the team.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  If the devs test with Proton, then I don't see a problem. Proton is open source, so the future of games that run well with Proton seems secure.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Do you want more games to be played on Linux or not? Because we've been trying the whole "please target native Linux" thing for awhile now and it simply isn't appealing enough to ever work. Evangelism is useless in the face of results.
  - memefrog 3y ago
    >Do you want more games to be played on Linux or not? This is meaningless if you change the definition of "on Linux" to mean "on Windows".
    - ShamelessC 3y ago
      “on Windows” is no longer a worthwhile phrase when it simply means “targeting a Linux/Windows shared compatibility ABI”. There are more functioning games on Linux than I ever would have thought possible because of this (very difficult and certainly open source) work that’s been done by Wine, Proton, Valve and many many more. But of course, someone has to find a way to discourage all of that because it isn’t pure enough or whatever.
- COGlory 3y ago
  Proton almost always runs better than Linux native. Windows is the only stable ABI on Linux, now.
stevepike 3y ago
Proton has earned steam my business forever. I haven't booted into Windows in over a year.
- INTPenis 3y ago
  I got rid of windows decades ago, so Steam has been the number one cause for my drop in productivity the last few years. And I love it.
- makomk 3y ago
  Valve have funded some good work on the underlying compatibility code, but their big contribution was really fixing a problem they themselves created. Lots of games expect to be able to call back to the Steam client for a license check, and this used to require running the Windows version of Steam which didn't work well (huge compatibility issues and it really didn't like being run at the same time as the Linux version). One of the big things enabling easy Linux gaming was a Valve-approved way to run Windows games under a compatibility layer and have them still connect to the same Linux client used to run native games.
  - henryfjordan 3y ago
    Valve may have contributed to the issue initially, but can you blame them? There wasn't exactly an abundance of Linux Support before Valve came along either. Why would they support a Linux Steam client and the whole compatibility layer when the demand just didn't exist. Valve becoming big enough to break into the hardware market (first Steam Machines and then the Steam Deck) was the first time they had any incentive to care about the OS layer. They could've made some deal w/ Microsoft but instead went the open-source route to the benefit of everyone. Kudos to Valve.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >but can you blame them? Sure I can. They decided ultimately to make an indirect dependence on Windows instead of encouraging devs to make good native linux ports. They more or less made the deal with Windows without having to get their hands dirty.
haunter 3y ago
11 years ago today (2012, Aug 21) Valve released CSGO forever changing gaming сука блять
- calderknight 3y ago
  Don't look at a calendar, it will be a depressing experience.
  - haunter 3y ago
    Damn yes my bad
    - calderknight 3y ago
      Covid years flew past
      - baq 3y ago
        The days were long though
  - _cenw 3y ago
    to be fair, CSGO was a failure for the first few years of its existence. so it's likely you're remembering it best from around 2016. all I know is that I have the operation payback challenge coin, but no real memory of those maps. i do wish they'd bring back some of the operation maps... (santorini anyone?)
    - calderknight 3y ago
      As it happens, I was an early adopter. I have my 10-year badge just from CSGO. I was SMFC in ~2013 (it was easy at that point in time, I get destroyed now). The game has changed a lot. The original version of CSGO wasn't even made by Valve Software. But every map in the Active pool is either a totally new map, or is an old one that's been re-built from the ground up. And I have a few skins and a bunch of cases left over from back then. They were worth $0.03 each back then. But the game has grown 500x so demand has increased while the cases actually reduce in supply over time...
mschuster91 3y ago
One thing that I'd love to see is a Proton version for M1/M2 Apple Silicon... UTM is the only thing that runs x86 VMs and for whatever reason its QEMU guest tool drivers are all completely buggy and everything is dog slow (and of course, Windows refusing to load unsigned drivers on Win7 x64 makes trying out different drivers pretty much impossible).
- stetrain 3y ago
  Yep, if Apple could get over their stubbornness and work with Valve on this it would be fantastic for customers of both companies. Apple has done some work with their game porting toolkit to support certain flavors of DirectX games with a combo of Wine and Rosetta. But this isn’t officially pitched as tool for end users to run Windows games.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    > if Apple could get over their stubbornness and work with Valve Maybe Value should give more an 10% of a thought to the Mac and make Steam not be terrible on the Mac first. They don’t care about the Mac. They only care about Linux because it lets them ship the Steam Deck and have a hedge against MS. The Mac is worse than an afterthought.
    - augusto-moura 3y ago
      Valve already had Wine on Linux to work with. Although we have Wine on Mac now, it is a subpar experience. Aside from that, Vulkan on MacOS never received official support from Apple I would say Valve stand on the shoulder of giants with Wine and Vulkan, they just had tl connect the dots between the two. If Apple itself would respect its gamer users it could spend sometime on these open projects, but knowing Apple, if they do anything it would be on a closed-source vendor lock-in style
      - MBCook 3y ago
        None of that explains why the Steam client on Mac is so terrible and has been for a very long time. Games have their own issues (you mentioned some). But the client is inexcusable.
sebazzz 3y ago
I run winesapOS[0] which is based on SteamOS and was able to repurpose an old Toshiba notebook for my kids, running Freddy Fish* and other games. Windows 10 doesn't run smoothly (even though it came with Windows 10) and I'm not going to run anything older than that. Steam also makes it very easy to switch between Proton versions. If version X doesn't work, perhaps version X-1 or X+1 does work, or even the experimental version. * Yes, ScummVM is available for Linux but the Steam Linux distribution included an old ScummVM which wasn't able to load some libraries. Running the Windows version through an compatibility layer was easier than modifying shell files to run the latest ScummVM through flatpak. [0]: https://github.com/LukeShortCloud/winesapOS https://github.com/LukeShortCloud/winesapOS
abtinf 3y ago
It’s been many years since I was current on the state of cross platform gaming. Is it possible that proton could become the de facto target platform? That is, if a developer builds to ensure that their game works correctly under proton, then will it also work correctly under windows? So by just ensuring it works under proton, which seems to be minimal effort, do they get access to the expanded market for “free”? Do any of the consoles support proton, so that the only barrier to releasing a game are the legal agreements?
- tmccrary55 3y ago
  Microsoft definitely wouldn't let that happen.
  - chongli 3y ago
    How will they prevent it?
    - erinnh 3y ago
      Force the move to their UWP platform even more? Only release DirectX 13 with UWP support etc.
      - SoKamil 3y ago
        UWP is dead.
        erinnh 3y ago
        Is it? Not really up to date on Windows stuff, but isn’t Microsoft only using UWP for all their (new) stuff? Xbox launcher and all games on it are UWP, aren’t they?
        DiabloD3 3y ago
        UWP is dead, and a lot of the people who were pushing that weirdly locked in platform have been pushed out of the company. All future stuff is moving to WinUI 3.x (which belongs to the same family of C# XAML UI libraries, and Visual Studio has a wizard to help you turn your UWP app into a real C# app) and the Microsoft Store is no longer locked to UWP apps only and WinUI 3.x is officially supported on other non-CLR langs (such as calling it from C++ or Rust) and WinUI 3.x is coming to non-Windows platforms (such as Linux). Microsoft isn't going to transform all their own apps overnight (for simple apps, updating a UWP app to a C# WinUI 3.x app buys you nothing), but will happen over time as WinUI 3.x-only features are added to those apps. Microsoft set themselves on this path starting uh, like 5 years ago? They publicly announced it about 3 years ago.
gabereiser 3y ago
Proton was the missing piece to Linux gaming/desktop. It’s also a vital part of steam deck. Maybe someday we’ll get a standard rendering pipeline :/ /s.
MrDresden 3y ago
Threw my Windows partition away 4 years ago and haven't looked back since. Steam has earned my business with their work on Proton.
- heyoni 3y ago
  I keep windows for 1 reason: call of duty. all those games with kernel level anticheats have trouble running on linux apparently :\
  - gpderetta 3y ago
    I have had luck running CoD on a VM with GPU passtrough. It is not necessarily less cumbersome than dual booting though.
    - heyoni 3y ago
      That is my next goal right right after I master NixOS! The learning curve is steep for nix itself and I know vfio is no walk in the park. I want to make sure if I'm doing complicated stuff like that, I can at least roll things back to a clean state if they break.
      - frio 3y ago
        I followed this path too; it all worked, but the magic vfio incantations can change kernel to kernel, so there was always a fair bit of maintenance involved. I'd use Proton for 95% of my games, so whenever I had to fall back to vfio/Windows for a game for a while, everything would've changed. NixOS made this manageable, but it was never pleasant. Have fun with the project; I'd be curious to know if (like me) you end up (sadly!) continuing to dual-boot for Windows only games. VFIO seemed like the dream end goal, and maybe it's gotten better since 2021, but for me at least, it got in the way more often than not. I have rigged up a non-VFIO VM that boots off the same Windows partition though, so that I can log into it and run Windows updates once in a while without needing to do a full reboot.
hanniabu 3y ago
I really wish the linux community would polish off the UX for ubuntu so it's more attractive and usable for mainstream
- barbs 3y ago
  I think these days there are other distros that do it better, like Pop!_OS
  - hanniabu 3y ago
    In your opinion how does Pop!_OS it better?
- shmerl 3y ago
  You don't need to use Ubuntu. A distro with recent KDE release is better.
- ilc 3y ago
  I really wish Ubuntu would stop going their own way and work with everyone else. And that's a more general comment than just this.
- dcgudeman 3y ago
  If you think that UX polish is the reason why "mainstream" people use microsoft/apple products over linux you are really deluding yourself.
  - mmercedes 3y ago
    not a productive comment to call someone deluded without at least explaining why. The UX does seem like a significant hurdle to maintream adoption to me.
    - dcgudeman 3y ago
      Does it really require an explanation? All you have to do is observe that literally everyone besides a few free software zealots use "non-free" operating systems. What company is developing consumer linux computers for retail sale? If someone even wanted to buy one they would have to really look. There are many unknowns about what programs will run on linux. Will a buyer encounter a situation where they are literally blocked from doing what they need to do because they are using a fringe operating system? There are a million services that have integrations into these operating systems that would go out the window with linux. And this doesn't even begin touch the entire ecosystem of enterprise device management. But yeah maybe it's the UX. Just a couple more polished features in GNOME and then Walmart will roll out an entire fleet of new linux computers for their financial department! And grandma will finally switch over to that sweet FOSS laptop! And genz will drop their nice macbook pros and get on a nice fedora laptop! Just one more UX release.
Zhyl 3y ago
When Proton came out I had multiple people on HN going on quite long rants about how Linux would never be viable for gaming. One multi-million-unit-selling handheld gaming system later and I don't see those arguments much anymore.
- throwaway89201 3y ago
  It makes for a very boring discussion (and makes this a boring comment) to recall some random person who ranted in a way that didn't age well. If you're going to make that point, at least link to the thread to allow reading some interesting comments there instead. If your memory is about [1], which is the first main topic on Proton, the criticism seems quite muted (and otherwise downvoted). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17815892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17815892
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  It was a safe prediction to make. Even SEGA couldn't do a console anymore, Linux was behind MacOS in games support, all app developer companies whined about Linux being unsupportable and no market. "The year of the Linux desktop" was a recurring joke (still is with the GNOME / Unity churn, Wayland switchover, snaps breaking how GUI apps interact with a filesystem, and the usual perpetual churn for churn's sake making system support and OS upgrades a crapshoot).
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I never particularly doubted Linux working for gaming, but I'm not sure if a compatibility layer to the actual dominant platform is really the long term win to celebrate here. Great for customers, but a ticking time bomb for the FOSS crowd (aside from Steam being proprietary ofc. More talking about the Microsoft dependency).
jwells89 3y ago
I'd love to go Linux full-time on my gaming machine, but for now VR (Beat Saber, primarily) is keeping me tethered to Windows. It's no fault of Valve's, though… the blame falls entirely on Facebook for insisting on their proprietary Oculus client, not supporting Linux with that client, and not doing anything to make that client work with Proton/WINE.
gumballindie 3y ago
Like many others here have said, Valve has won a loyal customer. The impact proton has over linux as desktop is unmeasurable. They did open source right, and they will likely benefit massively from it.
- mariusor 3y ago
  The only people that hate proton are the teams that port games to linux for a living. I personally am sad to see that icculus and flibitjibobo, to name just two, are out of work on this front.
deergomoo 3y ago
I picked up a Steam Deck recently and aside from when I’ve booted into the desktop mode to set up some emulators you’d never know it was running games through a compatibility layer. Truly incredible work from Valve. Technical impressiveness aside it’s a really nice device too—I like having something that feels mostly like a console in the “it just works” factor, but still allows me to do some fiddling if and when I want to.
- noxvilleza 3y ago
  It's truly a brilliant holiday device: gaming on the go, but also able to plug into a keyboard/mouse (maybe a TV) and get some minor work done.
NietTim 3y ago
Just went and checked, out of my top 20 games only flight simulator and space engineers do not work. I had completely missed that proton has come so far...I think this means I can finally truly ditch windows on my game/virtualisation machine
SirMaster 3y ago
Proton might be great for the game itself. But something needs to be done about anti-cheat. I only play multi-player games, and when I search ProtonDB none of the games I play say they are supported. Call of Duty, Battlefield 2042, Rainbow 6 Seige, PUGB, Destiny 2
NelsonMinar 3y ago
Proton is a remarkable accomplishment; I never believed it would have worked as well as it does. It helps that newer games are increasingly based on a couple of engines (Unity in particular) but its support for older games is also impressive. Proton is the basis of Chromebook's experimental Steam games support. It works pretty well, as well as Proton itself as far as I can tell.
roody15 3y ago
Playing Baldurs gate three on unbuntu. Haven’t booted a windows machine at my home now in years!!
- agnivade 3y ago
  It's crashing frequently for me. Are you using Proton experimental or v7? I am using experimental and vulcan and it keeps crashing for me.
everdrive 3y ago
I've been running solely on Linux since something like 2015. I was primarily on Linux from ~2006 or so, but did switch to Windows for a couple of years to play some Windows games. (this was before Proton really existed) I'm probably less technically savvy than a lot of the HN crowd, and I just have not ever had a significant problem running linux. For sure, I've avoided some problems by being picky about what PCs I buy. But for the most part it's been pretty pain free. Running Linux full-time has been effortless and easy. And thanks to Valve, gaming on Linux gets better every year. I played Elden Ring on launch, and on launch, it actually played better than PC. To the extent that HN types have trouble with Linux, I can only imagine it's because they're doing _more_ on their PC than me. ie, they have some software or project that just needs to run a certain way. For sure, Linux isn't always perfect for that.
- sph 3y ago
  Linux is great for both the non-techie layman and the computer wiz. Those that complain are the majority on people you frequent on HN which know enough shell commands to be dangerous but couldn't unfuck a broken fstab. Which is fine, mind you, just pointing out that most people that are NOT in tech would find Linux very usable, if not more usable than Windows.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Well, there are a few areas where Linux desktop is as bad as ever: accessibility and security.
    - yencabulator 3y ago
      For what it's worth, ChromeOS is Linux+Wayland and does both of those pretty well. It's worth studying.
      - kaba0 3y ago
        It’s definitely better than “gnu+linux”, but Android is currently the most secure and usable linux distro hands down, and in my opinion it is just very sad that it is so hard to even run an android app on linux.
Apocryphon 3y ago
For someone with a Mac (non Apple Silicon), does it make sense to run Linux in a VM in order to play Proton-supporting Steam games?
zeta0134 3y ago
Well this is a topical place to ask this tangent I suppose. My GPU is on the fritz and I'm looking to replace it. Has anyone gotten SteamVR working decently under Linux through Proton? If so, what GPU do you have? It's basically impossible to search for information on this, but I really want to develop for VR, and I'd like to not have to boot into Windows to do it
senectus1 3y ago
VR and DRM are the two things that keep me from wiping my windows partition.
tegmark 3y ago
i cant wait for counter strike 2
sharts 3y ago
Is proton actually good now? I tried it a few years ago to play some not-uncommon game and it was absolutely terrible, regardless of the hardware power available.
- kaba0 3y ago
  It depends more on the game at hand - proton, the tech itself is absolutely amazing and can sometimes run windows apps faster than they would run on windows itself. But video drivers have glitches, strange use cases, etc, so certain games may require extensive tweaking, or even more rarely won’t work even with that. Steam makes most of the configuration seamless, though.
heelix 3y ago
My best workstation runs Linux for work, so I've spent time getting 'odd' setups like Centos 7 to work before there were nice packages for it. Learned a bit trying to game on my good video card without booting to Windows. Fast forward to current, and I don't even bother with a Windows partition on it. Today, Ubuntu sorts the drivers and steam setup just lovely. I've gifted out old workstations to extended family and they are pretty happy with what they can do from a gaming/browsing perspective. With Windows 11 not able to support these boxes, having something 'just work' gives these older boxes an extended life. Most have not needed to pick up a Windows license. Very much at that 'good enough' state.
butz 3y ago
Sometimes is just hard to believe, that you can open Steam, buy almost any game and play it right away without any issues or additional tinkering, on Linux.

308 points by chungus 3y ago

idle76 3y ago

Also check out Glorious Eggroll on Gihub for even better performance.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
On the topic of GE, anyone try his custom Fedora distro, Nobara[1] and has any feedback on it? Is it daily-drivable on a laptop without any issues, and stable long term without any breakages? Not just for gaming, but for daily entertainment and productivity task of those with one distro for everything? I tried installing it a while back and found the default installer partitioning much more janky and messed up GRUB making my system unbootable, unlike other "Just Works™" distros like Ubuntu, EndevourOS or Mint where they worked flawless on multi-boot systems. I'm not knocking it, I can imagine it's tough for a single developer to do all that and test everything, it would just be cool to know if it's gotten some polish now and how stable it is to daily drive. [1] https://nobaraproject.org/ https://nobaraproject.org/
- johnny22 3y ago
  I've only heard good things about it, but i see no reason to use it. making fedora do what it does is easy enough.
  - slikrick 3y ago
    "Easy enough" sure, you keep up with all those patches, manually, on your own system, then say it. This site literally can't not be pretentious
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >This site literally can't not be pretentious Infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
    - johnny22 3y ago
      most of those things other than the codecs and steam from rpmfusion just aren't necessary for most folks is all. I'm not trying to shame folks from using an easy route. You read my comment extremely uncharitably. I do think one should be careful of relying on a project with a bus factor of 1 for your OS.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >i see no reason to use it. making fedora do what it does is easy enough Yes, people working in tech and with free time can do that, but many don't want to go down that rabbit hole anymore and fiddle with their OS to get it to where Nobara is, and would rather go for something that's already preconfigured out of the box for the best gaming experience where everything is already set and you can immediately start installing and playing games after installing the OS, similarly to Windows is. That's the whole point of these distros.
    - Glome495 3y ago
      Then they should be using a simpler distro like mint because an install script doesn't change the fact that it's still Fedora which doesn't target new users.
- oaththrowaway 3y ago
  I have it installed on my gaming PC. It is fine

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

I don't know how common it is, but the AI War developers posted recently about their new game & said Steam recommended they drop their Linux port, saying that just relying on Proton would be better performing & a better use of time. I'm very curious how widespread this advice is. It's a little sad & ironic to me if Proton is now entrenching Windows as the only target platform. I'm hoping this wasn't blanket advice Valve is handing out but really something specific to the team.

mcpackieh 3y ago
If the devs test with Proton, then I don't see a problem. Proton is open source, so the future of games that run well with Proton seems secure.
ShamelessC 3y ago
Do you want more games to be played on Linux or not? Because we've been trying the whole "please target native Linux" thing for awhile now and it simply isn't appealing enough to ever work. Evangelism is useless in the face of results.
- memefrog 3y ago
  >Do you want more games to be played on Linux or not? This is meaningless if you change the definition of "on Linux" to mean "on Windows".
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    “on Windows” is no longer a worthwhile phrase when it simply means “targeting a Linux/Windows shared compatibility ABI”. There are more functioning games on Linux than I ever would have thought possible because of this (very difficult and certainly open source) work that’s been done by Wine, Proton, Valve and many many more. But of course, someone has to find a way to discourage all of that because it isn’t pure enough or whatever.
COGlory 3y ago
Proton almost always runs better than Linux native. Windows is the only stable ABI on Linux, now.

stevepike 3y ago

Proton has earned steam my business forever. I haven't booted into Windows in over a year.

INTPenis 3y ago
I got rid of windows decades ago, so Steam has been the number one cause for my drop in productivity the last few years. And I love it.
makomk 3y ago
Valve have funded some good work on the underlying compatibility code, but their big contribution was really fixing a problem they themselves created. Lots of games expect to be able to call back to the Steam client for a license check, and this used to require running the Windows version of Steam which didn't work well (huge compatibility issues and it really didn't like being run at the same time as the Linux version). One of the big things enabling easy Linux gaming was a Valve-approved way to run Windows games under a compatibility layer and have them still connect to the same Linux client used to run native games.
- henryfjordan 3y ago
  Valve may have contributed to the issue initially, but can you blame them? There wasn't exactly an abundance of Linux Support before Valve came along either. Why would they support a Linux Steam client and the whole compatibility layer when the demand just didn't exist. Valve becoming big enough to break into the hardware market (first Steam Machines and then the Steam Deck) was the first time they had any incentive to care about the OS layer. They could've made some deal w/ Microsoft but instead went the open-source route to the benefit of everyone. Kudos to Valve.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >but can you blame them? Sure I can. They decided ultimately to make an indirect dependence on Windows instead of encouraging devs to make good native linux ports. They more or less made the deal with Windows without having to get their hands dirty.

haunter 3y ago

11 years ago today (2012, Aug 21) Valve released CSGO forever changing gaming сука блять

calderknight 3y ago
Don't look at a calendar, it will be a depressing experience.
- haunter 3y ago
  Damn yes my bad
  - calderknight 3y ago
    Covid years flew past
    - baq 3y ago
      The days were long though
- _cenw 3y ago
  to be fair, CSGO was a failure for the first few years of its existence. so it's likely you're remembering it best from around 2016. all I know is that I have the operation payback challenge coin, but no real memory of those maps. i do wish they'd bring back some of the operation maps... (santorini anyone?)
  - calderknight 3y ago
    As it happens, I was an early adopter. I have my 10-year badge just from CSGO. I was SMFC in ~2013 (it was easy at that point in time, I get destroyed now). The game has changed a lot. The original version of CSGO wasn't even made by Valve Software. But every map in the Active pool is either a totally new map, or is an old one that's been re-built from the ground up. And I have a few skins and a bunch of cases left over from back then. They were worth $0.03 each back then. But the game has grown 500x so demand has increased while the cases actually reduce in supply over time...

mschuster91 3y ago

One thing that I'd love to see is a Proton version for M1/M2 Apple Silicon... UTM is the only thing that runs x86 VMs and for whatever reason its QEMU guest tool drivers are all completely buggy and everything is dog slow (and of course, Windows refusing to load unsigned drivers on Win7 x64 makes trying out different drivers pretty much impossible).

stetrain 3y ago
Yep, if Apple could get over their stubbornness and work with Valve on this it would be fantastic for customers of both companies. Apple has done some work with their game porting toolkit to support certain flavors of DirectX games with a combo of Wine and Rosetta. But this isn’t officially pitched as tool for end users to run Windows games.
- MBCook 3y ago
  > if Apple could get over their stubbornness and work with Valve Maybe Value should give more an 10% of a thought to the Mac and make Steam not be terrible on the Mac first. They don’t care about the Mac. They only care about Linux because it lets them ship the Steam Deck and have a hedge against MS. The Mac is worse than an afterthought.
  - augusto-moura 3y ago
    Valve already had Wine on Linux to work with. Although we have Wine on Mac now, it is a subpar experience. Aside from that, Vulkan on MacOS never received official support from Apple I would say Valve stand on the shoulder of giants with Wine and Vulkan, they just had tl connect the dots between the two. If Apple itself would respect its gamer users it could spend sometime on these open projects, but knowing Apple, if they do anything it would be on a closed-source vendor lock-in style
    - MBCook 3y ago
      None of that explains why the Steam client on Mac is so terrible and has been for a very long time. Games have their own issues (you mentioned some). But the client is inexcusable.

sebazzz 3y ago

I run winesapOS[0] which is based on SteamOS and was able to repurpose an old Toshiba notebook for my kids, running Freddy Fish* and other games. Windows 10 doesn't run smoothly (even though it came with Windows 10) and I'm not going to run anything older than that. Steam also makes it very easy to switch between Proton versions. If version X doesn't work, perhaps version X-1 or X+1 does work, or even the experimental version. * Yes, ScummVM is available for Linux but the Steam Linux distribution included an old ScummVM which wasn't able to load some libraries. Running the Windows version through an compatibility layer was easier than modifying shell files to run the latest ScummVM through flatpak. [0]: https://github.com/LukeShortCloud/winesapOS https://github.com/LukeShortCloud/winesapOS

abtinf 3y ago

It’s been many years since I was current on the state of cross platform gaming. Is it possible that proton could become the de facto target platform? That is, if a developer builds to ensure that their game works correctly under proton, then will it also work correctly under windows? So by just ensuring it works under proton, which seems to be minimal effort, do they get access to the expanded market for “free”? Do any of the consoles support proton, so that the only barrier to releasing a game are the legal agreements?

tmccrary55 3y ago
Microsoft definitely wouldn't let that happen.
- chongli 3y ago
  How will they prevent it?
  - erinnh 3y ago
    Force the move to their UWP platform even more? Only release DirectX 13 with UWP support etc.
    - SoKamil 3y ago
      UWP is dead.
      - erinnh 3y ago
        Is it? Not really up to date on Windows stuff, but isn’t Microsoft only using UWP for all their (new) stuff? Xbox launcher and all games on it are UWP, aren’t they?
        DiabloD3 3y ago
        UWP is dead, and a lot of the people who were pushing that weirdly locked in platform have been pushed out of the company. All future stuff is moving to WinUI 3.x (which belongs to the same family of C# XAML UI libraries, and Visual Studio has a wizard to help you turn your UWP app into a real C# app) and the Microsoft Store is no longer locked to UWP apps only and WinUI 3.x is officially supported on other non-CLR langs (such as calling it from C++ or Rust) and WinUI 3.x is coming to non-Windows platforms (such as Linux). Microsoft isn't going to transform all their own apps overnight (for simple apps, updating a UWP app to a C# WinUI 3.x app buys you nothing), but will happen over time as WinUI 3.x-only features are added to those apps. Microsoft set themselves on this path starting uh, like 5 years ago? They publicly announced it about 3 years ago.

gabereiser 3y ago

Proton was the missing piece to Linux gaming/desktop. It’s also a vital part of steam deck. Maybe someday we’ll get a standard rendering pipeline :/ /s.

MrDresden 3y ago

Threw my Windows partition away 4 years ago and haven't looked back since. Steam has earned my business with their work on Proton.

heyoni 3y ago
I keep windows for 1 reason: call of duty. all those games with kernel level anticheats have trouble running on linux apparently :\
- gpderetta 3y ago
  I have had luck running CoD on a VM with GPU passtrough. It is not necessarily less cumbersome than dual booting though.
  - heyoni 3y ago
    That is my next goal right right after I master NixOS! The learning curve is steep for nix itself and I know vfio is no walk in the park. I want to make sure if I'm doing complicated stuff like that, I can at least roll things back to a clean state if they break.
    - frio 3y ago
      I followed this path too; it all worked, but the magic vfio incantations can change kernel to kernel, so there was always a fair bit of maintenance involved. I'd use Proton for 95% of my games, so whenever I had to fall back to vfio/Windows for a game for a while, everything would've changed. NixOS made this manageable, but it was never pleasant. Have fun with the project; I'd be curious to know if (like me) you end up (sadly!) continuing to dual-boot for Windows only games. VFIO seemed like the dream end goal, and maybe it's gotten better since 2021, but for me at least, it got in the way more often than not. I have rigged up a non-VFIO VM that boots off the same Windows partition though, so that I can log into it and run Windows updates once in a while without needing to do a full reboot.

hanniabu 3y ago

I really wish the linux community would polish off the UX for ubuntu so it's more attractive and usable for mainstream

barbs 3y ago
I think these days there are other distros that do it better, like Pop!_OS
- hanniabu 3y ago
  In your opinion how does Pop!_OS it better?
shmerl 3y ago
You don't need to use Ubuntu. A distro with recent KDE release is better.
ilc 3y ago
I really wish Ubuntu would stop going their own way and work with everyone else. And that's a more general comment than just this.
dcgudeman 3y ago
If you think that UX polish is the reason why "mainstream" people use microsoft/apple products over linux you are really deluding yourself.
- mmercedes 3y ago
  not a productive comment to call someone deluded without at least explaining why. The UX does seem like a significant hurdle to maintream adoption to me.
  - dcgudeman 3y ago
    Does it really require an explanation? All you have to do is observe that literally everyone besides a few free software zealots use "non-free" operating systems. What company is developing consumer linux computers for retail sale? If someone even wanted to buy one they would have to really look. There are many unknowns about what programs will run on linux. Will a buyer encounter a situation where they are literally blocked from doing what they need to do because they are using a fringe operating system? There are a million services that have integrations into these operating systems that would go out the window with linux. And this doesn't even begin touch the entire ecosystem of enterprise device management. But yeah maybe it's the UX. Just a couple more polished features in GNOME and then Walmart will roll out an entire fleet of new linux computers for their financial department! And grandma will finally switch over to that sweet FOSS laptop! And genz will drop their nice macbook pros and get on a nice fedora laptop! Just one more UX release.

Zhyl 3y ago

When Proton came out I had multiple people on HN going on quite long rants about how Linux would never be viable for gaming. One multi-million-unit-selling handheld gaming system later and I don't see those arguments much anymore.

throwaway89201 3y ago
It makes for a very boring discussion (and makes this a boring comment) to recall some random person who ranted in a way that didn't age well. If you're going to make that point, at least link to the thread to allow reading some interesting comments there instead. If your memory is about [1], which is the first main topic on Proton, the criticism seems quite muted (and otherwise downvoted). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17815892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17815892
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
It was a safe prediction to make. Even SEGA couldn't do a console anymore, Linux was behind MacOS in games support, all app developer companies whined about Linux being unsupportable and no market. "The year of the Linux desktop" was a recurring joke (still is with the GNOME / Unity churn, Wayland switchover, snaps breaking how GUI apps interact with a filesystem, and the usual perpetual churn for churn's sake making system support and OS upgrades a crapshoot).
johnnyanmac 3y ago
I never particularly doubted Linux working for gaming, but I'm not sure if a compatibility layer to the actual dominant platform is really the long term win to celebrate here. Great for customers, but a ticking time bomb for the FOSS crowd (aside from Steam being proprietary ofc. More talking about the Microsoft dependency).

jwells89 3y ago

I'd love to go Linux full-time on my gaming machine, but for now VR (Beat Saber, primarily) is keeping me tethered to Windows. It's no fault of Valve's, though… the blame falls entirely on Facebook for insisting on their proprietary Oculus client, not supporting Linux with that client, and not doing anything to make that client work with Proton/WINE.

gumballindie 3y ago

Like many others here have said, Valve has won a loyal customer. The impact proton has over linux as desktop is unmeasurable. They did open source right, and they will likely benefit massively from it.

mariusor 3y ago
The only people that hate proton are the teams that port games to linux for a living. I personally am sad to see that icculus and flibitjibobo, to name just two, are out of work on this front.

deergomoo 3y ago

I picked up a Steam Deck recently and aside from when I’ve booted into the desktop mode to set up some emulators you’d never know it was running games through a compatibility layer. Truly incredible work from Valve. Technical impressiveness aside it’s a really nice device too—I like having something that feels mostly like a console in the “it just works” factor, but still allows me to do some fiddling if and when I want to.

noxvilleza 3y ago
It's truly a brilliant holiday device: gaming on the go, but also able to plug into a keyboard/mouse (maybe a TV) and get some minor work done.

NietTim 3y ago

Just went and checked, out of my top 20 games only flight simulator and space engineers do not work. I had completely missed that proton has come so far...I think this means I can finally truly ditch windows on my game/virtualisation machine

SirMaster 3y ago

Proton might be great for the game itself. But something needs to be done about anti-cheat. I only play multi-player games, and when I search ProtonDB none of the games I play say they are supported. Call of Duty, Battlefield 2042, Rainbow 6 Seige, PUGB, Destiny 2

NelsonMinar 3y ago

Proton is a remarkable accomplishment; I never believed it would have worked as well as it does. It helps that newer games are increasingly based on a couple of engines (Unity in particular) but its support for older games is also impressive. Proton is the basis of Chromebook's experimental Steam games support. It works pretty well, as well as Proton itself as far as I can tell.

roody15 3y ago

Playing Baldurs gate three on unbuntu. Haven’t booted a windows machine at my home now in years!!

agnivade 3y ago
It's crashing frequently for me. Are you using Proton experimental or v7? I am using experimental and vulcan and it keeps crashing for me.

everdrive 3y ago

I've been running solely on Linux since something like 2015. I was primarily on Linux from ~2006 or so, but did switch to Windows for a couple of years to play some Windows games. (this was before Proton really existed) I'm probably less technically savvy than a lot of the HN crowd, and I just have not ever had a significant problem running linux. For sure, I've avoided some problems by being picky about what PCs I buy. But for the most part it's been pretty pain free. Running Linux full-time has been effortless and easy. And thanks to Valve, gaming on Linux gets better every year. I played Elden Ring on launch, and on launch, it actually played better than PC. To the extent that HN types have trouble with Linux, I can only imagine it's because they're doing _more_ on their PC than me. ie, they have some software or project that just needs to run a certain way. For sure, Linux isn't always perfect for that.

sph 3y ago
Linux is great for both the non-techie layman and the computer wiz. Those that complain are the majority on people you frequent on HN which know enough shell commands to be dangerous but couldn't unfuck a broken fstab. Which is fine, mind you, just pointing out that most people that are NOT in tech would find Linux very usable, if not more usable than Windows.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Well, there are a few areas where Linux desktop is as bad as ever: accessibility and security.
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    For what it's worth, ChromeOS is Linux+Wayland and does both of those pretty well. It's worth studying.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      It’s definitely better than “gnu+linux”, but Android is currently the most secure and usable linux distro hands down, and in my opinion it is just very sad that it is so hard to even run an android app on linux.

Apocryphon 3y ago

For someone with a Mac (non Apple Silicon), does it make sense to run Linux in a VM in order to play Proton-supporting Steam games?

zeta0134 3y ago

Well this is a topical place to ask this tangent I suppose. My GPU is on the fritz and I'm looking to replace it. Has anyone gotten SteamVR working decently under Linux through Proton? If so, what GPU do you have? It's basically impossible to search for information on this, but I really want to develop for VR, and I'd like to not have to boot into Windows to do it

senectus1 3y ago

VR and DRM are the two things that keep me from wiping my windows partition.

tegmark 3y ago

i cant wait for counter strike 2

sharts 3y ago

Is proton actually good now? I tried it a few years ago to play some not-uncommon game and it was absolutely terrible, regardless of the hardware power available.

kaba0 3y ago
It depends more on the game at hand - proton, the tech itself is absolutely amazing and can sometimes run windows apps faster than they would run on windows itself. But video drivers have glitches, strange use cases, etc, so certain games may require extensive tweaking, or even more rarely won’t work even with that. Steam makes most of the configuration seamless, though.

heelix 3y ago

My best workstation runs Linux for work, so I've spent time getting 'odd' setups like Centos 7 to work before there were nice packages for it. Learned a bit trying to game on my good video card without booting to Windows. Fast forward to current, and I don't even bother with a Windows partition on it. Today, Ubuntu sorts the drivers and steam setup just lovely. I've gifted out old workstations to extended family and they are pretty happy with what they can do from a gaming/browsing perspective. With Windows 11 not able to support these boxes, having something 'just work' gives these older boxes an extended life. Most have not needed to pick up a Windows license. Very much at that 'good enough' state.

butz 3y ago

Sometimes is just hard to believe, that you can open Steam, buy almost any game and play it right away without any issues or additional tinkering, on Linux.