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Red Hat Developer (Author of ProtonGE) Talks at the Ubuntu Summit about Proton

46 points by ekianjo 3y ago

samueloph 3y ago
What's up the the Red Hat mention? One of the first things the presenter says is that his job has nothing to do with this. Edit: mentioning the presenter's name might be better. FTR the video is titled: "Glorious Eggroll (ProtonGE Developer )Talks at the Ubuntu Summit (Day 2)"
- dj_mc_merlin 3y ago
  Red Hat has more name recognition (at least for now). Even though the GE fork of Proton is way more technically impressive for one person than a Red Hat job IMO. Creating a fork of a public tool maintained by a large company with a team that actually gets popular is something. edit: Proton itself is also a massive achievement that often gets overlooked. Somehow emulation on a grand scale with many edge cases and optimizations can run 95% of Windows games, at near native performance and often with multiplayer. If you think of Linux gaming in, say, 2014, this is kind of insane.
  - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
    Just a bit: it's not emulation but compatibility. Proton (and Wine) implement and/or translate calls made by Windows programs without requiring any virtualization or emulation. In some ways it's closer to an open-source implementation of Windows and its runtime. After all, Wine (on which Proton is layered atop) stands for "Wine is not emulation."
    - dj_mc_merlin 3y ago
      Fair enough, it's in the name. I still treat it as black magic since it just kind of slowly started almost always working in the last 5 years. As if some great curse was lifted and we were freed from the shoddy install scripts and long debug sessions etc. etc.
  - reactordev 3y ago
    I would have laughed at you and said there’s no way to get all the FOSS developers to implement a win32 shim like this. Here I am now, foot in mouth, because it was done by people who had a vested interest, Valve et al. It’s like if someone said: “Hey kid, 10 years from now you’ll be on the moon.” and then, a decade later, you’re literally on the moon doing science or moonwalks to Michael Jackson or potato farming.
    - geraldhh 3y ago
      afaik valve did mostly package and polish the components like wine and dxvk when making proton but the bulk of the w32 api was implemented by foss dev's in the decades before
      - paines 3y ago
        Exaxctly. The one really big thing, at least for me, was making controller/joypad usage easy or more less hazle free. Before that, you had to do that manually which was a PITA
    - HeckFeck 3y ago
      Gabe used to work on Windows, he has a long memory.
- squigz 3y ago
  And the submitted title should reflect that https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
_ea1k 3y ago
Some guy who makes hats and is the author of a book about subatomic particles talked at a meeting about "humanity towards others" about those particles?
systems 3y ago
Not sure if this correct, but it was kinda hard to find, if you have no clue what Proton Ge is Proton GE is a compatibility layer that allows more games to run on the Steam Deck
- adr1an 3y ago
  Proton is the compatibility layer from Steam (e.g. a wine fork). Meanwhile, ProtonGE is a fork that has a couple of enhancements. GE stands for GloriousEggroll, the author's nickname. Edit: and they're used in many Linux machines, not only steam deck
  - SSLy 3y ago
    it's important to note that both proton and protonge are soft forks, they pull most changes from their upstreams.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  here is more info: https://boilingsteam.com/protonge/ https://boilingsteam.com/protonge/
SSLy 3y ago
Audio is incomprehensible, can someone boost it? I can't put the volume any louder.
- c0pium 3y ago
  The issue is on your end, the audio is fine.
  - geraldhh 3y ago
    nope, the audio volume is too low but generally of better quality than most foss cons
  - justinclift 3y ago
    The audio is a bit low, but (for me) not to the point where the audio controls on my desktop can't boost it enough to work.
- Modified3019 3y ago
  For desktop browsers there are addons available to boost sound: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/600-sound-volume/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/600-sound-vol... Not sure about mobile.
gigatexal 3y ago
Glorious Eggroll is awesome. I’ve been low key following the GitHub for his fork and it’s really dedicated work they’re doing. Kudos to them.

46 points by ekianjo 3y ago

What's up the the Red Hat mention? One of the first things the presenter says is that his job has nothing to do with this. Edit: mentioning the presenter's name might be better. FTR the video is titled: "Glorious Eggroll (ProtonGE Developer )Talks at the Ubuntu Summit (Day 2)"

dj_mc_merlin 3y ago
Red Hat has more name recognition (at least for now). Even though the GE fork of Proton is way more technically impressive for one person than a Red Hat job IMO. Creating a fork of a public tool maintained by a large company with a team that actually gets popular is something. edit: Proton itself is also a massive achievement that often gets overlooked. Somehow emulation on a grand scale with many edge cases and optimizations can run 95% of Windows games, at near native performance and often with multiplayer. If you think of Linux gaming in, say, 2014, this is kind of insane.
- xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
  Just a bit: it's not emulation but compatibility. Proton (and Wine) implement and/or translate calls made by Windows programs without requiring any virtualization or emulation. In some ways it's closer to an open-source implementation of Windows and its runtime. After all, Wine (on which Proton is layered atop) stands for "Wine is not emulation."
  - dj_mc_merlin 3y ago
    Fair enough, it's in the name. I still treat it as black magic since it just kind of slowly started almost always working in the last 5 years. As if some great curse was lifted and we were freed from the shoddy install scripts and long debug sessions etc. etc.
- reactordev 3y ago
  I would have laughed at you and said there’s no way to get all the FOSS developers to implement a win32 shim like this. Here I am now, foot in mouth, because it was done by people who had a vested interest, Valve et al. It’s like if someone said: “Hey kid, 10 years from now you’ll be on the moon.” and then, a decade later, you’re literally on the moon doing science or moonwalks to Michael Jackson or potato farming.
  - geraldhh 3y ago
    afaik valve did mostly package and polish the components like wine and dxvk when making proton but the bulk of the w32 api was implemented by foss dev's in the decades before
    - paines 3y ago
      Exaxctly. The one really big thing, at least for me, was making controller/joypad usage easy or more less hazle free. Before that, you had to do that manually which was a PITA
  - HeckFeck 3y ago
    Gabe used to work on Windows, he has a long memory.
squigz 3y ago
And the submitted title should reflect that https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

_ea1k 3y ago

Some guy who makes hats and is the author of a book about subatomic particles talked at a meeting about "humanity towards others" about those particles?

systems 3y ago

Not sure if this correct, but it was kinda hard to find, if you have no clue what Proton Ge is Proton GE is a compatibility layer that allows more games to run on the Steam Deck

adr1an 3y ago
Proton is the compatibility layer from Steam (e.g. a wine fork). Meanwhile, ProtonGE is a fork that has a couple of enhancements. GE stands for GloriousEggroll, the author's nickname. Edit: and they're used in many Linux machines, not only steam deck
- SSLy 3y ago
  it's important to note that both proton and protonge are soft forks, they pull most changes from their upstreams.
ekianjo 3y ago
here is more info: https://boilingsteam.com/protonge/ https://boilingsteam.com/protonge/

SSLy 3y ago

Audio is incomprehensible, can someone boost it? I can't put the volume any louder.

c0pium 3y ago
The issue is on your end, the audio is fine.
- geraldhh 3y ago
  nope, the audio volume is too low but generally of better quality than most foss cons
- justinclift 3y ago
  The audio is a bit low, but (for me) not to the point where the audio controls on my desktop can't boost it enough to work.
Modified3019 3y ago
For desktop browsers there are addons available to boost sound: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/600-sound-volume/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/600-sound-vol... Not sure about mobile.

gigatexal 3y ago

Glorious Eggroll is awesome. I’ve been low key following the GitHub for his fork and it’s really dedicated work they’re doing. Kudos to them.