15 ms·

Celebrating 6 years since Valve announced Steam Play Proton for Linux

340 points by freedomben 2y ago

nhggfu 2y ago
sigh still can't play PUBG cos of the anti cheat, designed for windoze, afaik.
Escapado 2y ago
This is so cool! I am genuinely happy that through this I barely ever had to boot up windows anymore when I still had my gaming PC. I wish we could have something similar on Mac. I tried GPTK and Whiskey before but a bunch of my steam games that flawlessly worked on Proton won’t even start and if they do there is a fair chance they random crash and have unacceptable performance.
- abrookewood 2y ago
  Yes, I'm doing the same ... Steam on Linux all the way and Windows has been wiped. Couldn't be happier.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
  We have a mostly MacOS household and I couldn't agree more. Even for games that work on MacOS, compatibility and FPS drops are major problems. It's funny because Wine always had "MacOS support", but it seems second class compared to Linux
  - k4rli 2y ago
    No reason why it wouldn't be second or even lower class. That walled garden OS is slightly better than Windows but Linux (mainly arch, debian based) is way ahead in every way Proton is absolutely amazing and everything has worked for me, some older badly made games haven't had ideal performance but with latest Proton even some of them have improved massively. Going from ~120 to stable locked 500FPS as expected. Soon, if not yet, the games will run better with Proton on Linux than natively on Windows, at least with AMD.
    - lillecarl 2y ago
      Arch and Debian based systems aren't further than RPM based distros, whatever they use in SUSE or Nix(OS). Stay factual
- MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
  The solution for Mac is called „have a separate Windows ITX machine on the shelf and Steam Remote Stream the games to your MacBook“. Works reasonably well on a fast wifi.
hparadiz 2y ago
Sins of a Solar Empire 2 launched this past week and it runs on proton flawlessly on day 1.
mavamaarten 2y ago
I've been so amazed at how well Proton works. I've bought myself a Steam Deck a while ago, thinking that I _might_ be able to play some of my Windows games on it. I had some experience with Wine many many years ago and it just didn't work well so I always dual booted my PC with Windows for gaming. To my surprise I was able to play AAA titles like RDR2 and Fallout without any issues or tinkering about. I'm so happy that a company like Valve was able to put their shoulders under an initiative like this and actually stuck with it. Thank you, Valve!
orwin 2y ago
I'm jumping on the occasion to reiterate here that Valve's Proton team hiring process is good, and although I wasn't picked, the time they took to help me improve, give me advices, as well as the overall communication make me think their company should be great to work with (at least 3-4 years ago)
- Philip-J-Fry 2y ago
  Coming out of an interview process learning new stuff and happy in defeat will always make me feel good.
- 63stack 2y ago
  Searching for "valve proton team" doesn't bring up much, how did you find a job ad from them?
  - account42 2y ago
    Given Valve's structure (you choose what you work on) I wouldn't expect a job ad specifically for the Proton team. So it would probably fall under https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/jobs?job_id=57 https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/jobs?job_id=57 Besides that, Valve does approach people who already do good open source work in the space.
    - 63stack 2y ago
      Thanks!
steinuil 2y ago
I switched my gaming PC to NixOS a few months ago, I couldn't be happier. Other than a few games that also had issues on Windows and VR, everything I run through Proton just works. I also own a Steam Deck, which is a wonderful little device and it proved to me that I could safely go through with this switch and not lose access to much. Congrats to both the Proton and hardware team at Valve, and the people who contributed to Wine; the Year of the Linux Desktop has come, as far as I'm concerned.
forrestthewoods 2y ago
Turns out the best gaming API on Linux is WinAPI. Who woulda thought!
- haunter 2y ago
  See the famous "Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux" article https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
  - forrestthewoods 2y ago
    > You know how on Windows, you can just download a zip with a program in it, unzip, double click, and the thing runs? Wouldn't it be nice if we could have that on Linux? There's no technical reason we can't, just standard practices that are hostile to this goal. Oh Linux. The inability to trivially target arbitrary versions of glibc is so frustrating. So much of Linux is stuck with terrible patterns from the 80s.
    - haunter 2y ago
      To more or less this what snap, AppImage, flatpak etc tries to solve. And honestly it works. One part of Steam Deck's success that it was entirely built on an immutable flatpak based distro (Arch)
      - trissi1996 2y ago
        AFAIK Arch is neither flatpack-based nor immutable by default, that's just how valve configured it, or am I missing something since I've used it a few years ago ? Still nicely done on valve's part.
      - opan 2y ago
        Arch does not normally use or make you use flatpaks, nor is it immutable. You describe SteamOS, which is based on Arch, but with changes to it. This is more clearing up ambiguity for others reading than a correction, there's a decent chance you knew this already. Fedora Silverblue is a distro which heavily uses flatpaks and is immutable out of the box. I believe this is what Bazzite, a community alternative to SteamOS, is based on.
WD-42 2y ago
Less reasons to run anything but Linux by the minute.
a_e_k 2y ago
I've seen it joked that with Proton, Win32 is a good stable ABI for gaming on Linux. Given that, and that I'm most comfortable developing on Linux and in C++, does anyone have a good toolchain recommendation for cross compiling C++ to Windows from Linux? (Ideally something that I can point CMake at and get a build that I can test in Proton.)
- saurik 2y ago
  Pretty much any distribution you are on is going to let you install mingw, but you should also be able to just use clang and ldd these days (though the header files and library stubs would still come from mingw, unless you want to just compile against an official Microsoft SDK).
- steeleduncan 2y ago
  MinGW works well (e.g. mingw-w64 in Debian/Ubuntu). It works well with CMake, you just need to pass CMake flags like -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=x86_64-w64-mingw32-c++ -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=x86_64-w64-mingw32-c Something like SDL or Raylib is useful for cross platform windowing and sound if you are writing games
  - westurner 2y ago
    Hey, TuxMath is written with SDL, though there's a separate JS port now IIUC. /? mingw: https://github.com/search?q=mingw&type=repositories https://github.com/search?q=mingw&type=repositories The msys2/MINGW-packages are PKGBUILD packages: https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages : > Package scripts for MinGW-w64 targets to build under MSYS2. > [..., SDL, gles, glfw, egl, glbinding, cargo-c, gtest, cppunit, qt5, gtk4, icu, ki-i18n-qt5, SDL2_pango, jack2, gstreamer, ffmpeg, blender, gegl, gnome-text-editor, gtksourceview, kdiff3, libgit2, libusb, libressl, libsodium, libserialport, libslirp, hugo] PKGBUILD is a bash script packaging spec from Arch, which builds packages with makepkg. msys2/setup-msys2: https://github.com/msys2/setup-msys2 https://github.com/msys2/setup-msys2: > setup-msys2 is a GitHub Action (GHA) to setup an MSYS2 environment (i.e. MSYS, MINGW32, MINGW64, UCRT64, CLANG32, CLANG64 and/or CLANGARM64 shells) Though, if you're writing a 3d app/game, e.g. panda3d already builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux; and pygbag compiles panda3d to WASM, and there's also harfang-wasm, and TIL about leptos is more like React in Rust and should work for GUI apps, too. panda3d > Building applications: https://docs.panda3d.org/1.11/python/distribution/building-binaries#building-binaries https://docs.panda3d.org/1.11/python/distribution/building-b... https://github.com/topics/mingw https://github.com/topics/mingw : > nCine, win-sudo, drmingw debugger, mstorsjo/llvm-mingw: https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw : > Address Sanitizer and Undefined Behaviour Sanitizer, LLVM Control Flow Guard -mguard=cf ; i686, x86_64, armv7 and arm64
knighthack 2y ago
I recently bought a machine with an RTX 4090 and a 7950X3D. Installed Pop OS; expected there might be one or two hiccups with the Nvidia drivers. Yet I had zero driver config/installation issues - and there's not been a single Windows game I could not play on Linux at full settings. On top of it the Linux machine also streams to my Steam Deck. I've abandoned Windows 2 years ago - I see no reason to ever return.
- masklinn 2y ago
  All these comments are pretty funny, I’ve been considering building a new gaming desktop (the current one is reaching a decade of age) and was very much thinking of putting Linux on it rather than bothering with Microsoft’s ever worsening, it’s giving me fomo and making me consider switching the old machine in the first place.
- lairv 2y ago
  > there's not been a single Windows game I could not play on Linux at full settings I also enjoy playing on Linux but this really depends on the type of games you play. If you play a lot of multiplayer games, you will be disappointed on Linux, Riot games won't work, Blizzard games won't work, Fortnite won't work Even with Elden Ring that runs perfectly on my Linux machine, I cannot use any multiplayer features (summoning friends, reading messages etc.) because the EAC anticheat doesn't work on Linux
  - jack_pp 2y ago
    Hearthstone mostly works. Wow doesn't
    - AegirLeet 2y ago
      Really? WoW used to work just fine back in the day (~2010). Is that no longer the case?
      - csunbird 2y ago
        Most of the bots use headless linux VMs for WoW, which is why Blizzard stopped allowing WoW to run on linux.
indulona 2y ago
The sad thing is what Jonathan Blow said - every program will run the same on the same cpu anywhere. It's just the OS that gets in the way that we have to deal with.
- coffeebeqn 2y ago
  How would you run multiple applications at the same time created by various developers without an OS or something that end up looking like a OS?
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    I think you're taking that too literally, he's not advocating against the use of OSes.
  - mariusor 2y ago
    I don't think Blow or parent imply there's no need for an OS, but that the instructions the CPU executes eventually are the same no matter the OS that executed the binary.
    - j_maffe 2y ago
      Yeah but what's the relevance of this statement? You still need an OS at the end of the day, don't you?
      - mariusor 2y ago
        I think the idea is that the convention of different executable formats each with their own loader should be abandoned in favour of something closer to the machine representation. Frankly I haven't done anything that low level to be able to say how much merit this has, but on a surface level it sounds reasonable.
        caspar 2y ago
        See also https://justine.lol/ape.html https://justine.lol/ape.html
unpopularopp 2y ago
At least they are spending the money earned from illegal (underage) gambling on something good
- pandemic_region 2y ago
  Care to explain a bit more? Sensing a grudge here.
  - unpopularopp 2y ago
    Its literally the most predatory microtransaction in the entire gaming sphere right now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling
    - lillecarl 2y ago
      They've cracked down on skin gambling as far as the media is concerned. But it was a real issue with CS:GO for awhile, since you could cash in and out through external services.
      - account42 2y ago
        Being able to cash out might be a requirement for some legal definitions of gambling but its absence doesn't really make the situation much better. The problem is abusing the dopamine reward mechanisms in vulnerable individuals to get them to spens unreasonable amounts of money. The reward here doesn't have to be monetary at all for it to be an issue.
DaoVeles 2y ago
It has only been 6 years!? It has felt like a bed rock of Linux gaming in almost forever. I cannot tell you the last time I have come across something that doesn't work via Proton. It is one of the many crown jewels of Valve. EDIT - ’From dust’ released in 2009 still doesn't work but that is due to Ubisofts awful DRM infrastructure.
- speeder 2y ago
  My wife keeps complaining that Beyond Good and Evil doesn't work... but last I checked it didn't work on Windows either, thanks to Ubisoft buggy DRM and some other issue I forgot.
  - rookderby 2y ago
    That sucks. Have you tried going the emulation route?
- imtringued 2y ago
  I don't know what it was like to use Windows anymore. It almost feels like I have never used Windows in the first place, and yet when I look back to the year I switched. 2018, when Proton was released, I am still kind of shocked how recent that is as a former user of Windows XP, Vista, 7 and Windows 10.
atoav 2y ago
During my last vacation I played Fallout 4 on my Kubuntu laptop on max settings and I had zero crashes throughout the complete time. With a Bethesda game, on Linux. What a time to be alive.
tannhaeuser 2y ago
Valve's work is the single killer contribution for Linux gaming (even though there are still many games not running under Proton which is why running Win on SteamDeck is a thing) but let's not forget to mention Wine on which it is based and which had been running regular (non-DirectX/Y/Z) win32 apps surprisingly/shockingly well for like 20 years.
ACS_Solver 2y ago
As I often repeat in these threads, Proton was an amazing leap. Once it released, it took probably two years for me to boot Windows again, and it's only been getting better. Now I'm already used to assuming games will just work on my Linux machine, including new major titles. Age of Empires 4 and Baldur's Gate 3 just worked. In broader terms, Proton is also a valuable lesson in how much the "last 10%" integration of software matters. Proton isn't developed from scratch by Valve, most of it is non-Valve code. Proton base is Wine plus DXVK plus gstreamer, but it's Valve's integration of those that allows the dramatic leap from "if you're a power user, you may get the game to work after lots of tinkering" to "just enable Proton for this game and click play".
- stavros 2y ago
  I tried to boot Windows recently because a friend wanted something from my Photoshop, and I realized it won't even boot now, the bootloader got hosed somehow. It's been years since I used it, thanks to Proton.
- ammo1662 2y ago
  Not only integration, proton also includes some patches of wine itself. Even though most of patches are merged back to upstream, but some are not. Valve is also paying some developers of open source projects like DXVK or Mesa to keep working on it. I think it is also the key to its success. And it shows a good example to some big companies that how to use FOSS libraries correctly.
  - ACS_Solver 2y ago
    Yeah, my understanding is that the key element that makes Proton games run so well is running the graphics through DXVK instead of Wine's WineD3D solution. Wine is excellent at the Win32 API but its D3D solution never advanced enough to support many complex applications like games. DXVK is extremely good at that. Valve pays DXVK devs, and I think CodeWeavers, with their long history of commercial Wine support, has also been getting paid by Valve to improve Wine in the specific ways required.
    - 2y ago
tupolef 2y ago
For those using Windows games from GOG or other none-steam supports, I recommend Lutris, it requires a little more setup, but after the initial groking you can have a library as nice as Steam and with a lot more manual settings and support for other platforms or emulators. A nice trick with Lutris is to create 2 initial prefixes for wine 32 and 64 bits and then to duplicate them in the library for each game. Only the lauch settings will be different but you get all games installed in 2 wine instances.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Or Bottles instead of Lutris.
- tumetab1 2y ago
  I recommend "Heroic Games Launcher" specially to run the free games provided by Epic. Also very easy to use.
nixass 2y ago
What's so interesting to me is that Win10 refuses to run some of the early 2000s game at all. I have a soft spot for Far Cry 1, no matter how much tweaking I did on its Win10 installation it-just-won't-run. Run the game on Linux through Wine or Proton? Effortless. I know it's huge technical debt but Microsoft is really doing poor job, or no job at all, on its backward compatibility. Now, Gabe, put some headcount towards Half Life 3 please, cheers
- pzmarzly 2y ago
  Windows 10 initially had a great support for DirectX 8 apps, but with every big update (starting with Anniversary Update), they broke something. At this point, running old games without d3d8to9[0] or dgVoodoo2[1] is impossible. [0] https://github.com/crosire/d3d8to9 https://github.com/crosire/d3d8to9 [1] http://www.dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/ http://www.dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/
- psd1 2y ago
  Alyx is everything I hoped for, and more. I spent a fucking fortune on hardware to play a single VR game - extravagant, but worth it.
ammo1662 2y ago
Not only games, but also some Windows applications could run smoothly on wine and proton. Especially those applications that use CUDA or DirectX for hardware acceleration. They cannot be used with wine previously.
mythz 2y ago
Can confirm as a recent switcher from 25 years of Windows to a Fedora Linux Desktop that all the flagship games I downloaded from my steam library just worked, which was the final hurdle before being able to switch to Linux full-time. I initially had some issues with not being able to run Wayland due to Nvidia drivers, but that's now fixed with Explicit Sync support in their recent driver upgrades and am now using Wayland. Thanks to Docker, JetBrains IDEs and most Daily Apps I use are cross-platform Desktop Web Apps (e.g. VS Code, Discord, Obsidian, etc) I was able to run everything I wanted to. The command-line is also super charged in Linux starting with a GPU-accelerated Alacritty running Oh My Zsh that's enhanced with productivity tools like fzf, exa, bat, zoxide and starship. There's also awesome tools like lazydocker, lazygit, btop and neovim pushing the limits of what's possible in a terminal UI and distrobox which lets me easily run Ubuntu VMs to install experimental software without impacting my Fedora Desktop. Anyway happy to have abandoned the Surveillance and Spyware train that Windows has become, thankfully never have to go back thanks to the great support of Steam and cross-platform Desktop Apps running natively on Linux.
- hyperman1 2y ago
  Didn't know lazydocker. Thanks! I learned something today.
  - OtomotO 2y ago
    There is also oxker! https://github.com/mrjackwills/oxker https://github.com/mrjackwills/oxker
- juujian 2y ago
  Are all those features really more important than core features of the OS? I switched a couple years ago because of Windows' flaws. The constant notifications and other distractions such as updates, not being able to jump into programs reliably via the windows key search, broken sleep. Windows laptops fail at just being laptops, first and foremost they are delivery platforms for whatever Microsoft pushes. Now I cut out Intel and Nvidia I have an AMD machine with Debian, and for the first time I have a stable, dependable machine. I know how long the battery lasts and I can leave the house without a charger. And looking back, windows always had you on your toes, it is so instilled in us to work around its flaws.
dcole2929 2y ago
Now, if we could get the anti-cheat companies on board all would be right in the universe and I could stop pretending that Win10 doesn't drive me insane. Seriously, it's ridiculous that you can play an entire game in Linux with no issue but the second you load into multiplayer for some titles you risk getting your entire account banned.
- jsheard 2y ago
  The two biggest anti-cheat providers (EasyAntiCheat and Battleye) are on board, both can run natively on Linux or in Proton. The problem is that neither solution is anywhere near as robust as they are on Windows, so Linux support is offered on an opt-in basis and not all developers have chosen to opt-in. Apex Legends did opt-in to EACs Linux support and the effect has been that nearly every cheat for that game now targets Linux, because it is so much easier to avoid being detected on there. I would be fascinated to know the ratio of actual genuine Linux users playing Apex versus those who just dual boot into Linux to cheat with impunity.
  - machomaster 2y ago
    > Apex Legends did opt-in to EACs Linux support and the effect has been that nearly every cheat for that game now targets Linux, because it is so much easier to avoid being detected on there. Source for that? It makes no sense. 1. Cheating in Apex has been rampant for many years, way before the game started to work on Linux. 2. I have not heard that cheating would increase lately, especially linked to Linux. 3. A lot of cheating is being done by Chinese players. It sounds incredible (I literally don't believe) that those pesky cheaters would bother and would even be able to start using Linux on their home computers and in game dungeons.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      > Source for that? https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/apex-legends/ https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/apex-legends/ Paid/private cheats are hard to keep track of but the free/open-source cheats are nearly all for Linux at this point, aside from the crude macro-based "cheats" which use AutoHotkey or similar. Apex enabled Linux support over two years ago so I wouldn't expect it to cause a recent uptick in cheating, it's been table stakes for a while.
sylware 2y ago
Some game devs are dropping native elf/linux support because of proton. proton is then, really, hurting native elf/linux gaming. Some game devs are aware of that and still try to provide clean elf/linux binaries. Not to mention, it is a version mess, namely most of the time you get games to run-ish less than optimaly (if it runs at all) and you need some exact version of proton (wine/vkd3d) since forward and backward compatibility is super shabby, but you often end up with "if you want to run game UHEOTHC optimally, you need an external custom version GMX.ultra.74389.12 of protron which does include direct copy of closed source windows components (and you better be careful since it is illegal to redistribute many windows components...). It would have been 1 billion times cheaper, and saner, to write audit tools for ELF64 binaries in order to drive game devs at crafting clean binaries (glibc ABI selection, dynamic loading of video game core interface libs, static linking). I am sorry, but there is nothing to be proud of, actually quite the other way around. They are doing the "embrace and extend": does embrace elf/linux but does extend it with abomination like proton. Shame on you, valve.
- chungus 2y ago
  Interesting take. I would be interested in reading more about these game devs dropping native linux support. Could you provide some examples?
  - sylware 2y ago
    blaze rush (if I recall the name right) for instance, the update dropped native elf/linux support. If we are honnest with ourselves, we know that many games devs which did provide native elf/linux builds and which are not announcing elf/linux support anymore for their future games, it is because of proton. And at the same time, you have some "games" currently being developed which are running state-of-the-art UE5 engine (for instance "vein") with a native elf/linux build. And we are talking super small teams.
- puzzlingcaptcha 2y ago
  >to drive game devs at crafting clean binaries But you can't! That's the whole point. You might have some indie devs support linux out of good will, but anything larger won't chase a 2% niche of a market _no matter how little extra development_ it would take. You either get Linux support "for free" or not at all.
bravetraveler 2y ago
This is what finally let me drop VFIO, a VM with GPU passed through for the occasional game. It's notable this happened at all because Valve supported what was there all along. They didn't go make their own path. They, and the ecosystem, all benefit. Truly thankful
gotbeans 2y ago
Proton did't just allow me to play on linux. It allowed me to uninstall windows. Ty valve
npteljes 2y ago
I am very thankful for the Proton effort, both for the product itself, and for the fact that the upgrades and modifications make it back to the community. Kudos for Valve for doing it this way.
2Gkashmiri 2y ago
Rememebr some time ago someone made an effort to paackage windows games in appimages I wonder what happened to that
tcsenpai 2y ago
Proton is a blessing. Proton-GE is the natural evolution of the blessing. UMU Launcher is the steroids over Proton-GE.
wslh 2y ago
I think Steam is one of the few cases where genious software internals engineering completely match business. Happy Steam Deck owner. Have Nintendo Switch and PS5 in place though.
pizza234 2y ago
John Carmack saw this coming, more than 10 years ago: > Improving Wine for Linux gaming seems like a better plan than lobbying individual game developers for native ports. Why the hate? (https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/298628243630723074 https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/298628243630723074)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
butz 2y ago
Buy game on Steam, install, play. Same as on Windows, sometimes even less issues, especially with really old games. And with recent renaissance of demos one can easily try a game compatibility before purchase.
bastard_op 2y ago
When I stopped using Windoze for Linux around 2006, I gave up on playing games on pc, which was fine as I always have latest generation consoles around anyways. Eventually it got annoying and expensive to keep consoles around, and more so now with the push to buy games digitally that you don't really even own and will stop working one day. Finally when Valve got involved to fix wine with Proton, it changed everything as a Linux user, and finally I don't need dedicated consoles to play what few games I still do. If a game is loaded with invasive DRM to NOT work under Proton/Linux, they're doing me a favor as I don't want to support them anyways. Proton alone made Valve saints to myself and most all Linux users in giving gaming back to the Linux world, far more than scabs like Epic that criticize Valve for market dominance ever will.
account42 2y ago
Let me instead mourn the death of native Linux gaming and the potential for Linux to be an independent platform in the future. Don't get me wrong, Proton and DXVK are very useful tools for compatibility with legacy software but Valve really jumped the shark by positioning it as the default way to run Games on linux and alledgedly even actively discouraging native ports. We had Wine long before Proton (or Steam for Linux for that matter) and so what if it's a little bit more convenient now. IMO peak Linux gaming was between the early Humble Bundles that required cross platform support for inclusion to the Kickstarter era where many campaigns felt the need to promise Linux versions to the Steam Machine hype that even got some AAA developers on board. Not seeing anything like that these days even with the Steam deck - seems most developers don't care to provide official support when gamers will buy the games to run with Proton anyway.

340 points by freedomben 2y ago

sigh still can't play PUBG cos of the anti cheat, designed for windoze, afaik.

This is so cool! I am genuinely happy that through this I barely ever had to boot up windows anymore when I still had my gaming PC. I wish we could have something similar on Mac. I tried GPTK and Whiskey before but a bunch of my steam games that flawlessly worked on Proton won’t even start and if they do there is a fair chance they random crash and have unacceptable performance.

abrookewood 2y ago
Yes, I'm doing the same ... Steam on Linux all the way and Windows has been wiped. Couldn't be happier.
OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
We have a mostly MacOS household and I couldn't agree more. Even for games that work on MacOS, compatibility and FPS drops are major problems. It's funny because Wine always had "MacOS support", but it seems second class compared to Linux
- k4rli 2y ago
  No reason why it wouldn't be second or even lower class. That walled garden OS is slightly better than Windows but Linux (mainly arch, debian based) is way ahead in every way Proton is absolutely amazing and everything has worked for me, some older badly made games haven't had ideal performance but with latest Proton even some of them have improved massively. Going from ~120 to stable locked 500FPS as expected. Soon, if not yet, the games will run better with Proton on Linux than natively on Windows, at least with AMD.
  - lillecarl 2y ago
    Arch and Debian based systems aren't further than RPM based distros, whatever they use in SUSE or Nix(OS). Stay factual
MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
The solution for Mac is called „have a separate Windows ITX machine on the shelf and Steam Remote Stream the games to your MacBook“. Works reasonably well on a fast wifi.

hparadiz 2y ago

Sins of a Solar Empire 2 launched this past week and it runs on proton flawlessly on day 1.

mavamaarten 2y ago

I've been so amazed at how well Proton works. I've bought myself a Steam Deck a while ago, thinking that I _might_ be able to play some of my Windows games on it. I had some experience with Wine many many years ago and it just didn't work well so I always dual booted my PC with Windows for gaming. To my surprise I was able to play AAA titles like RDR2 and Fallout without any issues or tinkering about. I'm so happy that a company like Valve was able to put their shoulders under an initiative like this and actually stuck with it. Thank you, Valve!

orwin 2y ago

I'm jumping on the occasion to reiterate here that Valve's Proton team hiring process is good, and although I wasn't picked, the time they took to help me improve, give me advices, as well as the overall communication make me think their company should be great to work with (at least 3-4 years ago)

Philip-J-Fry 2y ago
Coming out of an interview process learning new stuff and happy in defeat will always make me feel good.
63stack 2y ago
Searching for "valve proton team" doesn't bring up much, how did you find a job ad from them?
- account42 2y ago
  Given Valve's structure (you choose what you work on) I wouldn't expect a job ad specifically for the Proton team. So it would probably fall under https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/jobs?job_id=57 https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/jobs?job_id=57 Besides that, Valve does approach people who already do good open source work in the space.
  - 63stack 2y ago
    Thanks!

steinuil 2y ago

I switched my gaming PC to NixOS a few months ago, I couldn't be happier. Other than a few games that also had issues on Windows and VR, everything I run through Proton just works. I also own a Steam Deck, which is a wonderful little device and it proved to me that I could safely go through with this switch and not lose access to much. Congrats to both the Proton and hardware team at Valve, and the people who contributed to Wine; the Year of the Linux Desktop has come, as far as I'm concerned.

forrestthewoods 2y ago

Turns out the best gaming API on Linux is WinAPI. Who woulda thought!

haunter 2y ago
See the famous "Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux" article https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
- forrestthewoods 2y ago
  > You know how on Windows, you can just download a zip with a program in it, unzip, double click, and the thing runs? Wouldn't it be nice if we could have that on Linux? There's no technical reason we can't, just standard practices that are hostile to this goal. Oh Linux. The inability to trivially target arbitrary versions of glibc is so frustrating. So much of Linux is stuck with terrible patterns from the 80s.
  - haunter 2y ago
    To more or less this what snap, AppImage, flatpak etc tries to solve. And honestly it works. One part of Steam Deck's success that it was entirely built on an immutable flatpak based distro (Arch)
    - trissi1996 2y ago
      AFAIK Arch is neither flatpack-based nor immutable by default, that's just how valve configured it, or am I missing something since I've used it a few years ago ? Still nicely done on valve's part.
    - opan 2y ago
      Arch does not normally use or make you use flatpaks, nor is it immutable. You describe SteamOS, which is based on Arch, but with changes to it. This is more clearing up ambiguity for others reading than a correction, there's a decent chance you knew this already. Fedora Silverblue is a distro which heavily uses flatpaks and is immutable out of the box. I believe this is what Bazzite, a community alternative to SteamOS, is based on.

WD-42 2y ago

Less reasons to run anything but Linux by the minute.

a_e_k 2y ago

I've seen it joked that with Proton, Win32 is a good stable ABI for gaming on Linux. Given that, and that I'm most comfortable developing on Linux and in C++, does anyone have a good toolchain recommendation for cross compiling C++ to Windows from Linux? (Ideally something that I can point CMake at and get a build that I can test in Proton.)

saurik 2y ago
Pretty much any distribution you are on is going to let you install mingw, but you should also be able to just use clang and ldd these days (though the header files and library stubs would still come from mingw, unless you want to just compile against an official Microsoft SDK).
steeleduncan 2y ago
MinGW works well (e.g. mingw-w64 in Debian/Ubuntu). It works well with CMake, you just need to pass CMake flags like -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=x86_64-w64-mingw32-c++ -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=x86_64-w64-mingw32-c Something like SDL or Raylib is useful for cross platform windowing and sound if you are writing games
- westurner 2y ago
  Hey, TuxMath is written with SDL, though there's a separate JS port now IIUC. /? mingw: https://github.com/search?q=mingw&type=repositories https://github.com/search?q=mingw&type=repositories The msys2/MINGW-packages are PKGBUILD packages: https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages : > Package scripts for MinGW-w64 targets to build under MSYS2. > [..., SDL, gles, glfw, egl, glbinding, cargo-c, gtest, cppunit, qt5, gtk4, icu, ki-i18n-qt5, SDL2_pango, jack2, gstreamer, ffmpeg, blender, gegl, gnome-text-editor, gtksourceview, kdiff3, libgit2, libusb, libressl, libsodium, libserialport, libslirp, hugo] PKGBUILD is a bash script packaging spec from Arch, which builds packages with makepkg. msys2/setup-msys2: https://github.com/msys2/setup-msys2 https://github.com/msys2/setup-msys2: > setup-msys2 is a GitHub Action (GHA) to setup an MSYS2 environment (i.e. MSYS, MINGW32, MINGW64, UCRT64, CLANG32, CLANG64 and/or CLANGARM64 shells) Though, if you're writing a 3d app/game, e.g. panda3d already builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux; and pygbag compiles panda3d to WASM, and there's also harfang-wasm, and TIL about leptos is more like React in Rust and should work for GUI apps, too. panda3d > Building applications: https://docs.panda3d.org/1.11/python/distribution/building-binaries#building-binaries https://docs.panda3d.org/1.11/python/distribution/building-b... https://github.com/topics/mingw https://github.com/topics/mingw : > nCine, win-sudo, drmingw debugger, mstorsjo/llvm-mingw: https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw : > Address Sanitizer and Undefined Behaviour Sanitizer, LLVM Control Flow Guard -mguard=cf ; i686, x86_64, armv7 and arm64

knighthack 2y ago

I recently bought a machine with an RTX 4090 and a 7950X3D. Installed Pop OS; expected there might be one or two hiccups with the Nvidia drivers. Yet I had zero driver config/installation issues - and there's not been a single Windows game I could not play on Linux at full settings. On top of it the Linux machine also streams to my Steam Deck. I've abandoned Windows 2 years ago - I see no reason to ever return.

masklinn 2y ago
All these comments are pretty funny, I’ve been considering building a new gaming desktop (the current one is reaching a decade of age) and was very much thinking of putting Linux on it rather than bothering with Microsoft’s ever worsening, it’s giving me fomo and making me consider switching the old machine in the first place.
lairv 2y ago
> there's not been a single Windows game I could not play on Linux at full settings I also enjoy playing on Linux but this really depends on the type of games you play. If you play a lot of multiplayer games, you will be disappointed on Linux, Riot games won't work, Blizzard games won't work, Fortnite won't work Even with Elden Ring that runs perfectly on my Linux machine, I cannot use any multiplayer features (summoning friends, reading messages etc.) because the EAC anticheat doesn't work on Linux
- jack_pp 2y ago
  Hearthstone mostly works. Wow doesn't
  - AegirLeet 2y ago
    Really? WoW used to work just fine back in the day (~2010). Is that no longer the case?
    - csunbird 2y ago
      Most of the bots use headless linux VMs for WoW, which is why Blizzard stopped allowing WoW to run on linux.

indulona 2y ago

The sad thing is what Jonathan Blow said - every program will run the same on the same cpu anywhere. It's just the OS that gets in the way that we have to deal with.

coffeebeqn 2y ago
How would you run multiple applications at the same time created by various developers without an OS or something that end up looking like a OS?
- lupusreal 2y ago
  I think you're taking that too literally, he's not advocating against the use of OSes.
- mariusor 2y ago
  I don't think Blow or parent imply there's no need for an OS, but that the instructions the CPU executes eventually are the same no matter the OS that executed the binary.
  - j_maffe 2y ago
    Yeah but what's the relevance of this statement? You still need an OS at the end of the day, don't you?
    - mariusor 2y ago
      I think the idea is that the convention of different executable formats each with their own loader should be abandoned in favour of something closer to the machine representation. Frankly I haven't done anything that low level to be able to say how much merit this has, but on a surface level it sounds reasonable.
      - caspar 2y ago
        See also https://justine.lol/ape.html https://justine.lol/ape.html

unpopularopp 2y ago

At least they are spending the money earned from illegal (underage) gambling on something good

pandemic_region 2y ago
Care to explain a bit more? Sensing a grudge here.
- unpopularopp 2y ago
  Its literally the most predatory microtransaction in the entire gaming sphere right now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling
  - lillecarl 2y ago
    They've cracked down on skin gambling as far as the media is concerned. But it was a real issue with CS:GO for awhile, since you could cash in and out through external services.
    - account42 2y ago
      Being able to cash out might be a requirement for some legal definitions of gambling but its absence doesn't really make the situation much better. The problem is abusing the dopamine reward mechanisms in vulnerable individuals to get them to spens unreasonable amounts of money. The reward here doesn't have to be monetary at all for it to be an issue.

DaoVeles 2y ago

It has only been 6 years!? It has felt like a bed rock of Linux gaming in almost forever. I cannot tell you the last time I have come across something that doesn't work via Proton. It is one of the many crown jewels of Valve. EDIT - ’From dust’ released in 2009 still doesn't work but that is due to Ubisofts awful DRM infrastructure.

speeder 2y ago
My wife keeps complaining that Beyond Good and Evil doesn't work... but last I checked it didn't work on Windows either, thanks to Ubisoft buggy DRM and some other issue I forgot.
- rookderby 2y ago
  That sucks. Have you tried going the emulation route?
imtringued 2y ago
I don't know what it was like to use Windows anymore. It almost feels like I have never used Windows in the first place, and yet when I look back to the year I switched. 2018, when Proton was released, I am still kind of shocked how recent that is as a former user of Windows XP, Vista, 7 and Windows 10.

atoav 2y ago

During my last vacation I played Fallout 4 on my Kubuntu laptop on max settings and I had zero crashes throughout the complete time. With a Bethesda game, on Linux. What a time to be alive.

tannhaeuser 2y ago

Valve's work is the single killer contribution for Linux gaming (even though there are still many games not running under Proton which is why running Win on SteamDeck is a thing) but let's not forget to mention Wine on which it is based and which had been running regular (non-DirectX/Y/Z) win32 apps surprisingly/shockingly well for like 20 years.

ACS_Solver 2y ago

As I often repeat in these threads, Proton was an amazing leap. Once it released, it took probably two years for me to boot Windows again, and it's only been getting better. Now I'm already used to assuming games will just work on my Linux machine, including new major titles. Age of Empires 4 and Baldur's Gate 3 just worked. In broader terms, Proton is also a valuable lesson in how much the "last 10%" integration of software matters. Proton isn't developed from scratch by Valve, most of it is non-Valve code. Proton base is Wine plus DXVK plus gstreamer, but it's Valve's integration of those that allows the dramatic leap from "if you're a power user, you may get the game to work after lots of tinkering" to "just enable Proton for this game and click play".

stavros 2y ago
I tried to boot Windows recently because a friend wanted something from my Photoshop, and I realized it won't even boot now, the bootloader got hosed somehow. It's been years since I used it, thanks to Proton.
ammo1662 2y ago
Not only integration, proton also includes some patches of wine itself. Even though most of patches are merged back to upstream, but some are not. Valve is also paying some developers of open source projects like DXVK or Mesa to keep working on it. I think it is also the key to its success. And it shows a good example to some big companies that how to use FOSS libraries correctly.
- ACS_Solver 2y ago
  Yeah, my understanding is that the key element that makes Proton games run so well is running the graphics through DXVK instead of Wine's WineD3D solution. Wine is excellent at the Win32 API but its D3D solution never advanced enough to support many complex applications like games. DXVK is extremely good at that. Valve pays DXVK devs, and I think CodeWeavers, with their long history of commercial Wine support, has also been getting paid by Valve to improve Wine in the specific ways required.
  - 2y ago

tupolef 2y ago

For those using Windows games from GOG or other none-steam supports, I recommend Lutris, it requires a little more setup, but after the initial groking you can have a library as nice as Steam and with a lot more manual settings and support for other platforms or emulators. A nice trick with Lutris is to create 2 initial prefixes for wine 32 and 64 bits and then to duplicate them in the library for each game. Only the lauch settings will be different but you get all games installed in 2 wine instances.

Rinzler89 2y ago
Or Bottles instead of Lutris.
tumetab1 2y ago
I recommend "Heroic Games Launcher" specially to run the free games provided by Epic. Also very easy to use.

nixass 2y ago

What's so interesting to me is that Win10 refuses to run some of the early 2000s game at all. I have a soft spot for Far Cry 1, no matter how much tweaking I did on its Win10 installation it-just-won't-run. Run the game on Linux through Wine or Proton? Effortless. I know it's huge technical debt but Microsoft is really doing poor job, or no job at all, on its backward compatibility. Now, Gabe, put some headcount towards Half Life 3 please, cheers

pzmarzly 2y ago
Windows 10 initially had a great support for DirectX 8 apps, but with every big update (starting with Anniversary Update), they broke something. At this point, running old games without d3d8to9[0] or dgVoodoo2[1] is impossible. [0] https://github.com/crosire/d3d8to9 https://github.com/crosire/d3d8to9 [1] http://www.dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/ http://www.dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/
psd1 2y ago
Alyx is everything I hoped for, and more. I spent a fucking fortune on hardware to play a single VR game - extravagant, but worth it.

ammo1662 2y ago

Not only games, but also some Windows applications could run smoothly on wine and proton. Especially those applications that use CUDA or DirectX for hardware acceleration. They cannot be used with wine previously.

mythz 2y ago

Can confirm as a recent switcher from 25 years of Windows to a Fedora Linux Desktop that all the flagship games I downloaded from my steam library just worked, which was the final hurdle before being able to switch to Linux full-time. I initially had some issues with not being able to run Wayland due to Nvidia drivers, but that's now fixed with Explicit Sync support in their recent driver upgrades and am now using Wayland. Thanks to Docker, JetBrains IDEs and most Daily Apps I use are cross-platform Desktop Web Apps (e.g. VS Code, Discord, Obsidian, etc) I was able to run everything I wanted to. The command-line is also super charged in Linux starting with a GPU-accelerated Alacritty running Oh My Zsh that's enhanced with productivity tools like fzf, exa, bat, zoxide and starship. There's also awesome tools like lazydocker, lazygit, btop and neovim pushing the limits of what's possible in a terminal UI and distrobox which lets me easily run Ubuntu VMs to install experimental software without impacting my Fedora Desktop. Anyway happy to have abandoned the Surveillance and Spyware train that Windows has become, thankfully never have to go back thanks to the great support of Steam and cross-platform Desktop Apps running natively on Linux.

hyperman1 2y ago
Didn't know lazydocker. Thanks! I learned something today.
- OtomotO 2y ago
  There is also oxker! https://github.com/mrjackwills/oxker https://github.com/mrjackwills/oxker
juujian 2y ago
Are all those features really more important than core features of the OS? I switched a couple years ago because of Windows' flaws. The constant notifications and other distractions such as updates, not being able to jump into programs reliably via the windows key search, broken sleep. Windows laptops fail at just being laptops, first and foremost they are delivery platforms for whatever Microsoft pushes. Now I cut out Intel and Nvidia I have an AMD machine with Debian, and for the first time I have a stable, dependable machine. I know how long the battery lasts and I can leave the house without a charger. And looking back, windows always had you on your toes, it is so instilled in us to work around its flaws.

dcole2929 2y ago

Now, if we could get the anti-cheat companies on board all would be right in the universe and I could stop pretending that Win10 doesn't drive me insane. Seriously, it's ridiculous that you can play an entire game in Linux with no issue but the second you load into multiplayer for some titles you risk getting your entire account banned.

jsheard 2y ago
The two biggest anti-cheat providers (EasyAntiCheat and Battleye) are on board, both can run natively on Linux or in Proton. The problem is that neither solution is anywhere near as robust as they are on Windows, so Linux support is offered on an opt-in basis and not all developers have chosen to opt-in. Apex Legends did opt-in to EACs Linux support and the effect has been that nearly every cheat for that game now targets Linux, because it is so much easier to avoid being detected on there. I would be fascinated to know the ratio of actual genuine Linux users playing Apex versus those who just dual boot into Linux to cheat with impunity.
- machomaster 2y ago
  > Apex Legends did opt-in to EACs Linux support and the effect has been that nearly every cheat for that game now targets Linux, because it is so much easier to avoid being detected on there. Source for that? It makes no sense. 1. Cheating in Apex has been rampant for many years, way before the game started to work on Linux. 2. I have not heard that cheating would increase lately, especially linked to Linux. 3. A lot of cheating is being done by Chinese players. It sounds incredible (I literally don't believe) that those pesky cheaters would bother and would even be able to start using Linux on their home computers and in game dungeons.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    > Source for that? https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/apex-legends/ https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/apex-legends/ Paid/private cheats are hard to keep track of but the free/open-source cheats are nearly all for Linux at this point, aside from the crude macro-based "cheats" which use AutoHotkey or similar. Apex enabled Linux support over two years ago so I wouldn't expect it to cause a recent uptick in cheating, it's been table stakes for a while.

sylware 2y ago

Some game devs are dropping native elf/linux support because of proton. proton is then, really, hurting native elf/linux gaming. Some game devs are aware of that and still try to provide clean elf/linux binaries. Not to mention, it is a version mess, namely most of the time you get games to run-ish less than optimaly (if it runs at all) and you need some exact version of proton (wine/vkd3d) since forward and backward compatibility is super shabby, but you often end up with "if you want to run game UHEOTHC optimally, you need an external custom version GMX.ultra.74389.12 of protron which does include direct copy of closed source windows components (and you better be careful since it is illegal to redistribute many windows components...). It would have been 1 billion times cheaper, and saner, to write audit tools for ELF64 binaries in order to drive game devs at crafting clean binaries (glibc ABI selection, dynamic loading of video game core interface libs, static linking). I am sorry, but there is nothing to be proud of, actually quite the other way around. They are doing the "embrace and extend": does embrace elf/linux but does extend it with abomination like proton. Shame on you, valve.

chungus 2y ago
Interesting take. I would be interested in reading more about these game devs dropping native linux support. Could you provide some examples?
- sylware 2y ago
  blaze rush (if I recall the name right) for instance, the update dropped native elf/linux support. If we are honnest with ourselves, we know that many games devs which did provide native elf/linux builds and which are not announcing elf/linux support anymore for their future games, it is because of proton. And at the same time, you have some "games" currently being developed which are running state-of-the-art UE5 engine (for instance "vein") with a native elf/linux build. And we are talking super small teams.
puzzlingcaptcha 2y ago
>to drive game devs at crafting clean binaries But you can't! That's the whole point. You might have some indie devs support linux out of good will, but anything larger won't chase a 2% niche of a market _no matter how little extra development_ it would take. You either get Linux support "for free" or not at all.

bravetraveler 2y ago

This is what finally let me drop VFIO, a VM with GPU passed through for the occasional game. It's notable this happened at all because Valve supported what was there all along. They didn't go make their own path. They, and the ecosystem, all benefit. Truly thankful

gotbeans 2y ago

Proton did't just allow me to play on linux. It allowed me to uninstall windows. Ty valve

npteljes 2y ago

I am very thankful for the Proton effort, both for the product itself, and for the fact that the upgrades and modifications make it back to the community. Kudos for Valve for doing it this way.

2Gkashmiri 2y ago

Rememebr some time ago someone made an effort to paackage windows games in appimages I wonder what happened to that

tcsenpai 2y ago

Proton is a blessing. Proton-GE is the natural evolution of the blessing. UMU Launcher is the steroids over Proton-GE.

wslh 2y ago

I think Steam is one of the few cases where genious software internals engineering completely match business. Happy Steam Deck owner. Have Nintendo Switch and PS5 in place though.

pizza234 2y ago

John Carmack saw this coming, more than 10 years ago: > Improving Wine for Linux gaming seems like a better plan than lobbying individual game developers for native ports. Why the hate? (https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/298628243630723074 https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/298628243630723074)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

butz 2y ago

Buy game on Steam, install, play. Same as on Windows, sometimes even less issues, especially with really old games. And with recent renaissance of demos one can easily try a game compatibility before purchase.

bastard_op 2y ago

When I stopped using Windoze for Linux around 2006, I gave up on playing games on pc, which was fine as I always have latest generation consoles around anyways. Eventually it got annoying and expensive to keep consoles around, and more so now with the push to buy games digitally that you don't really even own and will stop working one day. Finally when Valve got involved to fix wine with Proton, it changed everything as a Linux user, and finally I don't need dedicated consoles to play what few games I still do. If a game is loaded with invasive DRM to NOT work under Proton/Linux, they're doing me a favor as I don't want to support them anyways. Proton alone made Valve saints to myself and most all Linux users in giving gaming back to the Linux world, far more than scabs like Epic that criticize Valve for market dominance ever will.

account42 2y ago

Let me instead mourn the death of native Linux gaming and the potential for Linux to be an independent platform in the future. Don't get me wrong, Proton and DXVK are very useful tools for compatibility with legacy software but Valve really jumped the shark by positioning it as the default way to run Games on linux and alledgedly even actively discouraging native ports. We had Wine long before Proton (or Steam for Linux for that matter) and so what if it's a little bit more convenient now. IMO peak Linux gaming was between the early Humble Bundles that required cross platform support for inclusion to the Kickstarter era where many campaigns felt the need to promise Linux versions to the Steam Machine hype that even got some AAA developers on board. Not seeing anything like that these days even with the Steam deck - seems most developers don't care to provide official support when gamers will buy the games to run with Proton anyway.