Happy birthday, Proton!
While I appreciate the efforts Valve puts into improving WINE/Proton, lets not forget that they are standing on the shoulders of giants and gaming with WINE was not that bad before the integration in Steam either.
Gaming with Wine was decidedly far worse before Valve started pumping money into it. Back before Proton was officially announced, there was a silent acceleration in Wine compatibility, getting better a rate we weren’t used to, and it’s in large part due to Valve partnering with CodeWeavers.
I think the point isn’t to say Valve’s help isn’t appreciated, but to give a little reminder to share some gratefulness with the amazing people developing Wine before Valve got involved as well. It was and is an impressive piece of software in its own right. :)
That doesn’t mean Valve wasn’t a complete game changer. The fact that they managed to make a handheld Linux gaming device popular among gamers rather than just open source fanatics is impressive as hell, and we’re all better off.
What? I’ve exclusively used Linux since 2006 and gaming outside of retro emulation was absolute trash until proton. Of course WINE and code weavers were doing great work but it was overly complicated to use and the compatibility was abysmal.
Let’s not forget that Valve released a Linux port for TF2 in 2012, released their native client in 2013, released SteamOS in 2013 and in the end ported nearly all their games to linux. It didn’t start with Proton.
But Humble Bundle pushed ports before that, because games had to have a Linux port in order to get into the bundle.
I am on Linux even longer than you and native Linux gaming was not trash at all, it worked great, just the selection of games was very small (edit: before Steam was even a thing on Linux). WINE was always a bit hit or miss, but once you got something working, it was usually ok. Sure Proton made it more convenient, but it was more of an gradual improvement than the quantum leap some people claim it to be.
Going from a miniscule library of games that could work (I remember Linux Steam back before Proton having almost nothing of note) to opening up something pretty close to the entire Windows library and running Linux on Valve/Steam’s own handheld console for their games is indeed a quantum leap. That’s what Proton has done for Linux gaming. It may have gotten there eventually just with Wine and community contributions, but it would have taken possibly quite a few years longer to get there without Proton.
I think that is very subjective to the types of games you are interested in. For me Steam before Proton had so many native (indie) games that I literally couldn’t find the time to play all of those I was interested in.
So you agree that your interpretation was very subjective, and many people didn’t have the ease that you had?
No, because going from thousands of games to play to even more that you will never have the time to play is not a quantum leap.
If you had said Proton/DXVK made it finally possible to play a few triple A games I would have agreed. Still not a quantum leap though.
Ah, good ole “your opinion is subjective, but mine is absolute”.
I think their efforts are more for bringing gaming on Linux to more mainstream attention. Not knowing you can game on Linux is a major factor for a lot of people in not switching.
Please don’t spread misinformation Valve does not put in effort, they paid people to make Proton, it’s the community that makes the code NOT VALVE. A simple github chart can tell you everything.
They directly hired people to work on it… how else would you describe “putting efforts into” when a company does it?
You can’t say Mcdonald’s CEO put effort in his work because he hired people to make the food. See how dumb that sounds.
It sounds dumb because no one’s saying that, you just made it up. That would be like if someone was directly crediting Gabe Newell with, idk, CS:GO battlepass sales or something. That’s not what anyone’s saying.
A better comparison would be crediting McDonalds as a company for their work in the handheld apple pie space. Did they outsource the work? Maybe. Did they come up with the recipe themselves? Probably not. But without McDonald’s involvement, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy hot, fresh, fruit-filled pastries with our Big Macs, and our fast food dessert choices are better for it. See? Much less dumb.
No it still sounds dumb, we know they were built by machines and were sold in packs. You lack basic understand in how certain things work. Game development also applies, Github is still the number one source for the information on Proton Contributors, GitHub data doesn’t lie, Valve employees do nothing.
Proton made me uninstall my dual-boot windows-steam-launcher
Are there still more people with VR headsets than Linux gamers on the steam survey?
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what Proton actually brought to Linux gaming.
I had been running Linux exclusively for some moths in 2013-2014, and trying to get games to work on Linux felt like this : Wine is likely able to run it if you can found the right configuration, but good luck with that. I think the only game I managed to run without issues was Civilization 4, so I rolled back on Windows some time later.
Of course, Valve contributed to Wine, and projects like dxvk and others are major achievements (if a team effort), but that’s not their main contribution. Valve understood that gamers may be somewhat more tech-litterate than other people, but that making games work on Linux should be easy. And that’s what Proton was made for.
Nowadays, most games I buy on Steam work out of the box. I sometimes forget to check protondb before buying a games, and I rarely had an issue. Even if in 2018 you had to tinker a bit, you rarely needed more than to choose the correct Proton version (big up to Glorious Eggroll).
I think it’s symptomatic of the situation of the Linux Desktop : technically, it’s where it needs to be. But there is still a gap in accessibility and easiness. Tinkering is nice, but you should not have to do it to have something that works.
I feel like attributing this to Valve is really disrespectful to the folks who developed wine for decades (and more recently also Vulkan). The real game changer is Vulkan, which made Linux graphics to be competitive with DirectX. (OpenGL interfaces to DirectX was simply not competitive)
You’re right. So many people to thank here. One thing you cannot deny is that Valve is one of few companies that loves gaming on Linux and it deserves a huge credit.
Valve does not love gaming, they refuse to listen to TF2 fans, they never build games, they brought out studios, criminal cases, Antitrust lawsuit and branding loyal fanbase that keeps defending Valve awful actions in gaming. This is not love, this is toxic community and a toxic company aiming to be profitable at all cost.
