- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
- steamdeck@lemmy.ml
Happy birthday, Proton!
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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.
Not only that but they helped reach critical mass to drive adoption, and used their dominance in the industry to push studios to work with us, instead of against us.
Nice to see some comments like yours truly get it. The amount of people I've seen that now use Linux just because of Proton is surprising. It also gave us the Steam Deck. Valve do tons and people saying it's just "Wine patches" or moaning I didn't focus on Wine are missing the big picture that you get nicely :)
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)
The kickoff meeting for Vulkan was hosted by Valve. Like everything it’s not only Valve, but they had their fingers in this too. Valve is just one of the companies/groups that is pushing linux ports and vulkan support.
Valve is mostly moving interests of big game companies with steam machines and steam deck. Steam machines flopped, but initially they made companies consider ports. The success of steam deck will likely result into them paying more attention to not break wine/proton.
It's a collaborative effort. The Wine and Vulkan projects have all done a lot and deserved credit for doing massive, amazing things. But for Linux gaming specifically, Proton has absolutely changed the landscape, and if Valve continues down this path, will make Linux an ever better gaming platform. So I don't think it's unfair to say thanks to Valve.
Not only have they sunk significant resource into making Linux gaming more viable, they've released Proton under BSD and seriously pushed developers to make Linux-compatible binaries. If Linux continues it's slow upward trend in popularity, Valve will be in large part to thank.
I feel like attributing this to Valve is really disrespectful to the folks who developed wine for decades
Honestly, it feels like comments like this are just intentionally missing the big picture, or just don't understand any of what Valve actually do.
It's been said by comments elsewhere, but Wine was really not good years ago. It was difficult to use, obscure as you had to seek it out and know what to do. Valve funded DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, various extra Wine patches and pushed it all together into Proton with Q&A testing, regular upgrades for big games to get them working ASAP and put it in front of millions easily directly in the Steam client.
and more recently also Vulkan
Which once again, Valve massively helped push and even hosted the early discussions on it.
Thank you. I found this post disrespectful, and insulting. Valve have started contributing to a long running project. Which is great, but there has been tremendous work over the years before valve, and even still
Games have to talk to your operating system to have it tell your GPU to draw lots of funny pictures that come together to make up the graphical portions of the game. Game developers do not want to do this directly, because talking directly to the OS is hard. As such, games talk to graphical APIs like Vulkan or DirectX to do the hard bit for them.
For years almost all games used DirectX, which is made by Microsoft. This gave Windows a virtual monopoly on PC gaming because they weren't about to let their competitors use their API. Then Vulkan came out, which was designed from the beginning to be OS-agnostic, sending us to the promised land of games that could (with some other efforts) run on any machine, anywhere.
Thank you Valve for consistently making gaming easier even in my silly little operating systema
Valve is the only corporation I will unapologetically simp for. It's amazing how far Linux gaming has come in the past few years, especially now that the developers of stuff like EAC are finally making their shit compatible.
Valve is such a weird company.
They became where nearly every PC game is sold by using some of the greatest games of all time as advertising. The orange box has to be the biggest return on a loss leader ever.
Oh those memories, playing Commandos 2 on an old Laptop running Lubuntu in the summer of 2016. The wine setup worked strangely easy. But yeah, Proton accelerated everything immensely!
Are there still more people with VR headsets than Linux gamers on the steam survey?
That's great and all, but the Wine devs deserve much more credit. Proton is just like the icing on top.
You're massively simplifying it. Proton is a lot more than just "icing" on the top.
while it's definitely not just icing on the cake, they were definitely standing on the shoulders of giants.
No one is denying that. I'm certainly not, and it's not the point of the article either. But people just seem to want to complain, and refuse to just take the win. As always.
