n 2010, we announced Steam Play: a way for Steam users to access Windows, Mac and Linux versions of Steam games with a single purchase. More than 3000 of the games that have been added to Steam after that point have included Linux support, with more titles being added every day. Since then, we’ve continued to look for ways to make more titles easily accessible to Linux users.
So, two years ago, we started an effort to improve the quality and performance of Windows compatibility solutions for Steam games. A lot of our work has been in the form of supporting Wine and other existing compatibility projects. We have also been integrating these tools into the Steam client to provide the same simple plug-and-play experience offered by regular Linux games.
[…]
As a result of this work, today we are releasing the Beta of a new and improved version of Steam Play to all Linux users! It includes a modified distribution of Wine, called Proton, to provide compatibility with Windows game titles.
Proton is available as open source on GitHub.
Already downloading an Unreal Engine 3 title to see how/if it works.
Nope, did not work. The game did never start. No CPU or HDD usage, just nothing. Trying it with steam under wine now. (Again, long download…)
If this could result in game devs using the subset of Windows API calls that work in both Windows and Wine, that would be great, but unfortunately the market share of Desktop Linux is not deserving even of that. And let’s be honest, unless Desktop Linux solves its power management problems and GPU drivers issues, and solves the dependency hell issue for native apps, the market share situation won’t improve…
Edited 2018-08-23 00:27 UTC
WINE isn’t solely Linux software. There’s ports of Wine to nearly all active *NIX OSes, from Mac OS X, to BSD, to Solaris and derivatives. If it’s *NIX, chances are there’s a WINE port.
It’s also worth noting that ReactOS relies heavily on WINE code for its userland, an example of a non *NIX OS using WINE. I believe there was an effort to port it to Haiku as well, but that stubled due to POSIX incompatibility
Edited 2018-08-23 09:11 UTC
For Steam, this would only be relevant for MacOS. Unfortunately, MacOS doesn’t support Vulkan, and the D3D >9 translation depends on Vulkan.
Not entirely true. Valve bought and open-sourced MoltenVK (fast translator Vulkan -> Metal), so Vulkan could be used on MacOS/iOS. Apple even accepted some game to AppStore that is using MoltenVK.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-Lets-In-Up…
The reason why Proton is not supported on MacOS now is probably esync – at this point it is not compatible with MacOS, but it could change in the future…
https://github.com/zfigura/wine/blob/esync/README.esync
If this were 2005, your post would have some valid points. Unfortunately, this is 2018, and the vast majority of your complaints have been addressed long ago.
Graphics drivers have seen rapid advancement in the past few years, especially on the AMD side– while NVidia still insists on closed-source binaries, at least those drivers are reliable, and perform well.
I personally haven’t had any power management issues, but I run primarily desktops– however, associates with Ubuntu laptops don’t have any complaints either.
Dependency hell hasn’t existed since YUM, Apt and Zypper became commonplace, except for people who insist on thinking they know better than the package managers.
grat,
I agree with you that the “dependency hell” isn’t as big an impediment as kurkosdr made it out to be, but there are many times we can’t use the package managers because we need a feature/fix that doesn’t exist in the managed packages.
I had to install a local version of nginx for a hosting client because the “stable” repo was too old. I wasn’t happy to do this because it’s much easier to update using repos. Fortunately nginx installation from source is strait forward.
Just this month I was encountering major performance issues with video transcoding on an odroid ARM device, I found posts suggesting this problem had already been fixed in a newer release, and sure enough when I installed ffmpeg from developer’s sources the problem completely went away. Unfortunately ffmpeg libraries break frequently and so there was some cascading dependency hell.
So in these cases, it’s not a matter of “thinking we know better than the package managers”, but knowing that the upstream developers have more recent software that fixes known issues.
But that’s not a linux failing, per se. It’s certainly not a package management issue– mixing source and packages will usually lead to pain, unless you’re running FreeBSD or Arch (I run Manjaro these days).
A little odd that Quake is on the list, since it very much works natively in Linux. I assume that’s just to demo that it also works in Proton?
The Quake engine works natively on Linux, but there are a number of games that use it which don’t. They most likely tested with Quake itself initially because that’s easy, but they were trying to make sure the Quake engine works so that they can know that that’s not the issue for any games using it that don’t work.
Anyone else used to use Transgamer’s WineX (later Cedega)? Sounds similar to that… I remember getting Vice City running under FreeBSD back around 2003 which I felt was impressive for the time.
I played Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project using Cedega and it worked very well. I recall some other titles didn’t but I can’t recall exactly which ones.
I used cedega for a few titles, it was a bummer when Transgaming died. Hopefully Proton will fare a bit better than Cedega (the financial model is very different).
But I do wish that Valve managed to improve Wine directly without forking it. They mention that Modifications to Wine are submitted upstream if they’re compatible with the goals and requirements of the larger Wine project, which makes me wonder about the patches which don’t meet those goals and requirements.
This is more like their own version of wine-staging, which is much better at playing Windows games than wine. I’ve been playing Doom 2016 under wine-staging for several months, and others for more than a year. It is nice to see a company get behind making wine more compatible with games – maybe that list of working games will get substantially longer now.
Tested yesterday with “Skyrim SE”, “Mudrunner Spintires” and “Castle Crashers”. I was already using Windows Steam on an Arch Linux + Lutris + Wine + dxvk, with lots of tweaking gotchas and man, when I installed all those games on Linux Steam using Proton it was damn out-of-the-box.
Congratulations to Valve. Maybe this layer will end that cyclic redundancy where people “dont use Linux for gaming cause there are no big games, and devs dont invest money and time on Linux cause there are no players…”
Only a minority of PC users are gamers. Most computers have Intel graphics cards exclusively and sold to non-gamers. Desktop Linux has many native problems like bad power management, bad GPU drivers even for non-gaming purposes, and issues like an LTS version of a distro from a couple of years ago not having the latest VLC in the repos (while Windows 7 can run the latest VLC version by double clicking on an exe).
But you see, this ruins the narrative that the 1-2% market share of Desktop Linux is someone else’s fault…
For the thousandth time: Even native apps on Desktop Linux suck compared to their Windows versions. Firefox can’t render properly because drivers, Chrome has GPU acceleration blacklisted, VLC is stuck to an old version unless you use a bleeding edge “rolling” distro, search dialogs in text editors open in a different monitor from the monitor the main application window is on, etc etc
Dear Desktop Linux community,, fix the native apps situation first and then you can build a matchsticks-and-glue implementation of the Windows API…
So, back on topic, Valve’s efforts will please the existing 1-2% of Desktop Linux users, but that’s it.
Edited 2018-08-23 13:36 UTC
> For the thousandth time: Even native apps on Desktop Linux suck compared to their Windows versions.
Wrong.
Extremely disagree on your Linux vs windows native comparison. I use both daily on multiple monitors. I can’t tell the difference between firefox, chrome on the platforms. Both just work. I do notice that my windows pc, still kinda suffers from memory leaks somewhere… Linux seems to have that solved, or at least not noticeable. I never reboot my linux because it “seems slow” even with all apps closed. I mean windows is a billion times better than it ever was, and never has the minor kernel update borks my system that linux still does every now and then on my less popular hardware.
Really? Perhaps you should view this page:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/748072/number-pc-gamers-world-pl…
… technically, you’re correct, since they estimate only 1/7th of the population of the planet plays PC games, and that *is* a minority– but it’s a very, very lucrative minority.
Though how large part are so called “casual games” like Peggle or… Solitaire?