Valve Rolls Out Wine-Based “Proton” for Running Windows Games on Linux

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Steam-Play-Proton-Linux

by kbumsik • 8 years ago

819 314 8 years ago

thsowers• 8 years ago

This is really interesting. Would anyone have a link into more information as to how they are making this happen behind the scenes? How is this different from wine?

flafla2• 8 years ago

Here are the details from Valve's announcement post [0]:

[begin quote]

Q: What is Proton exactly? How does it differ from normal Wine? Who worked on it?

Proton is a tool distribution based on a modified version of Wine. The included improvements to Wine have been designed and funded by Valve, in a joint development effort with CodeWeavers. Here are some examples of what we've been working on together since 2016:

- vkd3d[source.winehq.org], the Direct3D 12 implementation based on Vulkan

- The OpenVR and Steamworks native API bridges

- Many wined3d performance and functionality fixes for Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 11

- Overhauled fullscreen and gamepad support

- The "esync[github.com]" patchset, for multi-threaded performance improvements

Modifications to Wine are submitted upstream if they're compatible with the goals and requirements of the larger Wine project; as a result, Wine users have been benefiting from parts of this work for over a year now. The rest is available as part of our source code repository for Proton and its modules.

In addition to that, we've been supporting the development of DXVK[github.com], the Direct3D 11 implementation based on Vulkan; the nature of this support includes:

- Employing the DXVK developer in our open-source graphics group since February 2018

- Providing direct support from our open-source graphics group to fix Mesa driver issues affecting DXVK, and provide prototype implementations of brand new Vulkan features to improve DXVK functionality

- Working with our partners over at Khronos, NVIDIA, Intel and AMD to coordinate Vulkan feature and driver support

[end quote]

[0] https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...

kbumsik• 8 years ago

For more context, CodeWeavers is a company behind CrossOver, a proprietary software based on Wine. It is also a major contributor of Wine Project too.

gpderetta3• 8 years ago

People were speculating for a while that someone was financing DXVK; it seems that, at least since the beginning of the year, they were right.

mackal• 8 years ago

In addition to what someone copied and pasted, some python scripts to make sure everything is excuted right. I do need to look into it more though :P

dmead2• 8 years ago

For what it's worth, this seems reminiscent of other wine distributions like crossover office (for office) or cedega (for games)

filmor2• 8 years ago

It luckily has nothing to do with Cedegas approach :)

shmerl6• 8 years ago

As I said in another thread:

Congrats!

And big thanks to developers and Valve who funded dxvk, vkd3d, esync and other Wine as well as Mesa work, while contributing everything in FOSS fashion. This benefits not just Steam users but all Linux gamers.

ryanmarsh• 8 years ago

I used to be a big Wine user back when I believed in the potential for a commodity Linux desktop for normal people. These days I can’t for the life of me figure out why someone would want to run games on Wine instead of dual booting to Windows when it’s game time.

shmerl6• 8 years ago

Because they don't want to use Windows, period.

0x8BADF00D2• 8 years ago

You could just virtualize it, dual-booting isn’t even needed. Then create private NAT and only whitelist certain ports and traffic. Hardware assisted virtualization is actually faster in certain cases and workloads than native these days.

samirm• 8 years ago

Windows costs money.

SparkleBunny• 8 years ago

We don't like being spied on.

zaarn6• 8 years ago

I don't have to close my browser tabs.

andybak• 8 years ago

This...

It takes me a good 20m to reboot. 5m for the actual reboot and 15m to check to see if I'll lose any work.

Also - I tend to multitask. Dip into games, dip into work, browsing etc. It's not a concerted change of mode so closing one side of my mind down for a single purpose just doesn't work for me.

executesorder664• 8 years ago

Some games (mostly older ones) run faster (higher fps) on Linux via Wine, compared to when they run natively on windows.

Zardoz84• 8 years ago

windows start time is too long

fsloth• 8 years ago

I can reboot my Windows 10 desktop in a few second. The only reason I put my desktop to sleep is that I don't trust the hibernation to maintain my application state...

laumars2• 8 years ago

A few reasons:

  * License cost
  * HDD / SSD storage space
  * OS performance
  * They might not agree with the EULA
  * Or simply because they just don't don't like Windows.

The real question is now that the web has gotten everyone used to the idea of applications being platform agnostic, why would anyone want to go back to a Windows lock in?

hegz3• 8 years ago

A big one is not having to reboot in to the other OS to do stuff.

alias_neo• 8 years ago

All correct. Also, I booted into Windows on Saturday to play a game, it hadn't been booted in months, so I hat to wait for a forced SP install and Windows wiped out Grub. Every time I boot back into Windows it kills Grub and I have to fix it again. Not only did I lose all my gaming time to the updates, I lost extra time fixing my bootloader because of Windows' aggressive BS. The sooner I can get it gone the better and I'll free up an entire SSD for games.

another-cuppa• 8 years ago

I don't want to use Windows ever again in my life (of course I'm talking about the current software made by the current software company, not the name Windows, this isn't a religious issue).

Also, rebooting takes ages. My Linux boot time might be measured in seconds, but I'm always in the middle of some kind of work and I use my running system to maintain continuity. It's a major pain in the arse to reboot, so I do it rarely.

SmellyGeekBoy7• 8 years ago

I dual booted for a while but I found myself using Windows so infrequently that whenever I booted it up I'd wind up spending hours updating everything. In the end I decided it was far too much hassle.

Incidentally my "game time" these days is much more likely to be on my 486 PC, Atari 800 or Dreamcast. I don't have much time to game so being able to jump in immediately and not be interrupted trumps the latest-and-greatest blingy graphics any day.

laumars2• 8 years ago

This is exactly why I'm into retro gaming as well

majewsky2• 8 years ago

Completely agree with the first paragraph. I haven't booted Win 10 in over a year now.

A large part of my "game time" is on emulated PS2, so I guess I'm way younger than you. :)

eigenschwarz• 8 years ago

I have my dual boot on 2 separate SSDs and personally find it nice to keep gaming and research separate; there is no temptation to game during the week this way. As an aside, curious why some of these reboot times take so long.

moetech8• 8 years ago

Valve needs to partner with Google and launch a Chromebook/Steam Machine hybrid. It's in the interest of both companies to kill Windows. Google is already adding support for native Linux programs to Chrome OS, they could make a Chrome/Android hybrid that pulls all of the weight of the Android ecosystem and adds to that the weight of Steam. It would be a success and could seriously hurt Microsoft.

vecinu• 8 years ago

It's in the interest of both companies to kill Windows

Sorry why is it in both of their interests to do so?

foota• 8 years ago

As far as valve goes, the windows store is a potential competitor to steam.

ReverseCold• 8 years ago

Time spent not in a browser is time spent where Google might not be able to see what you're doing.

Considering that their business is watching what you do all the time...

moetech8• 8 years ago

The whole Steam on Linux thing is believed to have started because Valve saw the Windows Store as a threat to their business model. IIRC, at the time it looked like Microsoft would disallow installation of programs from outside sources.

As for Google, well they are just big competitors in a lot of areas. I'm sure they would love to beat Microsoft on the desktop like they did in the smartphone space.

remir• 8 years ago

There were rumors not long ago about Google working on a game console or streaming service.

philliphaydon2• 8 years ago

I couldn't think of anything worse than Valve and Google partnering.

And I don't know why you would want to 'kill' windows. What Valve is doing is great, its making more competition, that puts pressure on Microsoft to be competitive too. But killing off windows completely hurts everyone. No competition is bad.

moetech8• 8 years ago

I want Windows dead because it's a proprietary surveillance machine that has stayed alive thanks to really strong lock-in and network effects. I don't trust Google and Valve either, but even if they go full evil empire after after killing Windows, a monopoly built on Linux and Vulkan is a much better place than where we are now.

Google already has a near-monopoly in the smartphone space and it's much better than the Windows monopoly on the desktop. Android being built on tons of GPL software means they have to contribute changes back to the benefit of the FOSS ecosystem. It also means you can easily make/use a custom Android ROM without any proprietary components.

drb912• 8 years ago

But killing off windows completely hurts everyone.

Who the hell is competing with windows? Linux can’t meet its standards, and its main draws are being cheap and able to run popular software when macs can’t (I’m being reductive, but it doesn’t really matter much for my point). It already has no competitor. Each OS has its niches where it clearly excels, and they aren’t looking to be competing in the future.

Note, I use all three; I’m unsatisfied with all three. If this is personal, it’s not against just Microsoft.

So, Valve + literally anyone but Apple or Microsoft is amazing news in my book. GNU/Linux/whoever else benefits can use all the help they can get.

severino• 8 years ago

Well, currently there's no much competition with Windows around, right? They managed to get a ~90% share in the desktop market, using debatable practices, which to me looks like a monopoly. It's very difficult to get in there when virtually every PC manufacturer bundles their product.

flukus• 8 years ago

Why would valve want to replace an OS where MS controls the app store with one where google controls it?

Every threat the MS poses to valve google does as well. Especially when it seems google is angling for Fuschia to be the future.

paavoova2• 8 years ago

Kill Windows...and replace it with Steam/Linux? Don't pretend that a proprietary data mining platform that licenses titles behind DRM is in anyway better than Windows [1].

No, my fears are that this will only serve to grow the proprietary ecosystem on Linux and make general users reliant like Google has done to Android. Yes, Android runs on a base Linux kernel and userspace, but what use is that when users are totally reliant on Google services? Likewise, if users require Steam, etc, than the core OS running underneath that application matters little.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/privacy_agreement/

[..] information about the device you are using, including what operating system you are using, device settings, unique device identifiers, and crash data.

oliwarner2• 8 years ago

The Chromebook is the polar opposite of what's required for mainstream gaming. Wrong architecture, super-low perf, low storage.

The only way this happens is via streaming. You can already do that.

GenericsMotors• 8 years ago

Valve needs to partner with Google and launch a Chromebook/Steam Machine hybrid.

"Valve needs to"? Or you'd like Valve to?

It's in the interest of both companies to kill Windows. [...] It would be a success and could seriously hurt Microsoft.

Ah, there it is, your real motive. Valve will do whatever will make them money and keep their users mostly happy. I doubt they have much incentive to "kill Windows", and they definitely won't do it just to pander to an anti-MS zealot such as yourself.

whywhywhywhy• 8 years ago

Why would the owner of the largest and most profitable software store on Windows want to kill Windows?

There is some weird fan effect with Valve similar to the Google early days where people see them as a universal force for good that will free PC gaming from Microsoft and has the users best interests at heart.

Honestly feel the actual drives of Valve couldn't be further removed from the desires and beliefs of Valve fans.

davemp• 8 years ago

Valve needs to partner with Google and launch a Chromebook/Steam Machine hybrid.

This disturbing chimera would be such a disaster for computing privacy and agency.

Steam and android are both horribly mismanaged from a technical user standpoint.

_bxg1• 8 years ago

Glad to see Valve back to creating things other than hats and virtual trading cards

steve19• 8 years ago

Would be great if they could do that for Mac as well, although Metal is a deadend (for game devs) so they may not bother. I have had some decent success running wine games on Mac.

mlindner• 8 years ago

Unless game devs are going to not support Mac, Apple is deprecating OpenGL so they'll need to use Metal.

executesorder664• 8 years ago

There is the moltenVK project. So they could do a similar thing to what they did with DXVK.

fleetfox• 8 years ago

It supposedly works on Mac. MoltenVK is a thing

ulzeraj2• 8 years ago

On the proton github repo there are instructions for building for Mac and moltenvk libraries. It’s probably not as mature as the Linux version but there are bits hinting here and there. Link: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

jeffbax• 8 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if this is something that will "support Macs" being a library used for official releases, since there's generally more commercial support for Macs and porting houses likely to incorporate and contribute to this directly.

At least it's my hope, it could also be there's just a big unknown with what happens to WINE/tools like this when macOS doesn't support 32-bit apps anymore.

c487bd624• 8 years ago

Users playing through Steam Play experiencing Linux-specific issues should be directed to Steam for support

I wonder how they'll handle user reviews. Maybe performance won't be an issue, I know some games run even faster than on Windows, but bugs that you don't know are Proton specific could lead to bad reviews.

adrianratnapala• 8 years ago

From a user POV though, I guess proton is an improvement. It means there is a specific windows-like platform called "Proton" that might just about earn a spot in in someone's test matrix.

In that sense, the more bad reviews the better!

gboudrias• 8 years ago

This could be intentional, as it incentivizes developers to support the Proton version, which makes native Linux support a much smaller leap.

Excited as I am about a big player pushing Linux, we mustn't forget that the intent is almost certainly just to chip away at Windows and the threat it poses to Valve's own monopoly (as a PC game distributor).

emsy• 8 years ago

The more charitable interpretation is that Windows as it‘s currently handled is an unpredictable mess that you don’t want to be dependend on.

turbografx16• 8 years ago

A good deed done for selfish reasons is still a good deed done. Frankly I'm just happy to see Linux gaming getting any kind of attention as it's the only reason I still dual boot Windows.

AnIdiotOnTheNet8• 8 years ago

I think the intent is just to have an out for when Microsoft inevitably kills off the Windows personal desktop, either intentionally in favor of a subscription-based cloud service or through simply making it so crap that extremely desperate people turn to Linux instead.

Valve's behavior suggests that they've never really sought a monopolistic position. Vive was open to everyone, there's no exclusivity agreements with their marketplace, etc. But Steam requires a platform to sell games for, so making sure there's some kind of alternative is in their best interest.

ByThyGrace• 8 years ago

Steam reviews have recently started including "caveat" titles above the reviews themselves, like "Game received for free" or "Presale purchase". I wouldn't be surprised if Valve next added a "Linux version review" caveat.

bdz2• 8 years ago

My only fear: devs will push for "just enough" Steam Play compatiblity instead of a proper Linux port. A lot of big AAA games got post-launch Linux release. These can disappear

jchw3• 8 years ago

More likely, this will enable existing titles to run on Linux, making it easier to sell Linux machines like Valve's Steam boxes. Meanwhile, Valve can incentivize native ports on their platforms through many means, so I don't think an OS/2 situation is likely. Also, having a good DirectX 12 implementation on top of Vulkan will likely be useful the same way that Vulkan on top of Metal is useful for macOS ports.

Of course... it's still a long and difficult road for Valve here, given how well emulation will need to work to accomplish this.

c487bd624• 8 years ago

Not to mention that it acts as a compatibility layer for older games that don't run on Windows 10 and others that will stop working as they remove more and more legacy code/features.

Some say there are games that have noticeable stutters or bottlenecks on Windows that doesn't share the same issues on Wine.

LoSboccacc3• 8 years ago

and if at some point linux becomes good enough, companies might start targeting dxvk directly instead of wine. that alone would remove a lot of friction to proper ports.

zaarn6• 8 years ago

I think I can live with devs targeting Wine on Linux instead of Linux directly, it saves them a lot of resources since most will be invested into Windows support.

And yes, maybe it means we get less Linux native, I don't mind either. If it works on Linux and is supported on Linux, even if it's just via Wine, that's all I want.

SmellyGeekBoy7• 8 years ago

Indeed. Modern software has plenty of layers of abstraction to begin with. One more isn't going to break the bank.

(I genuinely can't believe I'm posting this comment completely un-ironically, but here we are).

tfha• 8 years ago

I know more than a few people who prefer Linux but boot windows for gaming. The biggest reason they don't make a bigger effort to support Linux games is because there aren't enough options.

More emulation means more traction for Linux gaming. If windows can be dropped as a requirement for serious gaming, the Linux userbase will grow significantly, and this will help turn the tide.

dtech• 8 years ago

Do we care how the Linux compatibility is achieved? If the end result is the game is available on Linux, stable and performant why should I give a damn that it uses Wine internally any more than whether is uses Unity or python or whatever?

aiCeivi9• 8 years ago

This already happens. Gnomoria had just bolted on Mono. And there were many games that simply used winelib.

giancarlostoro3• 8 years ago

Gnomoria running Mono? It's not a .NET project but a Java one, might you be confusing it with Terraria or something?

maskros• 8 years ago

This may actually be better in the long run.

Almost all proprietary Linux binaries I've seen shipped in the wild link to shared system libraries -- and tend to fall apart when the system libraries are a different version than expected. If you're shipping Linux binaries, you really should be linking statically! Any shared libraries you need, like OpenGL, you should load manually with dlsym.

A windows binary targeting Wine will not stop working just because some shared system library has been updated.

AnIdiotOnTheNet8• 8 years ago

Almost all proprietary Linux binaries I've seen shipped in the wild link to shared system libraries -- and tend to fall apart when the system libraries are a different version than expected.

This is probably the biggest problem with Linux as a desktop, and the sad reality is that it will never ever be fixed because the community has an almost religious adherence to their completely broken platform model.

Maybe if Valve puts enough effort into WINE, the future of the open source desktop will be WINE on top of the Linux kernel? That'd be... tolerable.

LambdaComplex• 8 years ago

Even Steam itself is "just enough." Off the top of my head, the Steam Linux client:

* Ignores flags (so `steam --help` for instance just starts Steam the same way `steam` does)

* Ignores signals (including SIGTERM, I believe)

* Screws up my tiling window manager sometimes, so it probably ignores EWMH

I personally think Valve needs to just separate the core Steam functionality into some backend and allow users to write their own frontends.

===========

And now for an unrelated "Valve/Linux" rant while I'm here: Half-Life: Opposing Force has been unbeatable on Linux since its release. The final boss's death animation plays too quickly and the trigger to change to the next map never occurs. There's been an issue open on the ValveSoftware/halflife GitHub repo about this since 2013. And the real kicker? Someone (not a Valve employee) actually went through the source code and determined the cause of the problem[0]. It still hasn't been fixed.

===========

Screw it, I'll give you one more. Last time I checked, it was impossible to get Half-Life Dedicated Server running through steamcmd[1][2], because the necessary files never finished downloading. When I was trying to get this working, I eventually found a GitHub repo containing modified versions of some files that you could use to make steamcmd actually download everything. I was unable to find this repo again while writing this comment (but I didn't put that much effort into it).

</rant>

0. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife/issues/917#issueco...

1. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife/issues/928

2. https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/14/129181688050...

s3krit• 8 years ago

Thanks for the heads up on the OpFor issue - I just started playing through the original HL games again.

bopbop2• 8 years ago

There's an open source version of the Half Life engine called Xash3d which is feature complete:

https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d

It's also got an excellent Android port:

https://www.moddb.com/games/xash3d-android

shazow• 8 years ago

I suspect you're right in the short term, but in the long term it will push more users to adopt Linux and maybe eventually devs will pay more attention.

tomc19854• 8 years ago

Most (if not all, now) of the major engines (Unreal, Unity, ???) export native binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This seems more for getting legacy titles included.

Even without emulation it is impressive how much of Steam's library is available on Linux.

jandrese• 8 years ago

If it means devs go back and tweak the one or two minor issues that prevent their game from working on Wine then I can't complain that much.

jpeg_hero• 8 years ago

This could be the year of the Linux Desktop!

acd2• 8 years ago

This is good for gaming on Linux!

Future prediction: Hackers reverse engineer Microsoft SQL server for Linux compatibility DLLs and adds better Wine support. Microsoft will eventually start selling a commercial Windows 10 compatibility layer for Linux. Reason Microsoft does not found main revenue through operating sales but of online cloud adoption and subscriptions. Microsoft of today is much more open source friendly than before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux

louhike• 8 years ago

Isn't the next version of SQL Server supposed to run in Linux?

philliphaydon2• 8 years ago

Sql server 2017 already runs on Ubuntu 16.08, really well.

abrookewood• 8 years ago

Yes. Not sure what this prediction means in light of that.

tonyedgecombe• 8 years ago

Microsoft of today is much more open source friendly than before.

When it's in their interest to be so, don't expect them to start giving away their bread and butter.

eahman053• 8 years ago

The only reason I still use Windows is Win32.

SmellyGeekBoy7• 8 years ago

While I agree with you, it seems their bread and butter is shifting more towards their cloud-based services like Azure and Office 365.

That said, I don't see Windows ever going open source if only because of the huge amount of legacy bits and bobs borrowed from elsewhere that would be a nightmare to license.

BuildTheRobots• 8 years ago

Hackers reverse engineer Microsoft SQL server for Linux compatibility DLLs and adds better Wine support. Microsoft will eventually start selling a commercial Windows 10 compatibility layer for Linux

I like the optimism but I honestly believe it's going to go the other way round.

Based on Microsoft s EEE strategy from the past, combined with the way they've pushed for SecureBoot on x86 and Arm and the (re-)rise of the WSL, I honestly expect it to get even more difficult in the future to boot a linux kernel on your own hardware.

Once all the usual suspects work properly under WSL I think more hardware lockdowns are going to come into place combined with phrases like "what do you need a kernel for? just boot windows kernel and use your linux userland and stop complaining!". The rise of GNU/Windows might well be coming...

H4CK3RM4N• 8 years ago

Or systemd/Windows, depending on how long it takes.

blitmap• 8 years ago

I think Microsoft was right to push for Secure Boot / bootloader signing. The way they pushed for it was/is anti-competitive.

I don't think UEFI was the right horse to put money behind. It's a complicated hot mess and the most visible innovation has been to use UEFI identifiers for DRM within web browsers. Yay.

dmitrygr• 8 years ago

That would be wonderful. If you're comparing kernel architectures, Linux kernel vs. NT is not much of a comparison. I will take NT kernel & gnu user space any day!

It's always nice to run a kernel designed by people who actually know what they're doing, and aren't doing it for the first time. Look into nt history, or how late Linux kernel started taking things like power management seriously. Hell, Linux kernel still insists on entirely living in nonpageable memory, most io is still synchronous, and there still is no stable driver API.

sbarre• 8 years ago

Hah funny you should say that.. A long time ago some friends and I debated whether Microsoft would eventually just turn Windows into a Window Manager that would sit on top of Linux/BSD/Darwin or something like that..

This was before Apple stopped caring about OSX/macOS though, so not sure this would still happen..

overcast2• 8 years ago

WSL works really well actually, like magically well. I do all my web dev work on Windows instead of my aging Mac now.

adventured• 8 years ago

I'll second that. I've had a near perfect experience using WSL for development. One of the best things Microsoft has added to Windows in many years.

brightball• 8 years ago

Why anyone would reverse engineer SQL Server for Linux is beyond me. It’s a good database...but it’s a trap. Once you’re on it, it’s nightmare to migrate off when you start hitting limitations. They go out of their way not to include features that make it possible to push data outside, so if your team is using even a single stored procedure for writing data you can’t just do it at the application level to bypass it.

Needs to be in less places, not more.

tomc19854• 8 years ago

They're only after the compatibility shims in its code to make it work on Linux.

alkonaut3• 8 years ago

What's the driving force behind this? Is it so that Valve won't have to be dependent on microsoft or a "windows tax" for their gaming boxes? Or is it that microsoft simply wouldn't agree to license windows to them because they are already pushing xboxes? Or is it something else?

chme• 8 years ago

I suppose its because Microsoft is now (since Windows 8) in the `app/game store` business on Windows.

alkonaut3• 8 years ago

My guess too - and they are also in the windows-for-couch-gaming space since forever (with xbox). But this project has to be very expensive for valve, so I'm wondering if it's not more expensive than just selling boxes with windows on it to play all these games that are mostly windows anyway? And that raises the question of whether that was ever a possibility

modeless• 8 years ago

Microsoft is trying to make Windows app distribution more like iOS. As a third party software store for Windows, Steam is prohibited from being in the Windows Store or running at all on Windows S. This is a direct attack on Valve, since Windows game sales make up the vast majority of their revenue.

Although the Windows Store and Windows S have not been successful so far, Valve is still hedging their bets and trying to reduce their dependency on Windows and DirectX by promoting Linux and Vulkan.

hegz3• 8 years ago

First Microsoft has to get every app on the windows store, then they have to get people to start using it and then they cut off external software sources or make it hard to do like requiring power shell to enable.

Its obvious this is the long term plan for MS. Apple has already shown people will buy locked down systems.

XorNot• 8 years ago

Even if this project never completely replaces Windows, it's existence ensure Valve gets favorable negotiating terms with Microsoft.

Of course, I'd really really love if the gap closed enough that Windows became completely optional for gaming (and now, VR for me). My Windows 10 upgrade recently was purely to run my HTC Vive with DX12 - there's nothing else on that partition.

Sylos8• 8 years ago

The original reasoning for Valve's Linux push was the shock from how terrible Windows 8 was and for the most part still is.

At that point, they realised that if Microsoft is being stupid, there's nothing they can do against it. Almost their entire market is in the hand of Microsoft.

And yeah, it certainly didn't help that Windows 8 featured the Windows Store, therefore officially competed with Steam, and included a new application API (Metro Apps, now known as UWP), which I think back then was still exclusive to the Windows Store. Nowadays you technically can sideload them, but if we look at Android, that's still not much comfort.

balls187• 8 years ago

Microsoft doesn't withold OEM licenses from competitors. That wouldn't make sense for a number of reasons.

1. Microsoft doesn't license xbox software, so in that regard a Valve Box isn't a direct competitor.

2. Windows and Xbox (Entertainment) are separate business units, with different revenue targets.

3. Xbox is far from the market leader in the current console generation, and hampering Windows sales to boost Xbox won't make up the difference.

4. There doesn't exist a relationship that can't be forged by increasing the how much you pay. Said plainly: if you're willing to pay, Microsoft will do business with you (governments and legalities aside).

To the original question, why Valve does anything is a mystery. Speculating: This is laying foundations for streaming games as a service. Linux is their target platform for the game servers.

I don't believe this is about top-line revenue, as PC Master Race has overwhelmingly chosen Windows as it's OS, and it's not going to change.

Edit to Add:

Actually as I think about this more, the central motivation is even more simplistic: a group of valve employees wanted to make more games compatible on Linux. Their entire driving force is doing stuff they find interesting, as long as it benefits the customer. There exists Valve customers who can't play games, because they're not available on Linux. Thus, Valve is addressing it.

Valve has so much capital resources, they're not motivated at all by financial reasons.

ece3• 8 years ago

Looking at other game publishers, Doom Eternal/Fallout 76 might not be on Steam and the newest CoD: Black Ops 4 will only be on Battle.net. GoG is DRM free and getting a lot of indie dev games.

Valve needs to sell more games, and this is the easiest way to do it. They haven't completely given up on Steam Machines/OS, so better Steam play options just reinforces that freedom-from-MS initiative.

I think it makes sense in a couple of ways, especially considering how good Wine was getting, and the availability of good GPU drivers on Linux.

bisby5• 8 years ago

From what I'm reading "considering how good Wine was getting" was because valve was paying devs to work on it.

Also, it's nice because basically they've given this all back to the open source community, so it doubly reinforces "freedom-from-MS", because you aren't actually shackled to Steam either.

Zarath• 8 years ago

This is awesome. As others have said, gaming is one of the few reasons I still use Windows on my desktop.

ezoe3• 8 years ago

Does anyone know why Valve forked the Wine rather than joining them?

gshulegaard• 8 years ago

Pure speculation, but it looks like Valve has a tight focus on DXVK whereas I think Wine is a bit more broad in it's support goals.

hegz3• 8 years ago

They said they work on their own fork and push everything back to upstream when its appropriate. I guess that gives them the freedom to do anything without worrying if upstream will accept it.

Blaiz0r• 8 years ago

From the FAQs of the original post on Steam:

"Modifications to Wine are submitted upstream if they're compatible with the goals and requirements of the larger Wine project; as a result, Wine users have been benefiting from parts of this work for over a year now. The rest is available as part of our source code repository for Proton and its modules."

Wine has very tight/strict requirements for what can merged into its codebase, it's why DXVK has had to remain a standalone project because it doesn't live up to Wine's code/goal requirements.

ezoe3• 8 years ago

Thanks.

londons_explore• 8 years ago

Can you be more specific on where the goals differ?

"Get all windows stuff to run perfectly in Linux" sounds like a pretty simple goal to me.

SmellyGeekBoy7• 8 years ago

Wait, so Wine has been accepting pull requests from Valve developers for a whole year and nobody has noticed? How did they keep that under wraps?

filmor2• 8 years ago

This is the corresponding github issue, open since 2012: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/74 :)

At some point during the beta of the Steam client for Linux, there was a bug in that you could install Windows games on Linux. I had a binfmt_misc setup at the time, which allowed me to run Windows executables directly through Wine as if they were ordinary ELF binaries. I don't remember exactly what happened when I tried running one, I think it failed when the Steam copy protection kicked in, but I always wondered if they couldn't make this work.

eahman053• 8 years ago

If you use Wine to play DirectX 9 games, try the d3d9 fork. It's a fork with patches that give a much increased performance with DirectX 9 games which aren't merged into the Wine mainline because of the usual bikeshedding reasons. I use it to play WoW and I get better performance than on Windows.

https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/app-emulation/wine-d3d9

LoSboccacc3• 8 years ago

I get better performance than on Windows

as anecdotal as it might be, I used to get better performance from wine'd dwarf fortress than with it's osx port, which is interesting I guess.

eahman053• 8 years ago

I don't know why it is in my case, but I suspect it's because Wine and/or the AMD drivers on Linux don't implement as many visual effects as there are on Windows, which makes the game easier on the GPU.

see-ya-99• 8 years ago

Back in the days of vanilla... WoW client has built-in native OpenGL support and was working perfectly under Wine.

BTW. Same with W3

tinus_hn3• 8 years ago

I don’t know how it is today but Microsofts compiler used to produce much better code than the free compilers used on Linux and Mac OSX

CodeArtisan• 8 years ago

Borderlands 2 is known for running better on wine than on Windows. IIRC the reason was the filesystems (ext4 vs ntfs).

Fiahil• 8 years ago

Atari is preparing the launch of its new linux console, the VCS (scheduled for next year). Apart from being a great toy for tinkering, it would be quite interesting if we could run a full steam client and some windows games on it !

Controls may be a bit hazy, but it's definitively something I would try.

SmellyGeekBoy7• 8 years ago

I look forward to attempting the new DOOM with a one-button joystick ;)

morganvachon3• 8 years ago

Sounds like a fun challenge, akin to playing Castlevania: SotN with the Richter character.

hasperdi• 8 years ago

You may want to adjust your expectation, as the current Atari is comparable to what Nokia, Polaroid and Kodak are today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0qyUhb3VXI

redisman• 8 years ago

Ah yes Atari, the company that singlehandedly almost destroyed the video game industry with their crapware games. How are they still alive? Just milking old IPs and patents?

ryu2k2• 8 years ago

Valve really needs to roll out a 64bit client though. I always have problems just installing the client because of the 32bit architecture.

colejohnson66• 8 years ago

How so?

xfer2• 8 years ago

Use your package manager.

mort96• 8 years ago

I've had a lot of bad experiences installing Steam from a package manager and having problems with either the Steam client itself or games crashing because they can't find 32-bit OpenGL libraries. I haven't had such issues that I can remember the last few times I've installed steam, but "use your package manager" isn't (or hasn't always been) the complete answer.

Aelius• 8 years ago

Flatpak to the rescue!

stubish• 8 years ago

I personally hope for Snaps or similar. Games could really benefit from containment. There is no reason for Counter Strike mods to have access to your World of Warcraft credentials, or your web browser or email client have access to them for that matter.

nullify88• 8 years ago

https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.valvesoftware.Steam

The only issue is that I can't get Hardware Accelerated Decoding to work in Steam Streaming. I believe that's because I don't have the 32bit libraries and associated dependencies for doing it installed and that's the whole point of me going the flatpak route!

Other than that, works beautifully. Didn't go flatpak for Spotify though.

tfolbrecht• 8 years ago

Yeah multiarch was an annoyance. Not sure why it's nontrivial on their side.

executesorder664• 8 years ago

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-64...

AnIdiotOnTheNet8• 8 years ago

It's 2018 and Linux still has issues with this? It's a complete non-issue on Windows. One wonders if you can really blame Valve for the Linux desktop community not being able to accomplish such a simple thing as running 32-bit applications along side 64-bit ones.

gpderetta3• 8 years ago

What are the issues exactly? 32 bit libraries are not installed by deafult in most distros because the vast majority of the software has been ported to 64 bits decades ago.

Sylos8• 8 years ago

It's not 2018 and Linux still has issues with this, rather it's 2018 and Linux is starting to have real issues with this.

Windows is the only desktop OS where 32-bit is still commonly used. On Linux, you nowadays generally don't have any 32-bit applications installed. Many Linux distributions don't offer 32-bit support anymore at all, because you'll have a seriously hard time finding hardware that doesn't support 64-bit.

With Steam however at the moment still only being available as 32-bit, you need 32-bit versions of the libraries that Steam uses. Distributions not hosting 32-bit libraries anymore, means you need to get these libraries in a different way.

Many distributions now actually offer you to install a Steam installer, which then gets the necessary 32-bit libraries from elsewhere.

You can also install Steam through a new package format, called "Flatpak", which includes all the necessary libraries directly in the package.

But these are all new workarounds and may still have problems. Flatpak in fact has only turned 1.0 a few days ago.

bdz2• 8 years ago

John Carmack in 2013

I truly do feel that emulation of some sort is a proper technical direction for gaming on Linux. It is obviously pragmatic in the range of possible support, but it shouldn’t have the technical stigma that it does. There really isn’t much of anything special that a native port does – we still make OpenGL calls, winsock is just BSD sockets, windows threads become pthreads, and the translation of input and audio interfaces don’t make much difference (XInput and Xaudio2 are good APIs!). A good shim layer should have far less impact on performance than the variability in driver quality.
Translating from D3D to OpenGL would involve more inefficiencies, but figuring out exactly what the difficulties are and making some form of “D3D interop” extension for OpenGL to smooth it out is a lot easier than making dozens of completely refactored, high performance native ports.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17x0sh/john_carmack_...

izacus2• 8 years ago

And here pretty much lies the gist of it - most issues I've ever had with Linux gaming wasn't due to ports, but due to really poor driver quality and support from the platform. Missing OGL extensions, broken features or partly-implemented features made games unplayable.

BurningCycles• 8 years ago

Is that really a problem these days ? Nvidia has had very good Linux drivers for a long time and in the recent years, Intel and AMD has made great improvements.

sandworm1013• 8 years ago

Except that the availability of emulation may cause developers to stop native linux support. I dont want to hear "talk to valve about your linux issue" every time i report a bug.

baldfat• 8 years ago

The nice thing about Linux and emulators is our reporting. It will be much easier to figure out what the issue is then most people think.

https://wiki.winehq.org/Bugs

TangoTrotFox• 8 years ago

Which would you see as more probable?

1) The ease of quality emulation leads to developers ceasing native linux support, resulting in lower quality linux gaming overall.

2) The ease of quality emulation leads more gamers to be willing to migrate to linux as their primary OS, thus helping linux come closer to being a first class deployment target, resulting in higher quality linux gaming overall.

Of course this isn't a dichotomy, but rather I think it's often unwise to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when you're looking at hypotheticals.

ekianjo6• 8 years ago

Native means nothing. Nobody rewrites DX engines to OpenGL from scratch. If you believe so then you have been lied to. Feral interactive uses InDirectX to translate DX calls, VP has eON which is very similar... Everyone is doing it already.

rootlocus• 8 years ago

If dev teams want "native" (as per the definition you posted downstream [1]) linux ports, they will put in the effort just like before, except they now have another tool.

Maybe with this new tool, teams that wouldn't have considered putting any effort into porting their game will now change their mind.

Regardless, no one who cares about porting their game will ignore issues because it's not their problem.

[1] "Without expanding upon ever tiny definition, take "native" to mean a linux release developed, beta-tested, and supported by the original developer. Not something developed for windows and then expected to just run on linux boxes thanks to a compatability layer."

joveian2• 8 years ago

I don't know the details of this stuff, but with .net/mono is it even correct to call it emluation? It seems more like a compatability layer than emulation.

vardump2• 8 years ago

Given the most AAA games are written in native C++, I don't see how mono makes much difference at all. No .net CLR or mono are used at all in those cases.

The only major platform using C# is Unity, and there are a few AAA games written in it, like KSP.

Phenix88be• 8 years ago

Why can't we just have native support... Why do almost everyone had to go for Wine instead of native support. Gaming on Wine is painful and often break with updates.

TulliusCicero2• 8 years ago

Why can't we just have native support...

Because the market for Linux gamers -- especially ones who don't already dual-boot Windows -- is tiny.

jpetso2• 8 years ago

I think it's interesting that tiny indie projects would often have a Linux port, when their user base isn't all that big to begin with and their Linux user base would be much smaller still. On the other hand, AAA titles which would presumably still sell tens of thousands of copies rarely ever seem to make the effort.

I'm not complaining, but shouldn't it be the other way around?

deadbunny• 8 years ago

Because developers target DirectX rather than OpenGL/Vulkan. There is the whole "commercially viable" aspect as well.

gpderetta3• 8 years ago

Even most native ports, made by third parties like feral, use a compatibility layer not unlike Wine internally.

As long as a game is supported, works well and has decent performance, it should be sufficient; everything else is implementation details. This might require shipping the right version of wine with the game itself of course which seems to be what Valve is planning to do.

bisby5• 8 years ago

If you give me a black box of code, and I can't tell the difference, I don't care what is in the box. The primary things to be concerned about are A) support (which sounds like valve is covering themselves, not that they are notorious for great support), and B) performance.

If something is performant and it works, who cares how it got there. If either of those things aren't there, then I could see how the frustration kicks in.

In the mean time, I have a ton of friends who have been saying "I would use Linux but my games" for years now that might actively take the plunge.

As proton evolves and gets better, I fully expect more devs to make minor tweaks to make their game play nicer with proton, which is far easier to do than making a full linux build. Which means overall, the games getting betters, and the tools getting better, this is great news for gaming on linux.

Now I wonder how proton will play out for non steam games. If proton is basically "game-centric wine", will I be able to use it to play Overwatch?

bitwize• 8 years ago

Oh, thank goodness. I could never get the Steam client running under Wine. Usually, nothing happens.

black_puppydog• 8 years ago

In case anyone else is wondering, this spreadsheet is posted as one of the github issues and compiles people's tests of different games:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DcZZQ4HL_Ol969UbXJmF...

neuromantik8086• 8 years ago

Machinarium --> Anything else notable? --> Still cute ass heck

Is this a Freudian slip from one of those robosexuals?

petermcneeley• 8 years ago

Has anyone addressed the possible legal issues with this type of emulation? What about titles with strong DRM is it likely that they will run in these environments?

dx87• 8 years ago

In Valve's announcment they mention that titles with strong DRM or complex anti-cheat measures probably won't work.

anc84• 8 years ago

Heh, I wonder if the list is correct about its Doom games. It links to the 2016 Doom as well as DOOM II: Hell on Earth (1994). Silly trend of re-using old names for new releases, they might have mean the original Doom instead...

nix0n2• 8 years ago

Both are on the list, Ultimate Doom further down is a re-release of the original.

Jeaye• 8 years ago

This makes GNU/Linux a more appealing and viable gaming platform than Mac OS, since it now has the opportunity to capture so many of the existing Windows games.

chupasaurus5• 8 years ago

Just run your macOS (not Hackintosh) on my Ryzen and then we'll talk.

wemdyjreichert• 8 years ago

Does this mean we can now have wine without breaking packages and having to reinstall?

ece3• 8 years ago

Samba was reverse engineered, MS somewhat tried to make it an open standard, now are agnostic to it and are still developing closed extensions.

Mono became big enough, and they opensourced their own CLR, and it runs on Linux.

DirectX was implemented as a compatibility layer and runs games at close to native speeds on Linux and MS dumps it for Vulkan. Or so the wish goes.

Valve Rolls Out Wine-Based “Proton” for Running Windows Games on Linux

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