With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

https://www.protondb.com

by bdefore • 8 years ago

932 311 8 years ago

protondb.com

danschumann• 8 years ago

Sweet.. haven't checked the list in a while.

ccnafr• 8 years ago

Most major games still don't work. Sadly.

Take the AC series, for example: https://www.protondb.com/search?q=creed

jcastro• 8 years ago

Most of the difficulty in getting these to run circles around the uplay stuff, for example it won't even launch unless you have the Microsoft fonts installed, and then there's an outdated libgnutls library in the steam runtime that you need to workaround.

But once you do that the games actually run, I've gotten Odyssey and Unity to run and they run surprisingly well. If Valve can convince Ubisoft to at least make the launchers not be too intrusive and can solve that last 10% of the config issue then it'd be viable.

TheRealDunkirk• 8 years ago

I see Skyrim, right at the top. And New Vegas. Wow. Any chance Valve could offer this support for Mac as well?

m_eiman• 8 years ago

As soon as someone makes them a DXMT to use instead of DXVK, I suppose. Isn't there some Rust project working on that..?

loxs• 8 years ago

So it's just wine under the hood, so "working" is not exactly true?

bpicolo• 8 years ago

Wine is a big part of it, but there's a bit more to it.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

lostgame5• 8 years ago

That is, um, incredibly not clear, based on the link you shared.

'Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system. It uses Wine to facilitate this.'

Even reading down the article to look for more details provides information about building the product, but as far as I can see no other significant details about it's underlying technology.

There may be other articles or posts that go over this more, but your link provided no useful or helpful information that I could see in two brief read-overs.

syntaxing3• 8 years ago

Hmm title is confusing. Maybe changing to the original post title will be better?

That being said, I wish I can run CAD like fusion 360 on Linux. Anyone know of any way to make this happen?

jstanley• 8 years ago

I use FreeCAD. It is sometimes annoying, but much better than any alternative I've tried.

For more programmatic CAD, OpenSCAD is also good.

fartcannon• 8 years ago

AND you can script them with Python!

https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Python_scrip...

syntaxing3• 8 years ago

I use FreeCAD and OpenSCAD (especially "automated" file generation) and like what they stand for but unfortunately neither really compares to a standard CAD program. Maybe I'm too used to the big three CAD software.

krn1p4n1c• 8 years ago

I'm in the same boat. Would love to be able to use Fusion in linux, especially with Apple dropping OpenGL support. Last I read they were looking to move the app to web-based and be platform agnostic.

syntaxing3• 8 years ago

I tried the web beta version and it's pretty limited and super slow. Nothing compared to OnShape but OnShapes license, policy and direction has been so bad that I dropped them pretty much after the official release (I used them during the beta phase).

djhworld• 8 years ago

Is anyone running this setup? The last time I used WINE was probably 12 or so years ago and I always got the impression it was a slow "it will do for now" experience

Has it come on leaps and bounds since then?

gyaru• 8 years ago

I've used wine forever to play games with, it's actually really good these days.

The difference between the past and now is that it lets you use your current native steam client and still run games through wine, in the past you had to run a separate steam client in each wineprefix and you'd end up with steam installed for each game.

The addition of DXVK makes directx10/11 games really speedy, runs great! World of Warcraft runs better in DXVK in its dx11 mode than what it did with OpenGL when they still offered that.

The "game-breaking" thing is usually DRM like denuvo though.

SOLAR_FIELDS2• 8 years ago

Is Proton tightly integrated into the steam platform or can it also be used to play DRM free games like GOG? I imagine Steam wouldn’t be too appreciative if GOG galaxy also integrated this

ddalex• 8 years ago

I'm using Wine actively to play on my Linux machine (Dell XPS 13 dual boot with Win 10). In my particular configuration, the game (Rome: Total War) works better and smoother with Wine. YMMV.

Symmetry• 8 years ago

Yeah. I just turned this on last week to try it out. I downloaded a game listed as "gold", Skyrim, and it installed and played just like any other Steam game.

nacs• 8 years ago

I've been using it on my Ubuntu box and its as easy as double clicking any game like you do for any native-Linux game in Steam.

Games run smoothly, no frame rate issues, no Wine to setup manually, no Wine configuration files to play with. It just works.

criddell3• 8 years ago

Why not just dual boot to Windows? It's going to be a better experience.

Filligree• 8 years ago

Because I don't want to lose my state, and I don't want to have to take ten minutes to switch to doing something useful.

melling• 8 years ago

Hasn't the 2 decades old goal been to be able to run Linux without the need for owning Windows? Windows is still 89% of the desktop market. A free alternative is still a worthy goal.

snarfy• 8 years ago

Well, except for the dual booting part.

SmellyGeekBoy• 8 years ago

I tried this for a while but I used Windows so infrequently that I was constantly interrupted by updates whenever I did boot it up.

welterde• 8 years ago

Or buy only games that have a native Linux port - which is what I do.

fyfy18• 8 years ago

I tried Banished which works perfectly, it's hard to tell any difference from native. I have integrated graphics though, so maybe if you are looking to play an FPS at 144Hz you might notice it...

gnulinux2• 8 years ago

Uhh WINE so unreliable. The summer when I started high school (like 7 years ago or something like that?) I played Skyrim in WINE in my shitty ass laptop. No kidding, it was an extremely good experience. My laptop was ~$800 and wasn't a gaming PC. I was running archlinux with some unknown version of WINE. The setup was super easy, I don't remember spending time on instaling Skyrim. The game was 100% working.

Then I tried this one more time the summer I started college (3 years ago?) It was working but lagging, and sound wasn't working, and some controls weren't working and it was randomly crashing. But it was still playable.

Then I tried it one more time this summer when I graduated from college. I spent an entire week and couldn't get it done. At some point I was applying patches in C and recompiling Wine which apparently fixed something? I also spent a lot of time trying to find the Wine version and Skyrin executable I used 7 years ago. For the love of God I, a CS graduate, couldn't get something my high school self done.

If you find something working in Wine, save the executable and Wine version. There is no guarantee any other combination will work. But I swear to god, 7 years ago whatever Wine+Skyrim combo I used was working flawlessly, I can't imagine it working any better in Windows back then.

ivanfon• 8 years ago

Wine configuration can be a bit of a mess - luckily tools like Lutris and PlayOnLinux are a huge help, since they essentially give you the Wine version and install script that automatically sets everything up and has been tested to work.

passwd2• 8 years ago

Some games have very bad performance. VR games are noticeably slower than in Windows (but I've heard this being the case for native games; haven't tried, cause there weren't many). Some are actually faster in some aspects (loading screens for instance). And for many you won't notice any difference.

shmerl10• 8 years ago

I'm using Wine+dxvk and can play quite demanding games.

marcosdumay• 8 years ago

You probably had a bad GPU driver. There have been a really long time (more than 12 years) that Wine has native-like performance (it's not an emulator, after all), but if your system can not use the GPU adequately, no game will run well.

z3t42• 8 years ago

We bought a Windows computer so the kids could play some old classics. Not a single game worked on Windows 10, not even in compatibility mode. But most of them worked in Linux/Wine ...

wishinghand2• 8 years ago

How old are we talking here?

z3t42• 8 years ago

I think they're from 2003-2005 System requirements: Pentium 166 or better. Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, or XP. Standard installer, nothing special. They are on PC cd-rom. Got them used for a bargain, mostly learning type games. Could probably run them in an emulator, for example emulating windows XP in the browser. But you shouldn't need to be a sys-op to install a game. And you don't want to fiddle around if you have inpatient children waiting. My point is that the games specially made for Windows, doesn't work on Windows. Byt they do just work on Linux after installing Wine, most of them.

dudul• 8 years ago

Did you get these games from Steam? I found that games distributed by GoodOldGames usually work pretty well on Windows10. I have a dozen of them and never ran into an issue.

thirdsun• 8 years ago

GOG releases often includes compatibility and even unofficial community patches. You can generally assume that even their old games will work on modern computers.

neilsimp1• 8 years ago

DOSBox? ScummVM? Depending one what age you're talking, those games should work fine on either OS really.

dwyerm• 8 years ago

Yes, but... that's actually the product that Steam (and GOG) is selling you: The ability to just click 'launch' on a game and it knows what collection of DOSBox, Scumm, Wine, Frotz, WinUAE, whatever is needed to just launch the game.

Trying to get a Windows game running under Linux is an adventure in itself. This opens up the door for people who don't like those kinds of adventure games.

jamesgeck0• 8 years ago

I've actually had to add Wine DLLs to a few older games to get them running on Windows. Games that use DirectDraw are the main suspects.

babypuncher• 8 years ago

Must be some old titles, it's pretty rare for a 32-bit Windows game to flat out not work in Windows 10. I'm even able to run Incredible Machine 3 (a game from 1995), albeit without CD audio. DOS and 16-bit Windows games however require an emulator like DOSBox.

Many 3D games from the mid-late '90s and early '00s relied on now esoteric hardware accelerators and APIs (like Glide) or GPU features that behave differently on modern hardware than the games expect. These might require a wrapper like nGlide or dgVoodoo 2.

Check the entries for your games on the PC Gaming Wiki (www.pcgamingwiki.com).

bischofs2• 8 years ago

PC gaming is a struggle for me as of now, I have an older rig which I would love to update but simply cant justify the cost. It is pretty frustrating when my friends xbox can run 4k games but the only GPU that is comparable is north of 500$.

The ML and crypto hysteria as well as AMD not willing to compete is not healthy for the long term PC gaming industry. It is certainly keeping me out of it.

eropple2• 8 years ago

Eh. I can get similar performance as an Xbox One X out of my not-built-for-4K gaming computer if I too lower all my other graphics settings. Soul Calibur VI, for example, runs around PC's "low" settings on an Xbox One S and around "medium" on an Xbox One X.

Instead I play at 1440p and 144FPS with most of the knobs in most games turned up near max (and my graphics card is a couple revs out of date).

wishinghand2• 8 years ago

Most PC gamers don’t play in 4K and 30 frames per second, much less 60 fps. That’s graphically taxing for many contemporary games, especially if other graphical quality is turned up.

The consoles also typically don’t run at full resolution. In the 1080p era, I recall many games topping out at 900p. It was a great source of pc gamer smugness due to the fact most of them could easily run 1080p and 45+ fps. I suspect modern console 4K is the same.

Since the generally accepted fps for consoles is 30, and that’s pretty low, it means developers can either compromise on resolution or other things like how many entities can be on screen at once, or how large open areas can be. I suspect catering to console audiences is why a lot of the last ten years some games feel either empty or constrained in scope.

beezischillin2• 8 years ago

While 4K is still somewhat far away on a reasonable set-up, a surprisingly large amount of games can comfortably push 3440x1440@60.

jtms• 8 years ago

30 FPS? AHHH mah eyes! ;-)

Jach6• 8 years ago

Most gamers don't play in 4K, but a large number (maybe most? Surely the largest minority) on PC probably get 60 FPS. You can look at the Steam hardware survey results here: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

I've been holding out to do a big upgrade myself, but I got a Gigabyte GTX 1050 Ti last year for $147 to comparably replace my dying AMD 7950. Same card today is $190 (on Amazon). It's more than capable for things at 1080p, and does just fine for some games at 4k too (or I survive with 30-50 FPS and/or tweak with the graphics options; "high" is usually acceptable even if it's not "ultimate").

The new xbone x can do 4k pretty reliably, but that's $500, plus $60 per game. Getting your aging PC (mine is nearly a decade old) up to par (and often exceeding) graphics wise is a cheaper investment in a GPU, and games on PC are routinely on mega sales.

izacus• 8 years ago

The consoles also typically don’t run at full resolution. In the 1080p era, I recall many games topping out at 900p. It was a great source of pc gamer smugness due to the fact most of them could easily run 1080p and 45+ fps. I suspect modern console 4K is the same.

Consoles tend to do dynamic resolution - they'll drive the display at 4K (together with UI), but the actual rendering resolution will drop and adapt to the load. It actually looks pretty good - the UI and text keeps being sharp while you generally don't notice the resolution drop that much. Unfortunately most games lose this capability on PC, so you're stuck with blurry looking text if you have a good monitor or TV :(

The other trick they do is checkerboard rendering - the console only renders approximately half the scene each frame. The partially rendered frame is then combined with the previous one with added filtering. The result is not unlike the interlaced CRT TV rendering of 80s era consoles/micros - just with better filtering. Again, this capability tends to disappear on PC versions of those games.

Lack of those two things means that in a lot of cases games on PC look/run worse on equivalent hardware than they do on the console :/

swebs• 8 years ago

Even the most powerful Xbox is only comparable to a RX 480. You can find a RX 580 on Amazon right now for $250.

bischofs2• 8 years ago

If you compare specs that is true, but if you actually run the games at 4k on high settings etc, the xbox will be fairly smooth where as the RX 480 will struggle. In reality you need to get a 1080ti to get the same 4k experience, and the new RTX cards are priced way too high.

beezischillin2• 8 years ago

I'm really hoping that this will change soon. The fact that AMD's making competent CPUs again is such a relief that I ended up upgrading to an 8 core Ryzen 2700X from a 4790k. I got a Vega64 knowing that it won't be as fast as a 1080ti, but still adequate. I don't like nvidia. I'm really hoping that once AMD starts regaining some more satisfying market share then they'll do whatever they can to get Radeon Technologies Group to be competitive again.

freehunter2• 8 years ago

I agree. I used to build my own PCs and I was a big-time PC gamer, but these days I struggle to find the energy for it. I recently bought an Xbox One for $200, which is half what my PC GPU cost. Not to mention I prefer working on a laptop, but laptops that have beefy GPUs and CPUs tend to be heavier and more expensive with worse battery life. So to play PC games, I have to have a desktop in addition to my laptop, which doubles the cost and in effect just turns my desktop into a really expensive and oversized game console anyway.

It's so much easier and cheaper and convenient to have one box dedicated to playing games and one box dedicated to doing work. Instead of a $2000 laptop or a $1000 laptop and a $1000 desktop, I can have a $1000 laptop and a $200 Xbox.

It's a shame the "PC Master Race" thing has become such a meme lately to fragment and radicalize the gaming community. All I care about is playing video games to relax and enjoy myself. It doesn't matter one bit how I accomplish that goal.

jimmy1• 8 years ago

I bought an Dell "gaming edition" laptop last year for about 700 bucks. It's my daily driver dual booted with Ubuntu, and Windows, and it handles any modern AAA game with 30+ fps or more.

To me the PC Master Race meme started with FPS games (CS 1.6/SourceGO vs COD on console), the cultures around the various platforms, and how video games in general just seem to be more enjoyable with a mouse and a keyboard than a joystick (not to mention you can be much more accurate with the crosshairs),. The only exception to me are fighters and drivers.

The meme then slowly morphed into this pseudo-elitism about graphics and performance, but most "pc master racers" have at least one console, if not two.

tobyhinloopen• 8 years ago

Even the Xbox one X cannot run all games on 4K. Most games have dynamic resolution somewhere between 1440p and 4K and/or run at low frame-rates.

You can grab a GTX970/GTX1060 and be able to run any game on 1080p-1440p.

briffle• 8 years ago

If steam spends some time working with the larger "anti-cheat" vendors, I think they could really bump up the list. Many of the 'borked' games use anti-cheat, like battle-eye.

breakingcups• 8 years ago

Considering the lengths these anti-cheat vendors go to to detect bad behavior (including but not limited to kernel-mode drivers and kernel-hooks), I doubt they have any incentive to go along with this until a massive amount of momentum for gaming on Linux exists.

drb91• 8 years ago

Valve and steam are large enough to provide incentive themselves if they so choose.

uranusjr• 8 years ago

I remember not being able to play anything BattlEye because it breaks on a Windows Insider version late 2017, and stuck for half a year until the next stable update cycle. It’ll be a loooong time until they even consider to support anything remotely interesting at all.

Klathmon3• 8 years ago

I'd much rather those games just become unplayable.

I've had so much trouble with anti-cheat systems that I will now refuse to buy or play any game that uses easyanticheat or battleye. I don't care how much it costs, how many of my friends are playing it, I'm not giving another penny to any company that uses those programs.

I get that it's not an easy problem to solve, but i'm so goddamn tired of having to shut down services dedicated to controlling fan speeds in my machine, having to disable network adapters, uninstall vpn software (not just turn it off, uninstall it), and wasting hours trying to figure out why it would crash on startup only to find that it was finding a pcap.dll in a random folder in my downloads from when I was messing with some traffic sniffing stuff on this system like a year before that, and it decided to crash without any warning or error...

Cheaters suck in games, and they can ruin it for many others, but there has to be another way other than forcing your paying users to jump through this many hoops. And if there isn't, then i'm happy to be doomed to playing against/with hackers and cheaters rather than not being able to play at all.

And I know it's kind of co opting the purpose of Proton, but if they refused to accommodate these anti-cheat systems, then maybe either the game developer or the anti-cheat vendor themselves will see some of the potential paying customers they are excluding and will significantly retool their systems to work.

voltagex_• 8 years ago

I've gotta wonder about your system config. I've got Wireshark, Viscosity, probably a TUN driver or two from another VPN install, fan control, system monitoring and I've had no problem at all.

Not saying it doesn't happen - I'm pretty sure there was one that didn't like VirtualBox and I haven't tried again since switching to Hyper V. Maybe I got lucky?

otakucode• 8 years ago

There is another way. Statistical analysis on game performance. No one is 3 standard deviations above the mean in terms of their skill. So ban anyone who hits that. Cutting that off leaves cheaters that are cheating just to be as good as pretty good players, but it keeps them defeatable.

wjoe4• 8 years ago

Cheaters suck in games, and they can ruin it for many others, but there has to be another way other than forcing your paying users to jump through this many hoops. And if there isn't, then i'm happy to be doomed to playing against/with hackers and cheaters rather than not being able to play at all.

Back in my day, we just played on community servers with moderators who'd just ban cheaters!

I know that's not really a solution with the scale of today's online games, but cheating isn't a new problem. It's only become a problem of today's world of matchmaking systems, global public servers, and the removal of community hosted servers. Still, I feel like just hiring a few more people to manually check suspected cheaters would reduce the need for such heavy handed anti-cheat.

On the other hand, Valve run 2 of the most popular online games (CS:GO and Dota 2), which both have Linux clients, and don't have the same level of intrusive anti-cheat compared to EAC and BattlEye.

hiccuphippo• 8 years ago

Is it possible to do those anti-cheat checks on wine/linux? Valve could work with the vendors to have them work on it.

dx87• 8 years ago

From what I understand, the anti-cheat checks work, it's just that the permissions model on Linux is so much more coarse than on Windows that there isn't really a good way to tell the difference between a cheat and benign behavior. They end up with so many false positives that it's better to just not let the game run at all. Even something as simple as running "ps" on Linux looks through procfs and can show where in memory different things are loaded, probably getting flagged by the anti-cheat.

bitwize• 8 years ago

I set up a separate user account for Steam precisely because I don't want anti-cheats sniffing my main account's memory through /proc. Anti-cheat can go fuck itself, doubly hard if it tries to install a kernel module just to play a damn game.

therein• 8 years ago

Unfortunately it probably will want to have itself loaded as a kernel module, if they ever were to decide to even begin supporting it.

Anti-cheat has been one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of gaming on Linux for a long time.

CodeArtisan4• 8 years ago

Linux being open source and gpl licensed is a problem for anti-cheats.

adtac• 8 years ago

Why does the operating system's license matter for software running on top of it? The software can still be proprietary.

Waterluvian• 8 years ago

Admittedly rather reductionist, but I'd love it if there was some single number representing how close to Windows performance each title gets. The main issue I have is that I'm not about to bother with any titles when I consistently find that titles "work" but don't really work well enough.

fabricexpert• 8 years ago

it's at the bottom

Current Game Rating Distribution Tier Rated Highest Report Highest Report (But Pending) Platinum 286 2356 1467 Gold 372 399 232 Silver 319 472 367 Bronze 178 195 158 Borked 245 1162 960

each game has this rating in winedb

Hello712• 8 years ago

  ╔══════════╦═══════╦════════════════╦══════════════════════════════╗
  ║   Tier   ║ Rated ║ Highest Report ║ Highest Report (But Pending) ║
  ╠══════════╬═══════╬════════════════╬══════════════════════════════╣
  ║ Platinum ║   286 ║           2356 ║                         1467 ║
  ║ Gold     ║   372 ║            399 ║                          232 ║
  ║ Silver   ║   319 ║            472 ║                          367 ║
  ║ Bronze   ║   178 ║            195 ║                          158 ║
  ║ Borked   ║   245 ║           1162 ║                          960 ║
  ╚══════════╩═══════╩════════════════╩══════════════════════════════╝

LanceH• 8 years ago

As of two years ago (before proton), 40% of my Steam library was available on Linux and play identically to the windows version (on the same computer). So I imagine Proton is an improvement beyond that.

loeg• 8 years ago

It's hard to reduce all of that data to a single number. In general average framerate matters, but not nearly as much as a discrepancy in 95% or 99% percentile low framerate or stuttering, etc.

c487bd626• 8 years ago

Around 85% of native D3D11 performance in most games. Certain Vulkan games can outperform their native Windows version (running under Wine/Proton).

AdmiralAsshat• 8 years ago

I enabled it on my Fedora laptop and tried a handful of games. About half a dozen of them bombed out immediately. So, very glad to see improvement, but we're still a ways off from being able to chuck my last Windows 7 machine.

I find myself more often just biting the bullet and re-buying some old classics when they get "Enhanced" editions (ala Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, etc)--even though I still have the original CD's kicking around--just so I get native Linux support.

jedimastert2• 8 years ago

I find myself more often just biting the bullet and re-buying some old classics when they get "Enhanced" editions (ala Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, etc)--even though I still have the original CD's kicking around--just so I get native Linux support.

I think it's a good thing to do anyways. It shows that there's a solid market interest in gaming on Linux.

kungtotte2• 8 years ago

That's another hidden feature of Steam/Proton:

Whichever platform you play a new game on the most during the initial two weeks after getting it will be registered as the platform you bought it for.

E.g. play a Windows-only game for two weeks using Proton and both Steam and the gamedev will see it as a Linux purchase in their stats. Meaning they get actual numbers how big their Linux demographic is.

module0000• 8 years ago

Got the enhanced BG...but I didn't know there was an enhanced Planescape Torment, that's awesome news. That was such a favorite game. Does the enhanced release work well for you under linux? Any big breaking issues?

icen2• 8 years ago

Not OP, but for me it works flawlessly. Load times are instant, lots of nice quality of life features.

Not tried multiplayer, but it's hard to make that worse.

Also never worked out how to mod things, but if you're just after the vanilla experience, it's very good.

Double_a_92• 8 years ago

With very old games you might have problems on windows too...

navaati• 8 years ago

Yep, bought Populous 3: The Beginning from GoG the other day, would not work (except in software rendering which was so slow as to be unplayable). It was €0.79 so whatever, but it was a bit of a disappointment. What about Windows legendary backward compatibility ?

ocdtrekkie• 8 years ago

Yeah, I have a lot of classic game discs from the Windows 98 era, which often require Windows 98 with DirectX support, and sadly, nobody supports DirectX on VMs that old AFAIK. (VMware supports DirectX on XP and up, I believe.)

It's often a much better prospect to see if it's available on GOG with any given fixes or notes on how to make it work.

aaronmdjones4• 8 years ago

I still occasionally play Malkari, a 1999 4X space game written for DirectX 5. It doesn't work on anything but Win9x, so I have a VM for it. On Win2K/XP it will just draw a half purple screen, even in compatibility mode.

Even then... Windows 98 doesn't work under VirtualBox, unless you run the VM with the Legacy paravirtualisation interface, and with the ICH AC97 audio card, which Windows 98 doesn't have drivers for ... nor does it have drivers for VirtualBox' VGA adapter.

Those problems are easily worked around, of course, but one day, either VirtualBox will drop its Legacy emulation code, or SciTech Display Doctor will stop working with VirtualBox' VGA adapter, or the sound won't work anymore, ...

I'm one glitch away from being unable to play a game I really like, and bought as a teenager...

wjoe4• 8 years ago

Or indeed more problems. I remember trying to get the original Doom working online with a group of friends at a LAN a few years ago. It was much easier to get it working on Linux via Wine than it was under Windows 7+ due to some old networking layer.

Shorel2• 8 years ago

Kotor runs equally bad in Windows 10 and Wine.

XP is the only way to get all the right grass textures.

int_19h2• 8 years ago

It really depends on the game.

One that I want to give thumbs up in particular is Age of Wonders (https://www.gog.com/game/age_of_wonders). It's a 2D turn-based strategy that was released in late 1999. Even back then it was unusual in explicitly supporting Windows NT, and perhaps that's why it continued to work just fine with 2K, XP etc.

But what's even more interesting is that they made the UI to resize according to the resolution, and resize it does - it supports literally any resolution (I tried it on 4K!), and it will properly resize everything. Of course, the widgets and the fonts are still bitmap, so everything's tiny - but even so, still impressive.

All in all, I'd say it's a good example of Win32 API stability. Windows upheld its part of the bargain, and a game like AoW that used all those APIs (DirectDraw etc) strictly as documented still works. The ones that don't work are generally the ones that made assumptions that were valid then, but no longer are.

Abishek_Muthian3• 8 years ago

If your use case for a Windows machine is just for the Games; A Xbox is a decent alternative.

bmurphy1976• 8 years ago

Not if you like games like "Baldur's Gate", as per parent comment.

driverdan3• 8 years ago

It really isn't. You can't use Steam or GOG, you have to pay to play online, the hardware is much lower end than what you can buy for a desktop, they have advertising all over the place, everything has DRM, and it's still another box.

_JamesA_• 8 years ago

Am I the only geezer that absolutely detests 'controllers'?

I prefer to play games with WASD and a mouse like God intended.

behringer• 8 years ago

A windows license is a lot cheaper than an XBox.

passwd2• 8 years ago

Which ones? There was quite some improvement since the release; also you need to consider that some particular types of software don't work well yet (some games related to XNA/.NET, anti-cheats, DRMs with other stores being a big offender)

optimiz3• 8 years ago

I find myself more often just biting the bullet and re-buying some old classics when they get "Enhanced" editions

People have to do real work to produce newer versions of software, often this work is quite extensive (newer graphics APIs, resolutions, art assets, etc.) If it wasn't a viable enterprise this work wouldn't get done. It's not reasonable to expect perpetual free upgrades.

tomc19852• 8 years ago

It still does get done, in many ways, by the fan community. Commercial entities updating games en masse as it is happening now is fairly new.

octonion• 8 years ago

Many of the older games that have problems running under Steamplay also have problems running under Windows 10 (for similar reasons). Another group of games that don't currently run under Steamplay require some form of additional DRM. Once that's supported, most of those games should work.

aerique• 8 years ago

I can imagine still keeping Windows around for gaming, it really depends on the person but Linux is really becoming a nice alternative.

Myself, I chucked Windows 10 a couple of months ago before the SteamPlay news (which was a really nice cherry on top). But it was easy for me since I'm not quite the gamer anymore that I used to be.

yellowapple3• 8 years ago

I've been Linux-only (plus other oddballs like OpenBSD and the occasional Haiku or 9front or FreeDOS) since about 2012 or so (after 4 or 5 years of gradually weaning myself off Windows). Steam for Linux was my nail in the coffin then; the only Windows installs on any of my machines have been virtualized.

Lately I've been tempted to setup Win10 LTSB on a NUC or something to play a couple oddball games that are too modern to be VM-friendly but old enough to be comfortable on Intel graphics and a relatively-weak CPU. Proton was released just in time to indefinitely postpone those plans.

neltnerb• 8 years ago

FYI, I tried this with tyranny and while it didn't work with steam play (started but super slow and crashed) it did work nearly at native quality using steam itself running under wine with play4linux.

So with the windows binary for the steam application running under wine, the game worked better than the Linux steam client running wine under the hood. Unclear why, but maybe worth trying both ways if one fails.

I also couldn't figure out how to report this, sadly. If it works better in play4linux steam than directly it seems like it should be straightforward to copy some configuration settings to improve things.

johnny22• 8 years ago

Fedora's default fd limit is too small for many games, so that might be causing your problem.

I'm not sure if the games you played rose above that threshold, but if they did then you'd probably see "eventfd: Too many open files" on the console or in the systemd journal.

It looks like Fedora will change the limit in a future update of the systemd package, but you can fix it manually if you chose to.

seanhunter• 8 years ago

In my quick test it seems it depends enormously on the quality of Linux support for your graphics card. If you have a graphics card that DXVK works for then you are in business. Otherwise, not so much.

bdefore4• 8 years ago

Right. It's important to have up to date drivers. ProtonDB receives many reports with outdated ones (those are colored in red and not counted toward the aggregate rating)

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Requirements

nurino• 8 years ago

Can you install and run this without Steam?

I already use wine-d3d9 which is very good for WoW but as its name says it doesn't run DX11/12 games.

shmerl10• 8 years ago

You don't need Proton without Steam (since it has various Steam specific stuff), but yes, you can.

See here for example: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/adamhms_linux_wine_wrapper...

However, you can simply use upstream Wine with add-ons like dxvk[1] (which is used in Proton).

Using esync[2] (also utilized by Proton) requires special branch of Wine, since it's not going to be upstreamed and it's not as simple as installing dll overrides.

1. https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk

2. https://github.com/zfigura/wine/blob/esync-rebased/README.es...

folknor• 8 years ago

Do yourself a favor and check out https://lutris.net/games/world-of-warcraft/

Lutris is excellent for getting many games up and running, and WoW runs much better with dx11+dxvk than wine-d3d9.

lostgame5• 8 years ago

Kinda disappointed this seems to be yet another WINE wrapper with some extra stuff piled on, though I'm not sure what else I could've expected it to be.

I long ago lost interest in PC gaming, both from the lack of cross-platform compatibility, and due to the fact that a great graphics card alone easily costs as much as a console these days.

I've never played a WINE-wrapped video game or application that did not feel like a half-baked version of it's native application. It's usually things like fonts and strange aliasing that are a complete and dead giveaway. Small aesthetic issues like that completely ruin an otherwise immersive experience for me.

I'm glad WINE exists, but I honestly sort of wish they'd just stick to supporting applications more, and pretty much just forget the gaming side. It's never going to get to an equivalent level, because Windows' gaming technology keeps moving forward.

Two people start running a race. One of them starts when the gun fires. The other one sits and waits, decides it wants to follow the first runner every step of the way, and starts several minutes (or years, in this metaphor) behind the first.

Even if this second runner (WINE) could run as fast as the first (Windows), it would never catch up. And that's assuming it could run as fast as a multi-billion-dollar company.

WINE can, simply, never reach a point of compatibility that even most major console emulators have. Because, unlike consoles, Windows keeps on moving.

Let's face it. None of us are running *nix or MacOS for the sake of gaming. If you want to run a desktop OS for gaming, there is one. Yes, it's not free, but neither are games. Windows is, at this point, just part of the initial cost of PC gaming, just like a couple extra controllers might be for a console.

elcomet• 8 years ago

None of us are running *nix or MacOS for the sake of gaming

This is true, but also irrelevant.

A lot of people are using Linux as their daily driver, and dual boot is not convenient. So wine is very welcome, and I think proton is amazing, you should try it again (i didn't encounter any strange fonts or aliasing like you're describing on games ran with proton via steam). I've been gaming on Linux for the past year and i'm impressed by steam's work here.

lostgame5• 8 years ago

Hey, I mean, let me say, I'm happy to hear this, but again, I feel like it's irrelevant to myself personally that this even exists.

Without 100% compatibility, I'm not really interested in something that may run half, or even 75% of my games. I play games to relax. I make games for a living.

So all I want, personally, is to pop any disc in my console or hit a shortcut on my desktop and just have it work, every time, out of the box.

I know this isn't everyone, but it does hopefully explain a little better why WINE will always be 'irrelevant' to myself.

Personally, I think it's the graphics card cost that really prevents me from considering it at all, especially as if I was bothered with PC gaming again, I'd be getting a Vive, also for development's sake.

sandworm1012• 8 years ago

> dual boot is not convenient.

Dual booting isn't just inconvenient. It is buggy and randomly unreliable. It is an ILoveLucy farce where a line has been drawn down the middle of the apartment and each side is supposed to share the TV. I really get angry when I see sob stories about linux from people whose only experience is a failed attempt to dual boot a dell laptop.

If you want to use both go with a VM, preferably a windows VM running within a linux box.

z0r• 8 years ago

WINE let me enjoy dozens of hours of replaying fallout new vegas on my linux laptop 3 years ago. steam did not work perfectly but the game ran just as well as it did natively.

bdefore4• 8 years ago

Ironically, Proton/Wine play many older games better than Windows 7/10. Has the first runner fallen down?

ivanivanovich• 8 years ago

i think it is more like the first runner is in another race now.

reacweb• 8 years ago

Windows keeps on moving. For me, this means that the software or game I have bought will stop working. Thanks to wine or virtualbox, I can still use what I own or old games bought on GOG. I do not play much, but recently, I wanted to show flight simulator to my children. I have booted on windows 10 and it was impossible to use my game that is less than 10 years old.

skohan2• 8 years ago

AFAIK the main value-add for Proton is DXVK, which gives DirectX games incredibly low-overhead access to the linux Vulkan driver. Dramatically improved performance is more than just "another WINE wrapper with some extra stuff piled on".

And Proton's not the end-game: it's a solution to the chicken-and-egg problem. Most people (like yourself) don't see Linux as a viable gaming platform largely because of the lack of games available, and therefore developers don't invest in Linux support, and thus there continue to be few games available for the platform. The promise of Proton is to make Linux good-enough for some gamers, thus increasing the Linux player-base, making Linux a viable target for 1st party titles.

It's never going to get to an equivalent level, because Windows' gaming technology keeps moving forward.

That's not really accurate, and hasn't been for some time. For years OpenGL has been on-par with DX in terms of what it can do for some time and the story has only gotten better with Vulkan. Just look at Doom 2016: it was a high-profile AAA game built entirely on an open-source graphics stack (OpenGL and Vulkan) and it was one of the best-looking, best-optimized titles of the year. The main "edge" Microsoft has in terms of being able to bring the best games to its platform has nothing to do with a technical advantage: it has everything to do with industry momentum and incentivizing studios and industry professionals to use their proprietary technologies.

thinkloop2• 8 years ago

thus increasing the Linux player-base, making Linux a viable target for 1st party titles

Do you think the studios will know? Seems like these would come in as windows sales.

lostgame5• 8 years ago

Thank you for being explicit about what exactly they've done to significantly improve this.

I had not understood that there was access to Vulkan, that does obviously significantly affect performance.

There was another poster here who attempted to elaborate and ended up posting something that absolutely did not.

Vulkan is good, but it doesn't affect compatibility, just performance. I just don't care about the performance if compatibility is not even at least close to 90%. I need to run all of my applications and games, not a select few of them that run great.

the_af• 8 years ago

Let's face it. None of us are running unix or MacOS for the sake of gaming. If you want to run a desktop OS for gaming, there is one.

True, not primarily for gaming. But there's more than Windows, and Linux is becoming increasingly viable for exactly the target of people who are tech savvy and play games but are not primarily gamers, a group which includes me. I seldom play AAA games -- but when I do, many of those work on Linux without emulators, such as Shadow of Mordor or Mad Max -- and many others work on Wine (e.g. Space Marine), but the bulk of what I play are indie games, which either run natively on Linux or are very easy to get working on an emulator. I understand if they are not your thing, but to me indie games is where it's at -- the latest and greatest 3D games bore me to tears, while something refreshing like Return of the Obra Dinn makes me renew my love of games.

So yes, Linux is a valid gaming OS for a non-gamer like me, who actually plays many non-AAA games :)

And I'll never buy Windows just for gaming, if I can help it.

zimpenfish• 8 years ago

So yes, Linux is a valid gaming OS for a non-gamer like me, who actually plays many non-AAA games :)

If I could get the handful of Windows-only games in my Steam library working on Linux, I'd dump Windows 10 in a second.

But they tend to be the old/AA/AAA and/or graphically heavy ones that are unlikely to port/Proton across well.

BuckRogers• 8 years ago

I think you're more of a gamer than those who would call themselves one. I'm in a similar boat- bored to tears with most new games. I thought arcades and consoles were fantastic in the 80s, with PC gaming being just good, but the 90's brought on an era of creativity in the PC space and it took the lead at that point. Today it seems like we're rehashing those old 80's arcade/console and 90's PC game mechanics over and over. There's some exceptions to that rule, but if you're playing AAA games, you'd probably be playing a game with very little in terms of gameplay innovation from those two decades. I do still enjoy a good 2-4 player brawler.

There may be two tiers of gamers, those who haven't seen much and are impressed with old mechanics, but with the latest graphical developments. And those who have seem more and are more difficult to impress.

I would add that buying my Nintendo Switch, my first new console since my Sega Genesis (I did buy some consoles after that point but they were last-gen by that point and second-hand), has proven to me they are the premier AAA game developer in the world. The polish and mechanics of most 1st party Nintendo titles are unmatched in my experience. If you're a real gamer, which you sound like to me, I would definitely recommend at least considering adding a Switch to pair with desktop/laptop PC gaming.

I will be looking into Return of the Obra Dinn based off your comment, and I can tell you already those graphics don't dissuade me at all. We're always in a creative crisis and technical overload. Whether it's 4K screens, $1,200 GPUs or bad shows and games. I'm ready for artistry to take hold and we already have more than enough technology to convey most creative visions. Gameplay, character development and story first.

perryprog2• 8 years ago

Let's face it. None of us are running *nix or MacOS for the sake of gaming.

I'll be honest, my main OS for gaming is macOS. Is it the best choice? No, but it works well for me. If there's ever a windows exclusive game then I just resort to GeForce Now[1]. It's definitely not the best option, but I find it to be the most convenient for me.

[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/

latexr2• 8 years ago

my main OS for gaming is macOS.

My only OS for gaming is macOS. I don’t even play on iOS. If a game doesn’t exist for macOS, it doesn’t matter how much I’d want to play it — I don’t buy it. If a humble bundle[1] has games that are not on macOS, I make sure to give those developers zero euros of my contribution.

But I don’t run macOS for gaming — and it seems that neither do you — and that was GP’s point.

[1] https://www.humblebundle.com/

arcosdev• 8 years ago

Can they make this work for the Adobe Creative Suite too?

jhasse• 8 years ago

They're just using WINE with some additions for games. So if it doesn't work with WINE yet, there's nothing from Proton that would help.

c487bd626• 8 years ago

Maybe this could work for you? https://github.com/corbindavenport/creative-cloud-linux

I suggest making your own script instead of using PoL (abandoned, check Phoenicis).

edoo• 8 years ago

I wonder if we can get Steve Carell to do a "Goodbye Windows" song.

Been dual booting for many years now only for steam.

nullifidian3• 8 years ago

Microsoft can sue them in the same way Oracle sued Google, and win, right? Because you can't reimplement the Windows APIs without the reimplementation containing 'derivative work', I think.

CodeArtisan4• 8 years ago

Microsoft did the same with Linux

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

nullifidian3• 8 years ago

Will the court consider it? I understand that suing Valve would be hypocritical for Microsoft, but, I think, legally speaking it's a separate issue. Will the Linux Foundation file a retaliatory counter suit against Microsoft because of its attack on Valve? I doubt it.

btreecat• 8 years ago

Something interesting to me is how many people are using either Debian family or Arch family of distros.

Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint are over half, and Arch & gang are about a 1/4

bdefore4• 8 years ago

Some context may be helpful, but the short of it is that I wouldn't look too far into those numbers.

1. Officially, Proton is only supported on Ubuntu. It doesn't stop you from trying though and many Arch-based OS reports are just as successful. 2. Reports people submit includes pasting Steam system info, which for some Arch installations reports as 'Linux 4.x' unless they install additional an additional library.

If you're feeling generous, count the 'Unknown' category as Arch-based.

esotericn4• 8 years ago

I've been using GPU passthrough for Windows gaming on and off for a while now.

I think it's fundamentally a better solution. edit: (for desktops).

Why is it better than dual booting? Well, it's faster, and you can use whatever backing store you like (e.g. ZFS volumes for snapshots, LUKS encryption, ...), run services in the background, etc.

Why is it better than WINE? Far more compatible. Setting it up can be a hassle, but once you get it working it's (as far as I can tell) identical to a native boot. Better sandboxing (VM's aren't perfect and GPU passthrough likely introduces more holes, but that's better than running proprietary code on your main system).

That said, it's a power user thing and probably always will be. But then, isn't that the PC gaming market anyway?

TeMPOraL2• 8 years ago

Why is it better than dual booting? Well, it's faster, and you can use whatever backing store you like (e.g. ZFS volumes for snapshots, LUKS encryption, ...), run services in the background, etc.

Any way to avoid dual-booting is also good because if you do your work on Linux, you don't lose state. After a day of work, I sometimes want to play games, and I like it when I don't have to shut down my editor and the image of the program I am working on. In fact, having to reboot is a quite effective deterrent for me.

Hello712• 8 years ago

Hibernation?

shmerl10• 8 years ago

I think it's fundamentally a better solution. edit: (for desktops).

Not really for Linux users who don't want to use Windows.

jplayer016• 8 years ago

There are plenty of programs that simply don't and won't work on Linux. For the people who need any these, using a VM with passthrough is the best solution if you prefer using primarily Linux.

RussianCow2• 8 years ago

This also requires a separate, dedicated GPU for the VM, which is a deal-breaker for many users.

esotericn4• 8 years ago

I use a single GPU.

I do however have a secondary machine (laptop) to manage the VM from, though.

It's never going to work for everyone, sure, but most will just game on Windows anyway. I like to evangelize because I think it's really quite neat.

shmerl10• 8 years ago

I'm not using Proton, but using regular Wine+dxvk (for DX11 games).

dxvk[1] is an amazing project (it's translating D3D11 → Vulkan). With Vulkan finally landing VK_EXT_transform_feedback[2] and Wine and dxvk using it (Mesa has it in master for radv, and there are patches for anv; Nvidia blob has it in beta), games like The Witcher 3 can be played on Linux perfectly, without graphics distortions.

1. https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk

2. http://jason-blog.jlekstrand.net/2018/10/transform-feedback-...

beilabs• 8 years ago

I'm rather impressed with Proton.

I was using wine quite obsessively well over a decade ago, wine tricks, fiddling with settings for one game, change them for another. Proton removed all of that for me.

I'm not at the forefront of gaming, though i have a nice card, CPU and a heap of RAM (Perks of the job.

Skyrim is my jam lately, I'm spending an insane amount of time in game at ultra settings. Played some Batman - Arkham Asylum, also a windows game, both run well. I'm happy!

akiselev• 8 years ago

If you get your hands on a VR headset, try out Skyrim VR. It works almost perfectly on Proton (you just have to do some stuff to get dialog/music working) and is by far the best VR experience with the most replayability I've tried so far.

I stopped playing the original Skyrim after only one (heavily modded) playthrough because I was just burned out on TES games but Skyrim VR brought back a sense of wonder I can only remember from my Morrowind days. Every dragon battle, every scenic backdrop is an order of magnitude more impressive and I can even tolerate a large part of the dialog without skipping through.

The only downside is how much time you have to waste getting the game configured and modded just right (afaik vast majority of major Skyrim mods work out of the box or were updated for Skyrim VR) and the cost. Bethesda has really been milking Skyrim.

mlevental• 8 years ago

which headset? Oculus works through proton?

Twirrim• 8 years ago

If you're up for it, there are some really good high quality texture packs available on Nexus Mods that have really improved the visual experience in the game. https://www.dsogaming.com/news/skyrim-high-quality-textures-...

wjoe4• 8 years ago

Wine was already mostly at that point a couple of years ago. It used to involve a lot of manual fiddling, but in the later days of DX9, the majority of games worked out of the box.

DX11 is where things went wrong again, and mainline Wine has been quite slow to implement DX10+ features. There have been some great projects like DXVK which have made DX11 games playable in Wine, as well as a lot of work going on in different branches and patches of Wine to improve certain functionality. Fortunately Proton brings all of these together, and has all of this configuration dealt with for you.

After a period of stagnation and not being able to play any games released in the last few years, we're back to the point where brand new AAA games can run with Wine/Proton with solid framerates - I was very surprised to see Monster Hunter World running well in Proton within a few days of release.

DRM and anti-cheat remains the biggest blocker though. Some Denuvo games run, but many don't. Anything using BattlEye or Easy Anti-Cheat won't work, or if you're lucky, the anti-cheat might let you in, but then ban you for a false positive. I hope these can be solved at some point, but the nature of Wine works and how anti-cheat identifies tampering means they'll probably never play nice together.

kbenson6• 8 years ago

but the nature of Wine works and how anti-cheat identifies tampering means they'll probably never play nice together.

Unless you're also the distributor and can get the publisher/developer to remove those mechanisms, since you have your own. E.g. Steam.

ben_jones• 8 years ago

I heard reports of some Overwatch players getting banned for using wine/proton. Just a heads up if anyone tries to run Blizzard/Activision games with these tools.

CodeArtisan4• 8 years ago

If the user has played more on Proton than on Windows in the first two weeks, it will count as a linux sale, not a Windows sale.

jniedrauer• 8 years ago

This is really good to know.

On a related note, I finally got a hardware survey on one of my Linux machines! Was even running SteamVR at the time.

BeefySwain• 8 years ago

Do you have a source for this?

tokai• 8 years ago

Update #1: I spoke to Valve earlier, about how buying Windows games to play with this system counts, they said this:
Hey Liam, the normal algorithm is in effect, so if at the end of the two weeks you have more playtime on Linux, it'll be a Linux sale. Proton counts as Linux.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/valve-officially-conf...

88e282102ae2e5b• 8 years ago

I've been happy just dual-booting Windows and Linux. Windows 10 is free as long as you don't care about personalizing it, which I definitely don't, since it's just for games. I look forward to having a Linux-only machine but I'm not in any hurry.

gnulinux2• 8 years ago

It's not about money though, at least for me. I can afford Win 10 just fine, and would also be paying for archlinux and/or Debian if they actually cost anything. But here I am using a free-as-in-beer OS because of other factors. If all games could run in my OS things would just be more practical, regardless of their cost.

tomc19852• 8 years ago

Just noticed Deus Ex: Human Revolution on that list. I'm pretty sure there's a native linux port for that one already out, I was playing it about a year ago.

(Unless that was proton and I didn't know it?)

cosarara2• 8 years ago

There's a port for deus ex: mankind divided. HR has not been ported AFAIK.

foxhop• 8 years ago

I've been out of the WINE scene for a long time, is Steam submitting patches to the upstream project?

wjoe4• 8 years ago

Yes, for the most part. All of their work on Proton (their fork of Wine) is open source, they're working with Codeweavers (the largest contributors to Wine) closely, and contributing as much as they can back to upstream Wine.

Part of what makes SteamPlay work so well is actually outside of Wine though - a lone developer started a project called DXVK a year or so ago, which is a separate translation layer for converting DX11 to Vulkan, and runs alongside Wine. Valve hired this developer and sponsored a few similar projects, and integrated them into SteamPlay.

It also seems like Wine is slow and quite opinionated on merging in changes. For a while now, most people who used Wine for gaming would use forks and patches to improve performance. Some of it got merged into upstream Wine eventually, some things get rejected as it works differently to the usual Wine way of doing things. So Steam has used some of these patches and their own work for Proton, but some of it may not be suitable to be merged into mainline Wine.

jandrese2• 8 years ago

Personal anecdote: Since SteamPlay dropped I have not rebooted into Windows once. I've been pretty impressed at its ability to handle the games in my catalog. That said I'm pretty sure I've just been lucky thus far.

The only problem I have is when a game has a broken Linux port there doesn't appear to be a way to tell Steam to use the Windows version instead. An example of this is Eador, which has horrible graphics problems and is effectively unplayable on Linux due to it being a very slipshod port. I'm willing to bet that using SteamPlay on the Windows version would work much better if Valve would give me the option.

bdefore4• 8 years ago

Issue here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/5638

Haven't tried this myself but may be of help: https://github.com/Holston5/Native2Proton

Jach6• 8 years ago

What broke my uptime was when I decided to try and play Gothic... Not that it "just works" on windows, there's a series of patches etc. you have to install, but with Proton I kept getting a dreaded access violation error about a minute into the game that I couldn't work around.

I too hope they make an option to run a so-called Linux compatible game using Windows instead. I've got a little category "failed in linux" for those. I bet you could do it manually by downloading the game using Steam running in wine and then using Steam's wine binary to run the exe...

atomc19• 8 years ago

they do give you the option to use Steam Play over native Linux client. Under the steam play menu in the preferences, select 'enable for all titles' along with 'use this tool instead of game-specific selections'.

jandrese2• 8 years ago

Doesn't seem to work for Eador. Even with both of those options checked it installs the Linux version and doesn't seem to have an option for anything else. I was hoping there would be a dropdown by the install button asking which version I wanted, but it was just a regular install button and it gave me the broken Linux version.

jefftime• 8 years ago

If you need the Windows version of a game on Linux, you can use SteamCMD[1] to do so.

[1]https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD

nuguy• 8 years ago

As soon as cs:go worked on Linux, I uninstalled windows. I never looked back.

amingilani• 8 years ago

If you're having trouble reading this on mobile, the Chrome Simplified Reading View will help.

Visit `chrome://flags` and set Reader Mode Triggering to Always. The prompt is a minor inconvenience but I use it so much.

russianbandit• 8 years ago

Any Mac love on this?

c487bd626• 8 years ago

https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...

Q: Any plans for macOS support?

While Wine and Proton work on macOS, there are no plans to support the new Steam Play functionality on macOS at the moment.

--------------------

https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/28/why-macos-mojave-...

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

nyghtly2• 8 years ago

I've recently converted my primary operating system to linux and--although Proton is very good--I still find myself unable to unlatch from Windows. My solution was to install Windows 7 on a separate hard drive for those games that are still unplayable. Among those games are Final Fantasy X/X-2 Remastered and The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth. Although I'd like to kick Windows to the curb for good, it's hard to believe that some legacy titles (like BfME) with nontrivial minimum specs will ever run on linux.

My other big concern with SteamPlay in particular is save game compatibility. It depends on the game, but a lot of the time your save games just won't be compatible across operating systems, which is quite a difficult problem to solve.

loa-in-backup• 8 years ago

I wonder what ever would make savegames incompatible between systems. Endianness? That should be handled by wine. Different path separator? I would think it's up to wine as well. So... unreported bugs in wine, or is there something fundamentally different about game state?

nyghtly2• 8 years ago

I'm guessing most saves--besides some really old games--are probably fine on a fundamental level. But even if a save technically works, the effort it takes to find that save in your old windows filesystem, then place it in the new location in your linux filesystem is actual quite substantial, especially when you imagine doing that for an entire catalog of games that you've played over the years. And if you're relying on steam cloud saves to keep track of it then you can expect to lose the saves for many of your games when changing OS. If you're looking to retain saves, its far from a simple migration. Which is another reason why I have trouble making the switch entirely.

andrepd• 8 years ago

How does this compare with PlayOnLinux? It seems to be a very similar concept: coordinate Wine+other tools, package configurations and game-specific tweaks in a script that can be one-click ran by users, aggregate user reports on compatibility. What's new?

c487bd626• 8 years ago

https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...

f4stjack• 8 years ago

This is actually mind blowing. Because in the last six months (I think) there are more developments in this front compared to last six years. Sure, there are little warts and niggles as of now but with this development speed I think we'll have a proper linux systems which can play non-linux games with negligible performance loss.

In addition to proton and steam play one has to add Lutris as well. It makes the emulation of games in wine really easy.

tofflos• 8 years ago

The Linux desktop experience has improved by leaps and bounds in the last year or two.

Does anyone know which improvements they are referring to?

jplayer016• 8 years ago

Not sure what he means tbh. The Linux desktop has been improving steadily for years. It's in a good spot now, Proton makes it even more viable, but it's still not perfect. I'd say the biggest barrier is if you require Windows-only programs that don't work with Wine (of which there are a lot).

cuddlecake2• 8 years ago

Two days ago, I read an article on why kids should not interact with screens too much in their early life and I reflected on how that affected me.

I also found that I have no fun in playing games lately. It feels like a chore, a heroin-like distraction, an addiction basically.

So yesterday I decided to ditch my PC in favor of my Linux-only GPU-lacking work notebook.

And now this.

Me 0:1 Irony

aerovistae• 8 years ago

I feel the same way but I can’t stop. When I do other things I get bored and find myself thinking about video games. It’s pretty frustrating. I feel pretty shitty about it.

cuddlecake2• 8 years ago

Same. I just kind of reached the climax of boredom in gaming. To be fair, I mainly played CS:GO, LoL, and WoW. Basically games where I could also watch YouTube videos or do other stuff during downtimes in-game (such as death, queueing, wipes)

I am quite safe with still having a gmaing console, since they are much more immersive in a sense that distractions will actually hinder the enjoyment. If I can only either do something productive or play a game, I usually try to be productive.

What's your poison?

candeira2• 8 years ago

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I still can't play Windows-only HL2 mods.

candeira2• 8 years ago

Oh, I had missed a step in the configuration. I can now announce that Windows-only HL2 mods play beautifully. _Minerva_ rocks.

azernik• 8 years ago

A note for people who want to go faster than Steam/Proton certification - in Steam settings you can turn on Proton for all Windows games, not just the ones that are certified by Valve. So far I haven't run into any problems running non-certified Windows games under Proton.

Paraesthetic• 8 years ago

Is this an advert for Proton? Why would you not just use windows 10, the platform that games were made to work on.

pathseeker• 8 years ago

So does anyone have a good recommendation for a gaming laptop that is good with linux?

ivankelly2• 8 years ago

Consider getting a laptop with TB3 and using an eGPU. I don't know how eGPUs work with linux though.

stevefan1999• 8 years ago

Isn't this just WineHQ but for games?

paulhilbert• 8 years ago

Too bad Linux still has no proper mouse support... I would be glad if even the games that are Linux native would be playable...

ivankelly2• 8 years ago

It's at the point now where the intro logos and stuff for games take longer than a reboot, so now I just reboot into windows.

then• 8 years ago

So...WINE with 'fancy' UI design?

With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

Related Stories