Valve Rolls Out Wine-based "Proton" For Running Windows Games On Linux

[audir8]

This looks like very bad news for port developers like Feral, Virtual Programming and Aspyr.

I may use this for Windows games that I already have and do not have a chance for a port, but I stand by the mantra "not tux, no bux".

I think this is just adding another option for developers, if only a bit more "concrete" than Wine staging+DXVK. The same choices people make when making any app applies. This isn't an apples to apples comparison, but if you're doing an HTML-only app on mobile, you might go with phonegap. If you're not doing a graphics-intensive game, and choose to use MS dev tools, you can use Proton/Wine as a viable target, but at this point, DirectX basically is a de facto first class library on Linux, albeit reverse engineered, like Samba. I would still expect Shadow of the Tomb Raider to get a native port, because Vulkan+Linux is a better runtime than Windows+DirectX which Proton/Wine uses too.

[davidbepo]

i just tried it with a crappy old game, and IT WORKS! now to test my favourite game, warframe, the hype is real

well... it seems that warframe doesnt work, anyway this is just the start, there are improvements coming and i look forward to see this game working

[shmerl]

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.

Is esync supposed to help The Witcher 3 in wined3d mode? I didn't notice any improvement after trying Wine built from esync branch.

[tiwake]

well... it seems that warframe doesnt work, anyway this is just the start, there are improvements coming and i look forward to see this game working

Crap. And here I was playing warframe, finished a thing and checked the news, saw your post as well and kinda got hyped a bit. It looks like they should be able to get it to work though... https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManag...estingId=99431

[boxie]

*eeeeek* I might just have to play some windows games tonight *yay*

[dEnigma]

Kinda want to try this out, unfortunately I don't own a single steam game that runs windows only. Can you use this with games that already have Linux support?

You can try it with "Doki Doki Literature Club" which is free.

[dungeon]

They should name this as Valve Translate, so that people know what to expect from it. In other words it might be successful in translating as Google's Translate - sometimes it is quite correct, but sometimes also weird to big fail As nothing beats proper native.

Maybe Transgate, Transgame or such

[Kver]

Good for Linux on general, but I feel sorry for CodeWeavers, though I suppose most of their business comes from macOS users anyway.

I think it's great a company like that is able to run on FLOSS, but at the same time there's the knowledge that the community (or another company) can always leverage the same open components you do and compete. If your only source of income depends on nobody doing the same thing as you - well - you're just asking for trouble. Especially if most of the pieces you have to play are available to everyone.

Codeweavers can still profit on ensuring things like Adobe and productivity software work well. If I were them though, I would look towards having a more robust portfolio than just Crossover. Frankly, I'm a little surprised they don't have more offerings.

[Filiprino]

I could finally remove Windows entirely.
I agree on the concern about developers not doing native ports. They might rely on the Steam runtime and don't even think on doing a native port.

[monte84]

I could finally remove Windows entirely.
I agree on the concern about developers not doing native ports. They might rely on the Steam runtime and don't even think on doing a native port.

In regards to native ports, was that ever the end goal? Even some indie devs were holding back sequals because of weak sales. We would never get the user base if we were waiting on native ports, peoples steam librarys are huge. I feel this was needed to allow further adoption. I, for one, am glad to have the games on linux, i care not as much how they are brought to the platform, so long as performance is acceptable.