The 2010s Were Very Successful For Wine Thanks To CodeWeavers + Valve's Steam Play

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The 2010s Were Very Successful For Wine Thanks To CodeWeavers + Valve's Steam Play

The 2010s were great for the long-standing Wine project that allows Windows games/applications to run near effortlessly on Linux, macOS, and similar platforms. CodeWeavers' investments into Wine continue turning out very well for the continued success and now with Valve's Steam Play built upon the Wine-based Proton, more Linux gamers are happier than ever...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-2010s-Highlights

[ix900]

I'm not sure how successful it is if I would even label it a success. I can play some games that I never thought would be playable on Linux via Proton but many others are broken in some way or already native.

Considering I dual boot Windows, I don't have to pick and choose games to play something that Proton doesn't fix and can't so long as they have 2k+ issues and growing all the time. Wine has a lot of problems to deal with. Too many and then there's regressions too. Its a lot of negatives. You can't just go to Linux and play any game and maybe never will because the problem pool continues to intake more.

To me 2010s were a start. They only good start of Wine. The 2020s maybe better.

[oiaohm]

I'm not sure how successful it is if I would even label it a success. I can play some games that I never thought would be playable on Linux via Proton but many others are broken in some way or already native.

Considering I dual boot Windows, I don't have to pick and choose games to play something that Proton doesn't fix and can't so long as they have 2k+ issues and growing all the time. Wine has a lot of problems to deal with. Too many and then there's regressions too. Its a lot of negatives. You can't just go to Linux and play any game and maybe never will because the problem pool continues to intake more.

The problem is not as black and white as it first appears. This overlooks the games that no longer run with Windows 10 as well. So you cannot go to Windows and play any random game either and expect 100 percent success. The question is will Linux percentage of success get close enough to the windows percentage of success. Remember Linux side is improving and the Windows side sliding.

The problems are not just getting bigger for Linux either as pool grows. As the pool of games grows so does the numbers that will not run with current windows as well.

Remember wine still runs win16 games straight up. Wine being asked to be ported to windows to run these happens quite a bit.

[uid313]

And with the Mono project implementing .NET, and with Microsoft releasing .NET Core as cross-platform open source, and open sourcing the .NET Framework. Also open sourced Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and XAML.
Hopefully someone ports (the now open source) WPF and XAML to Linux.

[Termy]

I'm not sure how successful it is if I would even label it a success. I can play some games that I never thought would be playable on Linux via Proton but many others are broken in some way or already native.

Considering I dual boot Windows, I don't have to pick and choose games to play something that Proton doesn't fix and can't so long as they have 2k+ issues and growing all the time. Wine has a lot of problems to deal with. Too many and then there's regressions too. Its a lot of negatives. You can't just go to Linux and play any game and maybe never will because the problem pool continues to intake more.

To me 2010s were a start. They only good start of Wine. The 2020s maybe better.

My experience is quite good - i would say that i have a 80-90% success rate with proton (excluding EAC/Battleeye-Issues). Which is quite impressive considering many games implement workarounds for quirks where windoze or drivers don't even follow windows-specifications ^^

And if you include dxvk, the progress made (performance and compatibility) from 3 to 5 is extremely impressive.

[loganj]

probably the title should be "thanks to dxvk/d9vk" without these projects steamplay would still be as bad as wine. and without steamplay maybe a lot of issues will still be present in wine.

oiaohm what do you mean by "As the pool of games grows so does the numbers that will not run with current windows as well." The pool of games that are too old for windows 10? or the new (as in the last 10 years maybe) and future games? cause if you talk about the later i doubt there is any (windows) game that it will not work on windows 10.

[schmidtbag]

I'm not sure how successful it is if I would even label it a success. I can play some games that I never thought would be playable on Linux via Proton but many others are broken in some way or already native.

I agree with Termy here - Wine's compatibility has expanded exponentially thanks to Valve and DXVK. I've been able to ditch Windows entirely. There are a few games here and there that don't work, but I have either already played them or they were never much interest to me in the first place (typically games I got for free). That's incredible progress for basically just 1 year of involvement. Valve seems to have a pretty decent sense of priority, where they're focusing on either the most wide-spread problems, or, the most popular games that aren't crippled by additional DRMs. Speaking of which:

One way to substantially increase your library of working games is to download DRM-free cracked versions of the main executable. This typically only involves only a few MB of files. I think I got 7 games in my library playable by doing this. I would recommend you rename the cracked binary and make a symlink to it with the correct name. That way if Steam validates the game data, it won't overwrite the crack.

[duby229]

I think -ALL- open source devs deserve to get paid for their work, so in that sense, thank you Codeweavers.... But no thanks at all to their completely asinine development philosophy. Wine -IS- an emulator and Codeweavers -NEEDS- to finally accept that fact so they can start working around bugs. Instead we have the situation where fixing one bug in an API implementation regresses almost everything else that uses that API. Every single time. Way past time to accept that they need to emulate windows behavior in addition to implementing windows API's. Wine -NEEDS- to be an emulator. It -IS- an emulator.

[schmidtbag]

I think -ALL- open source devs deserve to get paid for their work, so in that sense, thank you Codeweavers.... But no thanks at all to their completely asinine development philosophy. Wine -IS- an emulator and Codeweavers -NEEDS- to finally accept that fact so they can start working around bugs. Instead we have the situation where fixing one bug in an API implementation regresses almost everything else that uses that API. Every single time. Way past time to accept that they need to emulate windows behavior in addition to implementing windows API's. Wine -NEEDS- to be an emulator. It -IS- an emulator.

Nowadays, a better way to start a flamewar on Phoronix is to state your feelings about Outreachy, and treat those feelings like fact.

[Xaero_Vincent]

Linux is my primary gaming system. I've thrown an older Windows gaming rig into the closet with a 14' crossover cable and a dummy HDMI dongle to run as a headless In-Home Streaming server via the direct crossover connection. I use it to play anti-cheat enabled Destiny 2 and Fortnite streamed to the Linux desktop and with a dedicated crossover connection, there aren't any streaming lag spikes like when a using router.

Every other game I play is either native or works in Wine+DXVK and/or Proton.