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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

They would do better by sponsoring native GNU/Linux games, or even ports from other POSIX like platforms like Playstation/Android, instead of playing OS/2 with Windows games.

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Nah. Win32 is the only stable userspace ABI on Linux, so I'm glad they're supporting it. There's no point in supporting native ports of games that simply won't work anymore 4 years from now because everything else changed.

In another words, there is no money in GNU/Linux games.

Exactly. I played life is strange 2 recently. It has a native Linux Version. On startup it complained I should set my CPU governor to performance instead of governor. Then it said it only supports AMD and Nvidia cards. I pressed continue and the system hard-locked. This machine is about a year old today, and this is the only crash I had, ever. After that I configured steam to use the windows version instead, and I could play through the entire game flawlessly.

So, at least from personal experience yes, it makes absolutely no sense to port to Linux, if the result is still worse than proton.

Regularly test under proton during development, and you got a Linux Version of your game for free. From my experience, epic already took good care to make sure unreal engine works well under proton, so if you just pick that and don't add a ton of additional stuff that uses esoteric winapi stuff, you're already set.

Hence "OS/2 runs Windows better", all over again.

We all know how that ended.

I don't see too many parallels there tbh, so genuinely no idea how this will play out in the long run. But it's pretty exciting to watch.

That was in an era of rapid change for Windows APIs, these days games target Windows from ~5 years ago.

Another comparison that I think is more apt: "IBM PC Compatibles run IBM PC software better"

Source ports to Linux are actually pretty rare. Most big games with a 'native' Linux version are non-native in exactly the same way as Proton ports— they run using a custom compatibility layer based on WINE or something similar. Often the port is of such high quality that you wouldn't be able to tell (Feral Interactive has done a ton of great ports this way), but this is still how most are done, especially for AAA games.

(In that sense, developers (or Linux porting studios) switching from their in-house compatibility layers to Proton isn't really a change in terms of those ports being 'truly native' or whatever.)

I wonder if what we're starting to see, rather than the inferiority of source ports, is actually that some of these alternative compatibility layers are just no longer keeping up with Proton, since Proton/WINE has such wide use/testing and rapid development these days.

Why do you care? You really need to get over the "Linus said something bad about my mother 20 years ago" or whatever your issue is. It's just weird at this point.

You are the ones that need to get over the fact that these are Windows games, not Linux.

What is there to get over? They run better on Linux most of the time, plus I don't need to groan when Microsoft asks me to enable the Windows™ Gaming Hub™.

Great, I guess we can forget about SDL and friends, and start adding a note "Want this on Linux? Ask Valve".

Why? Native SDL apps work fine on Linux too.

They wrap to SDL, so it's still being used. Proton is mostly an assemblage of FOSS projects, direct interaction with Valve isn't needed to use those any more than direct interaction with, say, a major contributor to Mesa like Intel when using that.

Nobody. Cares.

Indeed, nobody cares about 2% market share.

What does 'getting over' even mean here? These games are coded to APIs provided by Windows; but there's nothing stopping another platform from implementing these same APIs and happily running these games on not-Windows.

They are not Linux games...

They run on Linux, which is close enough for me.

These games are targeting an ABI that happens to have come from MS.

My fucking linux machine runs on intel hardware that is targeting an arch made by AMD (x86_64).

There is no problem with sharing stable interfaces. The idea that we should not treat these as linux games because they consume an interface developed by MS, that is implemented just fine by proton on linux is... very very backwards.

Who gives a flying fuck who made the interface, as it can be implemented across platforms, I'm a-ok with the result.

Nah, backwards is jumping of joy by only having games via "emulation" of other platforms, regardless of how it is implemented.

This is almost intentionally obtuse at this point - and you're getting downvoted for good reason.

You don't have a compelling argument here - step back, pause, and consider whether you're having an emotional reaction.

Your argument is basically "Developers should do things I want, for my benefit, with no regards to the success or consequences of those actions".

And that's a pretty fucked up argument.

A much better argument is: Proton makes linux a compelling platform for gaming. There is a decent chunk of market segment that keeps Windows around only for gaming. Allowing those users to move entirely to linux increases the appeal of developing native gnu/linux games, because there is a much larger native market.

This is how interfaces work - they allow you to develop new products that are compatible with the existing userbase. It's why they're incredibly important as stepping stones.

---

Side note - Proton came out of codeweavers, codeweavers develop a custom version of Wine. Do you happen to know what Wine fucking stands for? hint:

Wine Is Not an Emulator.

I try to purchase games on GOG where I can. You can purchase games with a Linux build that fail to run on a modern system. Meanwhile the Windows version will continue to be runnable in a VM/Wine. Frustrating when there is a Linux release available that I cannot run without some kernel kung-fu.

They actually did in the past, but they've realised that many game devs can't be trusted to maintain Linux builds as a second platform. They're often left outdated, require dependencies they didn't ship with or simply have worse performance than the Windows builds running on Proton.

These days they check both builds if available and suggest the devs which one to use by default; often the Windows builds over Proton are simply better than mediocre Linux support.

The same devs that most likely are also shipping Playstation or Android versions of their game....

What does this have to do with anything?

Shipping something on Android does not guarantee functional builds for regular Linux, and PlayStation uses a heavily customized FreeBSD fork. Neither of which are helpful for much of anything.

They are closer to Linux APIs than Windows ever will.

Android even more so, assuming those that rely only on AGK/NDK.

But they don't rely only on the NDK because there are quite few basic APIs that are Java only

Orders of magnitude bigger markets.

And actually stable ABIs with good documentation.

That's not really true, native Linux games are a much harder sell for publishers because the proportion of users is just too low.

Hence why Valve should make the needful to change that, instead of "emulating" Windows.

Think embrace extend and extinguish...in reverse!

1. Make wine really really good.

2. Start adding Linux-only features.

hehehe

Those Linux only features don't matter because games are targeting Win32.

the DXVK project out of all this has been a godsend for the older DX11, DX9 games on modern hardware, its being used to increase FPS on older titles on windows

Isn't Intel even shipping DXVK on window for their shiny new GPUs as it is often works better than their DX9 drivers?

Yep. Their driver switches which DX9 implementation based on which game is running, according to which they've observed has better performance.

The promise is that they start targetting Proton or devices like the steam deck in particular.

They already do that by targeting Windows, and letting Valve do the work, no need for more development costs.

This would only have a chance of working if they dramatically improved performance over native I think.

That's exactly what proton is for: bootstrap a linux gaming ecosystem without having to port thousands of games

That only works if studios ever bother to write native Linux games, otherwise is like being happy MAME supports Linux.

Proton is a platform.

If Valve gets gaming studios to target proton and guarantee compatibility, is a win.

If that's equivalent to gaming studios explicitly targeting MAME and QAing it, I'll take it.

They already target Proton by writing Windows games, no need to bother with Steam.

Anyway it hardly matches Switch sales, for which studios do actually bother to actively support.

They tried earlier on before they realized this approach made way, way more sense. Even the native linux versions of games that have them often run worse than the windows version wrapped in Proton. Developers just aren't going to commit to making native linux versions for the most part and that isn't going to change. This is reality.

The magical thing is that they've done so much work with Proton that a device like the Steam Deck is more than a curiosity. It is a viable product. It is viable to play games on Linux in a way it has never been before. Even better, they aren't keeping it to themselves.

A purist ideology about linux isn't going to change reality. But Proton is. The Deck is a wildly popular device and the knock-on effect is going to be more systems running linux for regular people. The games may not be native but if they're indistinguishable from native games, then who cares? Meanwhile adoption of linux as a viable platform still goes up. Maybe on a long enough timeline things swing around, though I still very much doubt that.

The Year of Linux on the Desktop is still a fantasy, but reading the steam hardware survey, it is more true than it has ever been before, thanks to the Deck and Proton.

Yeah, a hooping change from 1 to 2%, to another 20 years.

It looks like this is getting a lot of hate, but I think there's clearly some truth to it. As an initial effort to bring a huge library of games to Linux, Proton is brilliant and a huge achievement. But it does feel less secure, in the long run, than having developers writing games for Linux as a first-class platform from the start.

Idk what the transition plan could look like, but eventually we should hope to see the Steam Deck treated like any other console with highly optimized, native ports, and then hopefully some of that can be reused for 'more native' general Linux ports.

It isn't less secure, win32 programs have just as much as access as native binaries do. Valve also runs Proton in a container.

Not to say the current implementation is secure though, only that the use of Wine/Proton makes no difference.

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