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> I was the creator & lead dev on Proton for its first 5 years (2016-2021),

Wow, than k you. I know it takes a village, and it’s always a team effort, but still thank you. My windows PC is gathering dust now. I only use my Linux laptop and steam deck now. If a game doesn’t run on Linux, I just won’t play it anymore.

That’s a huge change, and I really appreciate it.

Thanks to everyone who contributed.

Thanks, it was quite a ride! Definitely a team effort, not only developers, but also a fantastic QA team that puts a ton of work into polishing every single release. Also don't forget that Proton was built on top of 20 years of hard work on Wine before Valve even entered the picture.

I know I'm not the only (ex-)Wine/Proton dev who posts here on HN :)

It bothers me a bit when I see the narrative on here that the introduction of the Steam Deck changed everything for linux gaming, but really it is a culmination of steady ongoing work that didn't even start with Valve. I've been primary linux gaming since probably about 2014. When Steam machines fizzled out Valve just quietly brushed it off and continued investing in the general concept.

> When Steam machines fizzled out Valve just quietly brushed it off and continued investing in the general concept.

I remember being really disappointed when they did - I assumed gaming on Linux would be following the same path, because what the fuck kind of company breaks down a wall by repeatedly bashing their forehead into it?

Steam machines did not do well, and instead of Valve saying "Maybe this is a money pit we should abandon", they just shoveled money into it until it was mostly full.

There was a huge amount of work by WINE (and others), but it really was a huge leap in how accessible Linux gaming was to people.

Going back a few years, my experience was that you had to do some research to see if a game was likely to work, install it through wine, and then usually faff around with a load of winetricks/configurations/packages/etc to get a game that mostly worked (often with some weird bugs, performance issues, etc).

Now there's a whole library of games that you can just right click -> install and they work perfectly well on Linux. And of course that wouldn't have been possible without the years of work building up to it - but it was a massive improvement when Valve threw their weight behind it and built it directly into the Steam client.

Thank you for your, and your team's, work on Proton! It's one of the biggest software leaps I've experienced. I'd been using Wine to launch games on Linux for more than ten years and across all those years, it remained inconvenient and success rates remained fairly low despite some definite improvement. Then with the first Proton release, most of the games I wanted to play... just worked. These days my default expectation has changed to games working well on Linux unless they have stuff like kernel-mode DRM (such as Denuvo) and I refuse to buy games using that anyway.

Side note: thank you for your contributions to Linux gaming - Proton helped me finally shed Windows as a base OS and I couldn't be happier about it.

Do you think Mac gamers would ever see similar love, like Game Porting Toolkit integrated into Steam?

I don't know anything about Valve's future plans, and I don't know anything at all about that toolkit (it was announced after I stopped working on Wine). My gut feeling is it's unlikely. There was a lot of incentive to target Linux with this tech, even though it's a smaller market than macOS, because you can control the whole stack and do cool stuff like SteamOS, which is what allowed the Deck to happen. On macOS, all you can do is sell stuff to end-users, where you also have to compete with the Apple store, which is owned by Apple, who also make the OS. Apple has also shown they're a bad partner for game companies (nuking 32-bit support; crummy OpenGL support; no Vulkan support; shaky record on OS updates breaking stuff). My experience is there's generally a lot of bad feelings and skepticism about Apple and macOS in the gaming industry due to that record.

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the explanation!

> Apple has also shown they're a bad partner for game companies (nuking 32-bit support; crummy OpenGL support; no Vulkan support; shaky record on OS updates breaking stuff). My experience is there's generally a lot of bad feelings and skepticism about Apple and macOS in the gaming industry due to that record.

In your opinion, what steps should Apple take, and in what order, to make Mac a compelling, long-term platform for third-party game developers? They're certainly showing some interest in making games happen (GPT, raytracing), but most of the efforts so far seem to be pre-aligned in their favour (Metal, Apple Arcade).

I don't know that I'm the best person to ask, my scope is fairly narrow and definitely more Linux-focused (I don't even own a Mac). But, I think inventing a time machine so they can avoid making their partners write articles like this[1] would be a good first step. After that, stop putting out stupid special-snowflake APIs like Metal and adopt industry standards like Vulkan and OpenGL. Then build a 20-year track record of API and OS stability so game devs & users can expect their back catalog to continue to work.

I dunno, man. They've burned a lot of bridges, and they are a small piece of the pie[2]. Not a lot of incentive for people to put up with their BS.

[1] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6...

[2] macOS: 1.57%, Linux: 1.82%, Windows: 96.61% https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

I was a long-time "Mac gamer" who held out until the very end (where I personally define "very end" as Blizzard releasing their first non-simultaneous-platform-released game, Overwatch).

I'm here to inform you that that ship (with some notable exceptions, such as Baldur's Gate 3 releasing on Macs today, I think, which is FANTASTIC) has more or less sailed. Tim Cook is neither a programmer, nor a gamer, nor an open-source advocate, and every move Apple makes and has made since he took the helm shows where his priorities lie, and they're not in the AAA gaming market (and additionally, they're starting to be open-source-developer-hostile, IMHO). I think macOS would have achieved a ton more success (it would have basically become a better, more user-friendly Linux) had Apple open-sourced it and simply made Mac hardware the "reference" macOS hardware (between you and me, I also think this move would have instantly garnered Gabe's support), but it's simply not going to be. Apple likes their walled garden and their 30% App Store cut and their iOS-specific lame-games and their proprietary CPU/GPU/SoC architecture that is only being pried open by extremely clever individuals like Asahi Lina https://github.com/asahilina and Alyssa Rosenzweig (with zero help from Apple other than "leaving the door open," essentially... Which, by the way, they can still shut at any time...)

I've become more of a Linux fan over the years but only after I found NixOS- which unfortunately has kind of a steep learning curve. The reason why I couldn't use Linux as a daily driver until NixOS is that Linux's huge customizability (and my need to experiment and explore!) also lead directly to huge opportunities to brick your system or just break things in general (which happened again, and again, and again for me, across many distros such as Ubuntu, Arch, Manjaro, Pop_OS, etc.). Linux is thus like a hugely customizable sports car without brakes or safety belts. NixOS gives you both of those, so you get to fly with the sports car, enjoy all the customizability, but if anything goes wrong (which it rarely does, thanks to NixOS's architecture), you can instantly roll back to any prior version of the OS and its declaratively-installed apps and configs. It's the best of all worlds, currently, completely open-source, but the learning curve is still too steep for most. (I have hope that a NixOS-derived more-user-friendly distro like https://snowflakeos.org/ may help here, but it will take time.)

In parallel with that, gaming on Linux became "viable" (modding is still tougher than on Windows, but that will eventually be easier too) thanks to Valve's Proton efforts.

Hah! I had roughly the same route; I held out for things to improve on MacOS up until Catalina, then drifted around to settle on NixOS. Funny how things work out like that.

Largely though, I agree with your conclusion. It speaks volumes that Apple's most significant GPU translation efforts to-date (Game Porting Toolkit) is largely based on Open Source DXVK code. Apple and Microsoft basically have the same tactic now; push a high-level GPU API across your software platforms, using your clout to force developers onto it and 'lock them in' to your ecosystem, so to speak. The bigwigs might try to tell you that this is necessary for a quality native port, but I've doubted those words since I beat Elden Ring on Linux. Apple publishing the G.P.T. is their shameful admission that a Vulkan driver would fix gaming on Mac.

My understanding is that GPT can't actually be used to port a game to sell, ostensibly it is for proving out performance possibilities available from when you do port your game (to native metal). Has that changed?

To me it sounded like there was a group within Apple that wants to create an emulation layer (and did essentially) but that leadership hates the idea and in its current state it is a compromise that it even exists at all.

> To me it sounded like there was a group within Apple that wants to create an emulation layer (and did essentially) but that leadership hates the idea and in its current state it is a compromise that it even exists at all.

Heh, I hadn't heard that, but I can totally believe it. Openness really isn't their forte.

> but that leadership hates the idea

yeah, like I said. Tim Cook is neither a gamer, nor a programmer, nor an open-source advocate. Any one of these might open the door, but if you have none of them? Best of luck.

> I think macOS would have achieved a ton more success had Apple open-sourced it and simply made Mac hardware the "reference" macOS hardware, but it's simply not going to be.

Success in the gaming market, maybe. But Apple isn't a dedicated gaming company like Vavle. Mac is still a status icon (and most of the time, a pretty good machine in general) and macs dominate college campuses and especially the art industry. Which is why they have a higher market share than Linux.

Their moves are more hostile to open source, but it has a similar goal to Valve: make and own the entire vertical stack. And now with M1, they can converge that and more or less launch IOS and Mac devices on the same chips. That's why the IPhone 15 is running pretty modern games.

I hear ya. Here I'm hoping that with Apple Silicon and GPT, maybe some devs will take it upon themselves to port games even if Apple and Valve don't.

Gaming on Mac is definitely not my first choice, but I don't have the time, energy, or budget to deal with separate computers these days (or the fan noise and summer heat of a desktop GPU). Limited to whatever comes out on Mac or GeForce Now :/

And unfortunately it's hard to use Linux on desktop for frontend work. Adobe Suite is a must for me, and Linux font rendering is different enough to Macs and Windows that it's hard to get an apple to apple comparison of how a web page would look on mainstream computers.

I'm sure it's come a long way though! When I first tried desktop Linux in the 2000s, it didn't have the right fan drivers and melted my laptop, cracking the glass table underneath lol.

In the meantime... off to play BG3!

Ever consider a Steam Deck?

I'm a frontend dev happily using Linux, btw. I have no use for Adobe Suite, though. Figma is enough, and runs on any OS with a web browser. I agree font rendering is a bit different, but not so much that it's ever been a problem in my experience.

I tried a Steam Deck but ended up selling it. Coming from high-end PC gaming from my younger days, the Deck just wasn't quite enough, between the low-medium graphics and the lack of mouse/keyboard + big monitor (yes, you can dock it, but then you're running at a super low FPS even on ultra-low settings, especially without DLSS support). It was also really loud. These days I usually play with GeForce Now, which can do ultra graphics with minimal lag, works great on my ultrawide, is totally silent, and doesn't eat up the battery.

In fact GFN works so well I ended up getting a Logitech GCloud (https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/cloud-gaming/cloud-...) to replace the Deck, because it has a much better screen, battery life, and is like half the weight. It only streams games though (cheap Android hardware) and has sketchy ties to Tencent, unfortunately. But for anywhere with good internet, it's wonderful... ultra graphics on a nice screen in a lightweight and quiet form factor.

As for dev on Linux, yeah, that sounds right! I use Adobe less and less these days, frankly, but I do really enjoy any chance I get. Used to do a lot of graphics work with the dev work, before my job became super-specialized :( Right now I'm really happy with my Macbook, but if ARM ever gains a foothold in the PC laptop market and we see better hardware (especially performance/watt and decibels/performance) in the future, I'd reconsider that. Apple Silicon is pretty phenomenal for the time being... blows my old ThinkPads out of the water.