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CodeWeavers on how Proton (Steam Play) helped improve Wine 4.2

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CodeWeavers, specifically developer Andrew Eikum, has written a blog post giving a little more detail on how working with Valve on Proton (Steam Play) has helped shape Wine.

Recently, Valve released Steam Play Proton 4.2, which as the versioning suggests is based on Wine 4.2 and Valve did note in the changelog how "166 patches from Proton 3.16 have been upstreamed or are no longer needed." (as noted in my previous article).

From the blog post written by Eikum, who has worked on Wine for CodeWeavers since 2009:

As with CodeWeavers's own projects, the strong preference for work going into Proton is to also get the changes into upstream Wine. There are many benefits to this. First, all Wine users will benefit from these fixes, whether they are end users of Wine itself, CrossOver users, or users of any other Wine fork. There are also benefits for the maintainers of Proton. For example, upstreaming patches helps prevent regressions, thanks to Wine's extensive test suite; it lowers the maintenance burden, as there are fewer changes to move between Wine versions; it ensures code quality, since patches to Wine are reviewed by the Wine community; and it widens the pool of users to test, since Wine is used in many, many places other than Proton.

Proton 3.16-8 has 380 commits on top of Wine 3.16. After rebasing onto Wine 4.2, there are 214 commits. That means that 166 patches from the 3.16 branch have either been upstreamed, or are otherwise no longer needed going forward. In addition, a lot of work we have done for Wine 4.2 never got pulled back into Proton 3.16.

They go on to detail quite a number of patches that were upstreamed to Wine directly, as a result of work to improve games with Proton (sponsored by Valve) and it's quite impressive.

I think it's also great to get more people talking about what goes on behind the scenes like this, as well as the recent posts CodeWeavers put up giving an introduction to working on Wine.

This is probably a pretty good case on how open source can work well for a big company, in this case Valve who integrated Wine (along with DXVK and more) into the Steam client to make Steam Play/Proton a reality. As Eikum said, it's a good partnership since even people who don't use Steam Play but will use Wine for various purposes are obviously benefiting from this as well.

Hopefully this partnership will go on for a long time and keep pushing Linux and gaming forwards together.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Steam Play, Wine
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About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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9 comments

Shmerl Mar 27, 2019
Nice to see many fixes being upstreamed!
Dunc Mar 27, 2019
Quoting: GuestThis is a success story of OSS. Steam, Wine and Proton made Linux a viable gaming OS - and that's something to behold, thanks to Valve, Codeweavers and the hard-working linux community!
I don't think I've ever seen so many likes. :)
Quoting: GuestThis is a success story of OSS. Steam, Wine and Proton made Linux a viable gaming OS - and that's something to behold, thanks to Valve, Codeweavers and the hard-working linux community!

It's really my own personal hell as I made the decision last month to uninstall Elder Scrolls Online. Game works beautifully on Wine with DXVK but I'm not a person who can actively play games and work on adding beneficial habits/studying to my lifestyle. Just not at a point in my life where I can truly enjoy the now flourishing linux gaming scene :'(
Xakep_SDK Mar 28, 2019
That's power of Free Software. GPL for Life.
Palantir Mar 28, 2019
Man this is good news! It is good being a linux gamer at the moment. Imagine where we will be in a year!
Zlopez Mar 28, 2019
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This makes me believe that even Stadia can bring something positive to world of OSS.
Pecisk Mar 28, 2019
Just year and half ago we discussed Wine with friends and they said yeah, this will never run my Windows games reliably.

Cue today and oh god how things have changed. Valve might struggle with control over Steam curation, but this was right decision at right time. Thank you!

Linux gaming is getting there. Hard to even believe after all these years.
Radiarion Mar 29, 2019
^_^

Hi all,

Well I'm a bewby to Linux, been using it casually for about 6 months when I dumped window for a system that actually works (mint cinnamon 19.1) and I've been constantly impressed in many areas.

My gripe was the lack of options for gaming, native games that don't work, Windows games that are a pain to install until steam came along.

I think what they have done is a revolution, and can only push mire games manufacturers to do the same, after all, linux users want to buy games too.

I think these guys deserve majir credut for the work on proton, and i hour to see it continue to grow.

Another good gamer option is lutris, not so streamline but if an idiot like me can use it anyone can.

Kerp up the good work!

Ps, can someone develop an easy way to install nvidia drivers that doesn't require a phd?

Long live linux
Eike Mar 29, 2019
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Quoting: RadiarionPs, can someone develop an easy way to install nvidia drivers that doesn't require a phd?

In Debian, I do it with "apt-get install nvidia-driver".
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