What have you been playing recently?

Just started Touhou Luna Nights [External Link], great start so far, I think there's some lore I'm missing on but it doesn't seem to matter. I'm also playing Mirror's Edge and it's really fun, should be short too which I prefer so I should be close to finishing it. No one on the game's ProtonDB page seemed to have bothered to fix some of the technical issues so I'll try not to forget to do my part and share how I fixed those and post to the ProtonDB page. Before those two I was playing Alan Wake and found the game to be too boring so I flushed it, a shame as I do love Remedy's games.

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Quoting: Liam DaweAt least with Proton, being open source (and based on Wine), the maintained version can continue to be improved upon using it.

True. So in a sense, there's a potential for better longevity with Proton vs Native, actually. Being open source should mean there's always those who are passionate and skilled who can work to make a game continue to work, that and, you know, Valve, being obligated to keep ensuring whatever they sold on the Steam Deck continues to work.

Quoting: CalinouThere are a few practical issues with WINE/Proton that are more or less unsolvable by design:

- Slower startup times (compare `wine simple_program.exe` with `./simple_program` of a native Linux binary). This is especially the case if the WINE prefix needs to be updated following a WINE update, in which case it can take 10+ seconds.
- Larger file size – a WINE prefix isn't small, especially if you use one prefix per game.

Great points. I never realised that going with Proton means a slower startup, I think it's because it is pretty fast already, but obviously native should launch even faster.

The large file size is definitely an issue, and I suspect it'll become even more prominent over time as I keep downlaoding different version of Proton/Wine. Though I imagine in the future we should reach a point where only one Proton version is needed for virtually everything on Steam. And a select few for edge cases outside of Steam. I wonder if it's also possible to reduce Proton/Wine prefix's filesize too.

Quoting: PyreticHonestly not much

Yeah, I've just been thinking about it and thought it was interesting. "Okay, we're stuck with this "hack" to play our games, what could actually be so bad about it if that's the case?" And so far it doesn't look too bad, which is reassuring.

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Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: PyrateRealistically speaking, what could be so bad if Proton became the de-facto Linux support method for all games, including games that would've had Native Linux support if the developers were generous enough?

Because in practice, proton "support" often means ignore it and let Valve deal with any issues. I think I can count the number of devs that actually fixed something to get it running better (or at all) on proton on one hand.

I see, though I think that can also be applied to Linux Native ports too, no? whenever they get broken, fixes are usually rare from what I read, I'm asking here because like I said, I'm new and I wouldn't know how native ports went, what I hear nowadays is that the majority of the native builds are broken/worse than if with Proton.

So let me reiterate my question: From what I see, the work required to maintain 2 different versions of a game is generally too great for most dev teams, when taking into account the financial cost behind this. Call it laziness or whatever. Native Linux ports are a rarity, and so, Proton appears to be the reality we're going to have to accept, for better or worse. So, what is worse here? Bearing in mind that the only scenario where we start getting properly supported ports is if the market shifts to Linux (never).

I think the number of devs who'd fix something in Proton is the same number of whom would bother to make a native build anyways. And if Proton is easier to deal with, what could be the downsides? this is basically asking my original question again but better.

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Realistically speaking, what could be so bad if Proton became the de-facto Linux support method for all games, including games that would've had Native Linux support if the developers were generous enough? I'm a new Linux user and I've been thinking about this.

Asking for native ports is chasing a wild goose, to fix this issue you'd have to go to the source of it: user market share, until Linux becomes figuratively mainstream, that's when asking for native ports becomes logical and feasible, in my opinion.

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