Quoting: GuestOh absolutely, it's a good thing, and I don't mean to diminish the work Valve is doing. But Valve isn't doing quite as much as people think - for example, Valve isn't making any game work through wine directly. Well, that can be argued via dxvk, but the point I guess I'm trying to make is that while the impact might be large to users, the effort itself from Valve is actually not equivalent.

Hrm . . . more generally, it's an interesting question of value: Who deserves more kudos, someone who spends a lot of effort for a result that has little impact, or someone who spends little effort for a result that has a lot of impact?
Of course in this case it's more like, group A spend a lot of effort building most of what makes things work and outfit B puts on some finishing touches that allow it to be more broadly and easily used. On the other hand, one might ask if the Wine community on its own had shown many signs of ever turning Wine into something that worked transparently? And my answer would be "no", and that includes Lutris as far as I can tell from some of the other conversations around here in recent months. I even wonder if one problem might have been, if Wine started to Just Work, Codeweavers would be out of a job. An outsider coming and shaking things up may have been more important than we know.

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Quoting: mirowell I am not pessimistic about this, surely it will do lots and lots of good.
I am just afraid that too many people will blame "linux" for the less performance and more bugs, not understanding that this is not a native build, that there is dx->vulkan translation and .dll emulation aka at least one additional layer which makes things slower and more buggy.

That is a point, actually one of the most solid "con" points I've seen. Something like this happened with the Steam Machines only it was about bad ports.

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Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: stretch611Consumers are more likely to be ignorant of the lawsuit…

Precisely!

Quoting: stretch611…and even if they know about it they are more than likely to side with Valve…

Guess what will happen when Steam refuses to launch after the Windows™ Update? My bet they will run towards Microsoft® and Valve® with their sticks and stones and demands to "fix it back". And what happens next? Microsoft® won't budge and Valve will be unable to do anything.

If the US were the only significant venue that existed, you might be right. Valve would sue in the EU. And China, probably. The EU courts have a LOT more teeth with respect to this kind of anticompetitive behaviour, and would right now probably gleefully nuke MS just as a side amuse-bouche to the trade war.

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Quoting: GuestSo now that I've had time to think about this news more, I thought I'd try add more discussion points.

Disclaimer: I personally find it odd that people are praising Valve so much here. Valve didn't make wine. Or dxvk. Or actually any of the tools that make this possible. They're just packaging it into Steam.

Uh, I think they did make dxvk. Didn't the main DXVK guy just turn out to have been paid by Valve all along? Your general point is taken though. Most of the software this relies on (like Linux itself) is a community effort and we owe, and have owed all along, our thanks to the hardworking members of that community.

Anyway, so the first point for me is that nothing here couldn't be done before, and wasn't already being done before. Wine could already be used, and what whitelisted games I have already ran completely fine anyway on a vanilla wine with no extra patches. Furthermore, some games that run on that vanilla wine don't run with Steam Play, likely because the latter is based off an older version of wine - and this I consider a "con" of Steam Play. It's not very likely to get updates in a hurry, and a lot of games benefit from those updates.

That's not so great. But this is after all a beta, and they do seem to be paying people to make improvements. I expect it to get a bit more solid before they move this to main Steam from beta Steam. I don't get the impression that it's based on a very old version--Wine-related development is just moving at such lightspeed right now that the bleeding edge is significantly ahead of even quite recent stuff.

As a "pro", this does package everything nicely into Steam and avoids a lot of hassle for people who just want to push a button. I'm really not the target audience for this - I run gentoo, I like bleeding edge, I like customisation.

You may not be the target audience for this, but I don't think that's relevant. The point is that the target audience for this is a lot bigger than the audience of people like you--and, the audience of people like you are mostly already using Linux anyway. People are stoked about this because there is a perception that it is tactically significant in the struggle to increase Linux desktop/gaming market share, and similarly a perception that in the longer term if we want games we need that market share. I'm a fan of this as a tactical move helpful to Linux adoption. Of course it may not work, plenty of moves to promote Linux use have failed in the past. But it's a good shot, and seems likely not to be an isolated one. It also at the same time promotes Vulkan, and IMO increased Vulkan use is good for, well, every platform that isn't Windows--even MacOS, whether they want to realize it or not.

Another "con" however, is that something like this already exists! Lutris, for example. And many games really only work properly with different wine versions, different overrides, that sort of thing. Wine can be a bit of a temperamental beast, and needs coaxing to get it running sometimes, which Lutris handles far better (and doesn't need Steam to do it). appdb.winehq.org already has what I consider a "whitelist" - a community run lit of games that work nicely. Maybe there are plans for something similar here - it's still early days to know what the longer term plans are for Steam Play.

Doesn't need Steam to do it . . . no, you don't get it. Look, I'm not the target audience for this either, because I don't really have any non-Linux games and I have too many Linux games owned or wishlisted to ever really worry about the titles I can't get natively on Linux. But I'm a lot closer. Here's the thing: My games are on Steam. I'm going to be using it anyway. Having to fiddle with Lutris, much less vanilla Wine and different Wine versions and go find some whitelist half-ass maintained by some community I've never heard of and on and on when all I want is to relax and play a game . . . not interested. If I can buy a game and run it on Steam just like with any other game, I'm there--or I would be if I wanted any Windows games.

On the matter of support, I personally would prefer eON over wine.

What's eON?

To end on a "pro", the real news for me is apparent financial backing for some development effort. The wording makes me think that's what most of the effort from Valve really is (other than Steam packaging): financial backing, so if Valve employees are doing a lot more then I do apologise! This means that hopefully development will generically improve on things like dxvk and vkd3d, which helps the wine experience in general, for everybody, not just Steam users.

I for one would be far less approving if they were doing some kind of sequestering thing where they made their own private fork or whatever and weren't passing changes upstream. But they seem to be acting pretty responsible about it and like good open source citizens.

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Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: GuestYou might as well be a Microsoft employee at this point...

And, considering how you are propagating this Proton™ thing, you may be Valve®'s employee… :S:

See, those two things are not equivalent insults. Because, like, Valve is on our side (more or less), while Microsoft is our enemy (not more or less, but quite specifically). So, "might as well be employee of our ally" is different from "might as well be employee of our enemy".
This is perhaps only tangentially relevant, but if you don't (want to) grasp that basic point, I don't trust what else you have to say on the topic.

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Quoting: Ne021 pages in 9 hours ? WOW !
This is a SUPER HOT thread !

No, this is a Super Hot thread. :D

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Quoting: GuestTo all those who have concerns about linux native games, keep in mind that the vast majority of games never come to Linux anyway. If they are playable in some automagical way with acceptable performance, that will still remove a huge roadblock that prevents a lot of people from installing Linux. It only gets better from there.

The thing you need to understand is that we need to reach "critical mass" on the Linux desktop. We need a valid percentage of users so more proprietary companies can take us seriously and provide native ports, like Adobe for example, and proper hardware drivers for niche hardware. Once that happens, even more people will install Linux and it will snowball from there.

Linux native will always have the benefit of better performance + less bugs. So developers will still prefer this choice if they can, especially if Linux gets more marketshare.

So stop crying and support this move.

Not only that, but greater market share means more users and developers on Linux, which means faster development of the Linux Free Software ecosystem as well. It's always amazed me that Linux manages to have pretty dashed good desktops and pretty solid office, graphics, music etc. open source software at 1-2% desktop market share. What would we produce at 10%?! MacOS, MS Office, and Adobe would be left in the friggin' dust.

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Well, well, well. Very interesting.
This is a Good Thing. Yes, native ports may suffer in the short term, and that is not good. But network effects rule. If we get market share, games will in the end be routinely released natively on Linux. If we do not, they won't. It's that simple.

If quick availability of many games helps get us market share, all drawbacks are inconsequential in the end.

So. That's nice for us (if it works), but what does Valve get out of it? First, there seems to be a general vision of everything seamlessly cross-platform--Windows, MacOS, Linux, whoever else joins the party, all unified by Steam. Slightly more short term . . . does anyone else have the feeling this represents the clearing away of an obstacle to doing Steam Machines again? I see someone with a list, saying "Complaints about game availability, check."
There have been overhauls to the Steam interface lately as well. Person with a list, saying "Objections that the UI lacked polish, check."
Just maybe in a year or so, I can see Valve mounting the Steam Machine push again with all the boxes checked.

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Quoting: jordicomaAnd remember, linux support probably will be in half a year (or more), and it wont have wayland,

I'm surprised nobody's made more of this. Sure, Wayland has taken forever in snail years to arrive. But it's pretty much there now, and Canonical has finally given up on their NIH syndrome and adopted it too. Going forward, I expect X to be deprecated more and more. We're gonna need hardware that deals with Wayland, aren't we?

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Quoting: Doc Angelo

Quoting: GuestAnd i doubt that many miners are tech savvy enough to undervolt correctly their cards. I know some are.

I bet if gamers can follow a guide to get more fps, a miner can follow a guide to get more money. I think money is a better incentive to maximize

You'd be surprised. Turns out money is only an effective maximizing incentive for really rote tasks.
RSA Animate: What really motivates us [External Link]
Based on that, the drive to game well is probably a better motivator.

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