I recently moved to Debian Sid/unstable after alot of distro hopping as was maining Arch based distros and Arch itself for awhile but I started noticing alot of things in all of them breaking in Lutris like certain launchers and games just simply not working on Arch but yet working on just about every other distro I tried.

Surprisingly Debian Sid is pretty stable and pretty updated for it to be Debian and best of all everything that should be working is working in lutris again. I highly suspect its due to the build tools in the Arch repo being outdated even compared to a chunk of non rolling release distros as seen a video from a Youtuber called Brodie pointing that out and it kinda makes sense and honestly think Arch may be on a downward spiral if they can't even keep the build tools for which all the packages are built against updated even compared to point release distros!

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Quoting: melkemind

ICYMI: NVIDIA are also working with Valve to get Gamescope working on their drivers.

Did they even get Wayland working with their drivers? Last time I looked, it was a no-go in KDE. I admittedly haven't looked in a while though.

Wayland works on the latest greatest GNOME and KDE but mostly the rolling distros have it atm

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: tohur

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: GuestThey are not reverse engineering Windows. They are implementing specific interfaces - probably all of which are well documented (Microsoft documentation is generally pretty good as it turns out).

Well Microsoft really don't have any alternative, if they don't document it then application and games developers cannot write software for Windows :)

In any case, yes neither Wine nor this new attempt (I highly assume) is done via reverse engineering. Even the slightest wink in that direction would kill Wine legally, that Microsoft haven't gone after Wine in all of these years speaks volumes about how legally sound Wine is developed.

WINE is windows reversed engineered. It is called "clean room" reverse engineering thus they reimplement the windows api without ever decompiling nor seeing windows source code but regardless its reverse engineering if it wasn't it wouldn't be the windows api and windows apps wouldn't even be able to run

No Wine is not reverse engineered. One of the reasons behind the Wine Is Not an Emulator is that they don't emulate Windows behaviour, what they have done is to write their own versions of "all" the public WIN32 functions and DLL:s and since those are public there are no need for any reverse engineering.

All you have to do is e.g to look here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/nf-fileapi-readfile [External Link] and there you can see what ReadFile expects as arguments and what the replies will be.

The Wine devs then did this for each and every public function that exists. Their early work was the windows loader which they didn't have to reverse engineer either since the .exe format for Windows is also public information.

Now there are some quirks and bugs in the WIN32 API that they have to replicate but that is also not done by reverse engineering, instead its simply done by calling the same function on a real Windows install and see what the function returns, and of course based on bug reports from end users.

And what you just said is a long winded paragraph describing "clean room" reverse engineering... the very meaning of it. all emulators that are legal do it.. they write their own code to do the same things as what they are trying to emulate. I know WINE is not an Emulator but the acronym isn't telling you its not an emulator cause they write their own code but the fact its a translation layer

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: tohur

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut anyway, now the only people learning anything about Linux will be three guys at Google developing a compatibility layer. Game developers will just be targeting Windows as usual. So who gives a damn? And since they're inventing their own little wheel (again), they won't be contributing much upstream . . . maybe a bit to DXVK.

What feels even worse here, that they benefit from the work that already went into faudio, dxvk (I assume also vkd3d-proton, since I doubt they don't care about DX12 games) and other similar important projects. Yet they don't give their project back to FOSS at large and Linux gaming in particular. It's Google we are talking about with their money. When they act in parasitic manner while benefiting from open source projects, it just starts feeling disgusting.

Which is what really pisses me off here.. Anyone with more then two brain cells knows no matter their lie WINE is at this core of this project and it takes hundreds if not thousands of folks contributing to WINE to have WINE in the state it is in and here they are with a mere three devs are trying to claim they have done in months from the ground up outside of the DXVK and FAudio what it has taken WINE decades to do.. taking others work for their own at least Valve contributes back and doesn't claim the code in proton as their own

Yea I don't buy it and hope this blows up in their face in some manner and Stadia crashes and burns

I'm not that sure.
If I were Mr. Google using wine to build Stadia, I'd certainly not published "hey, i'm not using wine, i'm doing from scratch!".

I'm not even sure why they are even talking about this project, now that i think of it.

I can assure you they are using WINE code.. There is NO company outside Microsoft that can make a Windows compatibility layer in mere months I don't care how large Google is they are simply taking/modifying code and claiming it as 100% their own

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut anyway, now the only people learning anything about Linux will be three guys at Google developing a compatibility layer. Game developers will just be targeting Windows as usual. So who gives a damn? And since they're inventing their own little wheel (again), they won't be contributing much upstream . . . maybe a bit to DXVK.

What feels even worse here, that they benefit from the work that already went into faudio, dxvk (I assume also vkd3d-proton, since I doubt they don't care about DX12 games) and other similar important projects. Yet they don't give their project back to FOSS at large and Linux gaming in particular. It's Google we are talking about with their money. When they act in parasitic manner while benefiting from open source projects, it just starts feeling disgusting.

Which is what really pisses me off here.. Anyone with more then two brain cells knows no matter their lie WINE is at this core of this project and it takes hundreds if not thousands of folks contributing to WINE to have WINE in the state it is in and here they are with a mere three devs are trying to claim they have done in months from the ground up outside of the DXVK and FAudio what it has taken WINE decades to do.. taking others work for their own at least Valve contributes back and doesn't claim the code in proton as their own

Yea I don't buy it and hope this blows up in their face in some manner and Stadia crashes and burns

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: GuestThey are not reverse engineering Windows. They are implementing specific interfaces - probably all of which are well documented (Microsoft documentation is generally pretty good as it turns out).

Well Microsoft really don't have any alternative, if they don't document it then application and games developers cannot write software for Windows :)

In any case, yes neither Wine nor this new attempt (I highly assume) is done via reverse engineering. Even the slightest wink in that direction would kill Wine legally, that Microsoft haven't gone after Wine in all of these years speaks volumes about how legally sound Wine is developed.

WINE is windows reversed engineered. It is called "clean room" reverse engineering thus they reimplement the windows api without ever decompiling nor seeing windows source code but regardless its reverse engineering if it wasn't it wouldn't be the windows api and windows apps wouldn't even be able to run

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Quoting: whizse

Quoting: tohurwon't admit it because they would have to abide by the GPL

LGPL and no. If it's internal to the company they can do whatever they want. (L)GPL covers distribution of the software.

well regardless only a 0.1% chance they are not using wine code but they will never admit it. just rubs me the wrong way

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: tohurAnd if I remember right the Witcher 2 binary was disassembled which uses eON and guess what was found.. mostly WINE related code.. fact is Google can hide this fact cause its on their servers but even for games you are NOT reverse engineering Windows on a whim

That's exactly what I was thinking. Are they building it from the ground up or they are trimming down Wine?

The fact that they are using dxvk and faudio shows they aren't into complete from scratch approach.

Hard to believe ANY company outside of Microsoft can do so considering how many years it took WINE to even be usable and let alone THREE devs from Google.. no they are most certainly using WINE and won't admit it because they would have to abide by the GPL

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: tohurIf people for one second thinks Google wrote their own Windows layer you are highly mistaken as WINE has been in development since the 90s and took them YEARS to be able to run basic stuff let alone games... reverse engineering windows is nothing you just do overnight on a whim no matter how large your company is so thus the fact is they are using a wine code base rather you want to believe it or not.

Not true. They're not reimplementing Windows, but instead just enough of it to run the games. DXVK allows them to cut a huge amount of effort out, along with other libraries (FAudio was mentioned). In this way it's similar to eON; they're not after the same goals as WINE, they're limiting the translation to gaming.

It's not exactly an overnight effort of course, but getting some initial games running in a timeframe of months is certainly viable, and then once the core is ready they can more quickly expand out the supported interfaces.

And if I remember right the Witcher 2 binary was disassembled which uses eON and guess what was found.. mostly WINE related code.. fact is Google can hide this fact cause its on their servers but even for games you are NOT reverse engineering Windows on a whim even to a point of just enough to run games..

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If people for one second thinks Google wrote their own Windows layer you are highly mistaken as WINE has been in development since the 90s and took them YEARS to be able to run basic stuff let alone games... reverse engineering windows is nothing you just do overnight on a whim no matter how large your company is so thus the fact is they are using a wine code base rather you want to believe it or not.

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