Maybe it's just me and maybe I'm just synical but I read this a little differently. I read this as a developer who has been actively working on porting games natively to Linux is now moving to proton which is the exact opposite of what I hope to see. Proton shouldn't replace native titles it should merely be a stop gap till we get more.

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Quoting: EhvisIt's possible that people using Steam on Wine were now more likely to get their survey on Linux again due to proton. It could also be a statistical anomaly. Time will tell.

On a positive note, I got a survey last night. On Linux obviously. :D

I personally think people using steam in wine should at least decline to take the survey unless it shows up in their native client so as to avoid inflating windows numbers. Hopefully it won't be an issue now anyway thanks to proton.

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Quoting: Rolz73I have been playing this on the Vive, Windows though.

It is a beautiful experience.

Have you tried the Vive on Linux. I know it's supported in general, Talos principle VR is Linux native, but I'd be curious to know if distance supports VR on Linux.

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Quoting: Hori

Quoting: lqe5433Wine is only working with X.org, and X.org will be replaced with Wayland really soon, so I don't see the point of this. Games should use SDL2 on Linux, or Wine needs to use Wayland.

Wayland doesn't even work for gaming right now - I'd say "really soon" is greatly exagerated.
People kept saying that Wayland will come soon for the past few years now. It's like those end-of-the-world doomsayers, they schedule a new one each year and then postpone it again.
Even if Wayland does "replace" Xorg, Nvidia will have to do that too. Right now you can't use Wayland with an Nvidia GPU, not if you want to do any gaming on it - and Proton is built for gaming.

I see Wayland and Nvidia as two big issues that are highly unlikely to be fixed any time soon (a few years) - and only after they get fixed can we talk about Wayland slowly becoming popular.

What do you mean Wayland doesn't work for gaming? It totally does if the engine actually supports it, most just don't. Although seeing as most stuff uses either SDL or GLFW there should be indirect support for it. I've actually been meaning to test unreal on Wayland but haven't gotten around to it. As far as the Nvidia problem goes it's just stupid but leave it to Nvidia to be stupid.

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Quoting: qhartmanI see it has Occulus / Vive support up there. I thought neither of those were supported on Linux. Is that just missing in the Linux version, or am I wrong about the Linux support status of the headsets?

Vive has Linux support as far as I'm aware but it's pretty buggy and I think only supported on Vulkan but I could be wrong.

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I was an early backer on this game when they asked for people to fund it via humble and I've put a whole bunch of hours into this game since. I'm really looking forward to seeing the full campaign.

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Quoting: GuestIt's sad that people would be upset that Proton is a separate project than Wine. Valve has in my opinion done everything right with this. They've hired the actual Wine devs to make changes and made everything 100% open source which allows the Wine devs to backport anything they want into the Wine project. Valve needed this to be a separate project so they wouldn't be hindered by philosophies that differ from their own. They are a business and they need it to work for gaming, not office packages, not utilities, etc. They needed this project to be separate to make leaps and bounds and reach their long-term goals without snags. Whoever is upset about that simply isn't using their heads about how much Valve has done for the Wine project and Linux gaming.

I don't think that's what he was saying. I think he was saying people are salty that DXVK is not part of wine although maybe I misunderstood.

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Quoting: WendigoValve did a really clever move here to force game developers into cross platform development. Publishers will now have to make sure that their games run on all platforms Steam supports, no matter if they intend it to run there or not since the games were made available everywhere. Even though players get a notice when starting a game via proton I guess quite a few will still down vote a game that doesn't run on Linux or OSX, so the Publishers have 3 choices:

1) Do nothing and get a bad rating that affects their future sales of the game.
2) Make sure their game runs with Proton on all operating systems that Steam supports and hope that a future change in Proton doesn't break the game.
3) Do a proper cross platform port or develop future games with cross platform in mind and have control over the game's performance on Linux and OSX.

I guess the third option is the best choice.

While proton does support macOS, steam play does not so currently you can only use proton on Linux unless you manually build it yourself. It was in their announcement.

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Quoting: ulysses768You can't have a winning business plan for a game streaming service if that service relies on Windows instances/VMs. Right now on AWS Linux GPU instances are 20-25% of the cost of Windows instances for the same instance type. Video games, AR, VR are the future of entertainment and margins will be nonexistent if you have to pay MS a license for every node you spin up. Linux gaming is the future, it's just that whatever OS the consumer is using is irrelevant, just like any other web app. No one runs Windows on cloud services unless they absolutely have to.

I personally would rather run my games local. I don't really like being enslaved to a cloud provider to run my games. Not to mention I don't want to be forced to have an internet connection either(although this is less important than the first point). I really don't like the general trend towards web apps. I find them to be more cludgy than native apps. The web definitely has it's place but JS heavy websites that try to take the place of native software definitely isn't it. The cloud also has it's place but I don't really want to replace my own compute power with the cloud.

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Quoting: jarhead_h

Quoting: ScooptaRight now my Linux system doesn't have to emulate a Windows one to play games(except AAA ports). That's the future that scares me. I didn't leave Windows just to emulate it on Linux. Although maybe you do have a point. Maybe emulating windows is just an easy way to bootstrap Linux gaming. Maybe after it becomes reasonably popular the emulation will go away and we'll get real Linux natives. Being an after thought doesn't scare me, being an after thought where wine is the solution does.

Valve launched it today in the Steam Beta client. It's seamless, you check a box in the Steam Play settings and your entire Windows library is theoretically playable on Linux. It hasn't worked on a single game that I've tried it on yet. I bought Half Life 2 on release day in 2004 along with Vampire the Masquerade:Bloodlines. I was one of the people who couldn't play HL2 for weeks on release do to a bug. I ended up finding the RAZOR1911 version and playing that. Didn't bother with steam again until The Black Box promo for buying an ATI 1950XT. Not a single issue, not one, and haven't bothered pirating since. This will mirror that I imagine. In a few months time most of the big titles will just work.

There are two outcomes possible from this since Valve has already sunk two years of funding into it and doesn't look likely to stop anytime soon:

1) Valve is clearly pushing Vulkan and even mentioned specifically in the new faq on Steam Play that a developer looking to support this can add a Vulkan rendering option to maximize the chances of smooth compatibility. This will lead to more Vulkan titles. If the PS5 ends up using Vulkan we're set. That's the end of DirectX's dominance on anything other than the Xbox, and the end of WINE slowing down framerates because it can offload the entire graphics workload to the Linux Vulkan drivers without needing to do anything itself. We just keep running new Windows games seamlessly via WINE+PROTON+DXVK without even having to bother to configure any of it getting basically native performance with Vulkan titles. This is the WORST CASE SCENARIO, and it doesn't exactly suck.

2)This cascades. As soon as the current hotness games land with day one Steam Play support Linux starts siphoning off gamers that don't want to have anything to do with Microsoft. And Valve has stated that the two week rule is in effect for this - ie, Steam counts it as a Linux sale if you play the game in Linux for two weeks. Our user base climbs to about what Apple has(maybe ten percent), and then we start getting the same native ports that Apple does. That's when the snowballing really starts. This is dream scenario.

This NEEDED to happen. We NEED to build the user base and this is the only way to do it. Valve is going against Microsoft massively by doing this, fyi. Valve is quite literally funding an escape route from Microsoft to an OS that Valve doesn't even control and I don't see how we can thank them enough for that.

Oh believe me I understand they're going against MS with this. I've always rated it as Linux > Wine > Windows. Wine has always been my preferred option compared to Windows but for me personally I just stayed away from it because I'll always prefer Linux natives. I know the worst case scenario is living in a world of wine but I don't exactly like it. It's better than being forced to use Windows for games but IMO Linux already has enough games being ported to it for me so I don't feel forced to use Windows. Hopefully the number of Linux ports increases along side this. I care about two things, Getting a decentish amount of native Linux titles in the short term, which I would say we are currently, and not relying on wine for anything long term. I basically never want to have to rely on wine for gaming on Linux. As long as that never happens I really can't complain and the fact that proton/Steam play counts as a Linux sale makes me feel better about it. Still not as good as a native port would but it's definitely a hell of a lot better than wine on it's own.

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