I don't really have the time to deep dive these comments on this right now, so I'll just leave some comments on this and the first few pages of comments and a few questions here.

Finally! This is something I've wanted as part of Linux Steam quite often since it first dropped. I have no real issue setting things up to game using Wine, but it has never been optimal due to limits on my free time.

On the "but it's going to potentially hurt native support" comments, consider the fact that this counts the game as a Linux purchase if you buy those non-native games and run them through the builtin Proton. It doesn't help what's already out nor near future upcoming titles (potentially nothing will for a long time or possibly ever) but as the publishers and indie devs will now have a report of hard numbers of their Linux users from Valve, that'll be another potential piece of ammunition to use in the fight to get more native releases and in the fight to eliminate intrusive DRM.

On that front, if you're boycotting non-native releases I understand, but I hope you are actually taking the time to make the publisher/dev aware of that fact for every game you'd buy but for it not being native since that is statistically the only way such boycotts actually do any good in convincing them to release more native ports. That's been a big sticking point around the people intending to boycott Guardians of the Galaxy 3 or all future MCU films over James Gunn's firing, and it's no less true here.

I really want more details of how they're handling things under the hood here. Considering how many tricks and tweaks some games require (or historically have) to get running well under Wine and how many are mutually incompatible with one another, are individual games being essentially run under their own prefix or is everything under a single monolithic prefix? If the former, how easy is it to adjust the prefix compared to standard Wine? What about titles that don't run or don't run correctly unless you change the Windows version?

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Quoting: liamdaweIt seems people still get hackers and computer crackers mixed up.

I gave up that fight in the mid-00s. I instead switched to a somewhat more pedantic pointing out that while, yes, system breaking would be a specialty under 'hacker' in a proper taxonomy it's neither ubiquitous of hackers nor even all that common and there is a much wider and more utilized array of skills and activities one is ignoring when applying that term merely to those who system break. Part of my reason for doing so was someone pointing out that the "cracker vs hacker" argument comes across to everyone not part of the subculture as either a "no true X" or else as a "not every X" argument, both of which are problematic when trying to sway usage of the term. Another part was simply the weight of history, where it's impossible to not acknowledge while being intellectually honest that system breaking, FOSS, hardware hacking, phreaking, et al originated or else found a safe place to grow in a reasonably unified, culturally speaking, community surrounding the TMRC, MIT AIL, Homebrew Computer Club, et al during the '60s through '80s and only began to break away from each other once the internet became generally publicly available and used in the mid to late '90s.

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Quoting: throghWow, another one goes there and let's celebrate that an open-source game is distributed throughout a proprietary platform. Wait what? Sounds like an error? Yes, it is. But nothing more to say, celebrate whatever you want, making your local distribution to another copycat of Windows, full of more proprietary services. Nothing learned! :sick:

Yeah, we should be annoyed by the fact that we have yet another vector to get people who otherwise wouldn't to give one of the really solid pieces of FOSS software a try. I apologize about the snarky tone of that sentence, but it takes eons of baby steps to break people from the proprietary only model (been trying with various friends over the last two decades) and every little foot in the door like this is another tool to break down those barriers and hence does indeed warrant some celebration.

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On the Steam Machines front, I expect them to eventually return. The timing within the existing console cycle, available hardware, costs and available games were not great for the venture at launch making ongoing sales/support harder, but there is a place for an eventual Linux based console in the general console market, especially if it makes general audience *NIX gaming support more likely to happen by maximizing the value to consumers through the strength of a *NIX backend. but that has little to no chance of success until we're closer to the end of the current cycle and even then unless Valve get the AAA studios on board or else the core AAA studios finally fall and get replaced by the middle tier and indie studios (the lootbox fiasco nearly did that, so it isn't impossible just highly implausible) who generally already do quite a lot more pushing onto cross platform releases.

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I've had a very... particular... game concept on my mind for a while that itself builds off some of the gameplay and style of the 2D Zelda games (the first and third specifically) for quite some time*, to the point of doing some preliminary design document work and some playing around with the Solarus engine. I now find myself, after reading this, wondering if Resolutiion may not fit some of what I'm looking for that lead me to looking down such a path. Definitely going to check this out when it releases for multiple reasons.

*Off and on for around a decade, recently revived again by the surge in LTTP Randomizer playthroughs on YouTube reminding me it's been a couple years since I last thought about it.

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Quoting: AsuI so want the wine project dead. (I respect the devs tho.)
Please don't buy software that has no mac or linux client.

Much as I'd love for there to not be a need for Wine, we're not quite to a point where that is always feasible for new software and there's quite a lot of older software that will never work natively nor have a viable native alternative. Hell, in a lot of cases it's a comparative PitA or even impossible to get some of that older software to work correctly on current iterations of Windows, which has drawn some small number of users to at least duel boot a Linux distro in order to use Wine for older Windows software from which point they may even occasionally use some native software as well.

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Quoting: rafaelcgs10If Valve officially supported Wine by contributing with development and allowing to launch Windows games directly from Steam client, that would help to bring Windows gamers to Linux. I will never officially get all Windows games, so Wine is worth it.

The big problem there is that the publishers would have to agree to allowing their Win game(s) to be released with a Wine bottle. That is just as much a hard sell as getting them to release ports, native or not, even if they're not themselves assuming all the risk. Wine can be enough of a problem to work with and configure for the inexperienced without an even more clueless support staff trying to help.
Also currently such bottles would require including Steam itself in the bottle or else a Steam stub* of some kind, because software under Wine is not reliably able, last I checked and by design, to detect that it's under Wine nor any non-Wine software also running on the system (like say Linux Steam). Neither case would be tenable for various reasons to some the parties involved.

*Here I mean a stub in the sense of a truncated version that doesn't provide any UI but provides the standard back end functionality (cf. [url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_stub"]Test stub on Wikipedia[/url])

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Quoting: Luke_NukemThis is definitely someone's first game ever. Quite probably a cheap (or free) engine + additional assets. Maybe even done by a hopeful teenager...

So... this is apparently the work of a two man team and seems to be their only game to date. From their pics on their studio website, I'd say young end 20-somethings making "hopeful teenager" pretty much on the money.

Quoting: GuestI remember I spent so much time coding just a breakout game on Amiga, I was happy about it although I knew no-one would be interested !

Been there, though mine was an ASCII PacMan clone in QB circa Spring '92 which I invested easily 200 hours into coding and still couldn't get the AI quite right.

Quoting: razing32This seems like an asset flip.
Are there any cards linked to it Liam ?

This seems to be a legit, if very young and exceptionally small, team trying to bootstrap their way to indie success so far as I can tell. That "asset flip" feeling though is exactly the main downside to purchased premade assets in the hands of someone who hasn't the skill/talent to adjust them well nor the funds to hire someone with that skill/talent... the modern flavor of MSPaint made programmer art from back in the day. Right now it just runs afoul of the fact there are also a bunch of unscrupulous types who aren't making any real attempt at actual work and just trying to scam a quick buck from the fact they can sell what amounts to little more than an asset pack with some minor engine boilerplate for a profit.

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I haven't touched this one in a while (like three years) and didn't even know it was sans icon. May have to give it a new run when I have time, because I remember it being a blast.

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Quoting: ScooptaExcept they don't demonstrate demand...all stats collected will show wine users as Windows users. The only way they know we're on wine is if we tell them at which point just tell them we want a Linux version.

Sorry for the confusion there. That "...when they at least provide a way for us on Linux to demonstrate demand" is kind of badly worded on my part and is intended specifically to be about the use of Wine wrapper APIs in porting, not the full wine system install use case.

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