Quoting: ArdjeWell, some people never ever get a survey in their life. I think I am going to be that one.
But then again, I have lots of history with different sites having problems with my account.
I am that special snowflake, the exception, to stress the validity of the general rule.

So, I am the other special snowflake, which got the survey... 6 times or so two months ago, on each device, and each "OS" (Linux, dualbooted Windows and wine).
Well, it's still a hardware survey (ofc no hardware works without any kind of software), so I'm okay to get it on each device. Will be interesting, if I'll get it now in a year again, or sooner.

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There is definitely an impact on the Linux market share since Proton. I just hope this is not a statistical anomaly, as new Steam client installations have a pretty high probability to see the survey. So this could mean, lots of people are trying Steam on Linux now, and test if their games work with Proton... and maybe don't stick with Linux the month after. But from how I understand how the survey works, those people won't be counted the month after it again, as the survey should occur only once a year. Time will tell.

Nevertheless, it's nice to see tweets [External Link] like this:

@puppygames
Linux is now twice as big a platform for us as MacOS is (on Steam, anyway)

It feels so good to know that Valve is really behind their commitment, to make Linux the gaming platform of the future and seeing that it is slowly but steadily becoming true.

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Thank you!

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I hope they fix the CEG (custom executable generation) copy protection for proton or the Linux clients (steamcmd is also affected). This prevents me of getting Aliens vs Predator running #530 [External Link]
I can copy the binaries from my working wine prefix (I gave AvP a platinum rating on winehq [External Link], then it starts, but crashes after a while. Might be CEG or something else. Haven't found out yet. But as AvP will probably never see any upgrades anymore, so it's in a "stable" state, will never see a native Linux version, I'd love to be able to play it on Linux via proton. Even DXVK is working, though I don't have any sound then... but well, that's a different story ;)
And some more games are affected by this: #753 [External Link]

I'm still happy I could get rid of some manually wine prefixes of games, I play on a regular basis. Like Company of Heroes (the first one), No Man's Sky, etc.

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Great insight. Thank you for this nice interview!

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Regarding the pine/proton question I also think it should be a check box for both and/or none. I used wine before, some of my prefixed are now covered by proton, others work perfectly in wine (e.g. wine stable) but not in proton... so for me I'm using both and I'm using them separately.

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Valve's Proton release immediately reminded me of John Carmack's statement 5 years ago.

I've been to gamescom this week and could talk to some developers in person. I'm surprised so many of them are meanwhile aware of Linux gamers and especially surprised how many of the devs are Linux users themselves. Nevertheless, when it comes to Linux as a supported platform, it's becoming more vague, they don't say no, but also no promises. Some are afraid of the amount of incoming support requests, they almost can't handle the ones coming from mac users.

They said though, without me telling them anything, they know some gamers managed to play their games with wine on Linux. That was the moment when I dropped a word about Valve's fork proton. They didn't hear about that yet, as it was just released and they are busy on gamescom, but they are happy to hear about proton. So they could reach more gamers, which they want of course.

I agree, that if the Steam hardware survey now rises to a critical point, we'll see devs and publishers prefer creating native versions, which could be done inhouse or by porting studios and devs.

As Valve is also submitting their work upstream to wine, and everything is open source, we'll be able to play also more non-steam games. Valve just showed running World of Warcraft with DX12 over Vulkan. Here you go Blizzard.

I'm exited to see how this turns out in the long run. It can only get better for Linux gaming, native or protonized.

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Oh dear, oh f***ing dear!

Awesome, the picture around dxvk now comes together ;)

We'll now have to see if Linux (gaming) share rises. If so, I hope this means we get more native ports in the long run. Because now, devs have no real reason to take the effort to make a native Linux version, if it works well enough in proton. And we know how difficult it can be, and then in the end won't get any version of a game at all if the hurdles can't be taken economically.

So I'll be specially thankful to devs who do native ports! Keep supporting them especially.

I'm wondering, is it possible to use proton with games, that already have a native Linux version? I'm thinking of games that are not compatible in multiplayer, like Company of Heroes 2.

Oh man, I kinda feel bad asking this, Feral did an awesome job porting it to Linux. It's just, most buddies use windows and I have to dualboot.

Is this now the end of native Linux gaming, or the end of Windows gaming? ;)

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Quoting: nadrolinuxCan you provide a link to this project? I'm looking for something like that.

You can find such a project here: https://github.com/xomachine/SteamForwarder [External Link]
An older one was SteamBridge.
Beware though, I have never tried this myself, and you might get banned using it.

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Awesome, just awesome!

I'm wondering if the rumors that Valve could add Windows gaming in any way to Linux/SteamOS is correlated with this?

There is a github project out there already, that let's you use a Windows game with wine communicating with the Linux Steam client. So SteamWorks etc. is working. Of course not officially supported, but Valve could be working on something similar.

So, if we would then get Windows games on Linux with support by Valve and/or the devs and publishers... what do you think about that? On the one hand, oh hell, yes! I could finally play all the games, all of them! On the other hand, I'm afraid about native Linux games.

Maybe it's completely different and nothing like that happens :D

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