It's simply incredible the Wine project exists and is as far along as this. Thanks to it we're often able to install and play AAA games, Windows-only programs and such directly on Linux. I remember discovering Wine shortly after my first run in with Linux, a very long time ago and eventually it getting to a stage where Steam and a game or two would just about run in it. How far it's come to now power Steam Play Proton—cheers to the Wine team!

Absolutely agree.

I'll add: I like that we have multiple levels of access to Wine/Proton for different types of gamers, from extreme powerusers to people who want a 1 click 'it works' level of support.

Poweruser? You can compile Wine/Proton yourself, pull in patches, and always be using the bleeding edge version every day. Or you can wait for something like GloriousEggroll to update and use that. Submit bug reports to help improve Wine/Proton, manually add support for things like media foundation video playback, complicated tweaks to add windows dlls for certain games. You can use Lutris instead of Steam, with Proton or Wine. As a result you might be able to play some games a few months before everyone else can and help improve Wine or Proton.

Just want a 1 click experience that 'just works'? No need to even know what 'Wine' is, you can just rely on Valve to keep the whitelist of Proton compatible games up to date, and regularly pull in updates of Wine into Proton, and do literally nothing. SteamPlay will then be automatically available for any game that's whitelisted to work well with Proton, click Install, click Play, zero difference to your windows gaming experience for the compatible games, zero ambiguity over what will or won't work.

Somewhere in between? If you have the slightest energy to go a step beyond that, can just tick a box in the settings of Steam and use Proton for every game. Launch a game and it doesn't work? Check ProtonDB to see if it needs a launch parameter to startup correctly. No need to go beyond that, and 75% of your games will work just fine with 60% never needing a tweak at all.

It's really great in terms of making the User Experience of gaming on Linux so much nicer and more in line with what average PC users would expect. Because most people just want a "1-click" experience. But at the same time it's great there's a "poweruser" option for everything as well, it means there's something for everyone.

So I love hearing about the latest Wine and Proton updates, every little change, as much as I love hearing about the latest stable release of Proton. It's a nice 'flow' that's developing, of improvements starting upstream and accessible to power users for them to test those changes, and gradually flowing out into a 1 click reliable user friendly experience months later.

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Quoting: iiari

Quoting: gradyvuckovicFlatpak out of the box?

Woohoo!

I'm loving the slow but steady adoption of Flatpak....

Great explanation, thanks. As someone who hated Snaps (and those plus unstable PPA's pushed me out of the Ubuntu ecosystem) I have a few questions for you:

1) How are Flatpaks with speed? Snaps were soooo slooooow to launch.
2) Is native theming reflected in Flatpaks?
3) If Flatpaks conquer all, what kinda is the point of different distros anymore? They really do become only theming and software selection boutiques. In the best case scenario, as with Manjaro, they develop their own unique apps and workflows.

Thanks!

1) In my experience I notice no difference in startup time or running speed. In 2018 there were reports of some overhead during the first run of a Flatpak application but that was due to a bug with the fontcache and it's been fixed ever since.

At it's core, it's the same tech as Steam's runtime compatibility mode. There's no VM, no overhead, just lightweight containers as a way of logically sandboxing an application away from the OS so it can have it's own libraries.

You could argue there's additional startup time and memory usage from loading a couple of system libraries more than once, but in many cases the libraries being loaded more than once are libraries that the developers might have had to include with the 'native' version of the application anyway if they needed to target a specific version of the library, so any startup overhead or additional memory is debatable and really minor.

In the underlying tech there's a lot of cool stuff too that makes it very efficient. For example, in addition to sharing installations of runtimes, if two Flatpak applications bundle with them the same library, the library files will be stored only once for both applications, no additional storage space usage.

2) My understanding is that Flatpak applications can be made to respect system theme. I imagine many distros will choose to set this up by default themselves with their OOTB Flatpak coofigurations, but I understand you can install a system theme to Flatpak the same way you can to your distro, and applications will respect that.

3) I think it's great for distro maintainers as it frees up huge sums of their time and allows them to focus on the user experience of their distros rather than trying to maintain vast repositories of applications written by other people.

They can compete on delivering the best user interface they can provide, compete on delivering regular high quality updates and new features to their distros. Compete on performance of their OS, etc. Compete on ease of installation.

So there's still plenty of reason for them to exist and to compete. If it means a couple of unpopular distros become irrelevant because they offer nothing special that isn't available everywhere else, that's not the end of the world either, we probably don't need all 300+ active distributions. But I imagine all the popular distros will find ways to compete on user experience which benefits us all.

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Flatpak out of the box?

Woohoo!

I'm loving the slow but steady adoption of Flatpak.

I've been keeping track of how the distros are going in adopting it:

So far, distros with OOTB support:
Fedora: Flatpak OOTB, Flathub installed separately.
Endless OS: OOTB
Linux Mint: OOTB
CentOS: Flatpak OOTB, Flathub installed separately.
ElementaryOS: OOTB
PureOS: OOTB

And now we can add Manjaro to the list too.

And pretty much every major distro has Flatpak available as something that can be pretty easily installed separately. Give it time and eventually Flatpak will be everywhere.

Quoting: aokamiI fled gnome shell from Debian but it's coming after me, help!

On a serious note though would anyone teach me what is the advantage of snap and flatpack ? I always thought packaging libraries versions would open the way for flaws and exploits, is it neatly contained from the system ?

The advantages are, it's one universal system which can be used across all Linux distributions for distributing applications from developers to users. Applications come in a package, specifying what Flatpak runtime they need to be executed with, and if the runtime isn't already installed then it's automatically installed. It also puts developers in control of pushing out their own updates when they want, and allows users to get updates immediately instead of waiting for their distro maintainer to get around to updating the software package on their distro's repository.

The runtimes ensure newer applications work fine on older distributions, and older applications work fine on newer distributions, and any inconsistency between distributions are eliminated. For users, it means they can get their applications from one hub (Flathub) on all Linux OSes the same way and have a consistent user experience across the entire Linux landscape.

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Consider the consequences of Proton making it possible to bypass anticheat and DRM. Consider what the reaction would be from Developers upon learning Proton is a means of defeating their anticheat and DRM technology.

Say goodbye to being able to play games via Proton at all.

Look, I'm a simple person, I want to be able to play Windows games on Linux. DRM and Anticheat are separate issues for me. I want Proton to be able to play all games as they are. If a developer has decided to shove DRM into a game, that's unfortunate, but if I really want to play it I will.

If you choose to never install DRM and Anticheat because of your concerns over what that technology can do on your PC, then you can choose to never install those games that use that technology, on either Windows, Linux, or Linux via Proton.

Proton can not remove DRM/Anticheat from games for you, nor should you ask that Proton remain unable to play games that have DRM/Anticheat, because there are people who don't agree with you on that.

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Loving it, work being done on the three things Proton needs most, MF, DRM and AntiCheat. I'm sure it's all adding up to something bigger, these three challenges are no doubt too big for a single change to occur to make them possible, they're probably chipping away at the problem with each update like this. Would love to know what their plan is, how far along they are with it.

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More games I won't be able to play because they will be exclusive to a platform that isn't available in Australia and impossible to access from Australia. Exclusivity is just so fun isn't it?

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And as the number of Steam gamers increases, the number of Steam Linux gamers increases.

It's great news. Goes to show simply buying exclusives isn't enough to win over gamers. Apparently having a shopping cart does make a difference!

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Amazing work as always Valve. Looking forward to trying out some games with Proton 5.0 to see what's improved and doing some ProtonDB reports.

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Exclusives, are annoying at the best of times.

Exclusives for a gaming platform that is incomplete and lacking features, is enraging.

Exclusives for a gaming platform that is incomplete and lacking features, and requires buying new hardware and paying a subscription to access, is insulting.

Exclusives for a gaming platform that is incomplete and lacking features, and requires buying new hardware and paying a subscription to access, and officially only available in US/Canada/parts of Europe, is trolling on a corporate scale.

Exclusives for a gaming platform that is incomplete and lacking features, and requires buying new hardware and paying a subscription to access, and officially only available in US/Canada/parts of Europe, and a game streaming platform with minimum latency and speed requirements,... is downright cruel.

Slow clap for Google, Thanks Google! For locking 10 games behind a virtual wall that prevents the majority of the planet from being able to buy or play them.

The only positive is that at least the exclusivity is timed, so eventually the games will hopefully come to platforms that everyone in the world can access, hopefully a very short period of time, like 3 months.

It's fine for those who live in regions with fast connections who happen to live the US/Canada/parts of Europe and happy/able to sign up to Stadia, but for those who don't live in those areas, it seems we're just going to get shafted out of game streaming when combined with exclusivity. If there was any chance of me paying for Stadia when it eventually comes to Australia, it disappeared the moment Google decided to shaft me, just because they don't want my money 'yet'.

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Quoting: linuxcityOk valve the ball is in your court

What do you mean by that?

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