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Comment on 7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux

Do you know what I did last week thanks to Proton? Installed EndeavourOS on my freshly purchased laptop, installed steam, and installed a bunch of Windows games. Then I played them. At no point did I wonder whether they would run.

Now, you may think being able to do that isn’t something that is going to get more people using desktop Linux, but as much as I’d love to agree with you, then we’d both be wrong.

I say this as someone who used to care about convincing other people to use Linux. (Before shifting into “you can lead a horse to water…” mode, and now I just don’t give a shit.)

However, what I gained from that experience is this: In twenty years of being Linux-only on my personal desktop, the number of times I have read the phrase, “I’d love to use Linux, except for [some statement about a game or games]” is astronomical.

Now, is Proton going to make desktop Linux the best choice for everyone? Clearly not, duh. But it is remarkably disingenuous to suggest that it’s not had a massive benefit to the Linux community and ecosystem as a whole, including, and dare I say especially, desktop Linux. It is flat out impossible to imagine that a substantial portion of current and future Linux users aren’t people for whom Proton solved what they considered to be a substantial barrier to usage.

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Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
In my experience, it’s not actually Proton specifically but more generally Wine along with DXVK and Vulkan itself.

I have as good a success rate with Windows games from GOG under Wine through Lutris (which also defaults to using DXVK and Vulkan plus has Wine configuration scripts for most GOG games, making their install fully automated and zero-configuration) as I have with Windows games from Steam under Proton.

If I understand it correctly, Proton is mainly a fork of Wine with Steam integration thrown in and changes to make sure it works with specific Steam games, so I don’t think the improvements are Proton specific, but rather more global than that (the use of Vulkan instead of OpenGL, DXVK making DirectX games run with Vulkan, Wine improvements).

Mind you, if improvements in Proton are flowing to those other projects and having a big impact, then credit were credit is due for Proton pulling up the whole ecosystem, otherwise Proton isn’t actually as crucial in improving Gaming on Linux as seems to be portrayed in so many posts here.

I can understand that if all people have used for gaming in Linux is Steam and never games from other digital sources - like GOG or even pirated games - via launchers like Heroic or Lutris, it might seem like Proton is the secret juice, but in my experience in the last year of gaming in Linux using both, Wine + DXVK + Vulkan works just as well.

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- octopus_ink@slrpnk.net ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Proton developers are working on Wine code. Their patches go upstream. If you are using Wine, you have benefited (massively) from the sea change that has occurred (directly and indirectly) as a result of the development of Proton.
  
  I remember the naysayers predicting that Gabe would never in a million years make the required investment because the state of Linux gaming was (in their assessment) that terrible.
  
  And now we’re having argue about whether it actually did anything for us? In the comments about an article about how much it did for us?
  
  That’s not an argument I’m having, I watched it happen.
  
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  - Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Well, credit to Steam then.
    
    I didn’t know one way or the other if Proton development ended up in Wine or not, much less if Steam was or not directly participating in Wine development, all I knew is that Proton was forked from Wine in the beginning.
    
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