Has it really been that long? Apparently so. Valve originally announced their rebranding of Steam Play with Proton back on August 21st, 2018. Seems like a good time for a quick reflection being halfway to a decade old now with the tech that gave rise to the Steam Deck.
  • DracEULA@beehaw.org
    16·
    1 year ago

    I was able to ditch Windows completely thanks to them, haven’t had to dual boot for years. I remember back when I first tried linux there were only a handful of games that would run without hours of tinkering. Now compatibility is an afterthought; I just assume Steam games will work and I haven’t had any issues yet.

    • genoxidedev1@kbin.social
      5·
      1 year ago

      Problem for me is def going to be modding games, have they fixed alt tabbing between games and desktop yet at least? It used to “crash” the game for me if I tabbed out even for a second.

      • thehellrocc@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I’ve never had this issue but it might be specific to the game you’re trying, using gamescope might help.

    • thehellrocc@beehaw.orgEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      The only (large enough) area which is currently lacking is multiplayer games, especially those with anticheats. Unfortunately, there’s nothing users can do about that other than wait for game developers to enable wine support, which, despite EAC and Battleye significantly simplifying the process, many still haven’t done.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    Huge kudos to them, they saw that they were on top of the PC market and wanted to expand, and they found the market of linux users who wanted to game on their machines too. Wine wasn’t up to par for gaming and they took it and ran with it. Beyond that they open sourced proton too, something most companies wouldn’t have done. Even if they quit now the help they gave to the linux community is immeasurable

    • nodiet@feddit.de
      12·
      1 year ago

      Proton is based on wine, which is copyleft so valve didn’t exactly have a choice in keeping it open source. I also don’t necessarily think that their goal was to reach the rather small existing user base of Linux users, but rather they wanted to make sure they aren’t at the will of a bigger company (Microsoft) whose product is/was required to run most of what valve makes money with.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        This is probably more accurate, their entire model depended on Windows, and if they wanted to make their own devices they would all be forced to either start new or get Linux up and running. Motives aside they did good for the community

        • nodiet@feddit.de
          7·
          1 year ago

          Oh yeah their efforts are definitely a huge net benefit for the Linux community, I just don’t like seeing big companies portrayed in a better light than they deserve. When it comes down to it, what valve really cares about is still their bottom line.

    • knokelmaat@beehaw.org
      3·
      1 year ago

      Linux users (me included) are only a few percents of all PC users. I don’t think they did it for us as a market, more to have an alternative to windows if they start closing down more (started with Windows 8 I believe). First try they fumbled a bit with the Steam Machines (Stream OS and proton weren’t there yet and the prices were not really competitive) and now nailed it with the Steam Deck. I do love that they seem to care about openness to some degree!

      • thehellrocc@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, it’s probably more about them not being locked in MS’s ecosystem more than anything, but whatever the intention may be, everyone is benefiting from the results.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

    Click here to see the summary

    A lot of the early porting work that came along was slowly dying off since the Steam Machines didn’t provide the boost Valve and Linux gamers were hoping for.

    Side-note: John Carmack (id Software / Oculus VR / Keen Technologies) even thought Wine was the solution back in 2013.

    Valve has funded a lot of extra work though to get things like DXVK and VKD3D-Proton for the translation from Direct3D to Vulkan into a state where performance can be really great!

    Games like Deep Rock Galactic, God of War, Death Stranding, Baldur’s Gate 3, Brotato, Beat Saber and so on.

    You get the idea, there’s a truly ridiculous selection of games available and at times it’s a little paralysing scrolling through my Steam Library deciding what to play — a delightfully annoying problem to have huh?

    Valve produce updates to Proton constantly to improve compatibility, with over 300 revisions to the main changelog (although some a minor text corrections) it’s clear to see how much work goes into it.

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