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Steam Gets Built-in Tools To Let You Run Windows Games on Linux -- Now Available in Beta (pcgamesn.com)
Steam Play -- Valve's name for its cross-platform initiative -- is getting a major update, adding built-in tools that would allow users to run Windows games on Linux. It's now available in beta. From a report: The new tools run on Proton, which is custom distribution of the widely-used Wine compatibility tool. In the most practical terms, this means you can now download and install Windows games directly from the Steam client without any further fuss. Valve is currently checking "the entire Steam catalog" and whitelisting games that run without issue, but you can turn off those guidelines and install whatever you want, too.
Proton should provide enhanced performance over Wine in many cases, according to Valve. DirectX 11 and 12 implementations are now based on Vulkan, and performance in multi-threaded games "has been greatly improved compared to vanilla Wine." You'll also see better fullscreen and controller support with Proton. It's also fully open source.
Proton should provide enhanced performance over Wine in many cases, according to Valve. DirectX 11 and 12 implementations are now based on Vulkan, and performance in multi-threaded games "has been greatly improved compared to vanilla Wine." You'll also see better fullscreen and controller support with Proton. It's also fully open source.
Hopefully this doesn't give companies an excuse to ignore native Linux development.
How is a Wine app on a GTK+ system any less "native" than a Qt app on a GTK+ system? It's literally just a different set of userspace libraries.
I just think it's a thing of beauty what Valve has been doing for Linux gaming this past decade.
It seems that Apple has had a complicated relationship with Valve, with Apple previously rejecting their Steam Link app due to "business conflicts", etc. I wouldn't be surprised if this was more for business reasons than technical.
Some Linux diehards will say this is a backwards step because they think developers should make native games, and they worry that this will cause developers to get lazy and not bother building for anything but Windows.
But this is actually a good move by Valve. I've been tracking Linux games for a long time, and the rate of Linux game releases has flat-lined over the last two years. Initially Linux was gaining ground on Windows, in fact by mid-2016 Linux as a % of all games on Steam had reached the giddy height of 25.5% - there were 9000 Windows games and 2300 Linux games. Since then Linux has been losing ground again. The rate of new Linux games has been a virtually flat linear growth of ~100 new games a month. My conclusion from this is that the developers willing to make Linux releases are already doing so, and the rest aren't likely to. In contrast, Windows (and Mac) continued to show accelerating growth, pulling away again from Linux's linear growth. Some attribute this to the explosion of Windows gaming in China, and others attribute this to a boom in Windows shovelware. Regardless of the reason, only 20% of all games on Steam nowadays have a Linux version - next month we'll see the milestones of 5000 Linux games and 25,000 Windows games respectively
I believe Valve also noticed this trend two years ago and drew the same conclusion. I don't think it's a coincidence that all the Vulkan / Wine / DXVK work started then. It's a chicken-and-egg dilemma. They had already reached saturation in winning over developers to support Linux, and now they need to win more users. With more users will come another opportunity to win over more developers.
So yes, this is a good thing for Linux gaming.
Your clothes are a layer between your skin and people observing you.
A giraffe costume is a layer between your skin and people observing you.
Your clothes are made to fit you. They don't hide your shape or size, or make you look like something other than what you are. They are a natural fit to a human of your size and shape. They don't get in the way of using your hands and mouth, the interfaces you are designed to work with.
An giraffe costume isn't a natural fit for you, and it hides your actual size and shape. it gets in the way of using your hands and mouth naturally. It's awkward, and definitely not what you want to wear while running a race, because it slows you down.
Wine is a Windows costume for Linux, to make Linux look kinda like Windows. Rather than exposing the Linux interfaces in an organized, easy to use way as GTK does, it hides the Linux interfaces the same way a giraffe costume hides your mouth, and the result is muffled communication. GTK is designed for Linux, to fit properly on Linux, the same way your clothes are designed to fit properly on your body.
Games are literally the last bastion for Windows.... this is huge and Valve deserves our thanks.
Wine's gotten pretty good. Back in the day I used to use it to run Morrowind, but it was glitchy. Now it runs stuff like Skyrim, WoW and No Man's Sky flawlessly. You still have to check it on a case-by-case basis, but it seems like it's pretty solid.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You're comparing a set of libraries that (GTK/QT) that you install on a BSD/linux/whatever system
Wine is a set of libraries too: sudo apt install wine-development
which a natively compiled
Wine is also natively compiled for x86 and x86-64 architectures.
intended to be there
If it weren't "intended to be there", I don't see why it would be in the default repositories of major desktop X11/Linux distributions, ready for the administrator to install.
with an entire emulation layer that emulates / translates everything from a network stack
glib-networking
mouse/[...]/keyboard
GTK+ event handling
modem
NetworkManager
video
GDK, Cairo, GtkGLArea
and the list goes on
I'll gallop with you further if you want.