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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.
Working well for me so far. Windows games are installing and running. Some people are just adding the path to their Windows Steam games in the Linux Steam client and find that Steam Play is running those games!
Hopefully this doesn't give companies an excuse to ignore native Linux development.
Not in that general of a sense, no. It is still Wine but now with significant resources invested in gaming-specific technologies.
And as a bonus, your apostrophes will work!
As one with a dedicated game machine that was never going to update to Windows 10, this is a very positive outcome.
A game box with Linux will be far more useful, and likely to be on more than a couple of times a week.
I just think it's a thing of beauty what Valve has been doing for Linux gaming this past decade.
Wine is a layer in the middle that adds some inefficiency, compatibility issues and bugs of its own.
How much more so than GTK+ as "a layer in the middle" between an application and Xlib?
The biggest issue with companies ignoring "native" Linux is they'll tend to stick with the tools for the platforms they target and they will tend towards the most modern APIs particularly for graphics where modern generally means faster and with more features.
How much of this issue goes away if a developer instructs quality control to treat Wine as a fully supported platform alongside Windows 7 and Windows 10? That's how BGB (Game Boy debugger), FCEUX (NES debugger), OpenMPT (sample based sequencer), and FamiTracker (chiptune sequencer) work: the developer ships Win32 binaries tested on both Windows and Wine.
All changes are upstreamed to the Wine project as they said in their FAQ, located here: https://store.steampowered.com... internally it's their packaged version with changes for Steam specific support but otherwise just Wine. Open source, and sources here: https://github.com/ValveSoftwa...
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 is a layer in the middle that adds some inefficiency, compatibility issues and bugs of its own.
How much more so than GTK+ as "a layer in the middle" between an application and Xlib?
Much more, for the reason that GTK+ is a layer that provides high-level functionnality (I want a button, I want a window, I want a drop list, etc.) to the application, while itself talking to a low level interface (mostly used for blitting and rectangles filling).
What wine is doing is taking a certain low-level API and reconverting everything into a completely different low-level API.
It would be like if you took that Xlib API, but instead talking to the Xlib library it self, you talk to a separate layer that takes in Xlib API and translates it into something that is displayed using openGL, running on SDL, so that it could be used on some weird gaming console, because that GTK+ application is compiled with a GTK version hard-coded in that isn't supporting OpenGL.
Could be entirely solved by having that application built with GTK supporting OpenGL as a render back-end, but it cannot be done, because you have zero control on it, thus you need a rube goldberg layer of pancackes of middle layers to get the application working.
Wine is that adaptation layer.
That's why it would be great if eventually one day developers started to target Linux too.
But until then, there's the chicken-and-egg problem of linux not being a popular gaming platform, thus not worth spending resources on from the developers point of view, and in turn never getting popular because there are no games on it.
Thus...
How much of this issue goes away if a developer instructs quality control to treat Wine as a fully supported platform alongside Windows 7 and Windows 10? That's how BGB (Game Boy debugger), FCEUX (NES debugger), OpenMPT (sample based sequencer), and FamiTracker (chiptune sequencer) work: the developer ships Win32 binaries tested on both Windows and Wine.
Yup, developers at least starting to give attention to wine is a good intermediate step.
That at least solves the "users won't pick up linux as a platform due to lack of games" part of the equation.
And who knows, maybe this will suddenly make steam-on-linux a popular platform (maybe because it could enable cheap linux "steambox" gaming consoles ?)
And once these "steambox" gaming console become popular enough to show on the radar of the devs, some will try putting effort into true native linux builds, eventually ?
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