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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.
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.
Wine is a layer in the middle that adds some inefficiency, compatibility issues and bugs of its own. Albeit not much - the Wine devs are pretty awesome to do what they do - but it's there.
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.
Wine is always playing catch-up with those APIs so there's a very good chance today's Windows game will be years before it's even half playable on Linux using Wine.
And as a bonus, your apostrophes will work!
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...