
With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux - bdefore
https://www.protondb.com
======
beilabs
I'm rather impressed with Proton.

I was using wine quite obsessively well over a decade ago, wine tricks,
fiddling with settings for one game, change them for another. Proton removed
all of that for me.

I'm not at the forefront of gaming, though i have a nice card, CPU and a heap
of RAM (Perks of the job.

Skyrim is my jam lately, I'm spending an insane amount of time in game at
ultra settings. Played some Batman - Arkham Asylum, also a windows game, both
run well. I'm happy!

~~~
wjoe
Wine was already mostly at that point a couple of years ago. It used to
involve a lot of manual fiddling, but in the later days of DX9, the majority
of games worked out of the box.

DX11 is where things went wrong again, and mainline Wine has been quite slow
to implement DX10+ features. There have been some great projects like DXVK
which have made DX11 games playable in Wine, as well as a lot of work going on
in different branches and patches of Wine to improve certain functionality.
Fortunately Proton brings all of these together, and has all of this
configuration dealt with for you.

After a period of stagnation and not being able to play any games released in
the last few years, we're back to the point where brand new AAA games can run
with Wine/Proton with solid framerates - I was very surprised to see Monster
Hunter World running well in Proton within a few days of release.

DRM and anti-cheat remains the biggest blocker though. Some Denuvo games run,
but many don't. Anything using BattlEye or Easy Anti-Cheat won't work, or if
you're lucky, the anti-cheat might let you in, but then ban you for a false
positive. I hope these can be solved at some point, but the nature of Wine
works and how anti-cheat identifies tampering means they'll probably never
play nice together.

~~~
ben_jones
I heard reports of some Overwatch players getting banned for using
wine/proton. Just a heads up if anyone tries to run Blizzard/Activision games
with these tools.

~~~
c487bd62
No, it was just a mistake. Blizzard said in their own official forums that
Linux (or Mac) users will not be banned for using Wine or Proton.

[https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/can-we-get-
ban...](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/can-we-get-banned-for-
playing-on-linux/70929/4)

[https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/9g111m/blizza...](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/9g111m/blizzard_removes_bans_of_linux_overwatch_players/)

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blizzard...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blizzard-
Banning-DXVK-Wine)

> UPDATE - 14 Sep 08:03: Blizzard is investigating and they will be looking to
> overturn the bans if this is indeed the case. There appears to be at least
> five reports of bans so far and does indeed seem that the most likely
> explanation is a false-positive from Blizzard's anti-cheat technology having
> issue with DXVK.

~~~
shittyadmin
It's interesting because an emulation layer like that being present definitely
would make cheating easier. I'd imagine a few clever modifications to DXVK
itself would be all that's necessary to implement a wallhack or similar.

~~~
jrockway
I am guessing that they look for cheating based on actions in addition to
scanning the memory looking for known cheats. Aimbots are pretty recognizable
to experienced players, and no doubt some machine learning is going on to look
for those patterns. This lets them stay ahead of the curve on exploits... if
it looks like an aimbot, it doesn't matter that it's some new binary they
haven't yet heard of.

~~~
Insanity
For some reason it never occurred to me that they'd use ML for detecting
suspicious behaviour, until I read your comment.

I've never considered this but it makes perfect sense, thanks for that!

~~~
hatsunearu
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc)

Watch this! It's about using ML to catch cheaters.

I searched youtube to show you this video; I used the search term "cs go
machine learning". The first video was actually this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w88RIcTuGZQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w88RIcTuGZQ)

Looks like it's using ML to make better aimbots--lol!

------
AdmiralAsshat
I enabled it on my Fedora laptop and tried a handful of games. About half a
dozen of them bombed out immediately. So, very glad to see improvement, but
we're still a ways off from being able to chuck my last Windows 7 machine.

I find myself more often just biting the bullet and re-buying some old
classics when they get "Enhanced" editions (ala Baldur's Gate, Planescape
Torment, etc)--even though I still have the original CD's kicking around--just
so I get native Linux support.

~~~
Double_a_92
With very old games you might have problems on windows too...

~~~
aaronmdjones
I still occasionally play Malkari, a 1999 4X space game written for DirectX 5.
It doesn't work on anything but Win9x, so I have a VM for it. On Win2K/XP it
will just draw a half purple screen, even in compatibility mode.

Even then... Windows 98 doesn't work under VirtualBox, unless you run the VM
with the Legacy paravirtualisation interface, and with the ICH AC97 audio
card, which Windows 98 doesn't have drivers for ... nor does it have drivers
for VirtualBox' VGA adapter.

Those problems are easily worked around, of course, but one day, either
VirtualBox will drop its Legacy emulation code, or SciTech Display Doctor will
stop working with VirtualBox' VGA adapter, or the sound won't work anymore,
...

I'm one glitch away from being unable to play a game I really like, and bought
as a teenager...

~~~
vanderZwan
> _Those problems are easily worked around, of course_

Ehm... I think you learned to work around these issues so gradually that you
don't realize how complicated the mess that you've solved is

~~~
aaronmdjones
It's not particularly complicated, just extremely fragile.

Only the Legacy VirtualBox paravirtualisation interface provides all of the
BIOS interrupts and glue code that the Windows 98 installer requires. The
Sound Blaster 16 audio card will work out of the box in Windows 98, but
VirtualBox itself has trouble copying the virtual audio out onto the host,
playing only 3 seconds of the audio at a time and skipping a little;
eventually it crashes. So, use the ICH AC97 audio card instead, but then you
need to find drivers for it.

As for the VGA adapter, that used to work out of the box (once you installed
the VirtualBox Guest Additions), but the additions' support for Windows 98 was
dropped a long time ago, so that's no longer an option either.

Put simply, you need the Legacy interface to run the installer, SciTech
Display Doctor for the VGA card (which is now free), and Realtek AC97 Win9x
audio drivers (which you can find very easily).

Then it all just works... for now.

------
z3t4
We bought a Windows computer so the kids could play some old classics. Not a
single game worked on Windows 10, not even in compatibility mode. But most of
them worked in Linux/Wine ...

~~~
neilsimp1
DOSBox? ScummVM? Depending one what age you're talking, those games should
work fine on either OS really.

~~~
dwyerm
Yes, but... that's actually the product that Steam (and GOG) is selling you:
The ability to just click 'launch' on a game and it knows what collection of
DOSBox, Scumm, Wine, Frotz, WinUAE, _whatever_ is needed to just launch the
game.

Trying to get a Windows game running under Linux is an adventure in itself.
This opens up the door for people who don't like those kinds of adventure
games.

------
CodeArtisan
If the user has played more on Proton than on Windows in the first two weeks,
it will count as a linux sale, not a Windows sale.

~~~
BeefySwain
Do you have a source for this?

~~~
tokai
>Update #1: I spoke to Valve earlier, about how buying Windows games to play
with this system counts, they said this:

>Hey Liam, the normal algorithm is in effect, so if at the end of the two
weeks you have more playtime on Linux, it'll be a Linux sale. Proton counts as
Linux.

[https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/valve-officially-
conf...](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/valve-officially-confirm-a-
new-version-of-steam-play-which-includes-a-modified-version-of-wine.12400)

------
Waterluvian
Admittedly rather reductionist, but I'd love it if there was some single
number representing how close to Windows performance each title gets. The main
issue I have is that I'm not about to bother with any titles when I
consistently find that titles "work" but don't really work well enough.

~~~
fabricexpert
it's at the bottom

Current Game Rating Distribution Tier Rated Highest Report Highest Report (But
Pending) Platinum 286 2356 1467 Gold 372 399 232 Silver 319 472 367 Bronze 178
195 158 Borked 245 1162 960

each game has this rating in winedb

~~~
Hello71

      ╔══════════╦═══════╦════════════════╦══════════════════════════════╗
      ║   Tier   ║ Rated ║ Highest Report ║ Highest Report (But Pending) ║
      ╠══════════╬═══════╬════════════════╬══════════════════════════════╣
      ║ Platinum ║   286 ║           2356 ║                         1467 ║
      ║ Gold     ║   372 ║            399 ║                          232 ║
      ║ Silver   ║   319 ║            472 ║                          367 ║
      ║ Bronze   ║   178 ║            195 ║                          158 ║
      ║ Borked   ║   245 ║           1162 ║                          960 ║
      ╚══════════╩═══════╩════════════════╩══════════════════════════════╝

~~~
ByThyGrace
Nice, it's been quite a while since I've seen such tidy use of ASCII in a
forum message.

~~~
zeptomu
Nit-picky, but these are Unicode box-drawing characters which are not part of
ASCII: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-
drawing_character](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_character)

~~~
xtracto
I think they actually fall under extended ASCII:

[https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/E/extended_ASCII.html](https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/E/extended_ASCII.html)

~~~
deathanatos
It's… complicated.

> _The use of the term [extended ASCII] is sometimes criticized, because it
> can be mistakenly interpreted to mean that the ASCII standard has been
> updated to include more than 128 characters or that the term unambiguously
> identifies a single encoding, neither of which is the case._

— Wikipedia[1]

I would agree w/ Wikipedia here: the term is ambiguous at best, and misleading
at worst.

Hacker News delivers its pages in UTF-8, so saying they're part of the box
drawing characters in Unicode is not incorrect. Nor is the statement that
they're not part of ASCII: they're not.

That said, the box drawing characters exist in Unicode, I would guess, largely
because the IBM PC included those characters in the numerous character sets it
used. Particularly, in North America, it used the character set known today as
"Code page 437"[2]; other regions had other character sets w/ similar names,
and they usually had at least some (though not always all) of the box drawing
characters. IDK if the PC itself included them because some predecessor had
them, but it wouldn't particularly surprise me if that was the case; the Atari
and the Commodore had similar characters, though not exactly the same set. And
again, they might have had them b/c of a predecessor; for all I know it's
turtles all the way back to the first person who drew a table on a clay tablet
:-)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_ASCII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_ASCII)
[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437)

~~~
Mountain_Skies
In the BBS world we added some color and called it ANSI Art.

------
jandrese
Personal anecdote: Since SteamPlay dropped I have not rebooted into Windows
once. I've been pretty impressed at its ability to handle the games in my
catalog. That said I'm pretty sure I've just been lucky thus far.

The only problem I have is when a game has a broken Linux port there doesn't
appear to be a way to tell Steam to use the Windows version instead. An
example of this is Eador, which has horrible graphics problems and is
effectively unplayable on Linux due to it being a very slipshod port. I'm
willing to bet that using SteamPlay on the Windows version would work much
better if Valve would give me the option.

~~~
atomc19
they do give you the option to use Steam Play over native Linux client. Under
the steam play menu in the preferences, select 'enable for all titles' along
with 'use this tool instead of game-specific selections'.

~~~
jandrese
Doesn't seem to work for Eador. Even with both of those options checked it
installs the Linux version and doesn't seem to have an option for anything
else. I was hoping there would be a dropdown by the install button asking
which version I wanted, but it was just a regular install button and it gave
me the broken Linux version.

------
briffle
If steam spends some time working with the larger "anti-cheat" vendors, I
think they could really bump up the list. Many of the 'borked' games use anti-
cheat, like battle-eye.

~~~
Klathmon
I'd much rather those games just become unplayable.

I've had so much trouble with anti-cheat systems that I will now refuse to buy
or play any game that uses easyanticheat or battleye. I don't care how much it
costs, how many of my friends are playing it, I'm not giving another penny to
any company that uses those programs.

I get that it's not an easy problem to solve, but i'm so goddamn tired of
having to shut down services dedicated to controlling fan speeds in my
machine, having to disable network adapters, uninstall vpn software (not just
turn it off, uninstall it), and wasting hours trying to figure out why it
would crash on startup only to find that it was finding a pcap.dll in a random
folder in my downloads from when I was messing with some traffic sniffing
stuff on this system like a year before that, and it decided to crash without
any warning or error...

Cheaters suck in games, and they can ruin it for many others, but there has to
be another way other than forcing your paying users to jump through this many
hoops. And if there isn't, then i'm happy to be doomed to playing against/with
hackers and cheaters rather than not being able to play at all.

And I know it's kind of co opting the purpose of Proton, but if they refused
to accommodate these anti-cheat systems, then maybe either the game developer
or the anti-cheat vendor themselves will see some of the potential paying
customers they are excluding and will significantly retool their systems to
work.

~~~
otakucode
There is another way. Statistical analysis on game performance. No one is 3
standard deviations above the mean in terms of their skill. So ban anyone who
hits that. Cutting that off leaves cheaters that are cheating just to be as
good as pretty good players, but it keeps them defeatable.

~~~
dragonwriter
> There is another way. Statistical analysis on game performance. No one is 3
> standard deviations above the mean in terms of their skill.

Assuming normal distribution, 0.1% should be; with top games reaching 1+
million active players, that'd be on the order of 1,000+ players.

And if you start banning people for being too good with no other evidence of
cheating, you'll drive of the people who would likely be your most avid non-
cheating players.

~~~
duskwuff
And I'm not sure the assumption of a normal distribution is even correct.
Players will naturally get better at a game the more they play it. Most
measures of skill available to a game will end up picking this up more
strongly than anything else. The end result would be automatically banning
anyone who has been playing the game for too long -- this would be _terrible_
for retention...

------
cuddlecake
Two days ago, I read an article on why kids should not interact with screens
too much in their early life and I reflected on how that affected me.

I also found that I have no fun in playing games lately. It feels like a
chore, a heroin-like distraction, an addiction basically.

So yesterday I decided to ditch my PC in favor of my Linux-only GPU-lacking
work notebook.

And now this.

Me 0:1 Irony

~~~
aerovistae
I feel the same way but I can’t stop. When I do other things I get bored and
find myself thinking about video games. It’s pretty frustrating. I feel pretty
shitty about it.

~~~
cuddlecake
Same. I just kind of reached the climax of boredom in gaming. To be fair, I
mainly played CS:GO, LoL, and WoW. Basically games where I could also watch
YouTube videos or do other stuff during downtimes in-game (such as death,
queueing, wipes)

I am quite safe with still having a gmaing console, since they are much more
immersive in a sense that distractions will actually hinder the enjoyment. If
I can only either do something productive or play a game, I usually try to be
productive.

What's your poison?

------
shmerl
I'm not using Proton, but using regular Wine+dxvk (for DX11 games).

dxvk[1] is an amazing project (it's translating D3D11 → Vulkan). With Vulkan
finally landing VK_EXT_transform_feedback[2] and Wine and dxvk using it (Mesa
has it in master for radv, and there are patches for anv; Nvidia blob has it
in beta), games like The Witcher 3 can be played on Linux perfectly, without
graphics distortions.

1\. [https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk](https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk)

2\. [http://jason-blog.jlekstrand.net/2018/10/transform-
feedback-...](http://jason-blog.jlekstrand.net/2018/10/transform-feedback-is-
terrible-so-why.html)

------
azernik
A note for people who want to go faster than Steam/Proton certification - in
Steam settings you can turn on Proton for _all_ Windows games, not just the
ones that are certified by Valve. So far I haven't run into any problems
running non-certified Windows games under Proton.

------
seanhunter
In my quick test it seems it depends enormously on the quality of Linux
support for your graphics card. If you have a graphics card that DXVK works
for then you are in business. Otherwise, not so much.

~~~
bdefore
Right. It's important to have up to date drivers. ProtonDB receives many
reports with outdated ones (those are colored in red and not counted toward
the aggregate rating)

[https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Requirements](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Requirements)

------
foxhop
I've been out of the WINE scene for a long time, is Steam submitting patches
to the upstream project?

~~~
wjoe
Yes, for the most part. All of their work on Proton (their fork of Wine) is
open source, they're working with Codeweavers (the largest contributors to
Wine) closely, and contributing as much as they can back to upstream Wine.

Part of what makes SteamPlay work so well is actually outside of Wine though -
a lone developer started a project called DXVK a year or so ago, which is a
separate translation layer for converting DX11 to Vulkan, and runs alongside
Wine. Valve hired this developer and sponsored a few similar projects, and
integrated them into SteamPlay.

It also seems like Wine is slow and quite opinionated on merging in changes.
For a while now, most people who used Wine for gaming would use forks and
patches to improve performance. Some of it got merged into upstream Wine
eventually, some things get rejected as it works differently to the usual Wine
way of doing things. So Steam has used some of these patches and their own
work for Proton, but some of it may not be suitable to be merged into mainline
Wine.

------
djhworld
Is anyone running this setup? The last time I used WINE was probably 12 or so
years ago and I always got the impression it was a slow "it will do for now"
experience

Has it come on leaps and bounds since then?

~~~
criddell
Why not just dual boot to Windows? It's going to be a better experience.

~~~
melling
Hasn't the 2 decades old goal been to be able to run Linux without the need
for owning Windows? Windows is still 89% of the desktop market. A free
alternative is still a worthy goal.

~~~
criddell
I wouldn't choose Windows Home for Ruby on Rails development for the same
reason that I wouldn't choose CentOS for gaming.

------
f4stjack
This is actually mind blowing. Because in the last six months (I think) there
are more developments in this front compared to last six years. Sure, there
are little warts and niggles as of now but with this development speed I think
we'll have a proper linux systems which can play non-linux games with
negligible performance loss.

In addition to proton and steam play one has to add Lutris as well. It makes
the emulation of games in wine really easy.

------
amingilani
If you're having trouble reading this on mobile, the Chrome Simplified Reading
View will help.

Visit `chrome://flags` and set Reader Mode Triggering to Always. The prompt is
a minor inconvenience but I use it so much.

------
btreecat
Something interesting to me is how many people are using either Debian family
or Arch family of distros.

Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint are over half, and Arch & gang are about a 1/4

~~~
bdefore
Some context may be helpful, but the short of it is that I wouldn't look too
far into those numbers.

1\. Officially, Proton is only supported on Ubuntu. It doesn't stop you from
trying though and many Arch-based OS reports are just as successful. 2\.
Reports people submit includes pasting Steam system info, which for some Arch
installations reports as 'Linux 4.x' unless they install additional an
additional library.

If you're feeling generous, count the 'Unknown' category as Arch-based.

------
nyghtly
I've recently converted my primary operating system to linux and--although
Proton is very good--I still find myself unable to unlatch from Windows. My
solution was to install Windows 7 on a separate hard drive for those games
that are still unplayable. Among those games are Final Fantasy X/X-2
Remastered and The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth. Although I'd
like to kick Windows to the curb for good, it's hard to believe that some
legacy titles (like BfME) with nontrivial minimum specs will ever run on
linux.

My other big concern with SteamPlay in particular is save game compatibility.
It depends on the game, but a lot of the time your save games just won't be
compatible across operating systems, which is quite a difficult problem to
solve.

~~~
loa-in-backup
I wonder what ever would make savegames incompatible between systems.
Endianness? That should be handled by wine. Different path separator? I would
think it's up to wine as well. So... unreported bugs in wine, or is there
something fundamentally different about game state?

~~~
nyghtly
I'm guessing most saves--besides some really old games--are probably fine on a
fundamental level. But even if a save technically works, the effort it takes
to find that save in your old windows filesystem, then place it in the new
location in your linux filesystem is actual quite substantial, especially when
you imagine doing that for an entire catalog of games that you've played over
the years. And if you're relying on steam cloud saves to keep track of it then
you can expect to lose the saves for many of your games when changing OS. If
you're looking to retain saves, its far from a simple migration. Which is
another reason why I have trouble making the switch entirely.

~~~
gpderetta
That reminds me: a few years ago I got bored of playing Skyrim on my Xbox 360
and I wanted to play with mods on the PC. I didn't want to build a new
character, but turns out that there are tools to extract Skyrim save games
from the Xbox and are perfectly compatible with the PC version. In fact, not
having a Windows installation at home I managed to play them with Skyrim on
wine under linux. Everything worked pretty much flawlessly, mods included.

------
nuguy
As soon as cs:go worked on Linux, I uninstalled windows. I never looked back.

------
edoo
I wonder if we can get Steve Carell to do a "Goodbye Windows" song.

Been dual booting for many years now only for steam.

------
esotericn
I've been using GPU passthrough for Windows gaming on and off for a while now.

I think it's fundamentally a better solution. edit: (for desktops).

Why is it better than dual booting? Well, it's faster, and you can use
whatever backing store you like (e.g. ZFS volumes for snapshots, LUKS
encryption, ...), run services in the background, etc.

Why is it better than WINE? Far more compatible. Setting it up can be a
hassle, but once you get it working it's (as far as I can tell) identical to a
native boot. Better sandboxing (VM's aren't perfect and GPU passthrough likely
introduces more holes, but that's better than running proprietary code on your
main system).

That said, it's a power user thing and probably always will be. But then,
isn't that the PC gaming market anyway?

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Why is it better than dual booting? Well, it 's faster, and you can use
> whatever backing store you like (e.g. ZFS volumes for snapshots, LUKS
> encryption, ...), run services in the background, etc._

Any way to avoid dual-booting is also good because if you do your work on
Linux, you don't lose state. After a day of work, I sometimes want to play
games, and I like it when I don't have to shut down my editor and the image of
the program I am working on. In fact, having to reboot is a quite effective
deterrent for me.

~~~
Hello71
Hibernation?

~~~
esotericn
Not really viable if you want services running in the background.

Passthrough allows me to have one beefy machine that does everything. It's
just another VM.

That said, I game very rarely anyway, but sometimes you just want to blow
things up, y'know?

------
danschumann
Sweet.. haven't checked the list in a while.

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
I see Skyrim, right at the top. And New Vegas. Wow. Any chance Valve could
offer this support for Mac as well?

~~~
m_eiman
As soon as someone makes them a DXMT to use instead of DXVK, I suppose. Isn't
there some Rust project working on that..?

~~~
diesal11
There's a VKMT. So they could double up and go DXVK -> VKMT.

------
nullifidian
Microsoft can sue them in the same way Oracle sued Google, and win, right?
Because you can't reimplement the Windows APIs without the reimplementation
containing 'derivative work', I think.

~~~
CodeArtisan
Microsoft did the same with Linux

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux)

~~~
nullifidian
Will the court consider it? I understand that suing Valve would be
hypocritical for Microsoft, but, I think, legally speaking it's a separate
issue. Will the Linux Foundation file a retaliatory counter suit against
Microsoft because of its attack on Valve? I doubt it.

~~~
shmerl
After buying Github, it will be a pretty shortsighted move for MS to do it.
Everyone remembers their position on API copyrightability in Oracle vs Google
case. It's the reason many projects left Github after they bought it. If MS
will attack projects like Wine based on that junk, a lot more will ditch
Github for good.

~~~
nullifidian
The issue here is that games and commercial productivity software are the two
main reasons people(power users) still use Windows. If Proton/wine begin to
seriously threaten the market share of Windows (say loss of 5-10%), they'll
have to do it, I think.

~~~
shmerl
They'll lose gaming lock-in, that's already inevitable. Their only remaining
leverage now is Xbox, and even there translation layers can undermine their
API lock-in grip.

However attacking FOSS projects using such copyright trolling will backfire
and very strongly. In doing that, MS will admit their hypocrisy and all this
"MS has changed" will be proven completely wrong.

I'm not saying it's not possible for them to do such attack. But it will
basically completely ruin the image they are trying to build now.

------
tomc1985
Just noticed Deus Ex: Human Revolution on that list. I'm pretty sure there's a
native linux port for that one already out, I was playing it about a year ago.

(Unless that was proton and I didn't know it?)

~~~
cosarara
There's a port for deus ex: mankind divided. HR has not been ported AFAIK.

------
syntaxing
Hmm title is confusing. Maybe changing to the original post title will be
better?

That being said, I wish I can run CAD like fusion 360 on Linux. Anyone know of
any way to make this happen?

~~~
jstanley
I use FreeCAD. It is sometimes annoying, but much better than any alternative
I've tried.

For more programmatic CAD, OpenSCAD is also good.

~~~
syntaxing
I use FreeCAD and OpenSCAD (especially "automated" file generation) and like
what they stand for but unfortunately neither really compares to a standard
CAD program. Maybe I'm too used to the big three CAD software.

------
arcosdev
Can they make this work for the Adobe Creative Suite too?

~~~
c487bd62
Maybe this could work for you? [https://github.com/corbindavenport/creative-
cloud-linux](https://github.com/corbindavenport/creative-cloud-linux)

I suggest making your own script instead of using PoL (abandoned, check
Phoenicis).

------
88e282102ae2e5b
I've been happy just dual-booting Windows and Linux. Windows 10 is free as
long as you don't care about personalizing it, which I definitely don't, since
it's just for games. I look forward to having a Linux-only machine but I'm not
in any hurry.

~~~
gnulinux
It's not about money though, at least for me. I can afford Win 10 just fine,
and would also be paying for archlinux and/or Debian if they actually cost
anything. But here I am using a free-as-in-beer OS because of other factors.
If all games could run in my OS things would just be more practical,
regardless of their cost.

------
andrepd
How does this compare with PlayOnLinux? It seems to be a very similar concept:
coordinate Wine+other tools, package configurations and game-specific tweaks
in a script that can be one-click ran by users, aggregate user reports on
compatibility. What's new?

~~~
c487bd62
[https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...](https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1696055855739350561)

------
candeira
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I still can't play Windows-only HL2 mods.

~~~
candeira
Oh, I had missed a step in the configuration. I can now announce that Windows-
only HL2 mods play beautifully. _Minerva_ rocks.

------
tofflos
> The Linux desktop experience has improved by leaps and bounds in the last
> year or two.

Does anyone know which improvements they are referring to?

~~~
jplayer01
Not sure what he means tbh. The Linux desktop has been improving steadily for
years. It's in a good spot now, Proton makes it even more viable, but it's
still not perfect. I'd say the biggest barrier is if you require Windows-only
programs that don't work with Wine (of which there are a lot).

------
ivankelly
It's at the point now where the intro logos and stuff for games take longer
than a reboot, so now I just reboot into windows.

------
paulhilbert
Too bad Linux still has no proper mouse support... I would be glad if even the
games that are Linux native would be playable...

------
Paraesthetic
Is this an advert for Proton? Why would you not just use windows 10, the
platform that games were made to work on.

------
bischofs
PC gaming is a struggle for me as of now, I have an older rig which I would
love to update but simply cant justify the cost. It is pretty frustrating when
my friends xbox can run 4k games but the only GPU that is comparable is north
of 500$.

The ML and crypto hysteria as well as AMD not willing to compete is not
healthy for the long term PC gaming industry. It is certainly keeping me out
of it.

~~~
wishinghand
Most PC gamers don’t play in 4K and 30 frames per second, much less 60 fps.
That’s graphically taxing for many contemporary games, especially if other
graphical quality is turned up.

The consoles also typically don’t run at full resolution. In the 1080p era, I
recall many games topping out at 900p. It was a great source of pc gamer
smugness due to the fact most of them could easily run 1080p and 45+ fps. I
suspect modern console 4K is the same.

Since the generally accepted fps for consoles is 30, and that’s pretty low, it
means developers can either compromise on resolution or other things like how
many entities can be on screen at once, or how large open areas can be. I
suspect catering to console audiences is why a lot of the last ten years some
games feel either empty or constrained in scope.

~~~
izacus
> The consoles also typically don’t run at full resolution. In the 1080p era,
> I recall many games topping out at 900p. It was a great source of pc gamer
> smugness due to the fact most of them could easily run 1080p and 45+ fps. I
> suspect modern console 4K is the same.

Consoles tend to do dynamic resolution - they'll drive the display at 4K
(together with UI), but the actual rendering resolution will drop and adapt to
the load. It actually looks pretty good - the UI and text keeps being sharp
while you generally don't notice the resolution drop that much. Unfortunately
most games lose this capability on PC, so you're stuck with blurry looking
text if you have a good monitor or TV :(

The other trick they do is checkerboard rendering - the console only renders
approximately half the scene each frame. The partially rendered frame is then
combined with the previous one with added filtering. The result is not unlike
the interlaced CRT TV rendering of 80s era consoles/micros - just with better
filtering. Again, this capability tends to disappear on PC versions of those
games.

Lack of those two things means that in a lot of cases games on PC look/run
worse on equivalent hardware than they do on the console :/

~~~
mikewhy
Some newer first-party Microsoft games have dynamic resolution scaling in the
PC versions. I thought Battlefield One / 5 had it, but apparently not.

It works well in Forza Horizon 4. And yeah, I wouldn't mind the option for
checkerboard rendering on PC. I understand purists want nothing to do with it,
but hey, too many options is what PC is all about.

------
pathseeker
So does anyone have a good recommendation for a gaming laptop that is good
with linux?

~~~
ivankelly
Consider getting a laptop with TB3 and using an eGPU. I don't know how eGPUs
work with linux though.

------
russianbandit
Any Mac love on this?

~~~
c487bd62
[https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...](https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1696055855739350561)

Q: Any plans for macOS support?

While Wine and Proton work on macOS, there are no plans to support the new
Steam Play functionality on macOS at the moment.

\--------------------

[https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/28/why-macos-
mojave-...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/28/why-macos-mojave-
requires-metal----and-deprecates-opengl)

[https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK](https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK)

------
then
So...WINE with 'fancy' UI design?

------
stevefan1999
Isn't this just WineHQ but for games?

------
nurino
Can you install and run this without Steam?

I already use wine-d3d9 which is very good for WoW but as its name says it
doesn't run DX11/12 games.

~~~
shmerl
You don't need Proton without Steam (since it has various Steam specific
stuff), but yes, you can.

See here for example:
[https://www.gog.com/forum/general/adamhms_linux_wine_wrapper...](https://www.gog.com/forum/general/adamhms_linux_wine_wrappers_news_faq_discussion)

However, you can simply use upstream Wine with add-ons like dxvk[1] (which is
used in Proton).

Using esync[2] (also utilized by Proton) requires special branch of Wine,
since it's not going to be upstreamed and it's not as simple as installing dll
overrides.

1\. [https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk](https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk)

2\. [https://github.com/zfigura/wine/blob/esync-
rebased/README.es...](https://github.com/zfigura/wine/blob/esync-
rebased/README.esync)

------
loxs
So it's just wine under the hood, so "working" is not exactly true?

~~~
bpicolo
Wine is a big part of it, but there's a bit more to it.

[https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton)

~~~
lostgame
That is, um, incredibly not clear, _based on the link you shared._

'Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are
exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system. It uses Wine to
facilitate this.'

Even reading down the article to look for more details provides information
about building the product, but as far as I can see no other significant
details about it's underlying technology.

There may be other articles or posts that go over this more, but your link
provided no useful or helpful information that I could see in two brief read-
overs.

~~~
derimagia
The Github Readme says to consult the blog post for more info:
[https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...](https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1696055855739350561)

For your question, look under "Q: What is Proton exactly? How does it differ
from normal Wine? Who worked on it?"

~~~
lostgame
Okay, so, in the future, it may be nice to post a link to the blog post,
instead of trying to back up your point with something that requires digging
to get to.

I appreciate the attempt to clarify, but it's nice to make sure the
clarification actually makes things make more sense.

~~~
wild_preference
Yikes, that is some ridiculous condescension I think we can do without in the
future as well, if the wishlist is still open.

Also, if you're factually wrong about something, nobody owes you research even
though it would be nice. You're still wrong even if you can't be bothered to
click a few links, so it's a weird complaint. They didn't just have a "point";
they were right.

Finally, lighten up. It's just gaming-related chit chat. Nobody here is paid
to use their free time to write comments on HN or to give you better links.

------
lostgame
Kinda disappointed this seems to be yet another WINE wrapper with some extra
stuff piled on, though I'm not sure what else I could've expected it to be.

I long ago lost interest in PC gaming, both from the lack of cross-platform
compatibility, and due to the fact that a great graphics card alone easily
costs as much as a console these days.

I've never played a WINE-wrapped video game or application that did not feel
like a half-baked version of it's native application. It's usually things like
fonts and strange aliasing that are a complete and dead giveaway. Small
aesthetic issues like that completely ruin an otherwise immersive experience
for me.

I'm glad WINE exists, but I honestly sort of wish they'd just stick to
supporting applications more, and pretty much just forget the gaming side.
It's never going to get to an equivalent level, because Windows' gaming
technology keeps moving forward.

Two people start running a race. One of them starts when the gun fires. The
other one sits and waits, decides it wants to follow the first runner every
step of the way, and starts several minutes (or years, in this metaphor)
behind the first.

Even if this second runner (WINE) could run as fast as the first (Windows), it
would never catch up. And that's assuming it could run as fast as a multi-
billion-dollar company.

WINE can, simply, _never_ reach a point of compatibility that even most major
console emulators have. Because, unlike consoles, Windows keeps on moving.

Let's face it. None of us are running *nix or MacOS for the sake of gaming. If
you want to run a desktop OS for gaming, there is one. Yes, it's not free, but
neither are games. Windows is, at this point, just part of the initial cost of
PC gaming, just like a couple extra controllers might be for a console.

~~~
skohan
AFAIK the main value-add for Proton is DXVK, which gives DirectX games
incredibly low-overhead access to the linux Vulkan driver. Dramatically
improved performance is more than just "another WINE wrapper with some extra
stuff piled on".

And Proton's not the end-game: it's a solution to the chicken-and-egg problem.
Most people (like yourself) don't see Linux as a viable gaming platform
largely because of the lack of games available, and therefore developers don't
invest in Linux support, and thus there continue to be few games available for
the platform. The promise of Proton is to make Linux good-enough for some
gamers, thus increasing the Linux player-base, making Linux a viable target
for 1st party titles.

> It's never going to get to an equivalent level, because Windows' gaming
> technology keeps moving forward.

That's not really accurate, and hasn't been for some time. For years OpenGL
has been on-par with DX in terms of what it can do for some time and the story
has only gotten better with Vulkan. Just look at Doom 2016: it was a high-
profile AAA game built entirely on an open-source graphics stack (OpenGL and
Vulkan) and it was one of the best-looking, best-optimized titles of the year.
The main "edge" Microsoft has in terms of being able to bring the best games
to its platform has nothing to do with a technical advantage: it has
everything to do with industry momentum and incentivizing studios and industry
professionals to use their proprietary technologies.

~~~
lostgame
Thank you for being explicit about what exactly they've done to significantly
improve this.

I had not understood that there was access to Vulkan, that does obviously
significantly affect performance.

There was another poster here who attempted to elaborate and ended up posting
something that absolutely did not.

Vulkan is good, but it doesn't affect _compatibility_ , just performance. I
just don't care about the performance if compatibility is not even at least
close to 90%. I need to run _all_ of my applications and games, not a select
few of them that run great.

~~~
RussianCow
> I just don't care about the performance if compatibility is not even at
> least close to 90%. I need to run _all_ of my applications and games, not a
> select few of them that run great.

On Linux, I can now successfully (i.e. with decent performance and no critical
bugs) run about two thirds of the "active" (played at least once in the past
two years) games in my library. I originally had the same opinion as you—that
this doesn't matter if I still have to dual-boot Windows—but what I've found
in practice is that I haven't booted into Windows in months, and have simply
stopped playing games that don't run on Linux. YMMV, but I would bet that a
lot of Linux users would be perfectly happy with even half their games running
well on Linux, so I don't think compatibility is all-or-nothing like you're
implying.

