Linux Gaming

Gaming with Wine was decidedly far worse before Valve started pumping money into it. Back before Proton was officially announced, there was a silent acceleration in Wine compatibility, getting better a rate we weren't used to, and it's in large part due to Valve partnering with CodeWeavers.

Yeah, that's not necessarily the case. Did it kind of work? Sure, if you knew what you were doing. Was it at all the seamless experience that Proton is now? No.

What? I've exclusively used Linux since 2006 and gaming outside of retro emulation was absolute trash until proton. Of course WINE and code weavers were doing great work but it was overly complicated to use and the compatibility was abysmal.

You're correct in giving WINE the credit it's due.

But I couldn't disagree more with the "gaming with WINE was not that bad" statement.

It was horrible. Game updates broke compatibility a thousand times, outdated Wine wrappers were a mess, setting up most games involved convoluted scripts, and even when things magically just worked performance was usually lower (except for some specific CPU bound games).

The results were fine, but the work to get there was quite bad quite often.

UX polish is one of those things that just isn't as fun to do, and isn't as rewarding either. So pumping a bunch of money into it is going to go a long way towards making all the other hard work come out better.

I think their efforts are more for bringing gaming on Linux to more mainstream attention. Not knowing you can game on Linux is a major factor for a lot of people in not switching.

Not only that but they helped reach critical mass to drive adoption, and used their dominance in the industry to push studios to work with us, instead of against us.

Nice to see some comments like yours truly get it. The amount of people I've seen that now use Linux just because of Proton is surprising. It also gave us the Steam Deck. Valve do tons and people saying it's just "Wine patches" or moaning I didn't focus on Wine are missing the big picture that you get nicely :)

To add to that, back in the day you had to find out what engine a particular game used as there were huge compatibility issues with certain engines and others ran a fair amount slower via Wine. Some engines, however, ran incredibly well under Wine.

That said, there were some cool things you could do in Wine like define a pseudo monitor to run your game on. Example, back in 2010 (before widescreen monitors were more common) I had a triple head setup on Linux. I could specify in Wine an arbitrary monitor size (like say 2560x1024) and run games "full-screen" centered on my setup while having other windows open on the edges of my real desktop.

Even games that officially didn't support multiple monitors and on Windows (would force themselves to one screen and black out the other ones) ran well via Wine with this setup.

It was a bit involved to get working the first time though!

Played through the HL2 games, Supreme Commander, Rift: Planes of Telara, and even Wow that way (though WoW had other issues with non 4:3 displays).

You're massively simplifying it. Proton is a lot more than just "icing" on the top.

Are you kidding? Proton is much, much more than "icing on top".

You're right. So many people to thank here. One thing you cannot deny is that Valve is one of few companies that loves gaming on Linux and it deserves a huge credit.

The kickoff meeting for Vulkan was hosted by Valve. Like everything it’s not only Valve, but they had their fingers in this too. Valve is just one of the companies/groups that is pushing linux ports and vulkan support.

Valve is mostly moving interests of big game companies with steam machines and steam deck. Steam machines flopped, but initially they made companies consider ports. The success of steam deck will likely result into them paying more attention to not break wine/proton.

I feel like attributing this to Valve is really disrespectful to the folks who developed wine for decades

Honestly, it feels like comments like this are just intentionally missing the big picture, or just don't understand any of what Valve actually do.

It's been said by comments elsewhere, but Wine was really not good years ago. It was difficult to use, obscure as you had to seek it out and know what to do. Valve funded DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, various extra Wine patches and pushed it all together into Proton with Q&A testing, regular upgrades for big games to get them working ASAP and put it in front of millions easily directly in the Steam client.

and more recently also Vulkan

Which once again, Valve massively helped push and even hosted the early discussions on it.

It's a collaborative effort. The Wine and Vulkan projects have all done a lot and deserved credit for doing massive, amazing things. But for Linux gaming specifically, Proton has absolutely changed the landscape, and if Valve continues down this path, will make Linux an ever better gaming platform. So I don't think it's unfair to say thanks to Valve.

Not only have they sunk significant resource into making Linux gaming more viable, they've released Proton under BSD and seriously pushed developers to make Linux-compatible binaries. If Linux continues it's slow upward trend in popularity, Valve will be in large part to thank.

At least initially this was mostly DXVK though, which is a project that was secretly funded by Valve after it showed some promising initial results. Edit: but I agree that WINE deserves more credit.