If you've played Windows games on Linux via Steam, that was using what Valve calls Proton. Proton is just a gaming-specific modified version of WINE (which stands for WINE Is Not an Emulator), a compatability layer that translates Windows API calls into Linux-native API calls, enabling Windows applications to run like native on Linux. It's far from perfect, because the Windows API is of course proprietary, meaning that they depend heavily upon reverse engineering, but it's improving all the time and a remarkable number of applications run at least reasonably well via WINE.
There's an option in steams settings to "enable steam play for all other titles" in the compatibility tab. If you turn it on you can play the majority of windows games on linux.
i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations
I do. They drive the very economic system that allows them to exist (capitalism) and they buy up all the political power so they can steal the wealth of the citizens and establish new forms of wage slavery on those same citizens.
My wife formed a small business corporation, to protect our liability and separate our home from her business. My wife is not evil. She is nicer than 99% of people I know.
yea more so talking about the corporations that dont let their minimum wage workers take a fucking pisd break, or the ones that steal water from communities for example, my guy
OK - Noted, and agree. There are Evil Corporations run by Evil People. But it is the People who run the evil corporations that are evil. The Evil people running the corporations that only care about profit. The guys that ran Enron at the expense of all those employees that lost everything, or the CEO of Boeing letting people die in his planes for another dollar of Shareholder profit. The corporation itself is really just a piece of paper, imho.
Why not? They are huge cloud service providers and definitely need a lot of Linux servers.
And if you pay enough membership fee, you can even be a Platinum member.
Corporations are beholden to their investors/stockholders, so it is morally wrong of them not to maximize profits by any means necessary. However, this leads to a Catch 22, since it is also morally wrong to maximize profits by any means necessary.
Valve is structured in a VERY, VERY different way. Its much more of a co-op, even though gabe technically owns it.
There are no bosses at valve. Employees choose their own projects. The tagline has always been "Every desk at valve has wheels so you can just wheel yourself where you want to be".
Here is a video. Its not without its problems, but it IS an example of private corporations not being beholden to public shareholders, and the freedom that allows.
https://youtu.be/s9aCwCKgkLo?si=JFlP2HDkQDhVpcLa
The definition of corporation is "a body formed and authorized by law to act as a single person although constituted by one or more persons and legally endowed with various rights and duties including the capacity of succession."
As a 501(c)(6) organization, the Linux Foundation is a corporation. The Free Software Foundation is a corporation, as is the Open Source Initiative. KDE e.V. is a corporation. The Mozilla Foundation is most definitely a corporation.
In my experience Windows games run better on Linux in steam than they do natively on Windows. I'm sure there are exceptions. But today, my expectation is that any of the games I care to play will work on steam on Linux, and if they don't, I don't play them.
There's evidence to back that up. Because of the lower overhead of linux over windows most windows games that run through the proton emulator tend to run better on linux than natively on windows. The caveat being, the rate in which devs brick their games on linux due to things like anti-cheat, and the lag for bug fixes on updates for some games. This is the one tragedy of things like proton. It stunted linux native development of games.
Yes, but also, no. Linux native game development was already pretty stunted. And quite often you'd find a game with a Linux port that was just abandoned because the numbers don't make sense for the Dev to put resource into supporting it.
Proton is kind of the best of both worlds. The developer can concentrate on making one version of their game for the solution the majority of people have (IE Windows, directx) and we can use that solution with near-native performance on our setup of choice.
Anti-cheat is where it falls down, but in many ways that's really on the larger studios and how they choose to implement it. Kernel-level, Ring0 anticheat is pretty horrifying as a concept, and reportedly doesn't even completely prevent exploits from being used in the games it's implemented in. I'd like to see game studios be a bit friendlier to their players over this, specifically, because in general it feels quite hostile but also in particular because it's one of our last major hurdles to having a seamless, platform independent gaming experience.
>was just abandoned because the numbers don't make sense for the Dev to put resource into supporting it.
This is true. The market share to unit of work really wasn't/isn't justifiable. I know I wouldn't do that kind of work for just 4% of my users, and that's todays numbers. Back when proton was new on the scene linux only had a 0.8 market share (according to my googlefu...). That being said, I do remember seeing a few cases (not that a couple poorly remembered cases I can barely remember is a justification for a fuck proton stance) where devs gave up on linux in response to proton.
>Proton is kind of the best of both worlds. The developer can concentrate on making one version of their game for the solution the majority of people have (IE Windows, directx) and we can use that solution with near-native performance on our setup of choice.
Or as I said before. Thanks to the advantages of linux. Often better than native performance. I do like the container like aspect of how you encapsulate games with proton. Which is part of the reason why;
> kernel-level, Ring0 anticheat is pretty horrifying as a concept
above truely scares the fuck out of me. There is so much cooperate overreach into the most intimate aspects of out digital lives in almost every respect in the name of control and data collection. The tie ins on the windows side of the fence for games legit scares me. For those of us who live and breath FOSS this shit is downright offensive.
When it comes to someone wanting to protect the intellectual property that is their bread and butter, something they have poured their heart and soul into: I am quite sympathetic. It's why I think concepts like DRM have their place. Let alone trying to stop cheaters in games. But the massive coorperate overreach of gaming world (and in the IT space in general) is a total shitshow. Having the devs working for those companies probing the most core aspects of my silicon.. gives me pause. I think you are correct it pointing this out.
For this reason I generally don't game much since my gaming PC kicked the bucket. I refuse to polute my workstation and my old laptop can't handle much.
>one of our last major hurdles to having a seamless, platform independent gaming experience.
I think the main issue is that the kernel, even when built with something like a gaming mode with certain lockouts, to avoid cheating.. could easily be tricked by some precocious kid who is willing to compile their own kernel to cheat.
So emulating hardware and what not to cheat is relatively trivial. But this is also kinda true on windows... hense all the cheats and the associated cheat/anticheat arms race.
From a linux user practical standpoint, I really need to investigate the viability of windows VMs with passthrough again. When I last looked into it I didn't have the IOMMU group control on the hardware I was running so I wrote it off as a bad job. But I do actually have a machine that can do that well now. So I think that might be something I will look into in a month or two.
I think developers should focus on wine/proton support (whatever that looks like) rather than native linux support. It seems like we would all benefit a lot more that way. I think this is actually why the steam deck has been so amazing. Everyone should buy one so the support keeps improving.
Yes, and those options being available is great. But being able to simply build a version that's binary compatible is one thing; supporting that version can be a whole separate thing. Now you've got a whole new source of bugs that might never come up on windows.
Interestingly, it is significantly easier to port from Linux to Windows than from Windows to Linux, because most of the Linux stack is free software and so almost everything we create in tens of games will just work. Or audio solutions will just work. Vulkan will just work.
Why do developers keep insisting on using DirectX? I genuinely do not understand. I can understand it for old projects, but not for new ones.
Because on Windows it has better performance than Vulkan (specifically because it doesn’t process the possibility of usage on an another system, like Linux which happens on Vulkan)
Literally the best performing game on PC is DOOM Eternal, and it's not even close, and it uses Vulkan.
In fact, Vulkan is based on Mantle, which was built specifically to almost exactly match AMD's GPU architecture and it was built for Windows. Vulkan is also quite likely to be the reason why some games run faster on Linux even though they were written in DirectX - we are literally capable of emulating the entire DirectX stack and then translate it to Vulkan and still win.
The exact render target of the surface is such a tiny tiny tiny tiny part of Vulkan it's almost surreal you even bring it up.
Interesting! Didn’t know Doom Eternal ran on Vulkan!\
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Well you have to keep in mind, Vulkan’s strong suit is to render complex scenes, while DirectX’ is to render any kind of scene “well”. That just is wrong though (even if it is advertised this way).\
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DirectX can realistically only render medium-large scenes well, e.g. open-world low poly games.\
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These kinds of games are my kind of games, so I guess by being only exposed to these kinds of graphics, I couldn’t know about any better… :/
Not true either. There's almost no difference between them. You see, DirectX 12 was also inspired by Mantle, while Vulkan basically is Mantle. The only really different API that's in active development now is Metal.
In fact, Vulkan can even compile HLSL, aka DirectX's competitor to OpenGL's old GLSL. That's right, they compile the shame shader language - and since they must be compiled on device because there are so many different GPU's the developers can't ship them all or predict new ones - well... that's why DXVK and VKD3D is even possible, really.
Wait hold on, doesn’t Vulkan translate HLSL into GLSL using SPIR-V, meaning it doesn’t actually compile HLSL? Also a shader language isn’t what necessarily DirectX or Vulkan are or the reason for better performance. They are Graphics APIs, so I really don’t believe that shader compilation is a crucial factor in how performant a graphics API is…\
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Only the graphics pipeline is what truly is important iirc and DirectX has a way simpler but a hardly optimizable pipeline, while Vulkan has one, where it only necessarily targets newer GPUs, which have become more complicated over the years. This complexity led to better performance at the cost of a need for better fine tuning and more confusion for developers (One of the leading reasons Nouveau is trash, no?).\
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I actually didn’t know about Mantle, seems like it was forgotten in history… I thought both APIs came because OpenGL couldn’t fulfill the needs of many developers. Could you explain what Mantle is? I might be misinformed
No, SPIR-V straight up compiles HLSL and GLSL - whichever you'd like. [https://docs.vulkan.org/guide/latest/hlsl.html](https://docs.vulkan.org/guide/latest/hlsl.html)
Shader compilation creates stutters, which is why we often have to download or compile it ahead of time. But no, generally it's the same across the board. However, Vulkan has many extensions that help it load graphics data much faster, but on the other hand we do not have access to an equivalent to DirectStorage afaik - but nobody really uses it. But yeah, you take some, you lose some.
The leading reason Nouveau is trash is actually because, for the longest time, NVIDIA refused to allow setting power targets for any driver except their own, which resulted in abysmal performance no matter what, so it was abandoned and didn't get any features, either.
As for Mantle, you are right that the new API's came beacuse OpenGL and DirectX weren't fulfilling the needs of game developers, however it all started with Mantle, where DICE (makers of Battlefield) and AMD got together because they were sick of how slow DX11 was.
Some games run better on proton than native anyway. I've started playing KSP on proton instead of native bc the proton version can use directx (translated to vulkan through dxvk I think) which performs better than the native version that's in openGL, plus a lot of visual mods work better for the same reason.
Yeah, I play wow and after the acquisition by Microsoft, a genuine fear I had is that wow would go on the game pass and become inaccessible to Linux users, but honestly I'd rather drop wow entirely then. My guild knows this as well
Maybe I'm the problem or my config but with 14700k and a 7900xtx no game reaches the same FPS on Linux as in windows. Now, the fps is lower by 5-10 percent, which is negligible, but in any case it is what it is.
It's very evident in RE2 remake for some reason.
That's been my experience too. Performance has only ever been equivalent or better on linux for me. Of course some games are booked entirely, but the vast majority works fine for me
Does it tho ? From what ive seen it almost always runs worse... outside of games with native linux support they dont really run better, certainly not with as stable fps and even some of those which do have native ports have worse 1%lows and stability issues sometimes. Have you even played on windows to actually compare ?
Very true!
Bu my shout out is going to the KDE organization too for fixing so many gaming relating incompatibilities and add so many features needed for bettter gaming, like color management, HDR support, Adaptive sync (Freesync, VRR) support, DRM-leasing support (Vr), 10-bit colors, optional-tearing support for Wayland!
And of course for making Plasma so lightweight and efficient that it doesn't wastes many resources of the GPU or CPU!
Hopefully it wouldn't take much time until they start work for a Vulkan renderer too.
Plasma 6 supports it, but software support isn't really there yet. You can get HDR games running through Steam to work though: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1ampxta/hdr_is_in_kde_plasma_6_but_what_can_i_do_with_it/
I think it also might lower the bar for companies other than nintendo sony and microsoft who want to make a a gaming console. They would just need to give it linux support
This is the unsung benefit. Sony and Microsoft are currently fighting over the Activision acquisition with Sony saying that Microsoft is going to vendor lock the games and that's anticompetitive.
Sony have been putting more and more games on PC. This could be a strategy of releasing to an open platform for sales or it could be to ensure they don't get "no u"'d by Microsoft in a law suit.
The UK Competition and Market Authority noted in their block (which has now been removed) that MS putting to Windows isn't necessarily an open platform because they own that as well.
So it would, in theory, be in both of their interests to support a neutral open platform that neither of them owns so that one can accuse the other of being anticompetitive without being counter-sued and the other can pretend that they don't plan to lock everything to XBox at the first opportunity.
I'm not sure if the pointless, futile, and eternal toil of Sisyphus is the metaphor you wanted to make your point with.
Well, unless it was in which case carry on, I suppose.
I'm also not opposed to Unreal Engine. While it is of course *not* free and open-source software, it's under a remarkably permissive source-available license. Its royalty scheme is, in my opinion, a fair and equitable way of profiting from software. It's just 5% of revenue in excess of $1000000 total, flat-rate, and you don't owe them anything if it's used for e.g. creating an animation. If you look at the [four essential freedoms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software#Definition_and_the_Four_Essential_Freedoms_of_Free_Software) which define what is FOSS, the Unreal EULA meets Freedom 1 (the freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish) entirely, and mostly meets the others. Freedom 0, the freedom to use the program for any purpose, is met, albeit with the caveat that if used as the game engine of a video game you may be required to pay royalties. Freedom 2, the freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor, is probably the most limited, as you are only able to redistribute to persons who have already accepted the Unreal EULA. Freedom 3 (the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits) falls under similar caveats to Freedom 2, in that you can modify it and share your modifications, but only to your fellow licensees.
**Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator")** *~~is a compatibility laye~~*~~r~~ capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, & BSD. *Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator*, **Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop.**
**\[insert nerd emoji gif\]**
also i fucking hate corpos
Wine is the true hero.
Without wine, proton wouldn't be a thing.
I've been gaming on Linux with wine for more than a decade before valve even got into the linux market.
Fortunately proton devs regularly contribute back to wine, making wine even better than it ever has been!
Not even to mention all the native ports and wine assisted ports that GOG has facilitated.
I'm no AAA gamer, but the games I do play run great on Arch with KDE plasma 6. Rocket League & WGT golf both have tearing issues on my Windows drive. They're smooth as silk on my Arch build.
It's actually crazy when you are playing games on Linux and encounter issues like tearing or alt-tab crashes or whatever and blame it on Wine. Then you play on Windows and find the issues are even worse!
I prefer dry white wines. I'm not a fan of reds at all or sweet. Oddly enough, I do like dark peaty whiskey. I drink those neat. How about you? What's your whiskey of choice? Or, other hard drink?
Oh, sorry. I thought, this picture says proton is emulator. I’m sorry is my mistake. (Just I learning to English and sometimes make a awful mistakes, but I don’t give up😏🙏🏻)
You could make the same image 30 years ago for Windows gaming with Microsoft and Windows/DirectX. PC gaming on Windows/DOS used to be an absolute crap shoot of GPU compatibility, memory allocation, audio driver emulation etc. I remember spending HOURS trying to get WarCraft working on my friend's ancient PC as a kid.
At least with the efforts from Valve along with Wine, KDE, Vulkan and other contributors, the benefits are free to everybody.
I dunno. The picture makes it look like gaming is something that's inherently difficult to accomplish in Linux, and it's just not. Game companies just aren't making games for Linux, even though there's clearly an appetite for it.
Don't @ me with market share bs. People were making games for Mac back when Max had an abysmal market share.
Don't @ me with distro decision paralysis. It's real easy to choose what distro could be supported.
It's an uphill battle.
But what people don't realise is that there's no top to reach. Hence no plummeting back to the bottom either.
Just an epic journey up that keeps on giving.
[bale.gif](https://youtu.be/lUF9BPOXfcE)
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For me the best balance was to set up my gaming pc as a moonlight server, and connect into it from my main linux desktop when I want to game. I play a lot of game pass games, which I don't believe proton or wine can be of help with. It's hooked up to my living room tv, so if I want to game from my couch I can too or from any device really. I even loaded moonlight on my hacked wiiu to have a sort of poor man's steamdeck.
Wine needs to be on there too, proton wouldn't exist without it. I mean proton is just wine but tuned for gaming so yeah.
But still, valve's contribution is huge. Gaming directly with wine generally requires a lot of manual tuning to get working properly but proton usually just works. And the decision to make the steam deck run on linux made developers actually care (at least a little bit) about Linux support through proton
I totally agree! It's about time game developers start taking Linux seriously. While it's great that Valve and emulation teams are putting in the effort, I really wish I could play games natively on my Linux OS. It's the main reason why my dedicated gaming PC is still stuck on Windows...
I mean, wine did most of the heavy lifting, valve just came in and improved on it. It's a bit sad that wine doesn't get more recognition than valve.
Also, WINE Is Not an Emulator.
Except when it comes to their own products. Native CSG2 on Linux is garbage, the moment you navigate from the game to an side window the game will begin to become unstable or just load up Ancient and watch your fps turn to 1 when your team walks around in the water.
The Sisyphus metaphor is so apt and idk if it's even intentional... Compatibility is such a moving target it seems like we're eternally playing catch-up
Valve made the push that got us here. If they didn't we wouldn't be enjoying this Linux new Linux gaming golden age we are in.
There has NEVER been a point in time where Windows games were so playable on Linux and its thanks to Valve.
For me about 1 of 100 games working poorly with steam in linux the rest are crashing after a few seconds of trying. Linux gaming is still a mystery like 10 years ago. Funny that in protondb they say everything is gold but when you run them they just crash without any clues...
Dafuq, i Play Like everything without issue. Ok, Sometimes i need to Change some settibns, but thats it. Even Most online Games run smoothly, at least with Linux Mint & changing The GPU drivers(which is pretty easy)
That's crazy, I wouldn't have thought there's such a difference in the experience. For me it's the opposite where only 1 in 100 games *doesn't* run just fine
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I was thinking about WINE too!
Jesus turned water into WINE for a reason
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vino_veritas
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If you've played Windows games on Linux via Steam, that was using what Valve calls Proton. Proton is just a gaming-specific modified version of WINE (which stands for WINE Is Not an Emulator), a compatability layer that translates Windows API calls into Linux-native API calls, enabling Windows applications to run like native on Linux. It's far from perfect, because the Windows API is of course proprietary, meaning that they depend heavily upon reverse engineering, but it's improving all the time and a remarkable number of applications run at least reasonably well via WINE.
I haven’t I have steam in my fedora but can’t play windows game
There's an option in steams settings to "enable steam play for all other titles" in the compatibility tab. If you turn it on you can play the majority of windows games on linux.
Thank you is wine on my fedora or do I need it? I’ve been doing remote play but it can lag
Steam uses its own version (Proton) and will automatically install it and its dependencies.
Ok thank you, I’m really bad at this and I thought Wine was a Linux distro. I will try this it sounds easy!
You are very nice for this thank you!
Wine Is Not an Emulator.
Imagine google translate of windows language to Mac/Linux language
Wine Is Not An Emulator. Literally.
And Lutris.
Wine is the mountain. the label just couldn't fit in the cropped image
Yeah not to mention a single person made DXVK lol. Proton is nothing compared to that.
i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
working with corporations is sadly necessary in this sad hellscape of a world, i dont blame them for it.
I do. They drive the very economic system that allows them to exist (capitalism) and they buy up all the political power so they can steal the wealth of the citizens and establish new forms of wage slavery on those same citizens.
the linux foundation is that evil??? damn i didnt know
Naw, linux foundation is bae. At least for now. That COULD change. Just look at red hat. Or the history of Oracle.
im messing with you... im not excusing corporations.. i hate them... i excuse the linux foundation for accepting money from corporations
Hahaha! Got me!
My wife formed a small business corporation, to protect our liability and separate our home from her business. My wife is not evil. She is nicer than 99% of people I know.
yea more so talking about the corporations that dont let their minimum wage workers take a fucking pisd break, or the ones that steal water from communities for example, my guy
OK - Noted, and agree. There are Evil Corporations run by Evil People. But it is the People who run the evil corporations that are evil. The Evil people running the corporations that only care about profit. The guys that ran Enron at the expense of all those employees that lost everything, or the CEO of Boeing letting people die in his planes for another dollar of Shareholder profit. The corporation itself is really just a piece of paper, imho.
Does she pay her employees a living wage?
she always paid above average, but now has no-one working for her.
Tencent has holdings, they're like reverse midas, everything Tencent touches turns to shit
Ok but why is Tencent one of them? And it's Platinum rank??? Also Adobe... it shouldn't exist in that list...
Why not? They are huge cloud service providers and definitely need a lot of Linux servers. And if you pay enough membership fee, you can even be a Platinum member.
>Also Adobe... it shouldn't exist in that list... Seriously. Their hypocrisy baffles me.
Even Adobe is a member.
What about Valve?
valve is one of the less evil corporations, but corporations have to be evil by design its how capitalism works
Corporations are beholden to their investors/stockholders, so it is morally wrong of them not to maximize profits by any means necessary. However, this leads to a Catch 22, since it is also morally wrong to maximize profits by any means necessary.
But Valve isn’t accountable to external shareholders
Does it have people it's accountable to, though?
**external** Valve is only accountable to Gabe Newel iirc
explains why they haven't become another EA
Ah, so as long as Gabe Newel isn't craving pure profit, there should be fewer issues
Valve is structured in a VERY, VERY different way. Its much more of a co-op, even though gabe technically owns it. There are no bosses at valve. Employees choose their own projects. The tagline has always been "Every desk at valve has wheels so you can just wheel yourself where you want to be". Here is a video. Its not without its problems, but it IS an example of private corporations not being beholden to public shareholders, and the freedom that allows. https://youtu.be/s9aCwCKgkLo?si=JFlP2HDkQDhVpcLa
The definition of corporation is "a body formed and authorized by law to act as a single person although constituted by one or more persons and legally endowed with various rights and duties including the capacity of succession." As a 501(c)(6) organization, the Linux Foundation is a corporation. The Free Software Foundation is a corporation, as is the Open Source Initiative. KDE e.V. is a corporation. The Mozilla Foundation is most definitely a corporation.
🤓🤓🤓
🤡
https://preview.redd.it/1vw9jv3tqpsc1.jpeg?width=225&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b65d5938d7b7ebd6a0b30e6bdf3e8e1dac6aacdf
Reddit and Linux are made by corporations.
not all corporations are bad. corporations are people too! SCOTUS said so! So have a heart...
In my experience Windows games run better on Linux in steam than they do natively on Windows. I'm sure there are exceptions. But today, my expectation is that any of the games I care to play will work on steam on Linux, and if they don't, I don't play them.
There's evidence to back that up. Because of the lower overhead of linux over windows most windows games that run through the proton emulator tend to run better on linux than natively on windows. The caveat being, the rate in which devs brick their games on linux due to things like anti-cheat, and the lag for bug fixes on updates for some games. This is the one tragedy of things like proton. It stunted linux native development of games.
Yes, but also, no. Linux native game development was already pretty stunted. And quite often you'd find a game with a Linux port that was just abandoned because the numbers don't make sense for the Dev to put resource into supporting it. Proton is kind of the best of both worlds. The developer can concentrate on making one version of their game for the solution the majority of people have (IE Windows, directx) and we can use that solution with near-native performance on our setup of choice. Anti-cheat is where it falls down, but in many ways that's really on the larger studios and how they choose to implement it. Kernel-level, Ring0 anticheat is pretty horrifying as a concept, and reportedly doesn't even completely prevent exploits from being used in the games it's implemented in. I'd like to see game studios be a bit friendlier to their players over this, specifically, because in general it feels quite hostile but also in particular because it's one of our last major hurdles to having a seamless, platform independent gaming experience.
>was just abandoned because the numbers don't make sense for the Dev to put resource into supporting it. This is true. The market share to unit of work really wasn't/isn't justifiable. I know I wouldn't do that kind of work for just 4% of my users, and that's todays numbers. Back when proton was new on the scene linux only had a 0.8 market share (according to my googlefu...). That being said, I do remember seeing a few cases (not that a couple poorly remembered cases I can barely remember is a justification for a fuck proton stance) where devs gave up on linux in response to proton. >Proton is kind of the best of both worlds. The developer can concentrate on making one version of their game for the solution the majority of people have (IE Windows, directx) and we can use that solution with near-native performance on our setup of choice. Or as I said before. Thanks to the advantages of linux. Often better than native performance. I do like the container like aspect of how you encapsulate games with proton. Which is part of the reason why; > kernel-level, Ring0 anticheat is pretty horrifying as a concept above truely scares the fuck out of me. There is so much cooperate overreach into the most intimate aspects of out digital lives in almost every respect in the name of control and data collection. The tie ins on the windows side of the fence for games legit scares me. For those of us who live and breath FOSS this shit is downright offensive. When it comes to someone wanting to protect the intellectual property that is their bread and butter, something they have poured their heart and soul into: I am quite sympathetic. It's why I think concepts like DRM have their place. Let alone trying to stop cheaters in games. But the massive coorperate overreach of gaming world (and in the IT space in general) is a total shitshow. Having the devs working for those companies probing the most core aspects of my silicon.. gives me pause. I think you are correct it pointing this out. For this reason I generally don't game much since my gaming PC kicked the bucket. I refuse to polute my workstation and my old laptop can't handle much. >one of our last major hurdles to having a seamless, platform independent gaming experience. I think the main issue is that the kernel, even when built with something like a gaming mode with certain lockouts, to avoid cheating.. could easily be tricked by some precocious kid who is willing to compile their own kernel to cheat. So emulating hardware and what not to cheat is relatively trivial. But this is also kinda true on windows... hense all the cheats and the associated cheat/anticheat arms race. From a linux user practical standpoint, I really need to investigate the viability of windows VMs with passthrough again. When I last looked into it I didn't have the IOMMU group control on the hardware I was running so I wrote it off as a bad job. But I do actually have a machine that can do that well now. So I think that might be something I will look into in a month or two.
Even when games have native linux support I still use proton. I find that it tends to work better in many cases.
Yeah I've often found that to be the case. Sometimes the native build won't even start at all.
I think developers should focus on wine/proton support (whatever that looks like) rather than native linux support. It seems like we would all benefit a lot more that way. I think this is actually why the steam deck has been so amazing. Everyone should buy one so the support keeps improving.
I mean there are solutions that allow the dev to make one version that can build for Linux and windows. Like openGL, sdl2 or even unity.
Yes, and those options being available is great. But being able to simply build a version that's binary compatible is one thing; supporting that version can be a whole separate thing. Now you've got a whole new source of bugs that might never come up on windows.
Interestingly, it is significantly easier to port from Linux to Windows than from Windows to Linux, because most of the Linux stack is free software and so almost everything we create in tens of games will just work. Or audio solutions will just work. Vulkan will just work. Why do developers keep insisting on using DirectX? I genuinely do not understand. I can understand it for old projects, but not for new ones.
Because on Windows it has better performance than Vulkan (specifically because it doesn’t process the possibility of usage on an another system, like Linux which happens on Vulkan)
Literally the best performing game on PC is DOOM Eternal, and it's not even close, and it uses Vulkan. In fact, Vulkan is based on Mantle, which was built specifically to almost exactly match AMD's GPU architecture and it was built for Windows. Vulkan is also quite likely to be the reason why some games run faster on Linux even though they were written in DirectX - we are literally capable of emulating the entire DirectX stack and then translate it to Vulkan and still win. The exact render target of the surface is such a tiny tiny tiny tiny part of Vulkan it's almost surreal you even bring it up.
Interesting! Didn’t know Doom Eternal ran on Vulkan!\ \ Well you have to keep in mind, Vulkan’s strong suit is to render complex scenes, while DirectX’ is to render any kind of scene “well”. That just is wrong though (even if it is advertised this way).\ \ DirectX can realistically only render medium-large scenes well, e.g. open-world low poly games.\ \ These kinds of games are my kind of games, so I guess by being only exposed to these kinds of graphics, I couldn’t know about any better… :/
Not true either. There's almost no difference between them. You see, DirectX 12 was also inspired by Mantle, while Vulkan basically is Mantle. The only really different API that's in active development now is Metal. In fact, Vulkan can even compile HLSL, aka DirectX's competitor to OpenGL's old GLSL. That's right, they compile the shame shader language - and since they must be compiled on device because there are so many different GPU's the developers can't ship them all or predict new ones - well... that's why DXVK and VKD3D is even possible, really.
Wait hold on, doesn’t Vulkan translate HLSL into GLSL using SPIR-V, meaning it doesn’t actually compile HLSL? Also a shader language isn’t what necessarily DirectX or Vulkan are or the reason for better performance. They are Graphics APIs, so I really don’t believe that shader compilation is a crucial factor in how performant a graphics API is…\ \ Only the graphics pipeline is what truly is important iirc and DirectX has a way simpler but a hardly optimizable pipeline, while Vulkan has one, where it only necessarily targets newer GPUs, which have become more complicated over the years. This complexity led to better performance at the cost of a need for better fine tuning and more confusion for developers (One of the leading reasons Nouveau is trash, no?).\ \ I actually didn’t know about Mantle, seems like it was forgotten in history… I thought both APIs came because OpenGL couldn’t fulfill the needs of many developers. Could you explain what Mantle is? I might be misinformed
No, SPIR-V straight up compiles HLSL and GLSL - whichever you'd like. [https://docs.vulkan.org/guide/latest/hlsl.html](https://docs.vulkan.org/guide/latest/hlsl.html) Shader compilation creates stutters, which is why we often have to download or compile it ahead of time. But no, generally it's the same across the board. However, Vulkan has many extensions that help it load graphics data much faster, but on the other hand we do not have access to an equivalent to DirectStorage afaik - but nobody really uses it. But yeah, you take some, you lose some. The leading reason Nouveau is trash is actually because, for the longest time, NVIDIA refused to allow setting power targets for any driver except their own, which resulted in abysmal performance no matter what, so it was abandoned and didn't get any features, either. As for Mantle, you are right that the new API's came beacuse OpenGL and DirectX weren't fulfilling the needs of game developers, however it all started with Mantle, where DICE (makers of Battlefield) and AMD got together because they were sick of how slow DX11 was.
Some games run better on proton than native anyway. I've started playing KSP on proton instead of native bc the proton version can use directx (translated to vulkan through dxvk I think) which performs better than the native version that's in openGL, plus a lot of visual mods work better for the same reason.
sorry to be pedantic, but proton isnt an emulator
I enjoy the gentle \*thwack of the pednant's cane. All good.
Yeah, I play wow and after the acquisition by Microsoft, a genuine fear I had is that wow would go on the game pass and become inaccessible to Linux users, but honestly I'd rather drop wow entirely then. My guild knows this as well
Maybe I'm the problem or my config but with 14700k and a 7900xtx no game reaches the same FPS on Linux as in windows. Now, the fps is lower by 5-10 percent, which is negligible, but in any case it is what it is. It's very evident in RE2 remake for some reason.
I installed Garuda linux on my intel/nvidia laptop and it’s been great. I concur, sometimes it outperforms windows. Its 100000% more stable too.
That's been my experience too. Performance has only ever been equivalent or better on linux for me. Of course some games are booked entirely, but the vast majority works fine for me
Does it tho ? From what ive seen it almost always runs worse... outside of games with native linux support they dont really run better, certainly not with as stable fps and even some of those which do have native ports have worse 1%lows and stability issues sometimes. Have you even played on windows to actually compare ?
We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
We do things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.
r/iam14andthisisdeep
I don’t do things because they’re easy. I am hard.*
Like my cock?
Like my goose?
like my firewall?
Wine is missing in this picture, because Wine Is Not an Emulator
What's the definitive difference between a translation layer and an emulator?
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/18y0k99/comment/kg825d5/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Yes. I never said it is an emulator though
Very true! Bu my shout out is going to the KDE organization too for fixing so many gaming relating incompatibilities and add so many features needed for bettter gaming, like color management, HDR support, Adaptive sync (Freesync, VRR) support, DRM-leasing support (Vr), 10-bit colors, optional-tearing support for Wayland! And of course for making Plasma so lightweight and efficient that it doesn't wastes many resources of the GPU or CPU! Hopefully it wouldn't take much time until they start work for a Vulkan renderer too.
KDE has HDR support now?
Plasma 6 supports it, but software support isn't really there yet. You can get HDR games running through Steam to work though: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1ampxta/hdr_is_in_kde_plasma_6_but_what_can_i_do_with_it/
Sweet!
Yup, if im not wrong that feature its in Plasma6
I mean, the more people use SteamDeck, the more profit companies loose by not supporting Linux.
I think it also might lower the bar for companies other than nintendo sony and microsoft who want to make a a gaming console. They would just need to give it linux support
This is the unsung benefit. Sony and Microsoft are currently fighting over the Activision acquisition with Sony saying that Microsoft is going to vendor lock the games and that's anticompetitive. Sony have been putting more and more games on PC. This could be a strategy of releasing to an open platform for sales or it could be to ensure they don't get "no u"'d by Microsoft in a law suit. The UK Competition and Market Authority noted in their block (which has now been removed) that MS putting to Windows isn't necessarily an open platform because they own that as well. So it would, in theory, be in both of their interests to support a neutral open platform that neither of them owns so that one can accuse the other of being anticompetitive without being counter-sued and the other can pretend that they don't plan to lock everything to XBox at the first opportunity.
I'm not sure if the pointless, futile, and eternal toil of Sisyphus is the metaphor you wanted to make your point with. Well, unless it was in which case carry on, I suppose.
I mean that it has been hard, but they are doing it by themselves. Others might join later.
Godot FTW
I'm also not opposed to Unreal Engine. While it is of course *not* free and open-source software, it's under a remarkably permissive source-available license. Its royalty scheme is, in my opinion, a fair and equitable way of profiting from software. It's just 5% of revenue in excess of $1000000 total, flat-rate, and you don't owe them anything if it's used for e.g. creating an animation. If you look at the [four essential freedoms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software#Definition_and_the_Four_Essential_Freedoms_of_Free_Software) which define what is FOSS, the Unreal EULA meets Freedom 1 (the freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish) entirely, and mostly meets the others. Freedom 0, the freedom to use the program for any purpose, is met, albeit with the caveat that if used as the game engine of a video game you may be required to pay royalties. Freedom 2, the freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor, is probably the most limited, as you are only able to redistribute to persons who have already accepted the Unreal EULA. Freedom 3 (the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits) falls under similar caveats to Freedom 2, in that you can modify it and share your modifications, but only to your fellow licensees.
Unreal is alright too
**Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator")** *~~is a compatibility laye~~*~~r~~ capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, & BSD. *Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator*, **Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop.** **\[insert nerd emoji gif\]** also i fucking hate corpos
You hate valve?
\*I hate publicly traded corpos
This we know. What is your point?
Where ia Wine in that image? Wine existed way before Valve started working on gaming on Linux?
I never said Wine is an emulator in the picture.
It is but like "cars" "car manufacturers" you need to run windows games to run windows games, there's no way around it
And then there are a**holes Like Riot Games inventing new shit to make their Games that ran smoothly in Linux Impossible to Play.
Wine is the true hero. Without wine, proton wouldn't be a thing. I've been gaming on Linux with wine for more than a decade before valve even got into the linux market. Fortunately proton devs regularly contribute back to wine, making wine even better than it ever has been! Not even to mention all the native ports and wine assisted ports that GOG has facilitated.
I'm no AAA gamer, but the games I do play run great on Arch with KDE plasma 6. Rocket League & WGT golf both have tearing issues on my Windows drive. They're smooth as silk on my Arch build.
The sims 4 is like a slideshow on my thinkpad with windows, on my crappy pc from 2014 running arch it runs amazing
It's actually crazy when you are playing games on Linux and encounter issues like tearing or alt-tab crashes or whatever and blame it on Wine. Then you play on Windows and find the issues are even worse!
It is, but it's already a lot better than it is on the Mac.
Install steam, install game, enable Proton, hit play. That’s how hard gaming is in Linux.
Wine Is Not an Emulator.
I never said it is
I never said you said it is.
I never said you said I said it is
I never said I said you said it is. Checkmate.
so, do you like merlot, Sauvignon, tempranillo or which one? I love sweet red
I prefer dry white wines. I'm not a fan of reds at all or sweet. Oddly enough, I do like dark peaty whiskey. I drink those neat. How about you? What's your whiskey of choice? Or, other hard drink?
I don't drink spirits because I don't really drink. A single glass sends me to sleep
Add WINE to this image, and you'd be correct.
Yes. I wish Waydroid becomes stable enough to join the gang at some point
Oh yeah, that'd be nice. I actually tried Waydroid a couple of times in the past and I could never get it to work. Maybe someday.
But, Wine is not emulator….
I never said it is.
Oh, sorry. I thought, this picture says proton is emulator. I’m sorry is my mistake. (Just I learning to English and sometimes make a awful mistakes, but I don’t give up😏🙏🏻)
It's okay. I have received this same comment multiple times. I don't know why.
Idk🤷🏻♂️
You could make the same image 30 years ago for Windows gaming with Microsoft and Windows/DirectX. PC gaming on Windows/DOS used to be an absolute crap shoot of GPU compatibility, memory allocation, audio driver emulation etc. I remember spending HOURS trying to get WarCraft working on my friend's ancient PC as a kid. At least with the efforts from Valve along with Wine, KDE, Vulkan and other contributors, the benefits are free to everybody.
I dunno. The picture makes it look like gaming is something that's inherently difficult to accomplish in Linux, and it's just not. Game companies just aren't making games for Linux, even though there's clearly an appetite for it. Don't @ me with market share bs. People were making games for Mac back when Max had an abysmal market share. Don't @ me with distro decision paralysis. It's real easy to choose what distro could be supported.
 I imagine this happens when he finally reaches the top.
And on the other side of the stone pushing down are companies making live service games :)
It's an uphill battle. But what people don't realise is that there's no top to reach. Hence no plummeting back to the bottom either. Just an epic journey up that keeps on giving.
Wine is not an emulator ffs
I never said that
I just need a definitive solution for anti-cheat and a new SSD
Yea, it's an email.... No seriously, most of the time Devs just gotta send an email and it's done.
Valve employees are naked?
Valve and not emulator
Most of my gaming is emulated Nintendo games from different consoles
ahh yes one of the many forms of masochism I take great pride in as a linux user (I USE ARCH BTW).
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You forgot the wine devs
For me the best balance was to set up my gaming pc as a moonlight server, and connect into it from my main linux desktop when I want to game. I play a lot of game pass games, which I don't believe proton or wine can be of help with. It's hooked up to my living room tv, so if I want to game from my couch I can too or from any device really. I even loaded moonlight on my hacked wiiu to have a sort of poor man's steamdeck.
One must imagine Linux gamers happy
Wine needs to be on there too, proton wouldn't exist without it. I mean proton is just wine but tuned for gaming so yeah. But still, valve's contribution is huge. Gaming directly with wine generally requires a lot of manual tuning to get working properly but proton usually just works. And the decision to make the steam deck run on linux made developers actually care (at least a little bit) about Linux support through proton
Windows:"Come back we have HDR!"
Me playing the same 90s and 00s games over and over: "You have what?"
KDE Plasma 6 supports HDR iirc
It does.
Wine & browser games.
Eh good enough for most of us.
I totally agree! It's about time game developers start taking Linux seriously. While it's great that Valve and emulation teams are putting in the effort, I really wish I could play games natively on my Linux OS. It's the main reason why my dedicated gaming PC is still stuck on Windows...
Yep, and Im glad a company finally did this
But steam...
Windows is such an inconvenient way to play Linux games 🙄🙄
https://preview.redd.it/828t4tw5qqsc1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=57044983107b1849a4153a68124a6d8970b0656a
But wine is not emulator sir. You are wrong.
Oh My God, you're the 4th person saying that. Where in the picture it says that Wine is an emulator? I'm talking about Dolphin, Citra, melonDS, etc.
I mean in the picture u are not write wine so i guess u think wine is emu. Basicly upper post is for meme.
I just omitted Wine, because Wine is a general compatibility layer aimed at any .exe file. While Steam and emulators focus on gaming.
I mean, wine did most of the heavy lifting, valve just came in and improved on it. It's a bit sad that wine doesn't get more recognition than valve. Also, WINE Is Not an Emulator.
I never said in any place in the image that wine is an emulator
Oh, I assumed you meant wine when you said emulators since wine isn't mentioned at all otherwise.
It's because wine is general purpose while Steam and Emulators are specifically for games
but steam is using wine... proton is using wine.
Yes
Wine is not an emulator.
I never said it was. It's not in the photo.
I would say valve, wine and gloriouseggroll
[удалено]
There is no place in the post that says that Wine is an emulator
Except when it comes to their own products. Native CSG2 on Linux is garbage, the moment you navigate from the game to an side window the game will begin to become unstable or just load up Ancient and watch your fps turn to 1 when your team walks around in the water.
Does the dude who made DXVK work for valve? Cause proton gaming doesn't happen without DXVK.
The Sisyphus metaphor is so apt and idk if it's even intentional... Compatibility is such a moving target it seems like we're eternally playing catch-up
Wine I love you! Proton I love you! Valve I love you 😘
Sooner anti cheat systems work on Linux the better I will dump windows so fast.
Valve is doing God's work and deserves respect
Linux gaming is basically all wine and codeweavers developers, valve has only contributed a small bit of it.
this post describes linux perfectly rn
Progress never rests. Going downhill is such a Windows thing to do. Let's not do that.
But CS2 is still not ready.
Its not the truth. Im sorry I refuse to believe this. What you gonna do??
You like poop you sick fuck.
I HATE poop you sqeezed squirel fucking redditor
Is more like the devs and companies using tools that allow us to work our way into playing in Linux. But, you do you.
Valve made the push that got us here. If they didn't we wouldn't be enjoying this Linux new Linux gaming golden age we are in. There has NEVER been a point in time where Windows games were so playable on Linux and its thanks to Valve.
Ok
For me about 1 of 100 games working poorly with steam in linux the rest are crashing after a few seconds of trying. Linux gaming is still a mystery like 10 years ago. Funny that in protondb they say everything is gold but when you run them they just crash without any clues...
Dafuq, i Play Like everything without issue. Ok, Sometimes i need to Change some settibns, but thats it. Even Most online Games run smoothly, at least with Linux Mint & changing The GPU drivers(which is pretty easy)
Sometimes protondb may be different depending on your hardware and distro
That's crazy, I wouldn't have thought there's such a difference in the experience. For me it's the opposite where only 1 in 100 games *doesn't* run just fine
If everyone's experience is so drastically different, don't you work you're doing something wrong?