5 years ago Valve released Proton

Proton has earned steam my business forever. I haven't booted into Windows in over a year.

Like many others here have said, Valve has won a loyal customer. The impact proton has over linux as desktop is unmeasurable. They did open source right, and they will likely benefit massively from it.

I picked up a Steam Deck recently and aside from when I’ve booted into the desktop mode to set up some emulators you’d never know it was running games through a compatibility layer. Truly incredible work from Valve.<p>Technical impressiveness aside it’s a really nice device too—I like having something that feels mostly like a console in the “it just works” factor, but still allows me to do some fiddling if and when I want to.

One thing that I&#x27;d <i>love</i> to see is a Proton version for M1&#x2F;M2 Apple Silicon... UTM is the only thing that runs x86 VMs and for whatever reason its QEMU guest tool drivers are all completely buggy and everything is dog slow (and of course, Windows refusing to load unsigned drivers on Win7 x64 makes trying out different drivers pretty much impossible).

It’s been many years since I was current on the state of cross platform gaming.<p>Is it possible that proton could become the de facto target platform?<p>That is, if a developer builds to ensure that their game works correctly under proton, then will it also work correctly under windows? So by just ensuring it works under proton, which seems to be minimal effort, do they get access to the expanded market for “free”?<p>Do any of the consoles support proton, so that the only barrier to releasing a game are the legal agreements?

Proton is a remarkable accomplishment; I never believed it would have worked as well as it does. It helps that newer games are increasingly based on a couple of engines (Unity in particular) but its support for older games is also impressive.<p>Proton is the basis of Chromebook&#x27;s experimental Steam games support. It works pretty well, as well as Proton itself as far as I can tell.

Threw my Windows partition away 4 years ago and haven&#x27;t looked back since. Steam has earned my business with their work on Proton.

I&#x27;ve been running solely on Linux since something like 2015. I was primarily on Linux from ~2006 or so, but did switch to Windows for a couple of years to play some Windows games. (this was before Proton really existed)<p>I&#x27;m probably less technically savvy than a lot of the HN crowd, and I just have not ever had a significant problem running linux. For sure, I&#x27;ve avoided some problems by being picky about what PCs I buy. But for the most part it&#x27;s been pretty pain free. Running Linux full-time has been effortless and easy. And thanks to Valve, gaming on Linux gets better every year. I played Elden Ring on launch, and on launch, it actually played better than PC.<p>To the extent that HN types have trouble with Linux, I can only imagine it&#x27;s because they&#x27;re doing _more_ on their PC than me. ie, they have some software or project that just needs to run a certain way. For sure, Linux isn&#x27;t always perfect for that.

When Proton came out I had multiple people on HN going on quite long rants about how Linux would never be viable for gaming.<p>One multi-million-unit-selling handheld gaming system later and I don&#x27;t see those arguments much anymore.

11 years ago today (2012, Aug 21) Valve released CSGO forever changing gaming<p>сука блять

Also check out Glorious Eggroll on Gihub for even better performance.

I run winesapOS[0] which is based on SteamOS and was able to repurpose an old Toshiba notebook for my kids, running Freddy Fish* and other games. Windows 10 doesn&#x27;t run smoothly (even though it came with Windows 10) and I&#x27;m not going to run anything older than that.<p>Steam also makes it very easy to switch between Proton versions. If version X doesn&#x27;t work, perhaps version X-1 or X+1 does work, or even the experimental version.<p>* Yes, ScummVM is available for Linux but the Steam Linux distribution included an old ScummVM which wasn&#x27;t able to load some libraries. Running the Windows version through an compatibility layer was easier than modifying shell files to run the latest ScummVM through flatpak.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;LukeShortCloud&#x2F;winesapOS">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;LukeShortCloud&#x2F;winesapOS</a>

Proton was the missing piece to Linux gaming&#x2F;desktop. It’s also a vital part of steam deck. Maybe someday we’ll get a standard rendering pipeline :&#x2F; &#x2F;s.

Just went and checked, out of my top 20 games only flight simulator and space engineers do not work. I had completely missed that proton has come so far...I think this means I can finally truly ditch windows on my game&#x2F;virtualisation machine

I don&#x27;t know how common it is, but the AI War developers posted recently about their new game &amp; said Steam recommended they drop their Linux port, saying that just relying on Proton would be better performing &amp; a better use of time.<p>I&#x27;m very curious how widespread this advice is. It&#x27;s a little sad &amp; ironic to me if Proton is now entrenching Windows as the only target platform. I&#x27;m hoping this wasn&#x27;t blanket advice Valve is handing out but really something specific to the team.

Well this is a topical place to ask this tangent I suppose. My GPU is on the fritz and I&#x27;m looking to replace it. Has anyone gotten SteamVR working decently under Linux through Proton? If so, what GPU do you have? It&#x27;s basically impossible to search for information on this, but I really want to <i>develop</i> for VR, and I&#x27;d like to not have to boot into Windows to do it

I&#x27;d love to go Linux full-time on my gaming machine, but for now VR (Beat Saber, primarily) is keeping me tethered to Windows. It&#x27;s no fault of Valve&#x27;s, though… the blame falls entirely on Facebook for insisting on their proprietary Oculus client, not supporting Linux with that client, and not doing anything to make that client work with Proton&#x2F;WINE.

My best workstation runs Linux for work, so I&#x27;ve spent time getting &#x27;odd&#x27; setups like Centos 7 to work before there were nice packages for it. Learned a bit trying to game on my good video card without booting to Windows. Fast forward to current, and I don&#x27;t even bother with a Windows partition on it.<p>Today, Ubuntu sorts the drivers and steam setup just lovely. I&#x27;ve gifted out old workstations to extended family and they are pretty happy with what they can do from a gaming&#x2F;browsing perspective. With Windows 11 not able to support these boxes, having something &#x27;just work&#x27; gives these older boxes an extended life. Most have not needed to pick up a Windows license. Very much at that &#x27;good enough&#x27; state.

Playing Baldurs gate three on unbuntu. Haven’t booted a windows machine at my home now in years!!

Proton might be great for the game itself. But something needs to be done about anti-cheat.<p>I only play multi-player games, and when I search ProtonDB none of the games I play say they are supported.<p>Call of Duty, Battlefield 2042, Rainbow 6 Seige, PUGB, Destiny 2

VR and DRM are the two things that keep me from wiping my windows partition.

Sometimes is just hard to believe, that you can open Steam, buy almost any game and play it right away without any issues or additional tinkering, on Linux.

Is proton actually good now?<p>I tried it a few years ago to play some not-uncommon game and it was absolutely terrible, regardless of the hardware power available.

For someone with a Mac (non Apple Silicon), does it make sense to run Linux in a VM in order to play Proton-supporting Steam games?

I really wish the linux community would polish off the UX for ubuntu so it&#x27;s more attractive and usable for mainstream

i cant wait for counter strike 2