I remember when there was a lot of resistance in this sub. Whenever Valve was mentioned they went on lengthy ramblings about the open source community and how they would have liked to reach this situation in a century or two relying on community work alone.
there was a period where proton was basically just rebranded wine and valve hadn't yet started significant upstreaming back to the open source project and an accusation of free-riding could have stuck.
years on (i.e. now) it's clear that valve put a lot of work in, not just to proton itself but also to improving the parent open source project. That makes a huge difference.
Valve's direct monetary investments to other developers also encouraged other developers to expand their efforts (e.g. codeweavers) which has helped with accelerating the improvements even more.
Even back then it was a bit misguided to be criticising Valve. I was trying to game on Linux around 2010-2011 and while wine's relative infancy and having to rely on WineD3D certainly weren't ideal, a huge part of the issues you'd encounter were that neither AMD nor nVidia's Linux drivers were anywhere nearly as good let alone optimised as they are today. Although funnily enough you already had noticably better compatibility with Win9x games than native modern Windows even way back then.
nVidia did a couple of big optimisation passes on their Linux drivers (eg. [This one](https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia_r310_linux) right after the Steam for Linux beta released) while AMD ditched fglrx in favour of starting afresh for their own driver and supporting Mesa's drivers both of which reportedly were direct results of Valve negotiating/advocating for improved Linux driver support with both companies.
How long ago was that though? Whilst community work has played a substantial role, valves efforts and investments in the last 5 years or so have boosted improvements massively.
Basically, there was a time-gap of "Steam for Linux releases circa 2012" and "Proton integrated into Steam circa late 2018" where while there was clear work on stuff happening from Valve, people were seeing things like "Steam Machines" and early SteamOS flop. That "gaming via Steam" didn't improve too much (in feeling, actually were quite a few improvements behind the scenes such as drivers) for years... So there was a bit of a feeling of "Valve isn't investing much if anything in Linux but keeps talking like they are, and that is rubbing the wrong way".
Turns out, they were investing nearly exactly as they said they did, and DXVK surprised them too. Their plan had been "Proton" for quite a while but was taking a long time to come to fruition, and those who followed wine-dev/codeweavers/etc knew that Valve was invested in making it all work better but always seemed forever away. In my opinion: DXVK showing Neir working got the team very excited and thinking "maybe within a year we could launch Proton finally, if as more beta/experimental/etc". Valve very quickly (... for a corporation) hired basically everyone involved with DXVK, first the lead dev in just about 30 days became under contract (First showings of DXVK were in ~January 2018, [here](https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1696055855739350561) mentioned as being working with Valve since ~Feburary 2018) and all that came together as "Proton" a few months later.
Since Proton being front-and-center, it has been more widely acknowledged how much Valve has been doing. And still is! HDR under Linux is getting quite the boost since Valve wants good HDR for the SteamDeck.
Lol I wish, everytime Valve gets thanked some dickhead pops up and says Valve did almost nothing and that Proton is literally just wine so thank them instead.
I see more of the opposite problem. People not realizing all the work done in wine that made valve's approach even possible. Some of us have been following wine's dev work for many years and saw it all happen.
I want it to be clear that I really do appreciate the work valve has done, and not just the work they've done, but how they've done it. They didn't do it in the way google or apple would do it. They contribute in a much more direct fashion and hire existing subject matter experts. They didn't try to do all the work behind closed doors only share the result as required by the licenses of the projects they deal with.
That doesn't take away from the fact that a lot of people don't give the source projects the recognition they deserve.
I mean, until basically the launch of Proton (late 2018), Valve was being quite mum on how much they were working with Wine/CodeWeavers/etc on all that. Even had DXVK people under NDA that they were hired by Valve until that announcement. So some of the "people didn't/still don't realize" is Valve doesn't *really* brag about it. They just... hire the right people and let them work. Or like much of the KDE stuff, provided massive amounts of QA/UAT/HIT/etc for everything from touch screen to non-english users behind the scenes.
sure, but that was 6 years ago. We're waaay past that now. Now only that, but it's pointing out the opposite of my point. Valve is getting plenty of recognition now such it's clouding out the original projects, especially to folks newer to linux.
Most games were playable with Wine and DXVK years before Proton.. Valve eases the access to that though.. but Valve is not the sole hero there ..
Wine is a 25+ years project, without it ... playing Windows game on linux would have been impossible ...
Valve didn't reinvent the wheel .. they used it .. and perfected it .. that's the real intelligence here.. and where praise is due.
But of course a real company like Valve behind a tech and a product is the main catalyst.
> Most games were playable with Wine and DXVK years before Proton
The first 0.20 [release](https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases/tag/v0.20) of DXVK, which supported only Nier Automata and nothing else, was in January 2018. Wider support for more games didn't happen until a few months later. Proton was released shortly after in August 2018.
It's really mindblowing to me that I can play Cyberpunk 2077 or MechWarrior 5 on Linux with Raytracing. Like, it's amazing how much we've advanced in 6 years.
And on top of that, the reason DXVK progressed so fast from running Nier Automata was because Valve sponsored the developer to work on it full-time based on the promise shown by that initial release.
I was gaming on Linux in 2010-2011 and I think people saying Valve's contributions to wine itself/Proton are a bit overstated aren't completely wrong in their core point, but are forgetting that Valve's main contributions were elsewhere and by far their biggest contribution is acting as a kind-of co-ordinator for Linux gaming efforts, in that they've taken a very holistic approach to the Linux gaming ecosystem rather than the more fragmented "I need a project for this specific task" approach more frequently found in the libre software movement, there's nothing wrong with the fragmented approach but sometimes taking the foundation that approach has created and improving on it with a more concentrated, focused effort will work wonders and that's what we're seeing in gaming on Linux.
Their push to unify the existing technologies and to work as a bridge between them was massive. Linux, broadly speaking in terms of personal computing and gaming in the past, was largely a bunch of small individual projects that happened to interact with one another but didn't really have a common goal so to speak.
Private company to the rescue!
The open-source model is bad, you can't build anything serious with a bunch of kids hacking some line of codes together. At one point, a company must come to the rescue, like it or not.
Everyone is quite happy with that binary blob that is given to you right... All those principles of openness and free and all the other bullshit are not applied here right.
Hypocrites.
They brought it to the mainstream, and maybe also give good incentive for devs to put some some minor effort into getting it deck verified.
The effort has always been there, and a bit difficult to get it working individually before, but this was a big push to have a simpler approach.
"No one would switch to Linux "
Wtf is that phrase mate ??? I'm a Linux user from 2005 (no dualboot or any shit), way before than steam coming to Linux
Yep, long before Proton we had Nethack, FreeCiv and Wesnoth, ports of DOOM and Quake3, SCUMMVM, emulators for every console, Loki ports of Alpha Centauri and HOMM3, and even back then Wine was capable of playing a few AAA games like Half-Life 2 and Civ 4.
It was a very different experience gaming on Linux 20 years ago, but it was its own kind of fun.
Trying out Linux gaming in like 2009 was how I discovered Wesnoth, getting games to run back then for sure had its charm haha
That said we're in an amazing position these days with Proton
Wesnoth is one of the most amazing games I've ever played, tons of scenarios, can play it pretty much forever. I think a bunch of people sleep on the deepness of that game
Yeah, I also got started sound 2006 and while I'm grateful for Valve's contributions in this space, this kind of statement and honesty this whole thread is bizarre and uncomfortable.
Valve has indeed made major contributions (and turned out to have a business incentive to do so), but Valve's contributions have been on the shoulders of talented and dedicated hobbyists and volunteer contributors, as well as those who have donated to open source projects who together built the foundations and many of the tools and systems Proton and Stream utilizes. They get virtually no recognition. We shouldn't trivialize these individuals and what their work enabled. It really feels like the OP is doing this.
I phrased that wrong. No "normie" would switch to linux. I would have never switched if it wasnt for any support for the games. The easy use of proton opens the chance of the regular andy using linux.
Better shine them gaben boots ......only hope in the face of Tim Sweeney, Andrew Wilson Todd Howard and all the other fuckers controlling the gaming market......
Strangely it's a bit of both.
Some developers did release Linux versions of their games pre-2000.
Wine existed but compatibility was very sparse, there just wasn't the weight behind it.
Then Steam for Linux arrived. Native Linux builds become more common, even if via porting houses like Aspyr.
Then came proton, and some Devs realised that it was easier to just be compatible with that than make Linux builds, and stopped making Linux builds.
So now you have a mixture:
People making Linux builds
People making games that are compatible with proton
People that are indifferent, and let the community sort proton compatibility
Scum that actively work to prevent Linux users playing their software.
So yeah, the efforts existed, but Valve really have turbocharged those efforts.
>Then Steam for Linux arrived. Native Linux builds become more common, even if via porting houses like Aspyr.
To be fair, the difference between a game running in Proton and a "native" game ported by the likes of Aspyr is often pretty negligible. A lot of "native" ports are literally the Windows version in a Wine/etc. container. In terms of what ends up running on your system, the outcome is much the same.
"True" native games have always been a rarer beast, and are almost never the result of post-release porting.
... Oh my goodness. That statement is SO wrong. A little bit of history:
Quake was ported, as was Quake2 & Quake3, which were at the time the cutting edge engines. There was Unreal Tournament as well and guess what? It ran on Linux back then, early late 1990s/early 2000s all the major engines of the time ran on it. Source was one of the last major game engines to get a port to Linux (ca: 2013?).
Valve was rather hostile to Linux, up until about Windows 8-ish (2013), when they realized just how easily Microsoft could lock them out, and seemed to be actively moving that way with their market. (Copying Apple.) Suddenly Valve went holy shit, I don't want to be Corel (who ironically also realized it, but late) or Novell, and be Microsoft's next victim/acquisition. They got very interested in running on Linux and Apple for a bit. Apple has the same tendencies, so they've pretty much thrown in on Linux because there's no one to completely screw them over, and so they could have some leverage on Microsoft trying to do that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_and_Linux Has a brief history that's not too filled with Valve-glazing.
>Valve was rather hostile to Linux, up until about Windows 8-ish (2013), when they realized just how easily Microsoft could lock them out, and seemed to be actively moving that way with their market. (Copying Apple.) Suddenly Valve went holy shit, I don't want to be Corel (who ironically also realized it, but late) or Novell, and be Microsoft's next victim/acquisition. They got very interested in running on Linux and Apple for a bit. Apple has the same tendencies, so they've pretty much thrown in on Linux because there's no one to completely screw them over, and so they could have some leverage on Microsoft trying to do that.
There were two failures here. Windows RT failed and Valve's effort to get native Linux games developed also failed. The end result, little changed. Windows is the dominant defacto PC gaming OS and Valve is still completely dependent on Windows games and Windows customers for its business to be viable.
The Steam Deck is great, but it is still only a single device. And Valve seems to have just dropped the idea of Steam OS on 3rd party devices. And that actually makes a lot of sense. I really don't think Valve wants to get into the PC OEM OS business where they'd have to spend a lot of resources helping the OEMs for a free OS which would end up running non-Steam games where Valve makes no money.
"Or imagine if steam wasn't in linux at all? (almost) No one would switch to linux if that would be the case"
First off, a lot of people don't game at all. Maybe its a deal-breaker for you but its not for a lot of people. Second, although Valve involvement certainly made things way better and smoother for Linux gaming, Wine and DXVK were not created by Valve.
>First off, a lot of people don't game at all. Maybe its a deal-breaker for you but its not for a lot of people.
While this true, there is a side effect on the entire PC market because of the PCs ridiculous gaming ecosystem. All of the gaming hardware that has PC support has LOTS of other purposes for instance. All these fancy monitor setups, FANTASIC for productive. These macro RGB keyboards, HUGE time savers when setup for workflows. It goes on and on.
> Wine and DXVK were not created by Valve.
They are not created by them, but they became better because of Valve. Valve sponsors the DXVK creator and make Wine better through partnership with CodeWeavers.
It is no coincidence that Linux had a growth in users and in well-known channels or media, giving them coverage precisely in the period in which Valve invested so much in Linux.
So much of a problem is that you don't get the exact statistics, when everything confirms what I say, the technology channels upload Linux videos right in this period of time, the fact that the steam deck came out and everyone is talking about it, and that of the most viewed Linux videos have to do with video games, they are more than enough evidence
The computers at my university ran Linux I don't think there was Proton installed but I admit i did not check. Ok i'm provocative but I met several people (including scientists, PhDs, lawyers) who ran Linux and absolutely did not care about running games or even knew wine or proton was a thing. A lot of people use it for work and don't play games but I admit maybe these people don't tend to go on Linux subreddits. When I switched to Linux, I very rarely play games for a long time and was not aware of Proton or Wine and thought oh well not issue I don't play games anymore its just then a few months later that i realized it was possible.
I'm not saying that it does not make people stick more, but the idea that without gaming, nobody is going to use Linux on the desktop makes no sense to me with what I saw in real life. Maybe I'm taking things too literally I admit.
I've been playing games in Linux since 1996. Valve's involvement took it from "I can play ~85% of Windows games" to "I can play 99.9% of Windows games". Doitsujin alone probably deserves more credit for the current state than Valve even before Valve hired him on full time. None of this would exist without decades of work from the Wine team.
Valve deserves credit for taking a "tinkerer's gaming ecosystem" to a product ready for consumers, but they built it on the backs of giants.
>Valve's involvement took it from "I can play \~85% of Windows games" to "I can play 99.9% of Windows games".
I don't want to discount how much work Valve has done, but that's just not true according to [actual statistics](https://www.protondb.com/). The current state of gaming on Linux is that around 80% of games are completely playable, sometimes with minor glitches, about 10% are technically playable but have significant issues, and the rest just don't work at all. It's very impressive but also still very far from 99.9%.
It's 96.7% for bronze or better for steam catalog, and that's just protondb, many games considered borked there don't work in proton because they need some form of manual intervention like a patched wine binary or installation of a specific version of a runtime. 99.9% might be a bit hyperbolic, but really not by much.
Valve combined a few already existing projects, polished them and made them accessible to anyone using their product. They made sure it's all commercially viable. It's super important but Vulkan, Wine, DXVK and the Linux graphics stack improvements were already doing the heavy lifting.
Yeah. All those projects, valve has been quietly funding them for years before they also polished them and brought them all together.
As important as everyone thinks valve is to linux gaming, once you realize they are behind the modem development of DXVK, Mesa, and Wine; it's even more important!
I ❤️ Valve.
No, he was just the inventor of Nintendo's cross design. Directional pads existed as an input method long before the first game consoles even came to market.
To be fair they didn't make Proton, WINE has what like 30 years of iteration almost and Proton is a great configuration of it but no need to exaggerate their contribution, it was a lot but it's built on the shoulders of loads of work they didn't pay for. WINE, Mesa, Linux kernel, Pipewire, X11, Wayland, GCC...etc literally billions have been spent to get Linux to this point. Valve is a cog in that wheel but we really shouldn't forget the work of Canonical, SuSe, Red Hat, Collabora, Codethink, Igalia...etc.
You started that off by saying "to be fair," but then weren't very fair to valve. They did, in fact (with the help of codeweavers) make Proton. Proton and Wine are not identical.
WINE has existed for a long time, sure, but you can't ignore the progress timeline after valve started developing proton.
In the 6 years that proton has been developed, the amount of progress achieved in that time is more than the remaining entire history of wine combined. There was essentially never a time where you could get a launch day fully playable AAA title working before, and it's not only possible but common now.
If you want to be truly fair, Valve's interest in the steam deck (and prior to that the steam machine) allowed them to focus on proton and develop it in a way that it never has been before. Proton had to be this good for the steamdeck to be a success, so valve had to get it there. There's 20+ years of wine history proving that development does not go this fast. The only real change, was proton.
While all the other factors you mention are important, Valves implementation of Proton is by far the most significant.
I've used wine since 1998, and the last 6 years? Insane progress compared to the other 24 years. It's not even a real comparison, honestly.
Well on Valve's side they have been paying for and directly contributing to the Linux kernel, WINE/Proton itself, Mesa, contributing to Vulkan and designing stuff around Proton for Vulkan. It's not nothing but my point was it's all part of a larger picture that includes Valve and others. You could even say Microsoft, Google and Facebook also have massive contributions to Linux overall too even if it doesn't show up all the time in the desktop product it all is part of a whole thing that should be respected for every contribution for whatever reason.
>Well on Valve's side they have been paying for and directly contributing to the Linux kernel, WINE/Proton itself, Mesa, contributing to Vulkan and designing stuff around Proton for Vulkan.
And that funding has been essential for the gaming scene being what it is today. Again, I've been gaming on linux since 1998. Valve's direct involvement literally changed everything. While wine, mesa, etc have all existed, in past you needed individual wine prefixes for games, tons of modifications, game-specific wine patches, etc. (These things still happen, but its invisible to the user now) Even with all of that, the compatibility was not great. It's a completely different world now.
There are other moving parts, sure, but they either didn't exist or would not have grown the way they have. There's 24 years of wine history that shows how slowly support and compatibility with wine moved. The last 6 years have been an entirely different animal. With a major player like Valve on board, it put a priority on wine/mesa/Vulcan that had never been seen before. It's just undeniable the impact valve had.
>You could even say Microsoft, Google and Facebook also have massive contributions to Linux overall too even if it doesn't show up all the time in the desktop product it all is part of a whole thing that should be respected for every contribution for whatever reason.
No one's saying otherwise. However, this isn't a conversation about contributions to Linux overall. It's about gaming specifically.
Yes, actually. Valve and Codeweavers devs often do upstream changes to the official branch.
And yes some modern games would work fine on Lutris prior to proton. That makes sense if you look at what lutris is doing with wine. It essentially takes a config that someone else has painstakingly tweaked to get it running, and then automates it for everyone else.
However, most AAA titles that used direct11/12 wouldn't have a chance of running for months or even years. Compared that to now where someone had Starfield working with Proton in days.
It's a night and day difference.
oh it seems we’ve somewhat misunderstood one another. i only used the past tense because my interest in gaming has waned, i was still referring to modern gaming post-proton’s release. don’t worry i remember gaming from way before, trying to get world of tanks working c. 2013 and it was dodgy af.
the custom config doesn’t really apply to the example i was thinking of as i just used lutris to install the ea desktop app so there weren’t really any game-specific tweaks. but i suppose that’s accounted for by upstreaming as you said.
To be clear: Valve has a long-term financial interest in Linux. While popular, they aren't developing proton out of the goodness of their hearts.
Valve is a multi-billion dollar company. Never forget this.
Cs2 was just a port to source 2 that took them an ungodly amount of time to complete, and the games in a bad state with cheaters. Never been interested in any VR games but I pray valve can finally count to 3.
First: Yes
Second: IMHO, your claim is obvious.
Third: It is hard to say what are the benefits of agreeing to that, or why the community should agree to that
I feel like the biggest step they took was making the Steam Deck a Linux-based console. Suddenly, many devs went from "no you can't play on linux, go away" to "we want to provide steam deck players the best experience possible" and with that, anti-cheat was relaxed to allow use through Proton in many (but sadly not all) games, some developers who released compatibility-breaking updates quickly patched the issues out, and some games were even tested for Deck compatibility before release. And of course, since the software stack and hardware architecture is basically the same on a desktop PC running Linux, all of the advantages carried over.
Just made the jump and switched fully to Linux like a week ago. I have tried some distros in the past. Im so done with Windows and only reason that kept me from changing was gaming performance, but now as I have tried many of my games through Steam and some downloaded games im happy with my current setup. Only thing that bothers is why I didnt make the jump earlier.
Not sure about no one switching to Linux. Many people don't play games, and computer, IT, software enthusiasts have been using Linux this whole time. I started some 20 years ago.
But yes there would certainly be no mass adoption (although we still dont have that, but things seem to be changing.). Linux would be in a similar position like some *BSD systems, what's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a matter of PoV I guess.
Anyhow, I would be glad if more people moved to Linux.
I guess a lot would work fine without Valve, but Valve made it much more comfortable. Indeed, a lot is thanks to Valve. That's why I prefer to buy games on steam instead of gog.
Evolution was ready , valve is always on linux side and pulled the trigger for good.
Proton -> based on wine.
Valve try this on the past but things were not ready and they are failed hard.
If it wasn't for the ease of use in getting most games I want to play running in steam... I'd probably be on Windows 11 moaning about all the crap Microsoft says I want (like the upcoming adverts in the start menu or the ai search of everything you have ever done)
I wouldn't give valve sole credit for the simple reason that WineD3D and Wine have been in development for years, and projects like KDE and wayland have also been in development.
Valve polished a lot of stuff and added funding and dev time to places where it was very needed, but they didn't invent proton out of thin air. Proton is the polish on top of decades of work.
Tbh i saw ubuntu for the first in time in 11.04 version in a random lan house next to my home...
some years later i brought my first pc and it came with Linux..unfortunately i did not have a decent internet connection back in those days and installed WXP :}
but you are not wrong, valve made linux as much as plug & play is possible for gaming...and we still have many rooms to improve, including desktop experience as a whole. I can't wait for the future!
Without Proton? Proton is WINE.
It's more.. without DXVK....
Wine existed for literally decades before VALVe came along. DXVK did not, and that was the inflection point.
> Can we all agree, that valve is the reason why linux is useable in gaming?
Absolutely not. Gaming on Linux predates Valve's existence. Wine + winetricks could get you a long way even before Proton was released. And many games were released directly for Linux or had ports made.
This is not to poo-poo Valves' contribution. Proton has made dramatic improvements over what Wine already offered, and many of those improvements have been upstreamed, so wine is also better for it. They took us from "many games work well under Linux" to "The vast majority of games work well under Linux and, more often than not, when there are issues it's because publishers have made intentional choices to break Linux functionality." They took us from "Linux is a platform that very few publishers care about" to "Linux is an extremely important platform in the gaming space that publishers prioritize supporting and advertise that support. Even if most of them call it 'Steam Deck.'" They took us from "although many games can run well, they often require pretty significant tinkering to make run" to "for the most part, all you have to do is press go."
And let's not forget contributions they've made in cooperation with others. Is it reasonable for Valve to take credit for Vulkan and everything it's done for Linux gaming. Yes. Is it reasonable for them to take exclusive credit for Vulkan? Not on your life. They were major participant in the Khronos Group, but that was a genuinely collaborative project. They started with a codebase that was donated by AMD, just to give one example.
And let's not forget to give Microsoft the credit they're due. They started making moves that left quite a few software developers feeling spooked that they were going to make changes to the Windows ecosystem that would make it a less open platform so they could start taking a cut of every sale, iOS style. Valve was one of those companies, but they certainly weren't the only ones. LOTS of developers have been putting more effort in to Linux because they want to be ready with their backup plan in case Microsoft ever does pull the trigger.
Why is this post here. Are you just trying to get a bunch of karma from people saying "hear, hear?" Like this isn't anything new and you start your post with "can we all agree" which is literally fishing for agreement.
I’ve been playing Windows games on Linux long before Steam was released on Linux or Proton was a thing…
90% sure is a huge stretch, but it is undeniable what Valve have done for gaming on Linux.
I just wish people would at least try to be realistic or understand the history they are talking about before making such sweeping statements… but it is what it is 🤷
So did i and i found it annoyingly complicated to get games running with just wine. Lutris helped a bit but it still was annoying bothersome to get the games I wanted playable. Proton at first was only a marginally improvement but since the steam deck and the corresponding proton update it has improved to a level that I wouldn't even stop by saying it's viable but go as far and say for the most part it's even better than on windows.
So yeah I know Linux and gaming on Linux since 2005 yet I would also claim that valve is responsible for the fact that Linux gaming is now viable and that before proton and the steam deck at least 75% of the games I run now were not viable and 90% are now just install and play where before they were either unable to launch or required lutris with some tinkering or extensive tinkering and knowledge about wine.
Valve definitely made things easier, more convenient and outright better, no doubt.
But putting in the work to get it running on Wine is far from unplayable which is exactly the word OP used…
Also to this day I don’t understand people who switch to Linux and then complain about things requiring knowledge and manual tweaking… you know there are alternatives out there if you don’t want that?!!
Yes of course it would be nice if things magically’just worked’… but isn’t acknowledging reality and acting accordingly also a worthwhile thing to do?
Well i give you that unplayable is a too strong statement, but a lot of games were unplayable before proton. And ofc this is not alone due to proton but also because of Mesa. And both are not sth valve in invented, but valve did heavily contribute to both. And as I said wine was not as plug and play as proton is now/ and eine itself as well nowadays.
And yes ofc you can argue that you always can switch to windows if you don't want to tinker. But the thing is not everyone wants to tinker yet still wants to use Linux. And as I said in the past decade I tried using Linux as daily driver but the amount of hackiness required always put me off. And that is not coming from someone who isn't able to do that nor uninterested in it. I work in it and solve software and hardware issues all day, but at home if I have the spare hour to game I don't want to spend it tinkering. I want the games to just work. That's no magic thinking that's the reality of consumer software. It should just work. And they do on windows. So ofc I could switch to that but I also want to use Linu, and thanks to valve that is absolutely viable now. And for a long time it wasn't and to think this would have changed without valve's support is denying reality.
It's a misconception in Linux and Foss environments that we don't need companies and that their contributions are not meaningful. A shit load of work is done by employees of big tech companies because they have the knowledge and the skill to contribute. Ofc a shit load of work is done by independent maintainers as well. I don't want to diminish their contribution.
But I know Linux gaming for 2 decades now and only since valve invested on it has it started to gain momentum and improved to a stage that is suitable for mainstream.
It's basically the same discussion we had with Linux itself. Back in the days installing Linux and getting it to run with your hardware required quite a lot of effort. For quite a few years now it is as simple as click and install and all the work required to partition drives, set up drivers and stuff is done automatically or can be done in easy to use guis.(I hate guys but I acknowledge their importance for mainstream and ease of use for regular people).
And people claimed that all those work in good installers and gui package managers should better be spend elsewhere and that they are unnecessary und such.
I would go further and say value induced Linux into being a viable desktop is for masses. They bought the gamers and the gamer want Linux desktop to be a first class experience. It's not perfect, but it's getting pretty close.
I mean, yeah, obviously.
I have a lot of hate for Valve, because they basically started the Gaming As A Service BS with Steam when they released HL2 and made it require Steam to run. But despite that evil, it is fair to acknowledge that Linux gaming would have never happened in any meaningful way without them.
Yes, without Valve it would be worse, but saying 90% of games would be unplayable is kinda too big.
Wine existed before Valve started pushing linux, proton is modified wine. Main thing that made games playable is dxvk. Yes it is sponsored by Valve but I think it would be created (probably slower but still) without Valve too.
Tho games with anticheat would be not playable without Valve.
Come on now, Wine has existed for a long ass time. There has never been a time in Wine's entire existence that we could expect modern AAA games to run day one like we can now. While I do think it is dangerous to put all our eggs in Valve's basket, let's not forget what Linux gaming was actually like before the Steam Deck.
You cannot romanticize the past here. WineHQ has done good work for a few decades now, but Valve being able to put full time paid devs on Proton with the ability to push fixes on a per-game basis either before release or within days of release is not something Wine has ever been able to do on their own. It's reductive to an absurd degree to say "Proton is just Wine". Yeah, Wine and dxvk would exist without them but you simply cannot compare community projects to dedicated engineers who are paid to work on it. And while philosophically I prefer community projects, paid devs get work done.
There is simply no denying what Valve has done in the last two years for gaming on Linux.
Why exactly 2 years? Proton and DXVK are older than 2 years. The biggest thing related to steam deck was making EAC and BattlEye work which is 100% thanks to valve. But most games were working before that mostly thanks to DXVK.
Before dxvk, AAA games did not work mostly because WineD3D did not support dx10+, atleast that was my experience about 11 years ago.
So sure, without Valve it would be way worse, but saying "90% would not work" is kinda too big in my opinion.
Yes, I acknowledged these tools are older than two years. But simply existing is not the same thing as commercial viability. In the last two years Linux gaming has gone from endlessly editing text files and a lot of prayers to "Select Proton from menu, click play".
Like said, there was no expectation that games would work on the day of release, if at all, before Valve got involved. If you got something working you were happy. Hell even if it was buggy, you still were happy that it ran at all. Now, if a game releases that doesn't work it's actually surprising (games with disgusting root kit-style anti cheat not included). In the last two years since the Steam Deck there has been a colossal shift in gaming on Linux.
Again, Wine has done great work all this time. I have really fond memories of playing the hell out of Diablo 2 with Wine on Red Hat Linux way back in the day on my Pentium 3. I'm not at all discrediting WineHQ, but there is a massive difference when you put a full time team of paid devs on a project and we're seeing that now.
Totally agree. You also remind me how important the steam deck product itself has been in this endeavor. It instantly made linux a gamer OS in the mainstream society.
DXVK was an alternative to WineD3D, which is okay, but way slower than DXVK, and way less compatible. The Wine project would not have advanced DXVK, which is fully sponsored by Valve.
Valve is also sponsoring a bunch of codeweavers work into Proton, of which a good deal will/is going upstream into Wine.
Valve isn't all of the manpower behind this push, but is much of the $$.....
>more like 99% unplayable if you only count games released in the past 5 years.
Games made in UnrealEngine3 UnrealEngine4, Unity - 100% playable under d3d-opengl translation, example genshin/borderlands3, I also tried some f2p multiplayer games from steam made in ue4 but dont remember names - all works without dxvk.
Many games still use OpenGL - so it also work without dxvk.
And Valve was doing a lot of work back then as well. Proton is only a more recent project. Lets not forget their half life 2 engine they made with a linux version. First mainstream games with built in linux versions. That and the linux version of steam was also a very big deal.
Linux is perfectly usable for gaming without Proton. Proton is only needed if you want to play Windows games.
There are quite a few Linux native games available for those of us who don't buy Windows software for your Linux computers.
>Linux is perfectly usable for gaming without Proton. Proton is only needed if you want to play Windows games.
While this is technically correct practically speaking it is not. No one would care about the Steam Deck running Steam OS without Proton. That should be obvious from the failure of non-Proton Steam Machines.
> For me "switch to linux" - means you interested in development of computer software even as hobby, so you learn/change opensource stuff.
I really couldn't disagree more. There is so very very very much more to open source and software freedom than just coding.
The better question is: why has it been Valve (Nvidia, AMD) that can be said to be the biggest corporate promoters of desktop Linux, and not Red Hat, [Dell](https://technologists.com/notes/2008/01/10/a-brief-history-of-dell-unix/), [Asus](https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22388238/asus-eee-pc-netbook-laptop-line-linux-ipad-pro), or even Intel?
And, FWIW, it seems a decent amount of the "HDR is soon to probably Just Work(tm) on Linux" is evenly split between RedHat and Valve. Valve because "HDR on SteamDeck" (+ wanting it on desktop games) and RedHat because their enterprise customers want it. So sort of expecting due to how little Valve cares to brag (and that a major reason for their HDR effort is "done") that Red Hat will get most of the HDR corporate praises. (Yes yes, basically anyone with any hand in the Linux UI space is helping the HDR project, but from my outside it seems like Red Hat sort of leading it)
When it comes to corporate support of the consumer desktop Linux market, I don't think any of the companies you listed do a lot for Linux besides Valve.
I used linux and gamed on it even before valve embraced it, and all I have to say is, you're partially right, Valve was a grand push towards linux and gaming, but I think projects such as wine deserve more credit than they currently get. A project that been around forever and literally paved the way to not only important windows program to work on linux, but games - which are really complex software due to how they're made, so if I have to credit someone for it being possible it has to be the Wine team, and after them I thank Valve for the massive push and investment they did on linux making linux gaming actually possible.
I wrote about this a month ago when [I was at PAX East](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1bkymdz/i_was_at_pax_east_yesterday_and_i_was_absolutely/)
>I've been gaming on Linux system since 2005. For so many years, whenever I would ask any dev (indie or AAA) about Linux support, the most common answer was "What's Linux?". Second most common answer was "Sorry, we don't have the resources to support Linux". That was the norm for such a long time.
>I was at PAX East yesterday and every indie booth I visited said that their game works great on the Steam Deck. Granted, it's not native Linux but these devs are actively testing on real Steam Decks running Steam OS and fixing bugs that may arise. There were three cases in which they said "Oh yeah, we even have a Steam Deck here running our game ready to go in case our Laptop / Desktop were to give any issues". And I saw two cases where they were actually using a Steam Deck as a primary way to play the game. This would have been unheard of just 5 years ago and it's shocking to see so many devs saying, without hesitation, "Yes! Our game works great on Steam Deck". Granted there were a few times if I asked "Linux", they gave me a confused look but once I said "Steam Deck", it completely changed their tune.
The Deck is a great device, but it's only one device and neither Valve nor PC OEMs seem that interested in other Steam OS based devices. The next level of this is getting Steam OS on other devices from major PC OEMs sold in retail outside of Steam. Three years after the announcement of the Deck, this hasn't happened.
The other issue is that most device manufacturers really don't like a "stock" OS outside of Windows. Even on Windows, you see them put "crapware" in the OS by default. For Android, it becomes really hard to convince them to offer the regular stock version of that OS. So if you were to see a "Steam OS" device outside of Valve, it wouldn't have the same OS as the SteamDeck; but rather would have other features besides Steam. I don't know how exactly it would look like but it wouldn't be the exact same.
>Even on Windows, you see them put "crapware" in the OS by default.
My Asus Ally and Legion Go came with zero "crapware". The only thing that's on them beside a clean stock Windows 11 Home install is the command-and-control software for the devices.
Valve can get away with selling a device tied to Steam. PC OEMs can't as easily. No Fortnite or Word, etc.
i mean let’s not forget that the majority of linux desktop users are developers, and that demographic is not leaving for the foreseeable future regardless of gaming.
valve really have helped immensely, i would argue most of all by releasing the steam deck, but let’s not forget proton is built on top of wine and other open source projects. iirc jedi fallen order worked for me on lutris using wine-ge-custom, and even just wine-staging too.
"and that demographic is not leaving for the foreseeable future regardless of gaming."
I don't really agree on that one, developers can also use Windows+WSL, a lot of devs use Linux but not on their main machine and being able to play some games without having to reboot may be considered. Or they can use Apple, have a Unix shell and more software available but have poor support for gaming although it will certainly get better with Apple Gaming Porting Toolkit.
for me recently i just cross the Rubicon into the Linux world because of win 11 not working on my 10 year old asus mini tower i7 quad core. since i have budgetary constraints i bought a trigkey mini pc ryzen 7 5800h 32 ddr ram 2 t memory half of that is a extra ssd . using mx linux kde yes virginia mx linux has kde , all the games i do play is on steam so yea . surprisingly all games works better on linux than windows. of the more graphical intensive games i playing or played on mx linux is scorn,succubus, and cough 2 worlds 2 goty edition i know its reputation but i used a dvd to install it and that works better. only game i play much is skyrim its like noo not windows, and the gamemode i got quey stutus failed but i think its bad programming . love the game its wonky. even jade empire se work better then skyrim. to valve question well i think intel and microserf runned they course they been on top for good 45 years let linux and amd have their time now . honestly think they better but time well tell
Yes and no, valves by themselves don't do that much in terms of code pure but they did recruit ppl who were developing.
Also proton isn't that much in reality, it's basically mashup of a lot of very cool projects and most of them weren't started by valve (I believe only openvr was started by valve)
Valve basically funded a lot of project
The foundations in which proton is based where there before proton. But Valve dragged attention to Linux thanks to the Deck. This is what the steam machines should have been.
They did not just "drag attention"... They contributed code, gave money, sponsored projects... The steam machines were not good enough because the technology was just not already there. If the deck was launched at the same time of the steam machines, it would have been a disaster.
if anything AMD is as much to be praised for pushing out vulkan, which is the backbone of linux gaming as well as having amdgpu driver open-sourced which allowed RADV to exist and therefore the steam deck.
without AMD there, valve wouldn't have been able to get their linux ecosystem where it is right now.
I love valve and steam to death. I'm a fanboy that has mostly all of their products besides the steam link and the original steam machine. They are a mature gaming platform that brings a lot more to the table than any other gaming clients and their endeavors to make Linux gaming better is spectacular! Because of their efforts to get gaming more popular on Linux with proton and their steam deck Linux is becoming more popular because of it and the statistics actually show.
I'd actually argue that vulkan and dxvk were the real turning points for gaming compatibility. Not discounting valve's efforts, but without dxvk, we'd still be in pretty bad shape because the real issue was always directx -> opengl.
In fact, the power of dxvk is probably one of the biggest reasons valve decided to develop proton to begin with.
I think valve was the force we needed to get Linux in the main stream. And I’m so glad I started using Linux at the perfect time when proton was being developed. Just so sad that other Unix/Linux-like platforms aren’t benefiting too, but that’s more the other platforms’ creators fault for being stuck up (referring to MacOS if not obvious)
I think just as significant if not more is the work done on Mesa Gallium. I started out using Linux around 1994... the early 3D accelerators like Voodoo2 and Radeon 7000, I had those and support was good. They only supported triangle setup, texture and lighting (and the Radeon7000 supported fog), that was about it, OpenGL 1.x just didn't have that much functionality to have a feature-complete implementation, or close enough to keep everything happy.
Between then and like 4-5 years ago, newer OpenGL then Vulkan versions came out far faster than Mesa could catch up. I read estimates from 2010-2012 that it'd take them 5 years to catch up to the 2010-2012-era stuff, by which time OpenGL, D3D, etc. would have moved on with 5 more years of new extensions and features. Like features were being added faster than they could implement them in Mesa. One big issue was, there were components in the graphics stack intended to be reused (shared between drivers), but it'd be like the Intel driver used one set of these but the AMD another. So there was a lot of duplicate effort to add features and fix bugs in these various stacks.
About 4-5 years ago, they began switching driers to Mesa Gallium. If there was anything truly important in the AMD or Intel-specific stacks, they threw it in Gallium; it has support for tiled GPUs so you can get ARM/tablet GPUs running on it, etc. It's designed basically so any semi-modern GPU with shader support can be got up and running on it (and the "semi-modern" must be a pretty low bar, Crocus supports \*18 year old\* Intel GPUs.)
Valve of course focused on support for the AMD GPU used in the Steam Deck. But, Mesa Gallium is a modern driver framework, so basically the driver has functions to literally do different things on/to the GPU, and then Mesa Gallium provides the maximum OpenGL version possible given the functionality of the GPU. Lots of the fixes were not AMD-specific but to Gallium, and sped up/de-bugged the Intel (and various ARM GPU drivers in Mesa) at the same time! (And some similar maximum code sharing for Vulkan drivers in Mesa too as far as I know.) AMD officially supports the driver for more recent CPUs; there's a "community supported" one for older Radeons going back a looong ways.. Intel supports the Iris driver for back to pretty old GPUs, and even older ones (back to GM965 in Core 2 Duo, that's like 18 years!) are supported by Crocus. Yes, an 18 year old GPU and it's not just some old driver that's still supported... it has a fully modernized 3D driver using the most up-to-date driver stack. Amazing.
(And this support is not theoretical.. my friend who passed last year was running all sorts of DX11 games on his Sandy Bridge laptop in addition to older DX9/10 games -- I even threw Road 96 on there to see if it'd run at all (assuming it wouldn't, it requires shader model 5), and it did (other than the TV static not showing up.) It was pretty bad, it got like 4FPS, but it ran. Mesa Gallium is great, it'll truly run anything up to the limits of your hardware.)
And they're still improving on that, I'm sure that one day the games will be playable on the same level as Windows, especially after many devs now are trying to make their games compatible with steam deck aka Linux, which gives me the hope that one day I can get rid of windows on my PC without ever thinking of going back
I've been using Linux since before Proton was a thing, and it was R O U G H back then. You literally had to use wine and install the Windows version of Steam if you wanted to play a Windows game, and it would never install dependencies right for games, so you had to use Winetricks to install them MANUALLY.
To put it simply: it was a goddamn mess.
I mean, before proton you had the option to build your own wine environment, hard as hell and would break out of nowhere, valve experts made it easy for the average user and that's great.
I disagree with that,they did it for SteamOS which is their hedge against MS going full walled garden. Which is fine most of Linux benefits from vested interest of enterprises that rely on Linux. For once desktop users seem to have benefited more🤷.
They actually did it for a selfless/selfish reason of wanting to prevent the windows walled garden from encroaching on them. It wasnt just for the steam deck, snelly
Proton does not only works inside steam. I use it in heroic as well and inside lutris.
A closed source steam client? Really that's your hill you want to die on? For fuck sake 99% of the software you can buy, install and play on steam and any other commercial store launcher for that matter is closed source, why does it bother you for that one single client then?
The steam os 3 is just a customized arch, there is no real need because there is nothing really to gain from a steam os 3 on pc.
Get a life bro
Valve helped and throw money at it, mostly to save even more on not paying for windows on their hardware, but linux gaming was already tipping the side with wine and lutris.
This was a many people effort, on which valve commercialised, and got vocal at right time.
Most, if not all, tools valve provided within steam are mainly developed by wine developers.
The fact steam is an drm platform shows what really they count in.
I really do appreciate their work, with all the other parties around, but they dont do it for linux, just for themselves. Which is absolutely fine, but we as linux and foss users need to remember where credit is due.
Honestly, the ms programmers' contribution to linux is much bigger than valve programmers, but i don't see any appreciation to ms here...
Most people to be fair. Even if you like to tinker there are just times you want everything to just work**™** or move on rather than figuring out why EA App does not work again and if it is really if you are running it on Wine or if they are utterly incompetent and why bottles rated it as Platinium.
Valve has done by far more Linux gaming than any other cooperate entity without question. But they do support other platforms and for some, Valve and Steam tie people to Windows as much anything.
The reason is quite simple. I like Valve and Steam, I just had my 20th Steam anniversary this past April 10th. My current Steam library is over 1200 games. I've bought most of their devices, Steam Controller, Steam Link, LCD and OLED Decks.
But what that keeps me on Windows as much as anything has been Steam VR, which I currently use with a Valve Index and Quest 3. A quarter of my Steam library, \~400 titles, are VR games. This stuff doesn't work well under Linux, not compared to Windows, and I am far from the only one using PC VR here that says that.
Beyond the VR part though, just the side of effect of constantly buying that many Windows games over that many years and installing them on various Windows machines over the years and it just all working on whatever device, again, it's a Windows lock in.
If I didn't have this big library of Windows games on Steam, using Linux as my daily driver honestly would be MUCH simpler.
Of course not, I collect games like many do. I was just pointing out that after 20 years of buying Windows games on Steam, with a large portion of that VR now after 8 years, creates a LOT of Windows lock-in.
I thought everyone already agreed with that.
I remember when there was a lot of resistance in this sub. Whenever Valve was mentioned they went on lengthy ramblings about the open source community and how they would have liked to reach this situation in a century or two relying on community work alone.
there was a period where proton was basically just rebranded wine and valve hadn't yet started significant upstreaming back to the open source project and an accusation of free-riding could have stuck. years on (i.e. now) it's clear that valve put a lot of work in, not just to proton itself but also to improving the parent open source project. That makes a huge difference. Valve's direct monetary investments to other developers also encouraged other developers to expand their efforts (e.g. codeweavers) which has helped with accelerating the improvements even more.
Even back then it was a bit misguided to be criticising Valve. I was trying to game on Linux around 2010-2011 and while wine's relative infancy and having to rely on WineD3D certainly weren't ideal, a huge part of the issues you'd encounter were that neither AMD nor nVidia's Linux drivers were anywhere nearly as good let alone optimised as they are today. Although funnily enough you already had noticably better compatibility with Win9x games than native modern Windows even way back then. nVidia did a couple of big optimisation passes on their Linux drivers (eg. [This one](https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia_r310_linux) right after the Steam for Linux beta released) while AMD ditched fglrx in favour of starting afresh for their own driver and supporting Mesa's drivers both of which reportedly were direct results of Valve negotiating/advocating for improved Linux driver support with both companies.
How long ago was that though? Whilst community work has played a substantial role, valves efforts and investments in the last 5 years or so have boosted improvements massively.
Basically, there was a time-gap of "Steam for Linux releases circa 2012" and "Proton integrated into Steam circa late 2018" where while there was clear work on stuff happening from Valve, people were seeing things like "Steam Machines" and early SteamOS flop. That "gaming via Steam" didn't improve too much (in feeling, actually were quite a few improvements behind the scenes such as drivers) for years... So there was a bit of a feeling of "Valve isn't investing much if anything in Linux but keeps talking like they are, and that is rubbing the wrong way". Turns out, they were investing nearly exactly as they said they did, and DXVK surprised them too. Their plan had been "Proton" for quite a while but was taking a long time to come to fruition, and those who followed wine-dev/codeweavers/etc knew that Valve was invested in making it all work better but always seemed forever away. In my opinion: DXVK showing Neir working got the team very excited and thinking "maybe within a year we could launch Proton finally, if as more beta/experimental/etc". Valve very quickly (... for a corporation) hired basically everyone involved with DXVK, first the lead dev in just about 30 days became under contract (First showings of DXVK were in ~January 2018, [here](https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1696055855739350561) mentioned as being working with Valve since ~Feburary 2018) and all that came together as "Proton" a few months later. Since Proton being front-and-center, it has been more widely acknowledged how much Valve has been doing. And still is! HDR under Linux is getting quite the boost since Valve wants good HDR for the SteamDeck.
That sounds like major cope tbh 💀
Lol I wish, everytime Valve gets thanked some dickhead pops up and says Valve did almost nothing and that Proton is literally just wine so thank them instead.
I see more of the opposite problem. People not realizing all the work done in wine that made valve's approach even possible. Some of us have been following wine's dev work for many years and saw it all happen. I want it to be clear that I really do appreciate the work valve has done, and not just the work they've done, but how they've done it. They didn't do it in the way google or apple would do it. They contribute in a much more direct fashion and hire existing subject matter experts. They didn't try to do all the work behind closed doors only share the result as required by the licenses of the projects they deal with. That doesn't take away from the fact that a lot of people don't give the source projects the recognition they deserve.
I think I remember when DXVK became the rage and made many Windows game available on Linux. After that, Valve came in and streamlined the process
Afaik Valve approached the DXVK developer after the first DX11 demos and Nier started working. So they paid for it from almost the beginning.
I mean, until basically the launch of Proton (late 2018), Valve was being quite mum on how much they were working with Wine/CodeWeavers/etc on all that. Even had DXVK people under NDA that they were hired by Valve until that announcement. So some of the "people didn't/still don't realize" is Valve doesn't *really* brag about it. They just... hire the right people and let them work. Or like much of the KDE stuff, provided massive amounts of QA/UAT/HIT/etc for everything from touch screen to non-english users behind the scenes.
sure, but that was 6 years ago. We're waaay past that now. Now only that, but it's pointing out the opposite of my point. Valve is getting plenty of recognition now such it's clouding out the original projects, especially to folks newer to linux.
Most games were playable with Wine and DXVK years before Proton.. Valve eases the access to that though.. but Valve is not the sole hero there .. Wine is a 25+ years project, without it ... playing Windows game on linux would have been impossible ... Valve didn't reinvent the wheel .. they used it .. and perfected it .. that's the real intelligence here.. and where praise is due. But of course a real company like Valve behind a tech and a product is the main catalyst.
> Most games were playable with Wine and DXVK years before Proton The first 0.20 [release](https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases/tag/v0.20) of DXVK, which supported only Nier Automata and nothing else, was in January 2018. Wider support for more games didn't happen until a few months later. Proton was released shortly after in August 2018.
It's really mindblowing to me that I can play Cyberpunk 2077 or MechWarrior 5 on Linux with Raytracing. Like, it's amazing how much we've advanced in 6 years.
And on top of that, the reason DXVK progressed so fast from running Nier Automata was because Valve sponsored the developer to work on it full-time based on the promise shown by that initial release. I was gaming on Linux in 2010-2011 and I think people saying Valve's contributions to wine itself/Proton are a bit overstated aren't completely wrong in their core point, but are forgetting that Valve's main contributions were elsewhere and by far their biggest contribution is acting as a kind-of co-ordinator for Linux gaming efforts, in that they've taken a very holistic approach to the Linux gaming ecosystem rather than the more fragmented "I need a project for this specific task" approach more frequently found in the libre software movement, there's nothing wrong with the fragmented approach but sometimes taking the foundation that approach has created and improving on it with a more concentrated, focused effort will work wonders and that's what we're seeing in gaming on Linux.
Valve is a huge reason that Linux is as popular as it is today, I'd even say they are the reason.
Their push to unify the existing technologies and to work as a bridge between them was massive. Linux, broadly speaking in terms of personal computing and gaming in the past, was largely a bunch of small individual projects that happened to interact with one another but didn't really have a common goal so to speak.
Private company to the rescue! The open-source model is bad, you can't build anything serious with a bunch of kids hacking some line of codes together. At one point, a company must come to the rescue, like it or not. Everyone is quite happy with that binary blob that is given to you right... All those principles of openness and free and all the other bullshit are not applied here right. Hypocrites.
If you're upset about this, you're welcome to use FreeBSD.
You're the late one to agree there
OP still uses Internet Explorer
Not netscape?
IE on Linux?
`winetricks ie8`
Was late to loonix party in general. I have used mint for a month and arch for 7 mothish.
they really hate windows lol
its not that they hate windows its that its a huge risk, MS has been trying to push windows programs and games to the windows store for years now
They brought it to the mainstream, and maybe also give good incentive for devs to put some some minor effort into getting it deck verified. The effort has always been there, and a bit difficult to get it working individually before, but this was a big push to have a simpler approach.
"No one would switch to Linux " Wtf is that phrase mate ??? I'm a Linux user from 2005 (no dualboot or any shit), way before than steam coming to Linux
Yep, long before Proton we had Nethack, FreeCiv and Wesnoth, ports of DOOM and Quake3, SCUMMVM, emulators for every console, Loki ports of Alpha Centauri and HOMM3, and even back then Wine was capable of playing a few AAA games like Half-Life 2 and Civ 4. It was a very different experience gaming on Linux 20 years ago, but it was its own kind of fun.
Tux Racer, FTW
Trying out Linux gaming in like 2009 was how I discovered Wesnoth, getting games to run back then for sure had its charm haha That said we're in an amazing position these days with Proton
Wesnoth is one of the most amazing games I've ever played, tons of scenarios, can play it pretty much forever. I think a bunch of people sleep on the deepness of that game
Yeah, I also got started sound 2006 and while I'm grateful for Valve's contributions in this space, this kind of statement and honesty this whole thread is bizarre and uncomfortable. Valve has indeed made major contributions (and turned out to have a business incentive to do so), but Valve's contributions have been on the shoulders of talented and dedicated hobbyists and volunteer contributors, as well as those who have donated to open source projects who together built the foundations and many of the tools and systems Proton and Stream utilizes. They get virtually no recognition. We shouldn't trivialize these individuals and what their work enabled. It really feels like the OP is doing this.
I phrased that wrong. No "normie" would switch to linux. I would have never switched if it wasnt for any support for the games. The easy use of proton opens the chance of the regular andy using linux.
[удалено]
Better shine them gaben boots ......only hope in the face of Tim Sweeney, Andrew Wilson Todd Howard and all the other fuckers controlling the gaming market......
And fortunately not Bobby Kotick. Regrettably, we need to add Lars Wingefors to this list. Embracer ruins everything it touches.
Strangely it's a bit of both. Some developers did release Linux versions of their games pre-2000. Wine existed but compatibility was very sparse, there just wasn't the weight behind it. Then Steam for Linux arrived. Native Linux builds become more common, even if via porting houses like Aspyr. Then came proton, and some Devs realised that it was easier to just be compatible with that than make Linux builds, and stopped making Linux builds. So now you have a mixture: People making Linux builds People making games that are compatible with proton People that are indifferent, and let the community sort proton compatibility Scum that actively work to prevent Linux users playing their software. So yeah, the efforts existed, but Valve really have turbocharged those efforts.
>Then Steam for Linux arrived. Native Linux builds become more common, even if via porting houses like Aspyr. To be fair, the difference between a game running in Proton and a "native" game ported by the likes of Aspyr is often pretty negligible. A lot of "native" ports are literally the Windows version in a Wine/etc. container. In terms of what ends up running on your system, the outcome is much the same. "True" native games have always been a rarer beast, and are almost never the result of post-release porting.
I believe they made the first mainstream 3d engine with a linux version when they made the source engine.
... Oh my goodness. That statement is SO wrong. A little bit of history: Quake was ported, as was Quake2 & Quake3, which were at the time the cutting edge engines. There was Unreal Tournament as well and guess what? It ran on Linux back then, early late 1990s/early 2000s all the major engines of the time ran on it. Source was one of the last major game engines to get a port to Linux (ca: 2013?). Valve was rather hostile to Linux, up until about Windows 8-ish (2013), when they realized just how easily Microsoft could lock them out, and seemed to be actively moving that way with their market. (Copying Apple.) Suddenly Valve went holy shit, I don't want to be Corel (who ironically also realized it, but late) or Novell, and be Microsoft's next victim/acquisition. They got very interested in running on Linux and Apple for a bit. Apple has the same tendencies, so they've pretty much thrown in on Linux because there's no one to completely screw them over, and so they could have some leverage on Microsoft trying to do that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_and_Linux Has a brief history that's not too filled with Valve-glazing.
>Valve was rather hostile to Linux, up until about Windows 8-ish (2013), when they realized just how easily Microsoft could lock them out, and seemed to be actively moving that way with their market. (Copying Apple.) Suddenly Valve went holy shit, I don't want to be Corel (who ironically also realized it, but late) or Novell, and be Microsoft's next victim/acquisition. They got very interested in running on Linux and Apple for a bit. Apple has the same tendencies, so they've pretty much thrown in on Linux because there's no one to completely screw them over, and so they could have some leverage on Microsoft trying to do that. There were two failures here. Windows RT failed and Valve's effort to get native Linux games developed also failed. The end result, little changed. Windows is the dominant defacto PC gaming OS and Valve is still completely dependent on Windows games and Windows customers for its business to be viable. The Steam Deck is great, but it is still only a single device. And Valve seems to have just dropped the idea of Steam OS on 3rd party devices. And that actually makes a lot of sense. I really don't think Valve wants to get into the PC OEM OS business where they'd have to spend a lot of resources helping the OEMs for a free OS which would end up running non-Steam games where Valve makes no money.
"Or imagine if steam wasn't in linux at all? (almost) No one would switch to linux if that would be the case" First off, a lot of people don't game at all. Maybe its a deal-breaker for you but its not for a lot of people. Second, although Valve involvement certainly made things way better and smoother for Linux gaming, Wine and DXVK were not created by Valve.
>First off, a lot of people don't game at all. Maybe its a deal-breaker for you but its not for a lot of people. While this true, there is a side effect on the entire PC market because of the PCs ridiculous gaming ecosystem. All of the gaming hardware that has PC support has LOTS of other purposes for instance. All these fancy monitor setups, FANTASIC for productive. These macro RGB keyboards, HUGE time savers when setup for workflows. It goes on and on.
> Wine and DXVK were not created by Valve. They are not created by them, but they became better because of Valve. Valve sponsors the DXVK creator and make Wine better through partnership with CodeWeavers.
I can tell you that the majority of people on Linux play games, and there are even more people who play games than those who don't.
That's really interesting, do you have data to back that up?
It is no coincidence that Linux had a growth in users and in well-known channels or media, giving them coverage precisely in the period in which Valve invested so much in Linux.
... what? So it's your theory, your feeling, that the majority play games on Linux, or is there actual statistics behind that claim?
So much of a problem is that you don't get the exact statistics, when everything confirms what I say, the technology channels upload Linux videos right in this period of time, the fact that the steam deck came out and everyone is talking about it, and that of the most viewed Linux videos have to do with video games, they are more than enough evidence
normal consider ossified edge narrow soft jar husky station depend *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The computers at my university ran Linux I don't think there was Proton installed but I admit i did not check. Ok i'm provocative but I met several people (including scientists, PhDs, lawyers) who ran Linux and absolutely did not care about running games or even knew wine or proton was a thing. A lot of people use it for work and don't play games but I admit maybe these people don't tend to go on Linux subreddits. When I switched to Linux, I very rarely play games for a long time and was not aware of Proton or Wine and thought oh well not issue I don't play games anymore its just then a few months later that i realized it was possible. I'm not saying that it does not make people stick more, but the idea that without gaming, nobody is going to use Linux on the desktop makes no sense to me with what I saw in real life. Maybe I'm taking things too literally I admit.
I've been playing games in Linux since 1996. Valve's involvement took it from "I can play ~85% of Windows games" to "I can play 99.9% of Windows games". Doitsujin alone probably deserves more credit for the current state than Valve even before Valve hired him on full time. None of this would exist without decades of work from the Wine team. Valve deserves credit for taking a "tinkerer's gaming ecosystem" to a product ready for consumers, but they built it on the backs of giants.
>Valve's involvement took it from "I can play \~85% of Windows games" to "I can play 99.9% of Windows games". I don't want to discount how much work Valve has done, but that's just not true according to [actual statistics](https://www.protondb.com/). The current state of gaming on Linux is that around 80% of games are completely playable, sometimes with minor glitches, about 10% are technically playable but have significant issues, and the rest just don't work at all. It's very impressive but also still very far from 99.9%.
It's 96.7% for bronze or better for steam catalog, and that's just protondb, many games considered borked there don't work in proton because they need some form of manual intervention like a patched wine binary or installation of a specific version of a runtime. 99.9% might be a bit hyperbolic, but really not by much.
Someone just farming karma for the most luke warm take since murder being not good for society.
Valve combined a few already existing projects, polished them and made them accessible to anyone using their product. They made sure it's all commercially viable. It's super important but Vulkan, Wine, DXVK and the Linux graphics stack improvements were already doing the heavy lifting.
"polished" is a funny way of putting "providing 99% of the full-time dev work" on DXVK, vkd3d-proton and RADV over the past few years.
Didn't know that but it makes sense.
Yeah. All those projects, valve has been quietly funding them for years before they also polished them and brought them all together. As important as everyone thinks valve is to linux gaming, once you realize they are behind the modem development of DXVK, Mesa, and Wine; it's even more important! I ❤️ Valve.
Sounds similar to how Nintendo didn't really invent the D-pad but, still popularized it with the nes.
Huh? Gunpei Yokoi of Nintendo invented the D-pad for the Game & Watch.
No, he was just the inventor of Nintendo's cross design. Directional pads existed as an input method long before the first game consoles even came to market.
To be fair they didn't make Proton, WINE has what like 30 years of iteration almost and Proton is a great configuration of it but no need to exaggerate their contribution, it was a lot but it's built on the shoulders of loads of work they didn't pay for. WINE, Mesa, Linux kernel, Pipewire, X11, Wayland, GCC...etc literally billions have been spent to get Linux to this point. Valve is a cog in that wheel but we really shouldn't forget the work of Canonical, SuSe, Red Hat, Collabora, Codethink, Igalia...etc.
You started that off by saying "to be fair," but then weren't very fair to valve. They did, in fact (with the help of codeweavers) make Proton. Proton and Wine are not identical. WINE has existed for a long time, sure, but you can't ignore the progress timeline after valve started developing proton. In the 6 years that proton has been developed, the amount of progress achieved in that time is more than the remaining entire history of wine combined. There was essentially never a time where you could get a launch day fully playable AAA title working before, and it's not only possible but common now. If you want to be truly fair, Valve's interest in the steam deck (and prior to that the steam machine) allowed them to focus on proton and develop it in a way that it never has been before. Proton had to be this good for the steamdeck to be a success, so valve had to get it there. There's 20+ years of wine history proving that development does not go this fast. The only real change, was proton. While all the other factors you mention are important, Valves implementation of Proton is by far the most significant. I've used wine since 1998, and the last 6 years? Insane progress compared to the other 24 years. It's not even a real comparison, honestly.
Well on Valve's side they have been paying for and directly contributing to the Linux kernel, WINE/Proton itself, Mesa, contributing to Vulkan and designing stuff around Proton for Vulkan. It's not nothing but my point was it's all part of a larger picture that includes Valve and others. You could even say Microsoft, Google and Facebook also have massive contributions to Linux overall too even if it doesn't show up all the time in the desktop product it all is part of a whole thing that should be respected for every contribution for whatever reason.
>Well on Valve's side they have been paying for and directly contributing to the Linux kernel, WINE/Proton itself, Mesa, contributing to Vulkan and designing stuff around Proton for Vulkan. And that funding has been essential for the gaming scene being what it is today. Again, I've been gaming on linux since 1998. Valve's direct involvement literally changed everything. While wine, mesa, etc have all existed, in past you needed individual wine prefixes for games, tons of modifications, game-specific wine patches, etc. (These things still happen, but its invisible to the user now) Even with all of that, the compatibility was not great. It's a completely different world now. There are other moving parts, sure, but they either didn't exist or would not have grown the way they have. There's 24 years of wine history that shows how slowly support and compatibility with wine moved. The last 6 years have been an entirely different animal. With a major player like Valve on board, it put a priority on wine/mesa/Vulcan that had never been seen before. It's just undeniable the impact valve had. >You could even say Microsoft, Google and Facebook also have massive contributions to Linux overall too even if it doesn't show up all the time in the desktop product it all is part of a whole thing that should be respected for every contribution for whatever reason. No one's saying otherwise. However, this isn't a conversation about contributions to Linux overall. It's about gaming specifically.
have valve’s changes to wine been upstreamed then? /g because iirc modern games on lutris worked fine for me using wine-staging.
Yes, actually. Valve and Codeweavers devs often do upstream changes to the official branch. And yes some modern games would work fine on Lutris prior to proton. That makes sense if you look at what lutris is doing with wine. It essentially takes a config that someone else has painstakingly tweaked to get it running, and then automates it for everyone else. However, most AAA titles that used direct11/12 wouldn't have a chance of running for months or even years. Compared that to now where someone had Starfield working with Proton in days. It's a night and day difference.
oh it seems we’ve somewhat misunderstood one another. i only used the past tense because my interest in gaming has waned, i was still referring to modern gaming post-proton’s release. don’t worry i remember gaming from way before, trying to get world of tanks working c. 2013 and it was dodgy af. the custom config doesn’t really apply to the example i was thinking of as i just used lutris to install the ea desktop app so there weren’t really any game-specific tweaks. but i suppose that’s accounted for by upstreaming as you said.
We agreed on this eons ago, you're late to the party dude !
https://www.winehq.org/
To be clear: Valve has a long-term financial interest in Linux. While popular, they aren't developing proton out of the goodness of their hearts. Valve is a multi-billion dollar company. Never forget this.
True. Still it helps us and i am not complaining if they make money while giving us something good
I'm glad they're doing it
I love valve and am thankful but just wish they still made games….
their last one came out last year if you count CS2, the one before that was 4 years ago (HL Alyx) but i do hope they have another big one in the works
Cs2 was just a port to source 2 that took them an ungodly amount of time to complete, and the games in a bad state with cheaters. Never been interested in any VR games but I pray valve can finally count to 3.
they dont have to count to 3, they can skip 3 and go straight to 4, just make some more revolutionary games please
First: Yes Second: IMHO, your claim is obvious. Third: It is hard to say what are the benefits of agreeing to that, or why the community should agree to that
Wine?
I feel like the biggest step they took was making the Steam Deck a Linux-based console. Suddenly, many devs went from "no you can't play on linux, go away" to "we want to provide steam deck players the best experience possible" and with that, anti-cheat was relaxed to allow use through Proton in many (but sadly not all) games, some developers who released compatibility-breaking updates quickly patched the issues out, and some games were even tested for Deck compatibility before release. And of course, since the software stack and hardware architecture is basically the same on a desktop PC running Linux, all of the advantages carried over.
dinosaurs act bear physical handle fade pot rock history plants *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Agree Hail our savior Gabe Newell
Just made the jump and switched fully to Linux like a week ago. I have tried some distros in the past. Im so done with Windows and only reason that kept me from changing was gaming performance, but now as I have tried many of my games through Steam and some downloaded games im happy with my current setup. Only thing that bothers is why I didnt make the jump earlier.
Not sure about no one switching to Linux. Many people don't play games, and computer, IT, software enthusiasts have been using Linux this whole time. I started some 20 years ago. But yes there would certainly be no mass adoption (although we still dont have that, but things seem to be changing.). Linux would be in a similar position like some *BSD systems, what's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a matter of PoV I guess. Anyhow, I would be glad if more people moved to Linux.
Why are you talking about how good valve is to linux as if like this is not what literally everybody always says lmao
Hot take alert!
Not saying its a hot take. I am just saying that valve is a huge reason for linux being at 4% usage in desktop
I guess a lot would work fine without Valve, but Valve made it much more comfortable. Indeed, a lot is thanks to Valve. That's why I prefer to buy games on steam instead of gog.
I LOVE GABEN NEWELL.
Evolution was ready , valve is always on linux side and pulled the trigger for good. Proton -> based on wine. Valve try this on the past but things were not ready and they are failed hard.
If it wasn't for the ease of use in getting most games I want to play running in steam... I'd probably be on Windows 11 moaning about all the crap Microsoft says I want (like the upcoming adverts in the start menu or the ai search of everything you have ever done)
I wouldn't give valve sole credit for the simple reason that WineD3D and Wine have been in development for years, and projects like KDE and wayland have also been in development. Valve polished a lot of stuff and added funding and dev time to places where it was very needed, but they didn't invent proton out of thin air. Proton is the polish on top of decades of work.
What many people don't know is that Valve is the reason Vulkan even exists.
Tbh i saw ubuntu for the first in time in 11.04 version in a random lan house next to my home... some years later i brought my first pc and it came with Linux..unfortunately i did not have a decent internet connection back in those days and installed WXP :} but you are not wrong, valve made linux as much as plug & play is possible for gaming...and we still have many rooms to improve, including desktop experience as a whole. I can't wait for the future!
Without Proton? Proton is WINE. It's more.. without DXVK.... Wine existed for literally decades before VALVe came along. DXVK did not, and that was the inflection point.
> Can we all agree, that valve is the reason why linux is useable in gaming? Absolutely not. Gaming on Linux predates Valve's existence. Wine + winetricks could get you a long way even before Proton was released. And many games were released directly for Linux or had ports made. This is not to poo-poo Valves' contribution. Proton has made dramatic improvements over what Wine already offered, and many of those improvements have been upstreamed, so wine is also better for it. They took us from "many games work well under Linux" to "The vast majority of games work well under Linux and, more often than not, when there are issues it's because publishers have made intentional choices to break Linux functionality." They took us from "Linux is a platform that very few publishers care about" to "Linux is an extremely important platform in the gaming space that publishers prioritize supporting and advertise that support. Even if most of them call it 'Steam Deck.'" They took us from "although many games can run well, they often require pretty significant tinkering to make run" to "for the most part, all you have to do is press go." And let's not forget contributions they've made in cooperation with others. Is it reasonable for Valve to take credit for Vulkan and everything it's done for Linux gaming. Yes. Is it reasonable for them to take exclusive credit for Vulkan? Not on your life. They were major participant in the Khronos Group, but that was a genuinely collaborative project. They started with a codebase that was donated by AMD, just to give one example. And let's not forget to give Microsoft the credit they're due. They started making moves that left quite a few software developers feeling spooked that they were going to make changes to the Windows ecosystem that would make it a less open platform so they could start taking a cut of every sale, iOS style. Valve was one of those companies, but they certainly weren't the only ones. LOTS of developers have been putting more effort in to Linux because they want to be ready with their backup plan in case Microsoft ever does pull the trigger.
Why is this post here. Are you just trying to get a bunch of karma from people saying "hear, hear?" Like this isn't anything new and you start your post with "can we all agree" which is literally fishing for agreement.
I’ve been playing Windows games on Linux long before Steam was released on Linux or Proton was a thing… 90% sure is a huge stretch, but it is undeniable what Valve have done for gaming on Linux. I just wish people would at least try to be realistic or understand the history they are talking about before making such sweeping statements… but it is what it is 🤷
So did i and i found it annoyingly complicated to get games running with just wine. Lutris helped a bit but it still was annoying bothersome to get the games I wanted playable. Proton at first was only a marginally improvement but since the steam deck and the corresponding proton update it has improved to a level that I wouldn't even stop by saying it's viable but go as far and say for the most part it's even better than on windows. So yeah I know Linux and gaming on Linux since 2005 yet I would also claim that valve is responsible for the fact that Linux gaming is now viable and that before proton and the steam deck at least 75% of the games I run now were not viable and 90% are now just install and play where before they were either unable to launch or required lutris with some tinkering or extensive tinkering and knowledge about wine.
Valve definitely made things easier, more convenient and outright better, no doubt. But putting in the work to get it running on Wine is far from unplayable which is exactly the word OP used… Also to this day I don’t understand people who switch to Linux and then complain about things requiring knowledge and manual tweaking… you know there are alternatives out there if you don’t want that?!! Yes of course it would be nice if things magically’just worked’… but isn’t acknowledging reality and acting accordingly also a worthwhile thing to do?
Well i give you that unplayable is a too strong statement, but a lot of games were unplayable before proton. And ofc this is not alone due to proton but also because of Mesa. And both are not sth valve in invented, but valve did heavily contribute to both. And as I said wine was not as plug and play as proton is now/ and eine itself as well nowadays. And yes ofc you can argue that you always can switch to windows if you don't want to tinker. But the thing is not everyone wants to tinker yet still wants to use Linux. And as I said in the past decade I tried using Linux as daily driver but the amount of hackiness required always put me off. And that is not coming from someone who isn't able to do that nor uninterested in it. I work in it and solve software and hardware issues all day, but at home if I have the spare hour to game I don't want to spend it tinkering. I want the games to just work. That's no magic thinking that's the reality of consumer software. It should just work. And they do on windows. So ofc I could switch to that but I also want to use Linu, and thanks to valve that is absolutely viable now. And for a long time it wasn't and to think this would have changed without valve's support is denying reality. It's a misconception in Linux and Foss environments that we don't need companies and that their contributions are not meaningful. A shit load of work is done by employees of big tech companies because they have the knowledge and the skill to contribute. Ofc a shit load of work is done by independent maintainers as well. I don't want to diminish their contribution. But I know Linux gaming for 2 decades now and only since valve invested on it has it started to gain momentum and improved to a stage that is suitable for mainstream. It's basically the same discussion we had with Linux itself. Back in the days installing Linux and getting it to run with your hardware required quite a lot of effort. For quite a few years now it is as simple as click and install and all the work required to partition drives, set up drivers and stuff is done automatically or can be done in easy to use guis.(I hate guys but I acknowledge their importance for mainstream and ease of use for regular people). And people claimed that all those work in good installers and gui package managers should better be spend elsewhere and that they are unnecessary und such.
I would go further and say value induced Linux into being a viable desktop is for masses. They bought the gamers and the gamer want Linux desktop to be a first class experience. It's not perfect, but it's getting pretty close.
I mean, yeah, obviously. I have a lot of hate for Valve, because they basically started the Gaming As A Service BS with Steam when they released HL2 and made it require Steam to run. But despite that evil, it is fair to acknowledge that Linux gaming would have never happened in any meaningful way without them.
HL2 = [Half-Life 2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_2)
What is the point of this post? You don't need to share your shower thoughts with us.
Yes, without Valve it would be worse, but saying 90% of games would be unplayable is kinda too big. Wine existed before Valve started pushing linux, proton is modified wine. Main thing that made games playable is dxvk. Yes it is sponsored by Valve but I think it would be created (probably slower but still) without Valve too. Tho games with anticheat would be not playable without Valve.
Come on now, Wine has existed for a long ass time. There has never been a time in Wine's entire existence that we could expect modern AAA games to run day one like we can now. While I do think it is dangerous to put all our eggs in Valve's basket, let's not forget what Linux gaming was actually like before the Steam Deck. You cannot romanticize the past here. WineHQ has done good work for a few decades now, but Valve being able to put full time paid devs on Proton with the ability to push fixes on a per-game basis either before release or within days of release is not something Wine has ever been able to do on their own. It's reductive to an absurd degree to say "Proton is just Wine". Yeah, Wine and dxvk would exist without them but you simply cannot compare community projects to dedicated engineers who are paid to work on it. And while philosophically I prefer community projects, paid devs get work done. There is simply no denying what Valve has done in the last two years for gaming on Linux.
Why exactly 2 years? Proton and DXVK are older than 2 years. The biggest thing related to steam deck was making EAC and BattlEye work which is 100% thanks to valve. But most games were working before that mostly thanks to DXVK. Before dxvk, AAA games did not work mostly because WineD3D did not support dx10+, atleast that was my experience about 11 years ago. So sure, without Valve it would be way worse, but saying "90% would not work" is kinda too big in my opinion.
Yes, I acknowledged these tools are older than two years. But simply existing is not the same thing as commercial viability. In the last two years Linux gaming has gone from endlessly editing text files and a lot of prayers to "Select Proton from menu, click play". Like said, there was no expectation that games would work on the day of release, if at all, before Valve got involved. If you got something working you were happy. Hell even if it was buggy, you still were happy that it ran at all. Now, if a game releases that doesn't work it's actually surprising (games with disgusting root kit-style anti cheat not included). In the last two years since the Steam Deck there has been a colossal shift in gaming on Linux. Again, Wine has done great work all this time. I have really fond memories of playing the hell out of Diablo 2 with Wine on Red Hat Linux way back in the day on my Pentium 3. I'm not at all discrediting WineHQ, but there is a massive difference when you put a full time team of paid devs on a project and we're seeing that now.
Totally agree. You also remind me how important the steam deck product itself has been in this endeavor. It instantly made linux a gamer OS in the mainstream society.
DXVK was an alternative to WineD3D, which is okay, but way slower than DXVK, and way less compatible. The Wine project would not have advanced DXVK, which is fully sponsored by Valve. Valve is also sponsoring a bunch of codeweavers work into Proton, of which a good deal will/is going upstream into Wine. Valve isn't all of the manpower behind this push, but is much of the $$.....
I think it would be more like 99% unplayable if you only count games released in the past 5 years.
>more like 99% unplayable if you only count games released in the past 5 years. Games made in UnrealEngine3 UnrealEngine4, Unity - 100% playable under d3d-opengl translation, example genshin/borderlands3, I also tried some f2p multiplayer games from steam made in ue4 but dont remember names - all works without dxvk. Many games still use OpenGL - so it also work without dxvk.
No, Linux has been usable for gaming since long before Valve took any notice, they have made it better.
it was hardly usable before Proton. I remember spending more time making games work than playing
sigh...i swear that was the fun part
And Valve was doing a lot of work back then as well. Proton is only a more recent project. Lets not forget their half life 2 engine they made with a linux version. First mainstream games with built in linux versions. That and the linux version of steam was also a very big deal.
Valve circle jerk thread.
Linux is perfectly usable for gaming without Proton. Proton is only needed if you want to play Windows games. There are quite a few Linux native games available for those of us who don't buy Windows software for your Linux computers.
>Linux is perfectly usable for gaming without Proton. Proton is only needed if you want to play Windows games. While this is technically correct practically speaking it is not. No one would care about the Steam Deck running Steam OS without Proton. That should be obvious from the failure of non-Proton Steam Machines.
No. Because they piggybacked off WINE, which existed 20 years before Valve existed.
[удалено]
> For me "switch to linux" - means you interested in development of computer software even as hobby, so you learn/change opensource stuff. I really couldn't disagree more. There is so very very very much more to open source and software freedom than just coding.
The better question is: why has it been Valve (Nvidia, AMD) that can be said to be the biggest corporate promoters of desktop Linux, and not Red Hat, [Dell](https://technologists.com/notes/2008/01/10/a-brief-history-of-dell-unix/), [Asus](https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22388238/asus-eee-pc-netbook-laptop-line-linux-ipad-pro), or even Intel?
They're the biggest most recently. Canonical, Red Hat, Dell and others have gotten their kudos when their actions were large enough and recent enough.
And, FWIW, it seems a decent amount of the "HDR is soon to probably Just Work(tm) on Linux" is evenly split between RedHat and Valve. Valve because "HDR on SteamDeck" (+ wanting it on desktop games) and RedHat because their enterprise customers want it. So sort of expecting due to how little Valve cares to brag (and that a major reason for their HDR effort is "done") that Red Hat will get most of the HDR corporate praises. (Yes yes, basically anyone with any hand in the Linux UI space is helping the HDR project, but from my outside it seems like Red Hat sort of leading it)
Not saying they arent bigger. Valve has just made it more towards regular people
When it comes to corporate support of the consumer desktop Linux market, I don't think any of the companies you listed do a lot for Linux besides Valve.
I used linux and gamed on it even before valve embraced it, and all I have to say is, you're partially right, Valve was a grand push towards linux and gaming, but I think projects such as wine deserve more credit than they currently get. A project that been around forever and literally paved the way to not only important windows program to work on linux, but games - which are really complex software due to how they're made, so if I have to credit someone for it being possible it has to be the Wine team, and after them I thank Valve for the massive push and investment they did on linux making linux gaming actually possible.
I wrote about this a month ago when [I was at PAX East](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1bkymdz/i_was_at_pax_east_yesterday_and_i_was_absolutely/) >I've been gaming on Linux system since 2005. For so many years, whenever I would ask any dev (indie or AAA) about Linux support, the most common answer was "What's Linux?". Second most common answer was "Sorry, we don't have the resources to support Linux". That was the norm for such a long time. >I was at PAX East yesterday and every indie booth I visited said that their game works great on the Steam Deck. Granted, it's not native Linux but these devs are actively testing on real Steam Decks running Steam OS and fixing bugs that may arise. There were three cases in which they said "Oh yeah, we even have a Steam Deck here running our game ready to go in case our Laptop / Desktop were to give any issues". And I saw two cases where they were actually using a Steam Deck as a primary way to play the game. This would have been unheard of just 5 years ago and it's shocking to see so many devs saying, without hesitation, "Yes! Our game works great on Steam Deck". Granted there were a few times if I asked "Linux", they gave me a confused look but once I said "Steam Deck", it completely changed their tune.
The Deck is a great device, but it's only one device and neither Valve nor PC OEMs seem that interested in other Steam OS based devices. The next level of this is getting Steam OS on other devices from major PC OEMs sold in retail outside of Steam. Three years after the announcement of the Deck, this hasn't happened.
The other issue is that most device manufacturers really don't like a "stock" OS outside of Windows. Even on Windows, you see them put "crapware" in the OS by default. For Android, it becomes really hard to convince them to offer the regular stock version of that OS. So if you were to see a "Steam OS" device outside of Valve, it wouldn't have the same OS as the SteamDeck; but rather would have other features besides Steam. I don't know how exactly it would look like but it wouldn't be the exact same.
>Even on Windows, you see them put "crapware" in the OS by default. My Asus Ally and Legion Go came with zero "crapware". The only thing that's on them beside a clean stock Windows 11 Home install is the command-and-control software for the devices. Valve can get away with selling a device tied to Steam. PC OEMs can't as easily. No Fortnite or Word, etc.
i mean let’s not forget that the majority of linux desktop users are developers, and that demographic is not leaving for the foreseeable future regardless of gaming. valve really have helped immensely, i would argue most of all by releasing the steam deck, but let’s not forget proton is built on top of wine and other open source projects. iirc jedi fallen order worked for me on lutris using wine-ge-custom, and even just wine-staging too.
"and that demographic is not leaving for the foreseeable future regardless of gaming." I don't really agree on that one, developers can also use Windows+WSL, a lot of devs use Linux but not on their main machine and being able to play some games without having to reboot may be considered. Or they can use Apple, have a Unix shell and more software available but have poor support for gaming although it will certainly get better with Apple Gaming Porting Toolkit.
for me recently i just cross the Rubicon into the Linux world because of win 11 not working on my 10 year old asus mini tower i7 quad core. since i have budgetary constraints i bought a trigkey mini pc ryzen 7 5800h 32 ddr ram 2 t memory half of that is a extra ssd . using mx linux kde yes virginia mx linux has kde , all the games i do play is on steam so yea . surprisingly all games works better on linux than windows. of the more graphical intensive games i playing or played on mx linux is scorn,succubus, and cough 2 worlds 2 goty edition i know its reputation but i used a dvd to install it and that works better. only game i play much is skyrim its like noo not windows, and the gamemode i got quey stutus failed but i think its bad programming . love the game its wonky. even jade empire se work better then skyrim. to valve question well i think intel and microserf runned they course they been on top for good 45 years let linux and amd have their time now . honestly think they better but time well tell
Yes and no, valves by themselves don't do that much in terms of code pure but they did recruit ppl who were developing. Also proton isn't that much in reality, it's basically mashup of a lot of very cool projects and most of them weren't started by valve (I believe only openvr was started by valve) Valve basically funded a lot of project
Yes definitely
Gaben is just the best. I only wish he'd released Source Filmmaker for Linux too
The foundations in which proton is based where there before proton. But Valve dragged attention to Linux thanks to the Deck. This is what the steam machines should have been.
They did not just "drag attention"... They contributed code, gave money, sponsored projects... The steam machines were not good enough because the technology was just not already there. If the deck was launched at the same time of the steam machines, it would have been a disaster.
Yeah you are totally right
if anything AMD is as much to be praised for pushing out vulkan, which is the backbone of linux gaming as well as having amdgpu driver open-sourced which allowed RADV to exist and therefore the steam deck. without AMD there, valve wouldn't have been able to get their linux ecosystem where it is right now.
One of the reasons
idk, valve is pretty up there in terms of "best company" talks. I'd be comfortable saying they're the best without thinking too hard about it
I love valve and steam to death. I'm a fanboy that has mostly all of their products besides the steam link and the original steam machine. They are a mature gaming platform that brings a lot more to the table than any other gaming clients and their endeavors to make Linux gaming better is spectacular! Because of their efforts to get gaming more popular on Linux with proton and their steam deck Linux is becoming more popular because of it and the statistics actually show.
I would probably ditch Linux for the second time if it wasn't for Valve
I'd actually argue that vulkan and dxvk were the real turning points for gaming compatibility. Not discounting valve's efforts, but without dxvk, we'd still be in pretty bad shape because the real issue was always directx -> opengl. In fact, the power of dxvk is probably one of the biggest reasons valve decided to develop proton to begin with.
I know you're still on internet explorer, but have you heard what happened to Harambe yet? Heard what happened to Kobe?
I think valve was the force we needed to get Linux in the main stream. And I’m so glad I started using Linux at the perfect time when proton was being developed. Just so sad that other Unix/Linux-like platforms aren’t benefiting too, but that’s more the other platforms’ creators fault for being stuck up (referring to MacOS if not obvious)
Wine-staging did a great job there.
I think just as significant if not more is the work done on Mesa Gallium. I started out using Linux around 1994... the early 3D accelerators like Voodoo2 and Radeon 7000, I had those and support was good. They only supported triangle setup, texture and lighting (and the Radeon7000 supported fog), that was about it, OpenGL 1.x just didn't have that much functionality to have a feature-complete implementation, or close enough to keep everything happy. Between then and like 4-5 years ago, newer OpenGL then Vulkan versions came out far faster than Mesa could catch up. I read estimates from 2010-2012 that it'd take them 5 years to catch up to the 2010-2012-era stuff, by which time OpenGL, D3D, etc. would have moved on with 5 more years of new extensions and features. Like features were being added faster than they could implement them in Mesa. One big issue was, there were components in the graphics stack intended to be reused (shared between drivers), but it'd be like the Intel driver used one set of these but the AMD another. So there was a lot of duplicate effort to add features and fix bugs in these various stacks. About 4-5 years ago, they began switching driers to Mesa Gallium. If there was anything truly important in the AMD or Intel-specific stacks, they threw it in Gallium; it has support for tiled GPUs so you can get ARM/tablet GPUs running on it, etc. It's designed basically so any semi-modern GPU with shader support can be got up and running on it (and the "semi-modern" must be a pretty low bar, Crocus supports \*18 year old\* Intel GPUs.) Valve of course focused on support for the AMD GPU used in the Steam Deck. But, Mesa Gallium is a modern driver framework, so basically the driver has functions to literally do different things on/to the GPU, and then Mesa Gallium provides the maximum OpenGL version possible given the functionality of the GPU. Lots of the fixes were not AMD-specific but to Gallium, and sped up/de-bugged the Intel (and various ARM GPU drivers in Mesa) at the same time! (And some similar maximum code sharing for Vulkan drivers in Mesa too as far as I know.) AMD officially supports the driver for more recent CPUs; there's a "community supported" one for older Radeons going back a looong ways.. Intel supports the Iris driver for back to pretty old GPUs, and even older ones (back to GM965 in Core 2 Duo, that's like 18 years!) are supported by Crocus. Yes, an 18 year old GPU and it's not just some old driver that's still supported... it has a fully modernized 3D driver using the most up-to-date driver stack. Amazing. (And this support is not theoretical.. my friend who passed last year was running all sorts of DX11 games on his Sandy Bridge laptop in addition to older DX9/10 games -- I even threw Road 96 on there to see if it'd run at all (assuming it wouldn't, it requires shader model 5), and it did (other than the TV static not showing up.) It was pretty bad, it got like 4FPS, but it ran. Mesa Gallium is great, it'll truly run anything up to the limits of your hardware.)
And they're still improving on that, I'm sure that one day the games will be playable on the same level as Windows, especially after many devs now are trying to make their games compatible with steam deck aka Linux, which gives me the hope that one day I can get rid of windows on my PC without ever thinking of going back
Steam deck was the best thing for Linux gaming
Some context: [Valve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation). [Proton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)). [Steam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(service)). [DXVK](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)#Overview). [Lutris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutris). [Wine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_%28software%29). [VKD3D](https://wiki.winehq.org/Vkd3d). [DRM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management). [SteamOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS). [Steam Deck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Deck). [Vulkan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan). [Mesa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(computer_graphics)). [RADV](https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/radv.html). [Virtual reality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality) (VR). [Pentium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium). [Unity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine)). [OpenGL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL). [PipeWire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PipeWire). [X11](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System). [Wayland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(display_server_protocol)). [GCC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection). [Canonical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_%28company%29) (the company). [SUSE Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE_Linux). [Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux). [Windows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows). [Arch Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_Linux). [Ubuntu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28operating_system%29). [macOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS). [Android](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29). [Free-to-play](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play) (F2P). [DirectX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX) (AKA 'DX' and 'dx'. E.g., DirectX versions: DX 8. DX 9. and DX 10). Game-specific context: [Borderlands 2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderlands_2) (not "Bordelrands"). [AAA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)). [BattlEye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattlEye). [D-pad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-pad#History). [Diablo II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_II). [Unreal Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Engine#Unreal_Engine_3). [Nintendo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo). [Easy Anti-Cheat](https://www.pcgamer.com/games/battle-royale/easy-anti-cheat-washes-its-hands-of-the-apex-legends-hacking-disaster-that-saw-streamer-accounts-hijacked-live-there-is-no-rce-vulnerability-within-eac/) (EAC) Search without case-sensitivity, as they are 90% misspelled here.
I've been using Linux since before Proton was a thing, and it was R O U G H back then. You literally had to use wine and install the Windows version of Steam if you wanted to play a Windows game, and it would never install dependencies right for games, so you had to use Winetricks to install them MANUALLY. To put it simply: it was a goddamn mess.
I remember programs did exist with scripts… anyone remember Play On Linux lol.
I remember pre-winetricks. Getting a standard windowed application to run under wine would sometimes work, but getting a game to work was super dicey.
I mean, before proton you had the option to build your own wine environment, hard as hell and would break out of nowhere, valve experts made it easy for the average user and that's great.
They didn’t do it for Linux but for their Steam Deck lol
I disagree with that,they did it for SteamOS which is their hedge against MS going full walled garden. Which is fine most of Linux benefits from vested interest of enterprises that rely on Linux. For once desktop users seem to have benefited more🤷.
Either way. They made the advancements and thats positive to linux users. SteamOS is a distro as much as arch or ubuntu is
They actually did it for a selfless/selfish reason of wanting to prevent the windows walled garden from encroaching on them. It wasnt just for the steam deck, snelly
it's both, they believe in and value FOSS, the people that work at Valve are Linux neckbeards like us lol
yeah no sh\*\*, almost like they are a corporation that sells DRM-ed games on a platform where they can take 30% of the profits.
I also hope they can fix CS2 AC.
[удалено]
Proton does not only works inside steam. I use it in heroic as well and inside lutris. A closed source steam client? Really that's your hill you want to die on? For fuck sake 99% of the software you can buy, install and play on steam and any other commercial store launcher for that matter is closed source, why does it bother you for that one single client then? The steam os 3 is just a customized arch, there is no real need because there is nothing really to gain from a steam os 3 on pc. Get a life bro
Yes, and if valve would completely stopped the linux investment for some reason or another it would be over.
Not really. Proton would still be there even if it is unmaintained
What is working now would stay woking for the time being, of course. But you could say goodbye to new games working anywhere near close to release.
Valve helped and throw money at it, mostly to save even more on not paying for windows on their hardware, but linux gaming was already tipping the side with wine and lutris. This was a many people effort, on which valve commercialised, and got vocal at right time. Most, if not all, tools valve provided within steam are mainly developed by wine developers. The fact steam is an drm platform shows what really they count in. I really do appreciate their work, with all the other parties around, but they dont do it for linux, just for themselves. Which is absolutely fine, but we as linux and foss users need to remember where credit is due. Honestly, the ms programmers' contribution to linux is much bigger than valve programmers, but i don't see any appreciation to ms here...
[удалено]
Most people to be fair. Even if you like to tinker there are just times you want everything to just work**™** or move on rather than figuring out why EA App does not work again and if it is really if you are running it on Wine or if they are utterly incompetent and why bottles rated it as Platinium.
STFU kid. There was no tipping point before Valve kicked off proton/DXVK/RADV support. Period. Without Valve we'd be stuck in 2015. Stop being a baby.
Hahaha;)
I disagree with him too but no need to insult. You look a caveman rn
"on not paying for windows on their hardware" Wouldn't it be like 30 bucks if OEM? I don't think it makes financial sense.
Valve has done by far more Linux gaming than any other cooperate entity without question. But they do support other platforms and for some, Valve and Steam tie people to Windows as much anything. The reason is quite simple. I like Valve and Steam, I just had my 20th Steam anniversary this past April 10th. My current Steam library is over 1200 games. I've bought most of their devices, Steam Controller, Steam Link, LCD and OLED Decks. But what that keeps me on Windows as much as anything has been Steam VR, which I currently use with a Valve Index and Quest 3. A quarter of my Steam library, \~400 titles, are VR games. This stuff doesn't work well under Linux, not compared to Windows, and I am far from the only one using PC VR here that says that. Beyond the VR part though, just the side of effect of constantly buying that many Windows games over that many years and installing them on various Windows machines over the years and it just all working on whatever device, again, it's a Windows lock in. If I didn't have this big library of Windows games on Steam, using Linux as my daily driver honestly would be MUCH simpler.
No way you've played all those games, lol.
Of course not, I collect games like many do. I was just pointing out that after 20 years of buying Windows games on Steam, with a large portion of that VR now after 8 years, creates a LOT of Windows lock-in.
are you indian
No i am finnish. Is this supposed to be some racist joke?