Any chance someone can ELI5 this for me? I've been trying to game on Linux and I'm frustrated / confused enough with wine / lutris / proton an debugging their weird setups and interactions as it is.
Right now it’s a PoC (proof of concept, a rough implementation of an idea), to emulate launching games from other stores as if they were launched from steam using proton.
What this could be used for is to create a new Linux launcher, where you setup proton once, and launch all games using this launcher.
This simplifies usage for you as the end user, since you would only need to install the launcher, and it sets up ProtonGE, and you’re done. It also enables simple Proton usage for other games (Epic, Lutris, whatever).
Additionally it helps unifying development. Windows games under Linux have a lot of moving parts: there’s Proton as a compatibility layer. There’s integration between steam, proton and your system (sniper/vessel). There’s protonfixes which is game specific changes in proton. Each of which itself consists of components and stuff I’ve missed. In short, it’s complicated. Unifying all this components with one tool, with one battle tested installation and compatibility and with a single source of truth in development could be another big step in Linux gaming.
TLDR - potentially a new launcher for games under the Linux, enabling any game to be played using proton, when supported, not only steam games.
I’m guessing it would be a CLI launcher that Heroic, Lutris, etc would use internally. As in, it wouldn’t replace those tools, it would just make running games more consistent across those tools.
So you’d still use Heroic, Lutris, or whatever you’re happy with, the experience would just be more consistent across those services so you could file bug reports in one place.
I don’t think that the current tools will be using it internally, since this would require the tools actually supporting the CLI launcher, and in the best case we would have something like the proton config in steam in every tool separately again.
I think that you will need to have your launcher installed, but you will have this new launcher as your entry point, from which you will start your games using proton from the linked project.
But - it’s a PoC right now, maybe both ways will be possible.
From a wishful perspective, it would be super neat if this new launcher would hook into the installed regular tools, and automagically make those use the preconfigured proton runtime it brings. Shouldn’t this be possible using LD_PRELOAD?
I’m mostly interested in hopefully not having multiple copies of Proton/WINE installed. I’d have maybe 3-4 for compat, instead of copies for each launcher I happen to use (e.g. Heroic vs Steam vs Lutris, etc).
Sounds like this would be easier to setup and use than Lutris though - dunno about everyone else but I'm always so very confused trying to get non-steam games running on linux, with all the custom paths, simulated folder structures and prefixes while steam apparently does it on its own out of the box.
Its basically bugfixes for specific games through proton. Different fames need different fixes, so you cant just make a general fix for some bugs if they only exist in one game. The new launcher promises to make one database for those fixes where all the launchers can fetch their data from instead of everyone having to do their own thing and having to fix each game separately.
Wine attempts to translate Windows calls into Linux, its developed by Codeweavers whose focus is/was application compatibility.
Valve took Wine and modify it to best support games, the result is called Proton. For example:
Someone built a library to convert DirectX 9-11 calls and turn them into Vulkan ones, it was written in C++ and is called DxVK.
Wine has strict rules on only C code and their directx library handles odd behaviour from old CAD applications.
Valve doesn't care about that, they care that the Wine DirectX library is slow and buggy and DxVK isn't. So they pull out Wines and use DxVK.
There are lots of smaller changes, these are 'Proton Fixes', sometimes Proton Fixes are passed on to Wine. Sometimes they can't but discussion happens and a Wine fix is developed.
It really depends whether he got the devs of "Lutris, Heroic, Legendary, Bottles, etc." to agree to use the unified runtime before starting this project. As long as he gets most of the big players to join then it will actually become the only standard worth using.
Isn’t one of the features of bottles etc that you can select different versions of wine on the fly per-app? This sounds like it’s meant to supersede that
It sounds like it’ll replace that functionality, but not eliminate the ability to select different versions. So instead of using whatever Bottles is doing, Bottles would use this mechanism to select WINE versions.
I think people are getting the wrong impression because it said “unify” in the title. This is mostly GE want to obsolete wine-ge/winetricks and focus on proton-ge and protontricks/fixes. Nothing out of his works, at least for now. Everything else should work the same.
Unification of standards only works if everyone agrees to use it and only it (i.e. mobile phones and USB C), otherwise you're just adding another one to the pile.
My worry is Valve will look at the project and shut it down. Remember, Valve doesn’t care about your Linux, it only cares about money. Not having users on their Client side platform means less revenue and less ads to show.
You’re the troll if you can’t explain why no one owns all the code. You can’t even accept the lawsuits that the people of America brought against to Valve Corporation.
Dont talk like you have anything worthwhile going when you refuse to acknowledge their crimes.
The code isn't the operating systems that Valve owns. networking 101, something connects to make the thing work. Not the code that follows the rules. Learn about it.
Afaik proton is BSD-3, and everything else important is part of wine which is LGPL. Sure, valve can be hostile if they choose, but they haven’t given themselves the legal tools to do much.
Proton is open source. Valve has also been incredibly supportive of and is actively contributing to an open ecosystem for Linux and SteamOS. Desktop mode in SteamOS exists so end users can install whatever tools they want on it.
This doesn’t affect valve at all though. It’s borrowing their tech that they’ve made open source, and figuring out how to use it elsewhere outside of steam.
Actually, it’ll benefit them. More eyes are on proton and any fix will benefit everyone, including games played via steam.
It’s really up to the corporation whether they think it will benefit them. I agree that Valve has so far not been hostile toward GE, and it looks like proton has a very permissive license, but if it were any other digital storefront, doing anything to allow users to consume your content without using your storefront would be seen as at attack on their bottom line.
I’m actually curious how this new standard would potentially benefit other storefronts who haven’t natively supported Linux yet. If it’s going to make things easier for existing open source launchers, then it would also make things easier for competing launchers. I know as a consumer, I want GOG, Epic, EA, etc. supporting Linux, but does valve? I don’t know, maybe, maybe not. On the one hand, maybe they don’t want competition in their niche space, on the other hand, maybe they’ll do anything to take marketshare from msft.
Valve's Proton is open source but is it also free to use and distribute in commercial software? Cuz if so, there'd be nothing stopping GOG or Epic from implementing it already, they don't need this project at all
Valve’s Proton is open source but is it also free to use and distribute in commercial software?
Yes.
Valve’s Proton code is licensed under the BSD licence, which is a “do anything you like with this code” licence.
Wine code is under the LGPL. You can ship this in commercial software as long as you “make the source code available” (which, assuming the distributor isn’t modifying the Wine code further, can be achieved by just linking people back to the main Wine project code repository).
DXVK is licensed under zlib, which is functionally the same as the BSD licence.
Someone else already explained the licenses, but to your second point, yes, nothing stops any other launcher from using proton, which is what all the other open source launchers do. And yes, no one “needs” this project, just like we don’t “need” any standards for anything, but it could make things a lot cleaner and easier to support.
This is a bigger issue for hardware than software. This is why we can use heroic, proton, lutris, or whatever. And most programmers who can offload a part of their code onto another project that is doing the job well will. That’s exactly how Linux started.
It is a big issue for software. But usually companies are happy to try to trap users into their own thing, or developers are too arrogant to work with thee work on another developer.
You realize we’re talking about multiple projects based on WINE, which has had updates supplied by Valve, who has made a Linux distribution, which is based on multiple different projects all packaged together in one big install file, right?
Yes, you will get ego and “not invented here” syndrome in software, even in open software. But these groups are literally based on building off another person or group’s idea to make something better or easier.
Haven’t you heard of the stories ego or hubris that make projects split and die? Maybe you’re one of those people who think Linux was already fine 10 years ago and users should try a little bit to use it instead of setting for Windows without thinking?
Diversity is a strength. But hubris is a weakness. Inventing a new standard every 6 months is stupid.
C is 50 years old. Http is 30 years old, as is python. We forgot about fortrans, and it is a good thing. But you don’t build lasting things on technologies that are revolutionised every 6 months.
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From the naming it’s clear that GE wants this to be the new standard, but it’s not really a new standard. This is porting Steam’s launcher, which already exists, to non-Steam clients.
I’m tired of seeing devs on Discords and Slack channels jerk themselves raw with it every time they get any kind of negative feedback whatsoever on a change they pushed.
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