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).
This is great. Proton is getting a lot of testing just based on Steam’s userbase and it is backed by Valve. We also have a lot of data on proton’s performance and potential game-specific fixes in the form of protondb. Making sure that non-Steam launchers can use all that work and information is crucial to guaranteeing the long-term health of linux gaming. Otherwise it is easy to imagine a future where proton is doing great but the other launchers are keep running into problems and are eventually abandoned.
One thing that I am curious is how this handles the AppId. If this AppId is used to figure out which game-specific fixes are needed, then it will have to be known. Do we have a tool/database that figures out the AppId from the game you are launching outside of Steam?
I hope it makes pirated games easier to launch on Linux. 👍 I’ve got about 5 different games I’ve yet to play cos I can’t be arsed looking into Proton command line flags.
That sounds absolutely incredible if it’s pulled off. It would certainly make gaming on Linux even more accessible to people not comfortable with Linux.
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