Comment by dezzadk
3 days ago
> The Steam Deck is a great gaming system. This isn’t because of it’s great battery life. A Nintendo Switch would probably have better battery life. It’s not because of its great performance. I don’t usually play AAA games, so I wouldn’t know.
First paragraph pretty much confirms my belief that some people who aren't hardcore gamers don't buy the Steamdeck to play games, they buy it because they are Steam/Valve fanboys.
Steam doesn't give a flying f if it runs the games on Xorg or Wayland - the Wine project made Wine run on Wayland, not Steam. What Steam does is hire Crossover developers to hack compatability to newer games, because thats all that matters from a business perspective and Valve is as corporate as any other.
Don't forget that Wine has been a a several decades long project before Steam hired some Crossover devs to fork it and take the limelight from the original project, the gamer-stupidity seems to forget this and give all credit to Valve which is ignorant and disrespectful to the work Wine has put in over several decades.
Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm.. Rocket League and many other games simply don't see the reason to maintain their Linux ports. Linux ports are being cancelled more than ever.
Honestly, this shift towards running everything in Wine disgusts me. If you told me before the Steamdeck released that they would try to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds. Software crash can happen at any time, thats life with Wine.
Another thing is that I know people who own Steamdecks who have zero clue what games to play on it. It ends up being pirated Nintendo games or emulator games. Often they have to fiddle with control maps, settings before playing.
My idea of a handheld is that I don't want to tinker with it. I want the integrated out-of-the-box experience - maintaining another system despite my own PC is not something I prioritize my time on, same reason I don't buy an Android phone, really..
Native Linux ports matters!
> the gamer-stupidity seems to forget this and give all credit to Valve which is ignorant and disrespectful to the work Wine has put in over several decades
You seem to be forgetting that Steam Machines existed back then, and Wine barely supported D3D9.dll in those days. Valve and Codeweavers did the majority of the work bringing up DXVK, without which there would be no DX11/DX12 game support on Linux at all. It's not exaggeration to say that the Steam Deck would not have been a success if DXVK never existed.
There's certainly cause to celebrate Wine's accomplishments reverse-engineering Win32. But it's far from the only thing required to get games running, and I think you've oversold it's importance.
> Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm..
Shocker. Given the way MacOS is treated by game developers, I'd much prefer translation be the focus instead of courting native ports that will break in 2 months from a glibc update.
> to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds
I'm not sure why. The GPU is where the lion's share of power consumption happens, and Proton uses the same Vulkan API that modern, native Linux titles target. Sure, you have to wait for shaders to cache, but you have to do that on most Windows PCs nowadays too.
>There's certainly cause to celebrate Wine's accomplishments reverse-engineering Win32. But it's far from the only thing required to get games running, and I think you've oversold it's importance.
Thats like saying you think I've oversold Chromium because Brave has done the heavy lifting (I bet you use Brave too, I sure don't nor ever will).. You sound incredibly confirming to the gamer-stupidity that revolves around the Steamdeck community.. You literally discredit Wine a decades old project to shine on a fork that is a few years old. You're exactly the type I'm talking about- get a grip.
I don't use Brave, I'm pretty clued-in to Eich's personal dysfunctions. Contextually, this is more like you saying that Chrome users are ignoring the real innovations that Google leverages like KHTML. It's certainly an important element of the program, but it's also one of the oldest, least-complex and easiest to replace. The heritage Chrome owes to KHTML is basically nothing at this point, the same really goes for Proton too if you've seen what the repo looks like today.
I'll even go a step further, really - Wine isn't as technically impressive as DXVK. They're both large and complex projects, but the reverse-engineering required to get DX11 to run with Vulkan in realtime is a head-and-shoulders harder problem than mapping Win32 syscalls to a monokernel. Graphics performance was one of the biggest struggles Wine faced back in the OpenGL days, and the performance deficit still persists: https://linuxreviews.org/Wine_6.3_Built-in_vs_DXVK_1.8:_A_Co...
> You literally discredit Wine a decades old project to shine on a fork
Calling Proton a "fork" of Wine is like calling Fedora a "fork" of Linux. You're patently incorrect, and you're not really identifying how this is a bad thing for Wine or Proton users.
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