Comment by direwolf20
5 hours ago
This is why Valve invested so much in Linux. They saw the writing on the wall of Microsoft becoming Apple (but shittier). Now they have an alternative. If Microsoft charges a 30% tax on all Steam transactions and won't let Steam run unless they do that, Valve can heavily push Linux and Steam Machine sales.
And yet they failed to get game devs to natively target SteamOS.
As long as they depend on Proton, they haven't fully solved their problem.
I'm not sure how they could have failed that if that was never their goal in the first place. The entire point of Proton is that the Win32 API is infinitely more stable and worthwhile to target than anything Linux distros offer, and that the financial incentives aren't there for developers to 5x their platform distribution effort to reach 1% more users. An approach that relies on developers doing that would never work, and fortunately for Valve that isn't their approach.
You're thinking of now. Proton didn't exist yet the first time they tried Steam OS.
To be fair to Valve though, back then, there was a lot of movement in direct ports for Linux games. Humble Bundle (before they were bought) was spending real money on it and companies like Feral sprang up to help with titles like Mordor. It looked like there was going to be some real change.
But for various reasons the momentum waned. One of those reasons might be the existence of Proton itself. Some people were very against it because they thought it might lead to less native ports.
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Tbh, why bother?
kernel32+user32+gdi32+d3d[11|12]+dxgi is a pretty great API abstraction for game development. And unlike Linux desktop APIs the Win32 APIs are actually stable, so those games will also work in 5 years, and most importantly, performance is the same or better than on Windows. It's unlikely that game devs directly targeting Vulkan would do any better, and when using a high level engine, any layering overhead in Proton is negligible anyway. And don't even get me started about the state of audio APIs on Linux ;)
Also don't underestimate the amount of workarounds and tweaks that (most likely) go into Proton for games that make poor system API use. Without Proton those game-specific hacks would need to go into MESA, Wayland, X11 or various system audio libraries. At least Proton is one central place to accumulate all the game-specific warts in some dusty corner of their code base.
TL;DR: just think of Proton as an extremely low level and slim cross-platform API for games (not all that different than SDL), and suddenly it makes a lot of sense. And I bet that in 5..10 years Windows will have regressed so much that it might actually be better to run games through a Proton-like shim even on Windows (assuming Windows hasn't become 'yet another Linux distro' by then anyway) ;)
> run games through a Proton-like shim even on Windows
Already happening, to an extent. Specifically, modern Intel GPUs do not support DirectX 9 in hardware, yet legacy apps run fine. The readme.txt they ship with the drivers contains a paragraph which starts with the following text: “SOFTWARE: dxvk The zlib/libpng License” DXVK is a library which implements Direct3D on top of Vulkan, and an important component of SteamOS.
With game studios using Windows + Visual Studio, what a win!
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Try running a directx 5 game and let me know how it goes.
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> As long as they depend on Proton, they haven't fully solved their problem.
Maybe not, but they fully solved my problem with games, which was that I could not play on Linux. I started playing again just because of the SteamDeck, I think it's a pretty big achievement :-).
Hardly any different than running MAME.
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> Microsoft becoming Apple (but shittier)
At least Microsoft haven't fallen so low as to fail basic design principles like having transparent on top of transparent buttons, having disappearing controls depending on window size (scrollbars), or having corners so rounded that the click to drag mostly being outside the actual window.
The Windows 11 UI is annoying, but at least it doesn't look like a kid's toy.
> At least Microsoft haven't fallen so low as to fail basic design principles like having transparent on top of transparent buttons
That's just because Microsoft has been there done that already 2 decades ago ;) (IIRC in Windows Vista).
Same with the fine-grained in-your-face permission popups. Introduced by Microsoft in Vista, copied by Apple in Mojave ;)
One more reason for Apple to actually have delivered it properly, given that they had Microsoft's failures to learn from.
> At least Microsoft haven't fallen so low as to fail basic design principles like having transparent on top of transparent buttons,
They did that but made it work well all the way back with Windows 7, maybe even Vista.
Apple's bad ideas look ugly. Microsoft's bad ideas lock you out of your computer, delete your files and give the undeleted files to the FBI.