Celebrating 6 years since Valve announced Steam Play Proton for Linux

Can confirm as a recent switcher from 25 years of Windows to a Fedora Linux Desktop that all the flagship games I downloaded from my steam library just worked, which was the final hurdle before being able to switch to Linux full-time.

I initially had some issues with not being able to run Wayland due to Nvidia drivers, but that's now fixed with Explicit Sync support in their recent driver upgrades and am now using Wayland.

Thanks to Docker, JetBrains IDEs and most Daily Apps I use are cross-platform Desktop Web Apps (e.g. VS Code, Discord, Obsidian, etc) I was able to run everything I wanted to. The command-line is also super charged in Linux starting with a GPU-accelerated Alacritty running Oh My Zsh that's enhanced with productivity tools like fzf, exa, bat, zoxide and starship. There's also awesome tools like lazydocker, lazygit, btop and neovim pushing the limits of what's possible in a terminal UI and distrobox which lets me easily run Ubuntu VMs to install experimental software without impacting my Fedora Desktop.

Anyway happy to have abandoned the Surveillance and Spyware train that Windows has become, thankfully never have to go back thanks to the great support of Steam and cross-platform Desktop Apps running natively on Linux.

As I often repeat in these threads, Proton was an amazing leap. Once it released, it took probably two years for me to boot Windows again, and it's only been getting better. Now I'm already used to assuming games will just work on my Linux machine, including new major titles. Age of Empires 4 and Baldur's Gate 3 just worked.

In broader terms, Proton is also a valuable lesson in how much the "last 10%" integration of software matters. Proton isn't developed from scratch by Valve, most of it is non-Valve code. Proton base is Wine plus DXVK plus gstreamer, but it's Valve's integration of those that allows the dramatic leap from "if you're a power user, you may get the game to work after lots of tinkering" to "just enable Proton for this game and click play".

I recently bought a machine with an RTX 4090 and a 7950X3D.

Installed Pop OS; expected there might be one or two hiccups with the Nvidia drivers. Yet I had zero driver config/installation issues - and there's not been a single Windows game I could not play on Linux at full settings.

On top of it the Linux machine also streams to my Steam Deck.

I've abandoned Windows 2 years ago - I see no reason to ever return.

I'm jumping on the occasion to reiterate here that Valve's Proton team hiring process is good, and although I wasn't picked, the time they took to help me improve, give me advices, as well as the overall communication make me think their company should be great to work with (at least 3-4 years ago)

I switched my gaming PC to NixOS a few months ago, I couldn't be happier. Other than a few games that also had issues on Windows and VR, everything I run through Proton just works.

I also own a Steam Deck, which is a wonderful little device and it proved to me that I could safely go through with this switch and not lose access to much.

Congrats to both the Proton and hardware team at Valve, and the people who contributed to Wine; the Year of the Linux Desktop has come, as far as I'm concerned.

I've seen it joked that with Proton, Win32 is a good stable ABI for gaming on Linux.

Given that, and that I'm most comfortable developing on Linux and in C++, does anyone have a good toolchain recommendation for cross compiling C++ to Windows from Linux? (Ideally something that I can point CMake at and get a build that I can test in Proton.)

Now, if we could get the anti-cheat companies on board all would be right in the universe and I could stop pretending that Win10 doesn't drive me insane. Seriously, it's ridiculous that you can play an entire game in Linux with no issue but the second you load into multiplayer for some titles you risk getting your entire account banned.

It has only been 6 years!? It has felt like a bed rock of Linux gaming in almost forever.

I cannot tell you the last time I have come across something that doesn't work via Proton.

It is one of the many crown jewels of Valve.

EDIT - ’From dust’ released in 2009 still doesn't work but that is due to Ubisofts awful DRM infrastructure.

I've been so amazed at how well Proton works.

I've bought myself a Steam Deck a while ago, thinking that I _might_ be able to play some of my Windows games on it. I had some experience with Wine many many years ago and it just didn't work well so I always dual booted my PC with Windows for gaming. To my surprise I was able to play AAA titles like RDR2 and Fallout without any issues or tinkering about.

I'm so happy that a company like Valve was able to put their shoulders under an initiative like this and actually stuck with it. Thank you, Valve!

This is so cool! I am genuinely happy that through this I barely ever had to boot up windows anymore when I still had my gaming PC. I wish we could have something similar on Mac. I tried GPTK and Whiskey before but a bunch of my steam games that flawlessly worked on Proton won’t even start and if they do there is a fair chance they random crash and have unacceptable performance.

Valve's work is the single killer contribution for Linux gaming (even though there are still many games not running under Proton which is why running Win on SteamDeck is a thing) but let's not forget to mention Wine on which it is based and which had been running regular (non-DirectX/Y/Z) win32 apps surprisingly/shockingly well for like 20 years.

For those using Windows games from GOG or other none-steam supports, I recommend Lutris, it requires a little more setup, but after the initial groking you can have a library as nice as Steam and with a lot more manual settings and support for other platforms or emulators.

A nice trick with Lutris is to create 2 initial prefixes for wine 32 and 64 bits and then to duplicate them in the library for each game. Only the lauch settings will be different but you get all games installed in 2 wine instances.

John Carmack saw this coming, more than 10 years ago:

> Improving Wine for Linux gaming seems like a better plan than lobbying individual game developers for native ports. Why the hate?

(https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/298628243630723074)

During my last vacation I played Fallout 4 on my Kubuntu laptop on max settings and I had zero crashes throughout the complete time. With a Bethesda game, on Linux.

What a time to be alive.

Let me instead mourn the death of native Linux gaming and the potential for Linux to be an independent platform in the future.

Don't get me wrong, Proton and DXVK are very useful tools for compatibility with legacy software but Valve really jumped the shark by positioning it as the default way to run Games on linux and alledgedly even actively discouraging native ports. We had Wine long before Proton (or Steam for Linux for that matter) and so what if it's a little bit more convenient now.

IMO peak Linux gaming was between the early Humble Bundles that required cross platform support for inclusion to the Kickstarter era where many campaigns felt the need to promise Linux versions to the Steam Machine hype that even got some AAA developers on board. Not seeing anything like that these days even with the Steam deck - seems most developers don't care to provide official support when gamers will buy the games to run with Proton anyway.

Proton did't just allow me to play on linux. It allowed me to uninstall windows.

Ty valve

Less reasons to run anything but Linux by the minute.

At least they are spending the money earned from illegal (underage) gambling on something good

Sins of a Solar Empire 2 launched this past week and it runs on proton flawlessly on day 1.

This is what finally let me drop VFIO, a VM with GPU passed through for the occasional game.

It's notable this happened at all because Valve supported what was there all along. They didn't go make their own path. They, and the ecosystem, all benefit.

Truly thankful

I am very thankful for the Proton effort, both for the product itself, and for the fact that the upgrades and modifications make it back to the community. Kudos for Valve for doing it this way.

The sad thing is what Jonathan Blow said - every program will run the same on the same cpu anywhere. It's just the OS that gets in the way that we have to deal with.

What's so interesting to me is that Win10 refuses to run some of the early 2000s game at all. I have a soft spot for Far Cry 1, no matter how much tweaking I did on its Win10 installation it-just-won't-run. Run the game on Linux through Wine or Proton? Effortless.

I know it's huge technical debt but Microsoft is really doing poor job, or no job at all, on its backward compatibility.

Now, Gabe, put some headcount towards Half Life 3 please, cheers

Proton is a blessing. Proton-GE is the natural evolution of the blessing. UMU Launcher is the steroids over Proton-GE.

Buy game on Steam, install, play. Same as on Windows, sometimes even less issues, especially with really old games. And with recent renaissance of demos one can easily try a game compatibility before purchase.

Not only games, but also some Windows applications could run smoothly on wine and proton. Especially those applications that use CUDA or DirectX for hardware acceleration. They cannot be used with wine previously.

I think Steam is one of the few cases where genious software internals engineering completely match business.

Happy Steam Deck owner. Have Nintendo Switch and PS5 in place though.

Rememebr some time ago someone made an effort to paackage windows games in appimages

I wonder what happened to that

Turns out the best gaming API on Linux is WinAPI. Who woulda thought!

sigh still can't play PUBG cos of the anti cheat, designed for windoze, afaik.

Some game devs are dropping native elf/linux support because of proton.

proton is then, really, hurting native elf/linux gaming.

Some game devs are aware of that and still try to provide clean elf/linux binaries.

Not to mention, it is a version mess, namely most of the time you get games to run-ish less than optimaly (if it runs at all) and you need some exact version of proton (wine/vkd3d) since forward and backward compatibility is super shabby, but you often end up with "if you want to run game UHEOTHC optimally, you need an external custom version GMX.ultra.74389.12 of protron which does include direct copy of closed source windows components (and you better be careful since it is illegal to redistribute many windows components...).

It would have been 1 billion times cheaper, and saner, to write audit tools for ELF64 binaries in order to drive game devs at crafting clean binaries (glibc ABI selection, dynamic loading of video game core interface libs, static linking).

I am sorry, but there is nothing to be proud of, actually quite the other way around. They are doing the "embrace and extend": does embrace elf/linux but does extend it with abomination like proton.

Shame on you, valve.

When I stopped using Windoze for Linux around 2006, I gave up on playing games on pc, which was fine as I always have latest generation consoles around anyways. Eventually it got annoying and expensive to keep consoles around, and more so now with the push to buy games digitally that you don't really even own and will stop working one day.

Finally when Valve got involved to fix wine with Proton, it changed everything as a Linux user, and finally I don't need dedicated consoles to play what few games I still do. If a game is loaded with invasive DRM to NOT work under Proton/Linux, they're doing me a favor as I don't want to support them anyways.

Proton alone made Valve saints to myself and most all Linux users in giving gaming back to the Linux world, far more than scabs like Epic that criticize Valve for market dominance ever will.