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Comment by djhworld | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone running this setup? The last time I used WINE was probably 12 or so years ago and I always got the impression it was a slow "it will do for now" experience

Has it come on leaps and bounds since then?

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I've used wine forever to play games with, it's actually really good these days.

The difference between the past and now is that it lets you use your current native steam client and still run games through wine, in the past you had to run a separate steam client in each wineprefix and you'd end up with steam installed for each game.

The addition of DXVK makes directx10/11 games really speedy, runs great! World of Warcraft runs better in DXVK in its dx11 mode than what it did with OpenGL when they still offered that.

The "game-breaking" thing is usually DRM like denuvo though.

Is Proton tightly integrated into the steam platform or can it also be used to play DRM free games like GOG? I imagine Steam wouldn’t be too appreciative if GOG galaxy also integrated this

It is not tightly integrated. You can use it to play GOG games manually (from the command line) or using GameHub (https://github.com/tkashkin/GameHub).

I’m so glad that this is for ElementaryOS. It’s a good sign that their package management system is gaining popularity. It’s the only Linux based OS that I’m comfortable installing on friends/family old PC’s that can’t or shouldn’t run Windows 10. Runs fast enough and decent UX. I haven’t had much complaints from the non techies I install it on. Normally I’ll make Firefox the default web browser and throw on Ublock Origin and Privacy badger as well as installing LibreOffice before I hand it back to them. Great simplistic concept for an OS that I can really support.

I've been using it on my Ubuntu box and its as easy as double clicking any game like you do for any native-Linux game in Steam.

Games run smoothly, no frame rate issues, no Wine to setup manually, no Wine configuration files to play with. It just works.

I'm using Wine actively to play on my Linux machine (Dell XPS 13 dual boot with Win 10). In my particular configuration, the game (Rome: Total War) works better and smoother with Wine. YMMV.

Uhh WINE so unreliable. The summer when I started high school (like 7 years ago or something like that?) I played Skyrim in WINE in my shitty ass laptop. No kidding, it was an extremely good experience. My laptop was ~$800 and wasn't a gaming PC. I was running archlinux with some unknown version of WINE. The setup was super easy, I don't remember spending time on instaling Skyrim. The game was 100% working.

Then I tried this one more time the summer I started college (3 years ago?) It was working but lagging, and sound wasn't working, and some controls weren't working and it was randomly crashing. But it was still playable.

Then I tried it one more time this summer when I graduated from college. I spent an entire week and couldn't get it done. At some point I was applying patches in C and recompiling Wine which apparently fixed something? I also spent a lot of time trying to find the Wine version and Skyrin executable I used 7 years ago. For the love of God I, a CS graduate, couldn't get something my high school self done.

If you find something working in Wine, save the executable and Wine version. There is no guarantee any other combination will work. But I swear to god, 7 years ago whatever Wine+Skyrim combo I used was working flawlessly, I can't imagine it working any better in Windows back then.

Wine configuration can be a bit of a mess - luckily tools like Lutris and PlayOnLinux are a huge help, since they essentially give you the Wine version and install script that automatically sets everything up and has been tested to work.

Yeah. I just turned this on last week to try it out. I downloaded a game listed as "gold", Skyrim, and it installed and played just like any other Steam game.

Some games have very bad performance. VR games are noticeably slower than in Windows (but I've heard this being the case for native games; haven't tried, cause there weren't many). Some are actually faster in some aspects (loading screens for instance). And for many you won't notice any difference.

You probably had a bad GPU driver. There have been a really long time (more than 12 years) that Wine has native-like performance (it's not an emulator, after all), but if your system can not use the GPU adequately, no game will run well.

I tried Banished which works perfectly, it's hard to tell any difference from native. I have integrated graphics though, so maybe if you are looking to play an FPS at 144Hz you might notice it...

I'm using Wine+dxvk and can play quite demanding games.

Why not just dual boot to Windows? It's going to be a better experience.

Because I don't want to lose my state, and I don't want to have to take ten minutes to switch to doing something useful.

Hasn't the 2 decades old goal been to be able to run Linux without the need for owning Windows? Windows is still 89% of the desktop market. A free alternative is still a worthy goal.

I wouldn't choose Windows Home for Ruby on Rails development for the same reason that I wouldn't choose CentOS for gaming.

Well, except for the dual booting part.

I tried this for a while but I used Windows so infrequently that I was constantly interrupted by updates whenever I did boot it up.

Of all the replies to my comment, this is the only one that really makes sense to me. I have a PS4 and every time I want to play a game on it, either the PS4 needs an update or the game does or both.

Or buy only games that have a native Linux port - which is what I do.

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