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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm involved in this project. If anyone here is a skilled C programmer interested in getting paid to improve Wine and Proton, please throw me an email (see profile or use your detective skills to find my work email).

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Just wanted to say before I picked up my Windows desktop I tried out CrossOver to play a few games on my MBP. Worked brilliantly.

Wish my C chops were better! Anyway, nice work. Envious of the wood shop.

Interesting, is CodeWeavers employed/contracted/collaborating with Valve?

Yep! I worked at CodeWeavers during Proton development and we were basically contracted by Valve to build the whole thing for them. Although if projects like that interest you, the work on supporting Wine on MacOS after they drop 32 bit application support is amazing!

> supporting Wine on MacOS after they drop 32 bit application support

Steam itself still looks be 32-bit on macOS:

  lipo -info /Applications/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/steam_osx 
  Non-fat file: /Applications/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/steam_osx is architecture: i386

The executable in /Applications is 32-bit, but it's just a launcher for the real Steam app in ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/Steam.AppBundle which is 64-bit.

Ahh thank you! I knew I was missing something... I'd get the alert message, then the Steam app would seemingly close and re-launch. I wonder why it is architected like that.

I guess that it's like that in order to be able to update the executable for non-privileged users (who can't write to /Applications), which could be e.g. kids' user accounts in the family computer.

Love you guys for doing this, keep it up!

Looking forward to the eventual release of Proton for MacOS through DXVK, MoltenVK, etc.

I wrote on keybase

Quick question if you don't mind - what do the valve guys think of Windows Subsystem for Linux ? It's tempting even for me (who has used only Linux for 20 years now).

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=wlinux-w...

In most tests, WLinux and WLinux Enterprise simply performed inline with the other Linux distributions benchmarked.

Performance is pretty much at par (and in some cases better than Linux).

Do you guys envision a long term disruption in this space ?

How is WSL relevant to the needs of Linux gamers?

Or Windows gamers for that matter - it's not like there are a bunch of closed-source linux games that need WSL to run on Windows. I am puzzled by the assumption that Valve engineers somehow have a (professional) opinion on WSL

I imagine the stance is that Linux is meant to be a backup plan to Microsoft closing things down. WSL keeps you locked in with Microsoft.

It has the benefits of easing someone into Linux so they can migrate to Linux full time.

But it doesn't resolve any of the same problems as "Why support Linux gaming in general?" Because the biggest one is the whole Microsoft thing.

Is this really a threat? Because I haven't seen a shred of evidence to believe that Windows is going to block Steam. Hell they are actually releasing Xbox games on Steam!

But I guess Valve is flush with cash to throw at their hobby projects.

It was a big threat on Windows on ARM which only allowed you to install applications from the windows store or use an extremely slow x86 emulation layer. Microsoft blocked any browser from the windows store that was not based on the edge engine so Edge was the only usable browser available on ARM because emulated browsers simply cannot compete. Of course in the end it never went anywhere and even Edge's engine is about to be replaced with Chromium.

Nowadays Windows on ARM is basically the second coming of Windows RT, a massive failure. The biggest difference is that this time they decided to not produce a million devices too many.

Perhaps it's not going to block Steam because they have an escape path. They were leaning heavily into UWP right around the time Steam for Linux became a big thing.

Filesystem performance is closer to windows than linux which can be a deal-killer. Probably not for games.

> Filesystem performance is closer to windows than linux

Well.. filesystem performance is just bad under WSL period. Much worse than native NTFS or ext4 on the same hardware. It's so far from both that saying it's closer to one or the other doesn't _really_ make sense.

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