Proton 5.0, a package to run Windows games on Linux | Hacker News Reader

Proton 5.0, a package to run Windows games on Linux

github.com

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As a 20 or so year long linux as a desktop user, I've had my hopes up so many times that more people would embrace Linux. It's always been about the games, largely. Hell we had id's stuff running, and there was even a company porting Blizzard stuff if I remember right. This is the first time I've been genuinely enthused that "it's happenening", and I cannot be more thankful to the Wine team and Valve.

It's not only games. The Wayland/X/Nvidia fiasco is killin me.

To use Wayland and gestures I need to basically ignore the graphics card and run everything via integrated.

I love Linux but I also love when things just work and I don't have the time or energy to use my computer as a foss/Linux zealot ideology battleground.

Many experienced Linux users just avoid any Nvidia hardware at this point. Of course you might be trying to reuse existing hardware, but anything new you can just buy with AMD or Intel.

Can you get that on a Lenovo laptop?

Lenovo does make laptops with AMD hardware; some even within the ThinkPad line. e.g. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-ser...

I'm still trying to reconcile my zealot and pragmatic aspects. One thing that's for sure is that if you're going the Linux route, you have to be smart about the choices you make. It's not permadeath, but the training wheels are off: the choices you make will have more sway than they might on a Windows install. Nvidia/AMD; peripherals; apps without Linux support. You also often have to make compromises, which is an art in itself: how will you deal with something not working when you want it to just work?

Personally, I'm working on accepting personal computing as it currently is and trying to let go of wanting to change every second thing. In other words, I'm trying to look at what can be, rather than what could be.

"Gestures" in/for what?

There's always going to be a new proprietary hotness they keep locked away...who cares?

My guess would be for a laptop with a more recent touchpad in e.g. Gnome. It’s not “proprietary hotness,” it’s free software that only works on Wayland because that’s where lots of recent DE development has been. Nvidia users are out of luck; and I do blame Nvidia for this and intend to buy AMD next time.

I would say it used to be about games. But now many people use laptops and Linux has pretty terrible support for most of them. It often "works", but you'll usually have some issue with bluetooth or wifi or the trackpad, and good luck getting anywhere near as good battery life as Windows or Mac.

My 12 years experience with HP laptops is no issues with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, touchpad but, according to kernel releases, brightness control keys not working (workaround: hotkeys to run xbacklight, not every week) or shutdown is actually a reboot (workaround: hold down the power button when it starts rebooting, maybe 2 or 3 times per year.) Not ideal but I still trade those inconveniences with working on Windows, which I do on a few Windows servers of customers that are running some Windows only programs.

My wife had an HP laptop going on a decade ago that was terrible with Linux. But we've also since then had three Dell Inspirons and a Thinkpad that all work perfectly fine.

I think Linux has been perfectly adequate for "browses the internet" level users for quite a while.

Everything on my Dell just works, including docking station and 4k panels.

Yeah but I found we all have the same problems with Windows these days.

I watched a friend struggle to get slack to use the correct camera work on his windows 10 laptop. Another occasion, on a desktop machine problems with microphones.

A few months ago I woke up and my Windows 10 desktop just decided to lock up about 10 seconds after showing the desktop. There was nothing I could do to fix it and had to reinstall windows.

Linux laptop user checking in. No problems.

You're lucky!

I'm a power user and have been using linux since the early days. Support has actually never been this good. Mostly due to standards in buses and hardware. Even GPU support is relatively good despite the closed-natured mindset.

I'd still never recommend it to anyone who wants something that "just works" though. It will never be on the same level as that needs a ginormous organisation to provide testing, support, documentation. Especially if you follow the Windows model with all the hardware support vs the Mac model.

Nothing comes close to a MBP's trackpad on a Mac.

Even if I was a linux desktop user otherwise, I’d still prefer booting to a windows partition just to never have to wonder if the drivers are eating 5% of my FPS, or if that recent crash maybe doesn’t happen to everyone and it’s just me seeing it on Linux.

Games (of the normal kind) are pretty special in that you literally aren’t doing anything else simultaneously, and you are probably running them long enough that a reboot to run them isn’t a massive overhead.

Once in the games I won’t notice that I’m in Windows anyway.

Games these days are tightly coupled to the latest drivers. Both Nvidia and AMD mention which issues they fixed or improved for which games on their driver release notes.

(All of this post assumes that playing games means recent AAA games. Older games, smaller indie games, or non perf sensitive games obviously are a completely different story)

I haven't looked closely at windows for about fifteen years, but back then the antivirus was horrible. I/o and general performance was hideously slow as everything had to be inspected against virus signatures and heuristic analysis. Is that still The same now or you whitelist the AV for games?

We run x86-64, with a SSD (SATA2/3, or NVME). I/O should not be a problem anymore, regardless of OS.

It is. If you're running windows on an even remotely slow drive, unless you disable Windows defender (which you can only do temporarily through conventional means) the system is barely usable.

I suspect we value different things because from my perspective that 5% seems entirely worth not putting up with Windows' nonsense.

Over and above not needing to shut down everything, or tangle up my system in a complex VM.

I recently give up and bought a PS4 that is sitting under my dockstation. I really wanted to play Horizon Zero Dawn. Now, I've bought back games I already owned on PC (Firewatch and Dreamfall Chapters. Waiting for The Witness and Talos principle promo). It's a soothing experience. I was tired of the windows driver hunt and tweaking.

This post assumes windows doesn't have problems with games. One of the biggest is how you get input lag in borderless / windowed because you can't disable Windows 10's composition features like you could in 7. If you're in a scenario where 5fps matters enough that it can dictate your operating system of choice, that's a much bigger problem ime.

> This post assumes windows doesn't have problems with games.

It doesn't, but it does assume that game developers, and hardware/driver manufacturers all focus more resources on windows problems than they do Linux problems.

> One of the biggest is how you get input lag in borderless / windowed because you can't disable Windows 10's composition features like you could in 7.

Is this a common problem? I haven't heard about it.

> If you're in a scenario where 5fps matters enough

What is the actual difference for modern games now? I'm a few years out of date. E.g. this article is from 2017 (when the results were pretty abysmal). Things have likely improved a lot since, but I can't find a good article with modern titles. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=pascal-w...

Back then it looked like some games were at perf parity, but a lot of games being at 60-70% perf (i.e. more or less unplayable/unacceptable).

> Is this a common problem? I haven't heard about it.

Yep. It's known that since everything goes through Aero on Windows 10, if you need the absolute best response times you should play on exclusive full-screen. It's not significant for most people, but in FPS games specifically it's pretty easy to tell once you notice it.

> What is the actual difference for modern games now? I'm a few years out of date.

I can't give you anything except for anecdotes, but for what it's worth I noticed a significant improvement with DXVK on Final Fantasy XIV, where my old laptop could literally not play it acceptably on Windows and with DXVK I managed to achieve a stable 60fps on minimum settings.

Nowadays I have proper gaming hardware so I don't really look at fps anymore. As long as it's 60, it's good enough for me.

A big thanks also needs to go to Philip Rebohle for his DXVK package, and Joshua Ashton for his D9VK package, both of which are part of the not-so-secret sauce that Proton uses with Wine to get such a good compatibility with an ever increasing list of Windows games. I have huge respect and admiration for their contribution to Linux gaming.

Linux gaming is looking pretty healthy now.

An obligatory shoutout goes to Ryan C. Gordon (icculus) for this continued contributions to native Linux gaming too (currently working on porting Descent 3). He made it possible for me to play some of my favourite games on Linux well over a decade ago.

VR is the one thing I’ve really been wanting on Linux. I held off on buying a Vive for my PC (I have PSVR though), due to the lack of advertised first class support for Linux, but it seems that the Index kit is fully supported on Steam OS. I’d buy the Index kit right now, if it weren’t for the long list of RMA horror stories I keep reading about on /r/ValveIndex. If Valve could improve quality control on their hardware, myself—and I’m sure other Linux users—would be more inclined to purchase it.

Actual link: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Changelog

This blog spam is serving drive by malware. https://i.imgur.com/DpYTX0d.png appears to be the trigger, for people interested.

In case anyone is curious about specific game compatibility, I've created a community resource for it here: https://www.protondb.com. Notably this release fixes games that required DRM enforced through the Steam client.

Thanks for protondb! Is it open source?

Not at this time. Although anyone interested in helping translate the site would be welcome to help here: https://github.com/bdefore/protondb-i18n

Thank you for providing this service. I started using Linux on my gaming machine about a year ago and ProtonDB has been very helpful.

For me as a Linux only user, Proton is an incredible relief. I have all my games on Steam and can turn on Proton with a checkbox. I often use it to play old classics like The Eldar Scrolls Morrowind or Oblivion. For me Proton is a gamechanger, because a few years ago I had a second laptop running Windows and I played my games on it. I haven't had that for three years.

I've recently switched my desktop to Linux and almost every game I need runs without any problem using proton. The biggest problem Linux gaming has is the EasyAntiCheat. Most games using it don't work at all.

Is that the DRM bdefore mentioned? Because if so, they fixed it.

No, EAC/BattlEye are unfortunately much trickier problems, since they are effectively rootkits that can't play nice with Wine translations of Windows APIs. This is arguably Proton's biggest challenge at the moment, since it affects the marquis popular multiplayer games such as Fortnite.

My boy is very disappointed we haven't been able to get Ark to run yet. I hope this new release helps.

This is why I set up VFIO last week. It's sort of a pain but having windows use be sort of containerized on my system makes it more tolerable.

One thing I've always wondered is how much "per-game fine-tuning" Proton requires.

I know for some console emulators, it's not uncommon to require some per-game profiles that tweak the emulation for better compatibility for that specific game.

Heck, even GPU firmware updates will mention specific games in the patch notes.[0]

Is this necessary for something like Proton?

[0] https://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/156781 "...provides the latest performance optimizations, profiles, and bug fixes for Zombie Army: Dead War 4. In addition, this release also provides optimal support for Apex Legends Season 4 and Metro Exodus: Sam’s Story..."

I've personally never had to do any fine tuning with Proton. It works fine out of the box for almost everything I've tried. I think there are options available, but most of the people I've seen that want to squeeze out every ounce of performance will use Lutris because it comes with community tested tweaks.

https://lutris.net/

ProtonDB can give you a good idea of how well games work without tuning.

http://protondb.com

Exactly and if the game is not here check the wine database , so for example last time I checked Space Engineer is not working https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio... so not everything just works, some games though work perfectly including more Unity and Unreal Engine games.

It seems so for some games, at least Skyrim [1].

But reading through the GitHub "Game Compatibility" issues [2], I get the impression that most problems are due to graphics card and audio drivers, not game-specific irregularities.

[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/4

[2] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/labels/Game%20compat...

Less and less so every release. At this time it greatly varies per game. ProtonDB attempts to communicate this through a separation of SteamPlay reports and Tinker reports, the latter indicating that some tweaks are necessary.

WARNING: clicking that link leads to a vortex of notification permission prompts.

Please remove the link from HN.

It sends me to endless ‘appsflyer.com’ redirects and prompts to install Norton VPN apps from the app store on ios. Wtf.

i was redirected to a iCloud credential siphoning form on iOS.

I can’t be the only one who put Linux on his home desktop to discourage gaming... darn you valve.

Why do you want to discourage gaming? And who do you want to discourage?

They want to discourage themselves so they can be more productive.

Idk about him, but I spend absurd amounts of time gaming when it's too easily accessible. I get hooked, enter a flow state, and waste a day or accidentally stay up until morning managing my colony in rimworld or something.

I moved recently, and my current setup isn't conductive to that kind of gaming; I'm limited to games I don't hate playing on a controller. Which, fortunately, are the games that I don't get hooked on in the same way

Proton works amazingly well for me, on my Debian install. I recommend people try it out :)

It works properly only with AMD video cards right?

I actually run it without a dedicated GPU. I'm playing mostly older games though ;-)

nope, it also works VERY well with NVIDIA.

You only need a GPU that works fine with Vulkan, tho, like those reported on this page (if your GPU is made by NVIDIA, ofc): https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver

On Intel iGPUs it works if it has Vulkan support but, as always, the performance isn't that good (as with any Intel iGPU).

The unique thing made by Valve that only run on AMD is ACO, a shader compiler for Vulkan that's faster than LLVM, which is used by the open-source stack

Wait, you're telling us you don't have to use Nouveau or the proprietary Nvidia driver?

No, you need to use at least one of them, otherwise the GPU itself will not work, right?

What i'm trying to say is that Proton itself doesn't work only on AMD, as NVIDIA can run Proton games very well too, and Intel can run it too.

In the end, only ACO needs an AMD GPU to run, but it doesn't a lot to do with Proton itself.

Nvidia still doesn't work with Wayland AFAIK, and Nouveau doesn't work for 900 series or later AFAIK.

I still recommend everyone who wants to run Linux to go for AMD graphics cards. Their FOSS drivers work well, and you can get good performance on 1080p and 1440p. More and more games work with Proton, and Lutris allows one to download profiles which are supposed to work.

CPU-wise, AMD gives the best bang for the buck since Ryzen 2. So that is a no-brainer.

In both decisions though, you support the viable underdog.

We're talking about Proton, not about wayland, tho.

And I also recommend AMD graphics cards, my RX 580 and my Ryzen 7 1700 works fine with Linux...so yeah.

I'm guessing this doesn't work on arm64 as, classically, wine is not an emulator.. Been trying many different ways to get gaming to work on my Jetson Nano

- moonlight-embedded (works, kinda janky though, and the only GPU vps provider that I've used which works is paperspace, and I'd rather not spend about a dollar an hour to play games this way, plus paperspace's west servers are in norcal and I'm in socal so the latency is just enough for certain games to not be that fun to play)

- using qemu + virtgl to run the nvidia geforce now android app (still figuring this one out)

- anbox + geforce now (anbox flat out didn't work)

- parsec (wouldn't start)

You may have better luck with qemu-user-static. This is more like a container than a full OS, so you might be able to get away with using the OpenGL driver directly.

So far everything I run works (with only a couple exceptions). I am really happy to see this because some remasters are not paying their due respect to the original (looking at you, WC Reforged, although it hasn't got anything to do with Steam anyway), so being able to easily run the later is important.

Anybody with experience launching a unity game on Linux? If so, we’re there any complications that made the process difficult?

Wonder how does it work with Clear Linux

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