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Comment by bdefore | Hacker News Reader

ProtonDB creator here and solo dev (with a huge hat tip to the tens of thousands writing reports). It's been a wild three and a half years keeping this ship sailing. Happy to answer questions.

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Thanks for working on ProtonDB, it's such an invaluable resource. Here's their Patreon if anybody is interested in supporting the project: https://www.patreon.com/protondb

381 USD per month, one would think the community would support it much more.

I honestly thought it was part of Valve

Me too. I've just added another $10 to the patreon!

ProtonDB has been such an asset (thank you!), I'm often surprised Valve hasn't integrated it into the Linux steam client or at least included a link to the relevant entry. So... why haven't they?

Thank you for working on this! Maybe this is not your area of expertise, but I'm interested in the performance differences between native DirectX performance and going through Vulkan abstraction layers like DXVK. If you're a company designing GPUs that has a Vulkan driver already but would need significant time and effort developing DirectX drivers, is DXVK et. al. a viable alternative?

Just wanted to say thank you. Been using ProtonDB extensively lately to find more titles which may be a great fit for my recent migration from Windows towards Linux. Hope I can contribute one day either with the list of games or in any way with the site.

Keep up the good work

Thanks. Love hearing stories like yours.

I assumed Valve would have acquired you by now!

(deleted my old comment, I actually have a question now ;))

Are there plans to make proton support anti-cheat engines? Part of me hopes yes, but another equal part hopes you don't.

I'm hoping for NO too, mainly because this kind of software tends to become extremely aggressive.

When it comes to my PC, I agree.

But I think I would be ok with a device dedicated to gaming having anti-cheat. Not because I trust it, but because there's nothing on that device I need to trust it with. Except maybe my account login and network access.

Valve has recognized this is a threat to the success of the Steam Deck and helped Proton support at least two prominent anti-cheat tools (EAC and BattlEye). But it remains to be seen if we'll see widespread acceptance from developers. Fortnite in particular has come out that they won't enable it. Free-to-play games have a more sensitive threat perception.

On the site, you can review games that are known to use anti-cheat here: https://www.protondb.com/explore?selectedFilters=antiCheat

And to clarify, I'm not a dev on any of the underlying Proton technologies. I just run a community site for it.

It's a lot more granular than that, unfortunately. WINE and Linux natively support a plethora of anticheat engines, but the developers have to opt-in to allowing Linux players to use it. Bungie, for example, has recently confirmed that they won't be activating Linux support in their current plans. EA, on the other hand, just allowed Apex Legends players on Linux to start playing today (having played a couple hours, I can confirm it runs much better than on Windows).

It's really just a matter of developers opting-in. Rainbow Six Siege is one of the big ones I'd keep an eye out for next; Ubisoft has been teasing the community forums with official Linux questionnaires and RFCs for months now. Fingers crossed!

It already works, I can play Elden Ring online with Easy Anti Cheat working. Worked since day 2 I think.

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