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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

If Proton just becomes the "game runtime" for Linux, that's OK! It's still open source. There may come a time when Proton compatibility becomes as important or even more important than Windows compatibility for game developers. Not only might game developers start explicitly supporting Proton, they could even contribute fixes upstream, unlike with Windows.

Ultimately if it becomes popular enough, Proton could execute the embrace, extend, extinguish strategy on Windows itself. We'll know it succeeded if one day Microsoft gives up NT kernel development in favor of shipping Linux/Proton, just the way they ultimately gave up on Trident and started shipping Blink/Chromium. Today Windows is a relatively small and shrinking percentage of Microsoft's revenue so maybe it's not out of the question in a decade or two.

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I'd argue that Proton is better than native Linux support in the long term, hear me out.

Linux userspace API has no promise of long term compatibility, and in fact there's a lot of churn, especially nowadays as we approach the Year of the Linux Desktop and technologies come and go as they're improved.

The Windows API instead is known for its long term compatibility. Microsoft goes out of their way to ensure applications keep running a decade later, and using that as a base for gaming is a win-win, as developers can target two operating systems with one API, and gamers have more guarantees their game will still be playable on Ubuntu 2030 edition.

The last few times I played native Linux games I had to fish for old and unsupported libssl and libjpeg libraries that my distribution doesn't ship anymore. I can blame the port, but nowadays I just try the Proton version first.

It's not about Windows long term support, it's about Wine long term support (which is much better than Windows own).

So I agree with your point that long term Wine offers better support than Linux native ABIs.

I doubt Windows ABIs are better than Linux native ones on their own long term wise (i.e. without Wine).

That said, it would be cool for someone to develop Wine-like wrapping of historic Linux ABIs into modern ones so you could have the same preservation effect.

There was for example such project for older SDL over new one.

> I doubt Windows ABIs are better than Linux native ones on their own long term wise

Lots of games from the early 2000s still run as-is on Windows 10/11, and many games have updated versions on Steam or gog.com as well.

However, the real question for Linux is: is there any comparable long-term stable distribution format for Linux games other than Windows binaries?

If so, how popular is it?

> is there any comparable long-term stable distribution format for Linux games

Only Steam provides such a runtime, but outside of Steam you're out of luck.

The steam linux runtime is open-source with a license that reads much like the MIT license, so you need not run anything Steam proprietary if you don't like Steam.

Wine provides such long term support, but not Windows. I.e. many games from early 2000s don't run on recent Windows, but work in Wine.

Example: https://www.gog.com/game/vampire_the_masquerade_redemption

GOG doesn't list recent Windows as supported. But it works in Wine.

In this sense, the long term way to run old Windows games is Wine on Linux because Wine translates old Windows ABIs into modern Linux ones.

But there is no comparable translation of old ABIs for native Linux ones.

> Lots of games from the early 2000s still run as-is on Windows 10/11, and many games have updated versions on Steam or gog.com as well.

Actually, it's the other way around. Old windows games run fine in Proton, and have weird issues in Windows.

I think that supports the argument that Windows is the de facto durable ABI for games on Linux.

>The last few times I played native Linux games I had to fish for old and unsupported libssl and libjpeg libraries that my distribution doesn't ship anymore.

The so-called steam runtime can be targeted by devs to prevent this.

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