Valve is just a single company pushing for Linux gaming and the results have been excellent.
Linux is the perfect candidate too. Efficient, open, easy to modify and adapt. I hope more companies follow Valve and realize the true untapped potential of Linux systems.
And what's with all the valve/steam hype from people that should know better? At the end of the day you are using a DRM front end (steam) that fragments the mod ecosystem and obfuscates the process of installing and running the software you paid for on your own computer.
If DRM locked frontend like Steam is the price to pay for it, it is a small price. Eventually their changes get upstreamed and it improves the ecosystem overall.
> And what's with all the valve/steam hype from people that should know better?
In Linus Torvalds' own words: "Valve will save the Linux Desktop"
Proton is a fork of Wine with patches for games specifically.
There are no frontends for Wine, maybe Winetricks and Lutris can be called that but not exactly.
Obfuscating usually means to make harder. Steam generally makes it easier to download and play games with features like automatic updates, remote play and cloud save sync, not harder.
I tried many games with Wine across many years, from versions well before Wine 1.0 to 4.0, I also tried CodeWeavers something (Crossover?) when that was a thing. A few games worked very well, for example I remember running a newly-released Civ4 almost seamlessly. But most games didn't. Some would be playable but with graphical or audio glitches, performance or stability issues. Others wouldn't be playable no matter what. Tinkering with dll overrides, wineprefixes and all that was often necessary.
Then Proton came and, almost overnight, the Linux gaming experience improved more than in the previous fifteen years of Wine-based attempts. A few years later now, my default expectation has changed to games just working on Linux, unless they use a rootkit-style anti-cheat system. Most games I played under Proton have worked with native-like quality, I could as well be running them on a Windows gaming rig. A few games worked with minor issues such as a few seconds of garbled audio on startup or slower startup. There's only one recent game where I had to give up on Proton, and that game is supposed to run well according to ProtonDB, I just couldn't it right on my system.
I haven't been able to find any info to confirm but I have a sneaking suspicion that Proton builds heavily on Codeweaver's Crossover. The vast majority of commits in the Proton repo come from Codeweavers employees
I take it you don't use Steam.
Yes, Steam is DRM, but it's the most non-intrusive DRM to have ever existed. You can play your games offline. There are no "false positive" errors when it comes to copy protection. No activation limits. I've done at least 5 system overhauls since Steam came out, and I've never had it tell me "Sorry, you can't reinstall that game!"
I mean, yeah, if you're the type to go "ALL DRM IS BAD!", then none of this will convince you. But it should be worth noting that I have NEVER heard of anybody getting blocked from downloading or playing a game they bought from Steam.
> that fragments the mod ecosystem
More like, it replaces it with an excellent platform. Have you even HEARD of Steam Workshop?
> and obfuscates the process of installing and running the software you paid for on your own computer.
This is a feature, not a bug.
Also, once you've installed a game, you don't even HAVE to run it through Steam. You can just as easily find the executable and run it directly.
GOG provides offline archive installers. A web browser can be used to both browse the GOG catalog and download updates. An app store's walled garden mimicking that behavior is not required.
Is it true that steam limits concurrent access to one's catalog, or prevents other family members from accessing the same account for a game if a different one is being played? Digital products should not be made to artificially suffer the limitations of real-world objects.
As for mods, some GOG games can't access the steam workshop recently. This is bad for the longetivity of the game and it's success, and of course for modders and players.
And I believe that there is still a steam runtime that games check for, even if launching outside of Steam. If I wanted random corporate software blobs running all the time on my computer, I would use a Mac or Wintel machine and call it a feature.
While I do use Steam myself I think that part needs a lot more attention so that Valve is pushed to allow you do download content from the Workshop without a client or login. Perhaps some day the law will recognize that kind of network effect abuse as anti-competitive behavior.
> And I believe that there is still a steam runtime that games check for, even if launching outside of Steam.
It is up to the game, but yes many of them do need Steam or something that looks like Steam [0] running.