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Comment by giomasce | Hacker News Reader

Proton developer here, working for CodeWeavers. Everything we develop goes preferentially in Wine, and is kept in Proton as a "hack" only when a solution clean enough for Wine is unfeasible or too complicated. Proton is periodically rebased onto Wine, so everything in Proton and not in Wine is additional rebasing work, which we'd like to avoid as much as possible.

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Do you think Proton could be released on Steam for macOS? This could help rejuvenate the gaming community on macOS, which is suffering due to Apple's focus on the App Store. It seems like every decision Apple makes for macOS makes it harder to support games outside of their ecosystem.

On the technical level it should be totally doable. Whether that's something Valve is interested into, I don't have any privileged information.

I know people use CrossOver with Steam on macOS, though that requires a rather intricate setup I don't know much about. I guess what you'd like to have is the kind of seamless integration that Proton has with Steam on Linux.

Thanks for all the great work. I hadn't realised Proton was developed by CodeWeavers. Out of curiosity, what is the relationship between Proton and your own product Crossover?

In principle they are somewhat similar: they're both Wine + local patches (either backported from more recent Wine versions or hacks that are not suitable for upstream Wine) + some glue. CrossOver also has a GUI, which Proton doesn't need because the GUI there is Steam and Proton is supposed to be as transparent as possible. And like I said for Proton, it's in our best interest to keep the diff between Wine and CrossOver as small as possible, because that's a liability that takes its toll at each rebase.

In practice Proton and CrossOver tends to have rather different sets of needs. Proton only supports Linux and is only focused on gaming. CrossOver exists for a handful of platforms, most notably macOS (which has a number of intricacies: missing 32 bit libraries, Apple Silicon, missing Vulkan drivers which requires MoltenVK, but MoltenVK itself cannot really offer all the features standard Vulkan drivers have on Linux), and is also used for non-gaming applications. CrossOver also lives in the form of specialized branches we develop for specific applications, on request of their developers. So while of course we share everything that can be shared, in my experience this tends to be not that much (except what goes upstream, of course). In pratice CrossOver and Proton live in different repositories, have independent build systems and independent release schedules.

Thanks for the explanation!

I've been a Crossover customer since their 2012 end of the world sale.

huge THANK YOU for the hard work on Wine, the entire community much appreciates, I'm a steam customer (400 games, no less!) and that's my humble contribution :)

note that I commonly buy all games that run on linux :)

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