Valve Releases Proton 8.0-1c | Hacker News Reader

Valve Releases Proton 8.0-1c

github.com

124 pointsrc00112 comments

I'm amused by the subtitles of some of the Atelier games showing up as strikethroughs because of the Japanese practice of writing subtitles ~like this~.

Off-topic, but perhaps someone might appreciate this factoid in a hacker spirit sense (or it makes them check their code at work): Randomly reminds me of a relatively common CJK bug in Qt-based software.

Qt comes with its own string class that supports substitution like this: QString("%1 %2").arg(foo).arg(bar)

This is often naively used by devs to e.g. build filesystem paths (the framework has better APIs for this). With CJK, it often happens that HTML-style percent encoding ends up in strings and filenames somewhere (think %20 for space, etc; a lot of CJK ends up percent-encoded), and then arg() substitutes into the wrong thing and everything breaks.

I've fixed this at least twice in Qt-based music players dealing with song metadata, thanks to a Korean-language music collection and Korean radio/podcast streams.

A factoid is something which seems true but isn't. Perhaps you mean fact. If you must stress the insignificant nature of the fact, there is also factlet, trivia etc.

I appreciate this :-) I thought a factoid is a "small, not-so-important fact".

The "not actually a fact" usage is the original intent of the word. "Trivial fact" is how 'factoid' is commonly used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid

Quote for the lazy

A factoid is either an invented or assumed statement presented as a fact, or a true but brief or trivial item of news or information.

The term was coined in 1973 by American writer Norman Mailer to mean a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it is not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print. Since the term's invention in 1973, it has become used to describe a brief or trivial item of news or information.

It's funny how the general consensus of the definition of factoid is itself a factoid :)

Truly impressive stuff -- with Windows 11 being kind of terrible, I wonder if we'll soon reach an inflection point where Linux is the OS-of-choice for PC gaming.

"with Windows 11 being kind of terrible"

Curious what you dislike about it - I've felt the UX is a big improvement over 10 personally. Feels like they've adopted some patterns from OSX for the better. I use it less and less these days, but it works great for me as a gaming OS.

The built-in ads that are intentionally made difficult to disable is the major problem. That alone disqualifies it from being good, in my view.

Advertising in start bar, Hidden lock-ins, difficulty with creating local accounts, features requiring internet 24/7. Dark UI patterns, forced applications just to name a few.

The only UX things they changed from Windows 10 to Windows 11 were downgrades, so far as I can tell

- You can't move the taskbar to the sides of the screen any more

- The start menu is laggy now

- There are more ads and forced tracking integrated into the OS

I'm sure there's a lot of great stuff under the hood that got co-opted by whatever shortsighted idiot is in charge, but whatever it is, I'm not about to drop MacOS and linux to experience it

The windows ten start menu is also laggy. I’ve also disabled and uninstalled as much crap as possible.

Not to mention what is possibly the most asinine change I've ever seen in any UI revision of any software: Making the right click menu show you half the available options and requiring another click to view them all. Why?! It completely defeats the purpose of the right click menu as a convenient quick options menu. Nobody has ever said, "Man, right clicking is nice and all, but I wish I had to right click then left click on a More Options button then left click again." Just completely ridiculous.

This is not the first time Microsoft has done it, either.

In one of the MS Office generations, perhaps Office 2000, they introduced "Personalized Menus" as a major innovation in attempt to make the software less overwhelming. The idea was that the menubar menus would only show the most-used menu items by default, and hide the rest behind a "More items" at the bottom. It would then learn usage patterns and adjust the menu contents over time.

The result: Menu options disappearing seemingly randomly. Stuff you used rarely but relied on sometimes would suddenly not be where you found it last time.

The Ribbon later was kind of a "it's not working, back to the drawing board" reaction to that.

It's an interesting lesson in how "pseudo-intelligent" software can come at the cost of predictability. I once had to design tab nickname completion in a chat app, and remembering the MS Office anecdote I made it so that prefix<tab> would complete to the most recently active user matching the prefix, but that subsequent <tab> presses would go through the rest alphabetically instead, which also made a lot more sense to the testers.

> - You can't move the taskbar to the sides of the screen any more

Assuming this is what you meant, you can re-align the taskbar icons from center back to left in Settings.

https://i.imgur.com/zmulgwG.png

No, what they took away entirely is the ability to have the taskbar entirely on the side of the screen, with a vertical orientation. Now that they've settled on having just app icons in the taskbar rather than full window titles in wide buttons, a vertical taskbar at the side of the screen is a much better use of space on today's wide screens where vertical space is in short supply.

You used to be able to drag the taskbar to the sides (~like NeXTStep/BeOS) or the top (~like Mac OS). I assume GP means that functionality has departed to the great bit bucket in the sky now.

Tabloids being forced upon you: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-keeps-feeding-tabl...

Microsoft account horribleness eg: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/my-daughters-school-t...

Win key being unbindable for app specific shortcuts.

Windows update undoing all user preferences https://twitter.com/rygorous/status/1504572255665201154?s=46...

Janky crashes: https://twitter.com/litherum/status/1279164544544157696?s=46...

Forced internet accounts: https://twitter.com/rianflo/status/1589346472335937536?s=46&...

I could go on. A lot of these i found just searching “windows update” amongst people i follow on twitter.

And then you go into the Linux world where fractional scaling doesn't work properly yet, your XWayland apps interact differently than your Wayland apps, Chrome doesn't support hardware accelerated video decoding, and using Nvidia still requires you compile a kernel module and hope for the best. Oh, and you can't play most shooters since anti-cheats won't trust Linux.

The grass isn't always greener. I just treat my PC as a dedicated gaming machine. Though these days the PS5 is becoming the more appealing option.

Yea but it's not a company shoving hostile features down paying user's throats.

Good points but YMMV:

- fraction scaling: I don't need it

- Wayland: still using X

- hardware accel: I think that's true for chromium but IIRC there's a package with it and widevine (google-chrome-stablevon Arch AUR)

- nvidia: the AMD drivers are great and well supported (I've even been using ROCm to play with stable diffusion on my 6750XT)

- shooters: I mostly play strategy, puzzle, sim and 2D games. Haven't run into multiplayer issues yet but I'm sure there are some in the FPS genre with heavy DRM

Not for everyone but when I got my AMD card I stopped using my qemu virt-io VM w/ GPU passthrough and started using native steam with proton - much better experience all around and haven't booted windows ever since

> using Nvidia still requires you compile a kernel module and hope for the best

There's nothing inherently wrong with having an out-of-tree kernel module; a lot of software has, including software that is open source but has an incompatible license.

As far as I remember (I'm not on Nvidia anymore, but I've been for many years), the Nvidia module was one or two minor versions behind the latest release kernel, which is very reasonable support - for example, stable distros like Ubuntu LTS, or OpenZFS, are always a bit behind as well. I've actually changed filesystem because of this, but I certainly don't blame the OpenZFS devs.

At least those are not intentional, just lack of development time/resources. Knowing that somewhat brings me peace of mind. (and for the kernel module thing, the distro usually does it for you when the kernel is updated)

> fractional scaling doesn't work yet

Sway/wlroots and KDE support the fractional scaling extension. Seems to be an experimental setting in Gnome for now.

> your XWayland apps interact differently than your Wayland apps

How I can't wait for old legacy X stuff to no longer be a question. I feel like it's mostly Zoom & other randos holding me back from never seeing X again. https://arewewaylandyet.com/ is looking generally pretty excellent.

> Chrome doesn't support hardware accelerated video decoding, and using Nvidia still requires you compile a kernel module

Vendors gonna do what a vendors gonna do. Chromium does have fine support. ChromeOS has been slowly ticking along adding their own support, which hopefully rolls-forward. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/ozone-reviews/c/y...

Nvidia people say things have gotten better but also you bought a card from a company that has forever been adversarial.

> The grass isn't always greener

I'll take "slightly less green" over "looking to subvert every choice you make".

Have to add my ick as a question: what time is it, to the second?

This information is not available in any desktop or system clock configuration. You must either find the old analog clock buried in settings, or procure the information via command line. Maybe I’m wrong and they fixed it, but I haven’t noticed any change.

> I've felt the UX is a big improvement over 10 personally

Meanwhile, I feel like every step since 7 has been been a downgrade.

> Feels like they've adopted some patterns from OSX for the better.

IMO, adopting patterns from OSX is a critical-severity bug, not a feature. Everything about the OSX UI is the worst thing I've ever used.

Microsoft is abandoning a large userbase that chooses to use Windows because it's not MacOS.

I hate having multiple windows from one program being collapsed into a single entry on the taskbar. I hate programs on the taskbar only showing their icon and not the window titlebar text. I hate how flat everything looks.

Screens are bigger and DPIs are higher, giving us more screen real estate than ever before, so why are we filling it with whitespace and hiding functionality?

I'm still on Win10, and I use WindowBlinds to make it look like Win7 Classic. When I eventually am forced to upgrade to Win11 when I upgrade my CPU, I'll be using WindowBlinds11 and Start11 to continue to keep Windows looking sane.

> I hate having multiple windows from one program being collapsed into a single entry on the taskbar.

Hyperswitch solves that for good.

> I hate programs on the taskbar only showing their icon and not the window titlebar text.

Not sure yet if I agree with that, given that HyperSwitch is giving me the best of both worlds - a window preview and window titles.

> I hate how flat everything looks.

Windows is honestly worse. The new Settings "app" is... blargh.

> Feels like they've adopted some patterns from OSX for the better.

No, Windows 11 is a cargo cult. It imitates the look of an OS X dock (centered icons, no window titles, large icons etc) but not the parts that makes it properly functional. Have you tried to drag and drop an app to make a shortcut there? It doesn't work. For that matter, many modern windows 11 things do not understand the very notion of drag and drop.

By the way, the windows 11 taskbar has no quicklaunch. Without quicklaunch, you can't pin documents or folders to your taskbar.

Mac OS X allows you to drag anything to the dock. App, folders, documents. In the case of folders, clicking them will even show you the last modified files in a quick preview list. The dock can't do everything a windows taskbar can do, but it has its own advantages.

Windows 11's taskbar is, on the other hand, a dock with no advantages. There's nothing it does that makes it an improvement over what Windows 7 could already do (I cite windows 7 because it was the one that added most of the features that can make the taskbar feel more like OS X's dock, but those features, like grouped windows, were purely optional). You can't even have it on the sides of the screen anymore too. It was rewritten.. just for the sake of being rewritten. Developer churn at MS with no improvement on the user's side. Why?

I, as a person who has dealt for many reasons regularly with all the major desktop OSes, hate Windows 11 the most for how arbitrary the loss of features has felt. I hate it almost as much as I hate Gnome 3, but one advantage Gnome 3 has is that... you don't have to use it, Linux has a lot of real desktops. KDE, XFCE, LXDE, customized tilers..

Hate is such a strong word… I personally prefer Windows 11 to the jumbled mess that MacOS has recently become. Windows Subsystem for Linux is a major improvement over the BSD junk running on Macs. The tabloid headlines and Edge are annoying but it’s easy enough to turn that stuff off.

Can you quantify how the UX is an improvement?

For me, the death of having a vertical taskbar makes an ultrawide display annoying. The centred-by-default icons of the taskbar kill muscle memory because opening applications moves icons along. Just seems an absurd thing. I could go on.

Been asking this question out loud for 20 years.

Hah! Could this truly be the Year of the Linux Desktop™?

Probably not while Ring-0 anticheat remains a thing. But we did get EAC ported, at least.

The main issue for me is performance. Dota 2, which is "CPU-heavy" and has historically been very forgiving of low-spec hardware, ran poorly under Linux but runs flawlessly at max settings under Windows on the same machine.

I find that I can do just fine without all those rootkit-"anti cheat" games. I just don't see what they have that's worth that sort of corporate condescension and abuse.

Nope, as proven by OS/2 better Windows support.

Graphics drivers are still somewhat of a mess in Linux, especially with Nvidia. Also, compatibility of games is all over the place. Some games have platinum rating, and they run fine, but every one in a while you get a stuttering that you don't get on windows.

Until all games start releasing native ports (which could happen given Steam Decks success), Win is going to stick around.

Also Win 11 isn't that bad. I have the pro and you can turn off a lot of intrusive settings. All of my dev stuff lives in WSL2, including anything graphical since WSL2 now includes an X server that can render linux graphical apps), and it works perfectly even with ML.

> Until all games start releasing native ports

More realistically, game devs can target Proton as a platform, making sure it works on that.

This raises a question I have about Win 11. Are the problems people are attributing to 11 because they use the Home edition or are these problems also found in the Pro edition?

Seems like worldly different experiences.

Regardless getting a Linux system up and running is still infinitely more pleasant (assuming hardware compatibility is already taken into account).

Right now I'm deciding on getting a second drive since Windows doesn't like to play nice with duel booting from what I can tell. Also Microsoft fucked up the sound for Oblivion and Morrowind.

That's a HUGE assumption. I'm not some idiot neophyte who just migrated from a dumb phone yesterday; I've been running Linux since 1995. Debian 12 does not function on my Ryzen 7 5700G + Biostar B550M + RTX A2000 system-- it's nothing exotic! Neither does the stock Arch kernel, nor linux-rt, but linux-amd and my custom kernels do. I got it going, and I got VFIO passthrough working as well, but it took effort as well as knowledge normal users can't reasonably be expected to possess. Expecting people to buy based on an HCL is not reasonable, and that's half of why it will never be the year of Linux on the desktop. (The other half is the desktop being a dying breed, sadly.)

Okay but insert Linux USB drive; boot; install; system works. That's literally been my experience and for many others.

A Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is completely reasonable in my opinion for building your own machine and it's well known that Nvidia and Linux don't play nice. Recently built a new system and went with AMD for that reason. Considered Intel but they're a little new to GPUs and were a little too mid range for what I wanted.

Frankly it sounds more like you had issue with the Nvidia card than the rest of your components.

Also have to consider are you trying to use completely free open source software or are you okay with proprietary blobs and drivers.

For example Ubtuntu makes it easy for end user to activate those proprietary software blobs on installation.

> Frankly it sounds more like you had issue with the Nvidia card than the rest of your components.

Incorrect assumption. The Nvidia card went in last, after the OS was working, and is only used in passthrough.

So the onboard video worked from the get go and then things got messy after you installed the Nvidia card?

You're not being very clear here what happened and if you're only using free software sources (the default for Debian I believe).

Also looks like you replied further down. You're not even describing an average home user case but saying it's a massive assumption that average users will have an easy time installing Linux. Lol.

Remember I was comparing the ease of installing a Linux system and having it functional is a hell of a lot smoother than Windows. That's just true in general. No assumption needed.

There's other distros that have rolling releases that tend to have more updated software in exchange for stability and thorough testing.

As somebody who never even had a windows machine back in late 90s (my father was also a massive linux enthusiast) I can totally see your point. Ah, compiling the kernel...

Anyways, there are some decent oem options these days. Even if you dislike preinstalled distros, hardware compatibility is guaranteed to be there.

It just can't work any other way. Either vendors solve those compatibility problems for you, or you do it. I don't have much time so I went with the easier option of just getting dells or lenovos or simething from the numerous smaller sellers.

Both my wife and my daughter are fine with my older hardware, btw.

> RTX A2000

If you know that much about Linux, you should expect issues with Nvidia. AMD just works.

Thanks for the snipe. The A2000 is passed through to various VMs, and not used within the base OS: I'm running a 5700G APU and using its integrated GPU on the console. Unfortunately AMD doesn't offer anything comparable that fits inside the power envelope of an A2000 12GB, which is important because I'm passively cooling it and trying to keep my power bill low. I also need a decent platform for ML applications, and CUDA is far and away the leader there.

It's not a snipe. You're bragging about Linux knowledge and your A2000. Just saying that definitely doesn't work on Linux without some effort and you would buy it knowing there was some effort involved. If you want a no hassle easy install for gaming you get a consumer AMD GPU, not a professional Nvidia GPU. The context of this thread was gaming on Proton, not whatever you are doing.

> Expecting people to buy based on an HCL is not reasonable

It's totally reasonable for an OS with ~1% market share.

> especially with Nvidia.

How so? I'm using Plasma's Wayland session on a 3070ti and have very few complaints. The only issues I've seen are some weird Java GUI apps and that GTK4 text rendering issue that just won't go away. None of the "stuttering that you don't get on windows" that you're citing, I can count the number of dropped frames in most titles on one hand. Did you ever give Wayland a proper try?

> Until all games start releasing native ports

Why? Win32 is covered reasonably well with Wine, I see no reason in my experience why a completely-native runtime is required. It's certainly not needed to get the vast majority of Windows games running on Linux.

> Until all games start releasing native ports

Games on Steam don't run "native" most of the time to begin with; you can more or less always expect some random mix of "steam runtime" + "pressure vessel" + "environment provided" of containerization + i686 shared libraries on your (usual) "native" amd64 system.

I don't see how that is different from running stuff under Proton.

Personally, Linux would need to be many times better than Windows for me to use it to replace Windows for gaming. Currently W11 does the job with minimal fuss. I don't need to worry about anticheat, compatibility issues or driver problems.

Windows isn't without fault but at least for gaming I don't really have any complaints. I'm unconvinced that there's any upside to switching to Linux.

It already is. You don't seem to have done actual testing.

Proton DB makes that case handily, no personal testing required.

I wish people were a bit more sanguine and a bit less thinking wishfully about the real world performance of Proton. It is absolutely impressive, but "Playable" is not good enough of a rating; it's not even table stakes. There are bugs and manual interventions required on "playable" titles on proton DB that would lead to mass outrage and refunds if they behaved that way on their native platform.

"It can literally be played" is such a low bar.

Let's get some concrete facts out then - how is it better? A (selfish) practical example for myself - I play a lot of Overwatch. It works just fine in windows. I get low load times and usually maintain 177fps at full resolution. I have no complaints but I am open to switching. Am I guaranteed of seeing no issues in Linux?

No. Overwatch is not on Steam. So you would need to mess around with Wine or Proton separately. Maybe it works, but it's not a single click installation.

It's single-click if you use Lutris.

I play Overwatch on Linux. After you compile shaders (takes 2-3 minutes on a good CPU) it runs fine. Almost unnoticeable from a performance standpoint: I was getting ~120-130 frames at 1440p on my GTX 1050ti. On my new 3070ti it's so fast I don't even think about it.

This is an old benchmark, but still shows how good DXVK is for this title: https://youtu.be/voXc1nCD4IA

And yes, it still works with Overwatch 2. Did from Day 1, Blizzard must have had a Steam Deck dev kit or something.

Thanks! Were there any useful resources you used to make sure everything was configured correctly? I'm a relative Linux noob - I've used it here and there but never as my main home desktop, and most certainly never for gaming.

There's a well-maintained Lutris script[0] that's probably your most painless option. It's also possible to run it with Proton/Steam if you put in enough elbow grease, but... you've probably got better things to do. My only other advice would be to put in the work for getting Wayland to run so your framerate is as smooth as your GPU says it is.

I hope my last comment didn't come off as too hostile, it's a great time to experiment with Linux gaming now that the Deck is moving units! :)

[0] https://lutris.net/games/overwatch-2/

I suspect you already know this, but for anyone curious: for many of the big live service games, Linux/Proton is usually no substitute for Windows - anti-cheat renders them unplayable. MW2, Fortnite, Tarkov, Hunt, PUBG, Day Z and Cycle are some examples. By contrast, Apex and Halo work fine.

I do quite a lot of my gaming on the Steam Deck these days, but have to keep a windows box around for this reason.

Sort of relatedly: does anyone know how well the Unreal Engine 5 editor works on Linux?

Hunt, Dayz(as does Arma3 and Reforger), and The Cycle all work on Linux.

Ha, had no idea. You’re right, they’re Silver, Gold and Gold respectively on ProtonDB. Don’t know if that’s a recent development or what, but it’s fantastic.

Gonna install Hunt and Day Z on the Deck today so I can stare at them in the launcher and imagine how much fun I would have if I could find the time to play them.

If you care DayZ was BE enabled back in like October if my memory serves me correctly. The Cycle always supported it through Proton. Hunt recently enabled it like a month ago(finally, HMMMMing on linux is good).

what? protondb shows 44% aggregate game coverage, meaning 56% of games are not verified to be playable on linux systems. In what world is that "better".

my daily driver is PopOS and use proton for my games, i love it, but its not better, and the games do not play better on average in my experience. Nor is it fun having to do tinker steps when all i want to do is jump into the game

The database isn't perfect, for example Kingpin (https://www.protondb.com/app/38430) is listed as "unplayable" but it does work with the latest patch without problems, at least in Wine and presumably with Proton too. I don't know how common this is though – this is just something I encountered last week – but there's a long tail of older and sometimes obscure games, quite a few of which also don't run well on Windows any more without mucking about; I wouldn't necessarily put that much stock in that number.

There's also a native Linux version of Kingpin by the way; the instructions start with "must run as root" so never mind... The 90s were wild.

Something to keep in mind - how many of the games that work have been played to completion? Too often, "working" means the initial areas in the game work.

In my experience if works then it works; I can't recall any specific instance in almost 20 years of wine usage where it works fine for the first hour and then stops working at some specific point, although I'm sure there are instances where this is the case. I don't think it's a significant factor, especially because there are often multiple reports.

For me it's the opposite experience. Easier to get Linux installed, no driver issues, no messing around, and my games Just Work on Steam/Proton without any tricks. Windows has more hassle with downloading/installing drivers and disabling crapware and forced ads in the OS before I can begin to use it.

My wife is struggling with constant crashes in the new Harry Potter adventure game on the Deck.

That's the only thing I have encountered though.

There's a fix for that. Unfortunately it needs to be reapplied on every reboot:

sudo sh -c "echo 1000000 > /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count"

That's a sysctl config (any path under /proc/sys/ is). See `man sysctl` for how to make it permanent (i.e., auto-apply it on boot). Here's an example:

    echo vm.max_map_count=1000000 | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/max_map_count.conf
    sysctl -f /etc/sysctl.d/max_map_count.conf

Besides, there's plenty of ways to automatically execute any command on boot.

Excuse my ignorance, but would this be caused by a memory leak or an application that allocated an amount of memory allowed by Windows but not Linux, or something else?

While we can basically allocate almost infinite memory due to swapfiles storing unused pages when they cannot fit into RAM any more, we still have a limit on how many allocations you can do. The game crashes because it tries to do too many allocations. It still uses a reasonable (ish) amount of memory, it's just way too many tiny chunks of memory that aren't allocated next to eachother

Thank you, but wouldn't this be a problem on Windows then, or is Windows just more forgiving for this type of behaviour?

> disabling crapware and forced ads in the OS

Using the Pro version of Windows seems to have solved most of that. I'm on Win10 Pro, and when people talk about ads, I have no idea what they're talking about.

Same thing. I bought 10 pro, used a local account (that is now harder to do), turned off every switch on the next setup page (no cortana etc), and I had to right click -> banish the dumb tiles on the start menu, one of which was candy crush, and now it just looks like a normal Windows start menu from the bad old days.

None of that should have been forced on me, and I don't like it, but it's not incessant like everyone seems to say.

Game Pass is honestly the only thing keeping Windows installed on my gaming computer. If there was a way to use it on Linux, even if it was a bit hacky (or, say, didn't allow multiplayer), I would switch immediately.

AFAICT so far "FreeBSD" is the Unix of choice for gaming, since it powers Playstation 4 and (apparently) 5. too.

In quotes because the userland is, of course, heavily modified and proprietry.

That effectively doesn't matter, they could have also gone for Linux or written their own microkernel and it probably would be transparent to the user. They did choose FreeBSD because it's very safe, which the PS4's security track record has shown to be effective.

Xbox now runs Windows NT, there hasn't been a great interest in hacking them due to low adoption and them allowing homebrew by default.

They also chose BSD, I suppose, because it does not requite to upstream any special changes to it, which they likely made.

I can't wait for this day. The day I can run any new release on Linux, I will be off windows forever.

It's already my OS of choice for PC gaming. There are exactly two games which require me to ever boot Windows: Fortnite and Modern Warfare 2. Everything else I play runs good enough for me on Proton.

I'm confused, who works on Proton is it Valve or CodeWeavers?

I don't see valve employees in there: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/graphs/contributors

It could also be that Valve subcontracts the CodeWeavers people.

>... Griffais says the company is also directly paying more than 100 open-source developers to work on the Proton compatibility layer, the Mesa graphics driver, and Vulkan, among other tasks like Steam for Linux and Chromebooks.

https://www.theverge.com/23499215/valve-steam-deck-interview...

Valve is a relatively small company. They have absolutely fantastic in-house talent (gamescope, for example, is a Valve development and an important innovation of modern SteamOS), but they also have quite a few contractors and projects/teams they support.

(Disclaimer: I worked at a contractor on the Steam Deck for a while, working on the desktop mode.)

Thank you for making it dope! I love my deck.

Out of curiosity, why didn't desktop mode include things like language support or CUPS printing support?

Not sure! My particular team was working on features upstream in the KDE Plasma desktop. The packaging / Arch-based distro was done elsewhere. I also left the contracting company before the shipping year, though (while still involved with KDE otherwise today); it's possible there was more intra-team comm later on.

All I can offer you is speculation: Maybe just something no one's gotten around to yet? Also, I think desktop mode and its use cases are probably a lot more popular than anyone expected.

I wouldn't put CUPS on Steam deck because too many people have HP printers. People trying their HP printer or scanner and not having it working would put Deck in bad light really.

It's a desktop and was advertised as "a PC", but it has no printer support at all.

Since when is CUPS not able to handle HP printers? HPs have been basically plug-and-play for me.

I had an experience of trying to install InkJet and some old DeskJet AIO just 3 weeks ago and it wasn't great. Brother, Brother is plug and play.

That explains it, then; I use laser printers exclusively these days, so that probably cuts down a fair bit on any consumer-facing shenanigans.

CodeWeavers is contracted to work on Proton for Valve, and they are the main driving force behind it. I believe Valve only does triage for them. They're also contracting various other devs throughout the Linux desktop community to work on things like Mesa.

Vulkan is okay.

Proton has the energy of open source clones of video games.

There’s a reason games aren’t made for Vulkan, even on platforms like Android.

It’s not just because there is a lack of market share.

Valve’s immense resources would be better spent on making Source Engine work for more game genres; itself support Vulkan better, or even default to Vulkan on Windows; make it fully free. If they really felt strongly about this.

Better spent? Proton is what enables tons of Linux users play tons of otherwise Windows-only games. Plus it's not exclusive in the first place. In combination with Steam Deck it's console killer.

>In combination with Steam Deck it's console killer

Are you saying that Proton + Linux seriously threatening, killing, the market of PS5/Xbox Series/Nintendo Switch?

Steam Deck is kinda on some path there.

Steam Deck sold about 3 million units; Playstation 5 about 30 million, X-Box about 20 million, Nintendo Switch about 130 million. Steam has about 120 million active accounts.

I mean, it's successful I guess, but also not exactly taking over the world.

Well it's v1.0. Lot's of rough edges too! I see 3 million as a big number for an open/linux gaming console.

Well, the first Playstation sold about 100 million units; the NES about 60 million. Of course they had longer to sell those units, this is offset by the lower population, lower cost, and a smaller market (less Chinese people were able to afford a NES or even Playstation 1). Even the Dreamcast sold about 9 million units, which wasn't enough to keep Sega afloat. To get to numbers of the same magnitude we need to get to the Sega CD with about 2.2 million units sold, and that's widely considered to be a huge failure.

The Steam Deck is regarded as a competitor to the Nintendo Switch yeah?

I see no reason to buy any other console. Just the game availability and pricing makes it a no brainer for me. How long is it going to take the wider public to realize, is another story.

If there’s a company that can increase market share and adoption for Vulkan it’s Valve

Despite not being public, Valve still operates under capitalist pretenses. This means that their time is "best spent" on what generates revenue. Predictably, this means getting their commerce platform on as many devices as possible. That's made possible by Proton.

The side benefit is that the abstraction layer they are building will introduce near-parity between GPU APIs, which renders the whole thing moot.

> Proton has the energy of open source clones of video games.

Sorry, what?

Vulkan isnt perfect but it’s the only open source step in the right direction and is enabling things like proton to exist.

What's wrong with Vulkan? I was under the impression that it's pretty similar to DX12, and a big improvement over OpenGL.

> Proton has the energy of open source clones of video games

Given what it’s capable of, that’s one of the most uncharitable takes I’ve ever seen on Proton.

> Valve’s immense resources would be better spent on making Source Engine work for more game genres; itself support Vulkan better

Source Engine Vulkan support uses DXVK, and the main driver for DXVK development is Proton. So in a roundabout way, they are supporting Vulkan better.

> or even default to Vulkan on Windows

Is said Vulkan on Windows default better?

Most pretty naive direct DirectX-to-Vulkan conversions (running DXVK under Windows) have sightly worse performance that just using DirectX directly, and the proprietary Radeon Windows and Nvidia Windows drivers hide a lot of implementation-specific optimizations and workarounds for common game and application bugs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com