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Comment by birracerveza | Hacker News Reader

When they initially stated they wanted to bring games on Linux, I was ... skeptical, to say the least. It seemed like posturing to fend off Microsoft's predatory policies, but ultimately an empty promise that would never work out, despite every good intention they had.

I mean Linux? Running Windows games? Without hacks and tricks and magic and stuff to make it run maybe good enough to say "yeah, it kinda runs sometimes if you don't pay attention to the bugs"? Absolute lunacy.

But they did it.

The absolute madmen did it in just a couple years. That's incredible.

Congratulations to Gabe, Steam devs and proton devs.

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I feel like you're unfairly underplaying all the hard work and success of Wine. None of this would be possible without it. It allowed a lot of games to work on Linux that didn't have native ports. Proton and SteamOS are bridging the last mile (particularly in regards to polish and ease of use), which is important because of the Pareto principle, but I wouldn't credit Valve with everything.

Everything builds upon Wine, but when it comes to games it alone wasn't doing so well outside older dx9 titles.

It's mostly DXVK/Proton's VKD3D that actually allowed a lot of games to work on Linux with little overhead, both are funded by Valve. So I don't think calling upon Pareto principle in regards to Valve is fair either.

And yet none of it would be possible without all the emulation of all the other parts of the OS. You need more than emulating DX10/11/12 to get games to run. Valve is standing on the shoulders of giants here. The original comment didn't even mention Wine, which I think is criminally unfair. I do think Valve has made insanely valuable contributions, I just don't want anybody to forget that they're not the sole reason why any of this is possible. Wine and all its contributors deserve to be mentioned.

I don't think anybody is attributing it solely to Valve, but it's hard to deny that Valve is currently the main driving force behind gaming on Linux, hence they're getting lots of praise. The Linux gaming stack consists of quite a few open source projects however, and I don't think it's that criminal that they aren't being mentioned in a comment to an article that does mention them :)

Of course Wine played a very big part here, but at this point I'd also credit all Linux contributors.

As I should!

Because it's a massive, MASSIVE win for open source, which wouldn't be possible if, for the past decades, people didn't relentlessly try to create a worthy free alternative to Windows, that is also capable of flawlessly running Windows software.

> Without hacks and tricks and magic and stuff

I'd say Proton absolutely qualifies as "hacks ans tricks and magic and stuff". It's just polished and packaged so increadibly well it doesn't feel hackey. I'm constantly amazed at how well it all just works.

It's meant from a user perspective, it's a very polished experience that I couldn't fathom even 5 years ago. Even if there's dark magic lurking beneath, it's seamless.

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