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Comment by yazaddaruvala | Hacker News Reader

Could you help me understand why that is a pity? Seems like Valve’s adapter pattern is a great development tool to get Linux games without dev studios spending excessive dev time/money on it.

Is Proton in some way inferior to native?

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I can think of one thing, which might not be what parent meant: the incentive of developing for linux, or paying porters like icculus and flibitijibibo to build a native version goes out the window, and the need for their kind of craft goes away.

Frankly when the SteamDeck launched I hoped that game developers will start treating it as they do any other console and build specifically for it, but sadly Proton prevented that from happening.

I don't think Proton has prevented anything. In fact, without it, and the back catalog of Windows games it makes available on SteamDeck, I doubt the handheld would have been as popular. SteamDeck was successful enough to get a re-release in the form of the OLED model, which is a big success for a Linux handheld. The longer Valve remains committed to the platform, and the more devices they get into the hands of consumers, the more attractive native Linux games will look to developers.

The people I mentioned in my comment clearly disagree with you, and frankly they have more of an incentive to be well informed about the situation. See the twitter link I posted to your comment's sibling for Ethan Lee's impressions from three years ago.

Also, I never argued against Proton having been a boon for Linux gamers, but I tried to present an opposing point of view that usually does not get taken into account.

Like I mentioned in the other comment my impression over the past 3-4 years is that the number of native linux ports has dwindled to nothing and that is most likely due to Proton making them unnecessary.

In my experience, the Linux ports never got any attention from the devs either way. They'll usually have worse performance, not be on the current patch and in at least one case, Binding of Isaac Rebirth, not be compatible with the DLC as the DLC works in some hacky way on the windows version.

Without Proton the steam deck would not be popular enough to warrant any Linux ports either way. So Linux ports would be doomed regardless.

The real travesty is steam, with the recent introduction of WoW64 in Wine, is now the only software that requires me to run 32bit binaries on my desktop. Real annoying.

In your opinion, why is the "trust in Proton" not considered "developing for Linux"?

Is your argument specifically about the game developer's mental model for Linux's priority, or something core about the Proton abstraction layer?

All software runs on some abstraction. So specifically, if the game developer prioritized a Linux port by explicitly testing Proton, would that be enough for you to consider the game "developed for Linux"?

The consumer artifact for a game developed for a platform is a binary that can run natively on that platform.

Regarding games, that is a binary that targets the ubuntu based Steam Linux Runtime. That's what I meant when I said that devs should be able to target it as a regular console SDK.

I think it's a longer term play. Step 1) Establish a large enough non-windows userbase with great compatibility tools Step 2) Studios and especially game engine developers notice linux install base Step 3) Some tangible benefit to running natively, if only stability, pops up and the userbase is now large enough to care about it Step 4) Engines, and then games get better native support

I am pretty sure you're wrong. Here's a tweet from 2021: https://x.com/flibitijibibo/status/1416118465442852869

To quote from down the conversation:

> @flibitijibibo (Jul 16, 2021): Don't look at me - I'm just trying to figure out how much time I have left, either way it's pretty clearly finite

Also some anecdata from someone that pretty much bought all native linux releases from Steam since the linux version was released: in the past 2-3 years there were barely any new ones, outside of Valve's own titles maybe.

Sometimes (with older games) I force proton installation instead of the native port because it runs better.

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