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Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

So, what's the relationship between Wine and Proton? Is Proton just the SteamOS/Valve name for it, or is it actually it's own project?

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More or less Wine + some experimental patches not yet I twgrated in mainstream wine + a buch of DirectX translation libraries + close steam integration.

That makes sense. I thought they were entirely separate tbh but it makes sense that they'd share a lot of DNA.

I absolutely love my Ally running SteamOS. Incredible work by... everyone involved, really.

Though currently Proton has not yet shipped a release which uses Wine 11.

There's also Proton-GE [1], which is even more experimental and adds some bleeding edge fixes and features.

I've heard it's pretty good for fixing video playback/rendering (e.g. cutscene) issues if both the stable and the experimental branch of Proton can't make it work.

[1] https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom

A lot of what Proton-GE brings from my understanding is a larger support for Media Foundation, which can't be added to Proton itself because of license issues (Proton is from a commercial company, where Proton-GE is from an individual).

So aside from the stuff that has been implemented differently, running Proton instead of Proton GE is like trying to game on Windows N editions.

There is also UMU Launcher[0] which is basically all that without the Steam integration/dependencies so you can run games from GOG and other stores (it is a command-line tool but launchers like Heroic can use it behind the scenes). I used to install dxvk, etc manually but in recent months i switched to it as it tends to work much more seamlessly for games (i did disable its autoupdates though).

[0] https://github.com/Open-Wine-Components/umu-launcher

It's a distribution of Wine with some extra stuff added, importantly DXVK (directx => vulkan layer) and a lot of game specific workarounds.

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