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Comment by ACS_Solver | Hacker News Reader

Valve's Proton (so Wine + DXVK + some other additions) revolutionized gaming on Linux. I play games both for fun and work, and for a solid 3+ years now, gaming on Linux has been an "it just works" experience for me, and should be for most games that don't use kernel-level anticheat.

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Now if only Steam would add a checkbox on their checkout page to add 10% donation/tip that goes directly to their upstream opensource dependencies (like the Wine team), that would be amazing! I would add extra money on every purchase to support these people!

https://www.winehq.org/donate

Requires PayPal or credit card. The suggestion was to pay with your Steam Wallet or whatever payment method already used when you buy a Proton-based game on Steam.

for 99% of people it will also probably be paypal or credit card

> Donate to the Wine Development Fund by cash, cheque, or international money order in US dollars.

IMHO this supports the original point that payment via Steam would be an upgrade:

Sending cash to a postal address isn't low-effort nor low-risk.

Payment by cheque is something I have never done, nor would I know how to do it. I'd have to ask at my bank -- not low effort. I don't know if I'm an outlier here but I have never heard from any of my peers who ever did such a thing.

The same or even worse is true for international money orders. The whole concept of making a money transfer to a postal address is something I have never heard of. Where's the IBAN?

The Wine team is right to put even PayPal before all of these.

The best low overhead way to support them for Americans is to set up bill pay with their bank and auto send checks to their mailbox

Can you have a Steam Wallet without having a credit card?

Yes, I do. It just means that you have to manually "recharge" your Steam wallet when it runs low. That's some effort, but it limits the possible damage if something goes wrong.

How do you "recharge" you Steam Wallet? Gift cards, I assume?

Yep, depending on where you live you can probably find them wherever you find other major brand gift cards.

Paysafe cards. A store near me has them.

i pay for crossover license (wine on mac), if i understand correctly, they spend this money on development wine core as well.

This is a fantastic idea. I completely endorse it. I hope a Valve employee sees this.

You always give 30% to Valve and their interests so far are aligned. Everything that's possible within the Steam ecosystem is available outside of it. Maybe things will change in the future, but I doubt we could be getting a better deal.

Great idea!

Such donations might even be tax-deductible revenue for Valve, so even the finance bros should love it.

Although I would prefer if Valve simply commits to a fixed percentage of its Steam fee to be donated...

Forwarded donations are not tax-deductible (in the US); That's a lie that's been spread around the internet. If you give a company money with the express purpose of them forwarding it to someone else (the company acts as a "collection agent"), it's not their income or donation.

https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-gets-tax-benefit-thos...

And even if it was, all "tax deductible" would mean is that they wouldn't have to pay taxes on that money. Which, you know, they don't get to spend. So it's kind of defacto tax deductible in the same sense that my friend's income is "tax deductible" for me, I guess.

A lot of people online have convinced themselves that "tax deductible" means that the government would refund you that dollar amount. That's a "tax credit"... If forwarded donations were a tax credit, then yes, rounding up is giving the company "free" money! But you're not.

Interesting, thanks for the details.

So it would be actually financially _better_ for Valve to donate a portion of their revenue and state "we will donate x% of the price to yy", as THEN it would be tax-deductible for them

It's not better, because being revenue and donated away and tax-deductible all cancels out. It's as if they never saw the money, just like forwarding it.

Buy a steam deck. It sends a strong signal to Valve to continue supporting Wine and you get a Steam Deck

I'm in Africa, when I go to the steam deck page, it says it is not available in my country. Not interested in buying from a third party importer. So until then..

What about buying from a fellow Hacker News nerd? I'm willing to handle shipping a new unit for you, based in USA. :-)

I also have a used 1st-gen model, upgraded with hall-effect joysticks and a 2TB SSD with a glass screen protector that I am willing to part with. Apart from a few barely-visible scuffs on the plastic housing, it's in great condition. If you're interested, let me know how to get in touch!

Unfortunately Steam decks have been out of stock for a while. The AI slop Apocalypse ruined the consumer computing market with chip shortages.

it's was out of stock as soon as they came out and in a lot of countries outside of the US it wasn't available.

I wanted to buy the entire new lineup (Machine, VR, and controller), but alas, AI RAM shortage. I hope it can get released soon.

> if only Steam would add a checkbox on their checkout page to add 10% donation/tip that goes directly to their upstream opensource dependencies

Or how about instead of passing the cost off to users, Steam actually supports them from their own profits? After all, they are profiting from free work.

We can't be pushovers about this.

As far as I can tell, Valve makes significant contributions back to Wine via Proton development. Isn't that essentially them supporting their upstream dependencies with their own profits, by using some of those profits to pay people to contribute work to their open source dependencies?

No.

Valve pays over a hundred open source developers to work on the various open source projects that they rely on so heavily, so yeah Valve's 30% of your Steam purchases is already contributing to these open-source projects (like Mesa, the Linux kernel, Wayland, etc.)

https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-is-paying-a-whole-lot-of-devel...

Value does pay for development on open source projects already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34061110

I really is impressive. I wish publishers like EA and anti-cheat developers weren't so reluctant to support it. I hope Steam devices and SteamOS gain enough traction to force their hands.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/03/ea-javelin-anticheat-j...

Idk, kernel anti cheat is a pretty clear sign to me that I should pick a different game to play anyway...

Does windows make it easy to tell the installer wants to install kernel anti cheat? It used to pop up the generic binary "This application wants to change files on your computer" which could be installing in the protected "Program Files" or could be modifying anything.

I dont think you can even load the "windows" kernel module in wine. Last time i tried with the capcom rootkit, it didnt work at all.

Wine doesn't emulate the NT kernel; Just the NT and Win32 userspace APIs. For example, Wine provides a `kernel32.dll` that maps API calls into the appropriate Linux ones. Anything kernel level is operating "below" Wine.

I read the person I was responding to saying they avoided games with root kits for moral, not technical, reasons. So I assumed they were on Windows, and AFAIK, windows just offers binary "changes" permissions which covers anything from installing in the slightly protected Program Files directory to installing a rootkit. In other words, can they even detect they are about to install a root kit?

Good question and one I am now looking into

Ironically the only way I would ever consider robust anti-cheet is if the game installed a seperate bootable Linux witch didn't have the encryption keys for my main partition.

you may be on to something here. "you want to play our game, boot it off a usb drive"

Paying for a game that inserts rootkits into your kernel feels like paying money to get molested. no thanks.

Hate to be the one saying this, but that rootkit is there to prevent you from molesting/cheating other players. So its not an one-sided issue. It is unfortunate that the developers found no other way of fighting cheats, sure.

And by all means, if a game community is so toxic that it has to be policed by extreme measures, it is perhaps indeed better to avoid playing such a game altogether.

agreed. if a condition of attending an event was that I had to wear a chastity belt that prevented guests from raping each other, I'd think twice about attending alltogether.

I don’t care if my shooter game “community” is toxic. I don’t have any interaction with the “community” other than to try and virtually kill its members. I wish my chess app had anti-cheat, there are just some people who will cheat and any game is more fun if they can be prevented from playing.

Because anti cheat on linux is completely useless.

By and large Im happy to not participate in games that use kernel level anti-cheat.

It's reached the level where a game not working is a suprise.

Space Marine 2 was the latest one for me, but Steam is great at refunds if you do it quickly enough.

Space Marine 2 works, at least on steam deck

Yea it seems very variable depending on hw / config etc. And the most recent patch at the time (I think this was during summer?) broke it for a bunch of other people on desktop that had it working before.

For me it crashed after the first click in the menu.

> and should be for most games that don't use kernel-level anticheat.

It actually gives a far better user experience for games like Battlefield 6, because on Linux they just don't work at all. Try it for yourself - it won't even start!

By contrast if you run Battlefield 6 on Windows, eventually you'll end up playing it, and you'll wish you hadn't. It's a shitty buggy mess and you'll hate it.

So, notch up another score for Linux!

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