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from the year-of-the-Linux-desktop-redux dept.
Valve has confirmed the rumours that were discussed here on SoylentNews earlier.
Today, Monday, August 21, Valve has released a new beta steam client for linux. It includes a modified distribution of Wine, called Proton, to provide compatibility with Windows game titles. This goes hand-in-hand with an ongoing testing effort of the entire Steam catalog, in order to identify games that currently work great in this compatibility environment, and find and address issues for the ones that don't. (includes a list of 27 initial games supported for beta)
We will be enabling more titles in the near future as testing results and development efforts progress; in the meantime, enthusiast users are also able to try playing non-whitelisted games using an override switch in the Steam client. Going forward, users can vote for their favorite games to be considered for Steam Play using platform wishlisting.
To make this happen, 2 years ago, Valve started funding/supporting development efforts of Proton and DXVK (the Direct3D 11 implementation based on Vulkan.) Modifications to Wine are submitted upstream if they're compatible with the goals and requirements of the larger Wine project; as a result, Wine users have been benefiting from parts of this work for over a year now.
Also reported on GamingOnLinux.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:27PM (4 children)
various gnu/linux interests need to get together on this and make wine (or a different project) completely transparent to the end user. you should install the package and then be able to run windows applications without a bunch of config or needing a wine gui. also, isolate whatever it runs so it can't cause trouble. this would be huge for games but also all the businesses who can't switch to linux because of some decrepit slaveware they are stuck on for some reason. their parts suppliers have no api and only work with slavewareX, for instance. linux on the desktop will happen after linux on the business desktop, probably not before.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:05PM (2 children)
WINE does not care about isolation. On the contrary, they want to "invade" host system at every opportunity. That menubuilder.exe was a total disaster, with files opened in notepad and "IE" running on HTML pages.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @07:05PM (1 child)
What host system? Wine is not an emulator. It's an API. An interface. Providing access to the system is its very purpose.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @07:47AM
And that's the problem.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday August 22 2018, @06:24PM
*WINDOWS* can't even do that for Windows software.
The thing to keep in mind about Wine is that it supports a hell of a lot more Windows software than Windows does these days. You can run Win95 programs all the way up to Win10 programs. Microsoft's got their little "compatibility mode" toy, which as far as I can tell doesn't do a damn thing, and certainly doesn't meet your goals for end-user transparency even if it did.
The solution for Windows users would be to go dig out some ancient Win9x installation media and install it on a spare system or a virtual machine and run your older software on that. Wine just requires a couple config changes, which can be mostly automated through GUI tools like PlayOnLinux. It already IS the more transparent and seamless option, but I don't think you'll ever get 100% of the way there as you'd have to essentially fingerprint and test every possible Windows application in order to know what settings it requires. Valve is trying to do that, PlayOnLinux is trying to do that, Crossover Office and WineX tried to do that before them...but you'll never get more than the most popular packages supported that way. For everything else, you either let the user configure it manually or you just tell them it can't be done even if it might work fine just because you haven't tested it yet.