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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: 4, Insightful) by crafoo on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:52PM (10 children)
Anything that helps provide another option to Windows is good for everyone.
In some ways Valve is placing themselves in a typical console manufacturer's role as it related to online distribution of games. They can act as a certification authority for compatibility with Linux and their version if Wine. They can place a badge on the product's store page. They can do testing and help manufacturers with configurations. They can mark incompatible games.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:02PM (9 children)
It is also an option to kill native Linux gaming. Because, why bother porting, just run through this and pray.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:54PM (3 children)
Replace "pray" with "test thoroughly" and I fail to see a problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @07:24PM (1 child)
How about speed?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Thursday August 23 2018, @02:59AM
Speed to market with a single Windows/Wine build would exceed speed to market with a Windows build on launch day followed by an X11/Linux build 12 months later.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @07:44AM
Oh, but you will. Just about the time where you want to retire and play games of your youth.
(Score: 1) by higuita on Wednesday August 22 2018, @06:27PM
Vulkan ... if they start to use vulkan, the remaining is lot easier to port or for wine to support... but better, this may make developer break the windows prision and test/develop on another platforms, so increasing the portability of the code and the linux port could end being mostly free, you just have to add the QA and support to test that too
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday August 22 2018, @07:29PM
If this helps get Windows market share down and Linux market share up, then developers will eventually have an incentive to target Linux natively. SteamOS hasn't amounted to much yet, and I'm not sure it ever will. ChromeOS is much more common but is not oriented towards gaming. Maybe Google will try to expand their reach to more laptop and desktop systems with Fuchsia, which is Linux-like.
But even if you ignore SteamOS and Google, you have users right here who are using Windows just for the games. If Steam can help change that by beefing up WINE, that's a good thing.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @02:01AM
It's pretty difficult to kill something that is stillborn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @02:47AM
Because it's almost always faster to run things that are compiled specifically for the platform and with today's mutli-OS tool kits, this allows developers to get a sense of how much money they're leaving on the table when they don't offer a Linux option.
Realistically, any developer that's going to use this as an excuse to not release a Linux version was probably not doing so to begin with or were doing a poor job of it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by boltronics on Thursday August 23 2018, @03:25AM
The difference here is that lots of people (myself included) were already playing games under Wine. Now the developers get a chance to actually see the stats of how many people are doing this.
If the devs really care about their audience, and their audience has a significant percentage of people playing the Windows build under Wine, they should probably consider providing a port, or otherwise keep those stats in mind for future games they develop.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!