Liam Dawe at GamingOnLinux looks back at the release of Valve’s Proton, five years ago today.
Proton just makes a lot of sense. It didn’t take long for Valve to expand Proton to go initially from a few select Valve-approved titles, to being able to run anything we choose to try with it. From there, Linux gaming just seemingly exploded. And then eventually we saw why Valve made Proton with the Steam Deck announcement coming less than three years later in July 2021.
Proton is one of the biggest things to happen to desktop Linux and PC gaming in general. It cannot be overstated just what it has done to the gaming market – people expect new games to just work on Linux now, and developers have to answer questions about it and promise support sooner rather than later. From big, defining titles like Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3, down to the countless small indie titles – Proton and thus Linux support for games has been normalised.
PC gaming is no longer a Windows-only thing, and that benefits all of us.
I remember pre-Proton having a separate Steam install under WINE for playing some Windows games on Linux. Which I recall somehow actually working for at least a few games, but was definitely a lot more fiddly than just letting Steam handle running Proton. But now Proton is so good that even checking ProtonDB doesn’t feel that important since it’s almost always “Platinum” in my experience. Valve has done a great job polishing WINE into an it-just-works product for gaming.
Now we just need something like Proton for productivity apps – MS Office, Adobe Suite, Autodesk, accounting/bookkeeping software like Lexware and Quicken, and so on.
By the way @thom I am being asked to fill out an “are you human” form every time I post a comment, sometimes twice. This needs to stop.
You`re not the only one. š
Same
Same here. Thom is preparing for the AI uprising apparently, you never know when a T-800 will grab your phone and start posting as you.
j0scher,
That change was made at the same time the “osnews account” links on the right disappeared. They went in to add the “ad” section, but I’m not sure if any of the other changes were actually intentional?
https://web.archive.org/web/20220301043541/https://www.osnews.com/
Note the plugin that blocks requests with the “are you human” form doesn’t verify any of the data. I don’t think it’s of any security value other than maybe some security through obscurity?
IMHO established users shouldn’t be bothered with verification popups at all. To the extent that they are used, they should only apply to new users with no reputation (ie few posts and/or not registered long enough).
I think something has broken at the back end. I get a blocked notice when logging in but I am able to log in anyway. And I have started being shown ads again as of this week, even though Patreon support is supposed to get you an ad-free experience (and did until this week). I assume it will get fixed at some point.
You can add programs to Steam and run them under Proton.
Good day. If you want to run MS Office under Linux, you may be looking for CrossOver, the commercial version of Wine. Ya know, Wine being that thing which Proton is based on.
https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover/
It still blows my mind. I remember in the early 2000s, compiling MESA(?) packages and barely getting Tux Racer to run, because Tux Racer was almost all we had.
Nowadays, I can purchase Doom Eternal, a triple A title, the week it comes out, and it just works. It’s really incredible what Proton and Valve have done.
There’s a quote in one of the comments over there:
“People donāt realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior.”
— Gabe Newell, 2012.
If Apple took any note of that, they’d absolutely dominate the personal computing space. I’ll never understand why they leave the gaming community flapping in the wind. All they would have to do is support Vulkan (even if a Metal wrapper), and promise not to ditch Rosetta 2 any time soon – or just stop shitting on game/store front makers like Valve and Epic. But they are Apple. A consistently good experience for 5-15% of the market.
BTW which is the easiest way to run Proton without Steam?
Good day. Proton without steam is (more or less) Wine with DXVK. In general, if you’re not using Steam, you will want to skip the extra steps needed to use Proton as it’s extra effort for fairly little benefit.
For a nice front-end, you may consider something like Bottles.
https://usebottles.com/