Comment on 7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux
fartsparkles@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s been 12 years since Gaben committed to Linux publicly and honestly. It’s impressive to see that Valve has remained committed all this time and become a stellar contributor to the Linux ecosystem.
They could have forked and kept their toys to themselves but instead they’ve continuously pushed their hard work upstream for every Linux distro to benefit from.
My behemoth of a gaming rig is to be switched over to Linux in the coming weeks, bringing my use of Windows to an end after 30+ years (my gaming rig is the only system I still have Windows on).
I’ve been using Linux since 2002 and if you told my younger self it would be the ex-Microsoft people behind Half-Life that would kill Windows, I’d have laughed you into oblivion. And yet here we are.
lost_faith@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Did you ever get into Cedega back then?
fartsparkles@lemmy.world 1 day ago
No I didn’t. I think the public source was a nightmare to build and get working (never tried, friends did though) and I wasn’t going to pay for it when the Wine project was publicly annoyed by the proprietary forks not contributing upstream (didn’t Wine relicense because of Cedega?).
I payed for CrossOver over the years as they had Office working pretty well and as much as I use FOSS office suites for personal use, inevitably someone sends me something that wouldn’t open and I’d have to use MS Office.
My biggest gripe with using Linux for gaming over the years was drivers and needing to switch between them since some would be good for compositors (typically the FOSS ones), others for gaming (typically the proprietary blob ones). Then there was the regular breakages etc.
I wish I had switched to Arch sooner as I’ve had so few issues with that distro given the core packages are so minimal, there’s less opinionated cruft that other distros have.
lost_faith@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I don’t know about the upstream stuff but to get certain games running you had to contact them to make the game work for you, nothing like Proton today. I did support them for about a year or so as I wanted to encourage more gaming compatibility.
I never ran Arch, but did run a gauntlet of distros like RHEL5, Fedora, Fedora Core, Mandrake, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, and prolly a few more I’ve forgotten. At the time, yeah, video drivers were a mess for gaming, most of the time the drivers did install for both ATI and Nvidia on my machines but they were never bleeding edge so they had a lot of time to get well working instruction sets, Nvidia is still a pain(cause the smart people can’t fix the issues Nvidia won’t) and thats the vid card I have atm 4070ti super, shoulda gone AMD instead. My only issue with linux now is the VR part of it(thankfully Proton are still working on it and there is a better desktop access program that actually lets you control the desktop), the games do not run as well as under windows so I will most likely have to retain a windows partition for the games that do not work well under linux(all of the flat games I have installed work as well as under windows and if I don’t look at the task bar I forget which os I am using), but all that glorious storage will be moving under linux by end of 10.
fartsparkles@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah I’ve run the gauntlet of distros too (including setting up distcc across several boxes so I could run Gentoo everywhere (which is far too much of my life I can never get back).
Arch is the best of Gentoo/Slack with the ease of Ubuntu/Debian.
Also sounds like I need to buy a new card as I’m nvidia too right now.