Aceticon
@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on With the Legion Go S, we can now directly compare performance between official builds of SteamOS and Windows 4 days ago:
In Software Design terminology, Wine and DXVK are “adaptor” layers (each convert one kind of API interface into a different kind - Wine doing Windows API to Linux API conversion and DXVK doing DirectX API to Vulkan API - and nothing more) whilst Proton is more a controller that just manages those things and adds some more functionality on top such as Steam integration for ease of use.
Without Proton users would have to know a bunch of command lines parameters and environment setup to launch all the right components with the right configuration so that they can first install and then run their Windows game in Linux. In fact this is the situation if you use Wine directly without something like Lutris to do a similar work as Proton.
Personally I prefer Lutris since it’s more flexible - for example I can configure it to run games sandboxed with networking disabled - and it’s not tightly bound to a single games store.
- Comment on With the Legion Go S, we can now directly compare performance between official builds of SteamOS and Windows 4 days ago:
As pointed out higher up this thread DXVK and Vulkan also work in Windows (without Proton) were they give performance improvements.
Further, it’s perfectly possibly to run Windows games via DXVK and Vulkan in Linux without Proton - just use plain Wine (of which Proton is a branch) instead - and you also get the performance improvements (certainly that’s my perception in my system since I tend to get my games from GoG instead of Steam when available and thus run them via Wine instead of Proton).
So that’s at least two situations were the performance improvements are present without Proton, hence you cannot logically claim they’re due to Proton, even indirectly.
Logically the place most likely to yield performance improvements is the full implemention of a rendering stack directly on top of the hardward which even has its own architecture - Vulkan - since there’s a lot more room to improve usage of hardware resources at that level, though things like pre-conversion and caching of Vulkan shaders from DirectX shaders, which are done at a higher level (Proton or DXVK), can also improve performance.
It’s possible that Proton itself is delivering some performance improvements (for example, via the trick of, pre-converting shaders from DirectX to Vulkan before game start, uploading the generated shaders to the Steam servers and then other users just download the converted shaders and do not require that step, which should speed up game start tough I have at least one game were it actually can slow down A LOT game start because the generated shaders are massive) versus solutions using DXKV + Vulkan without Proton, but that’s not really enough to sustain a claim that the performance improvements are mainly thanks to Proton in the face of also seing the performance improvements when Proton isn’t there.
- Comment on Britain Orders Apple to Build a Backdoor Into Your iPhone 3 months ago:
When the Snowden Revelations came out, the US rolled back some of the surveillance, whilst in the UK which had even more invasive surveillance than the US, they go tthe editor of the newspaper which brought out the Revelations fired and passed a law to retroactively make all those practices legal.
This is now at all weird coming from the UK, quite the contrary - it’s totally expected since they’re worse than the US.
Maybe you’re confusing the much higher quality of image management of the UK (in the country that created the word “posh”, projecting the right appearance is traditionally a speciality of the upper classes over there) with the reality of Britain when it comes to civil society surveillance and democratic practices in general.
- Comment on A 25-Year-Old Is Writing Backdoors Into The Treasury’s $6 Trillion Payment System. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? 3 months ago:
Pushing code directly to Prod in a payments system handling trillions of $ is going to end in an almighty bang…
- Comment on Steam Machine 3 months ago:
I can log into my GOG account with Lutris and it will NOT auto-update my games but rather works as a pull-only manager, which I prefer since over 2 decades in Software Engineering have taught me that shit getting updated at the convenience of a 3rd party is a great way to randomly and for no good reason have stuff that works stop working. Even in Windows I refused to use GOG Galaxy for exactly that reason and kept downloading offline installers (and that’s also part of the reason I favored GOG over Steam). You could say it’s a professional quirk 😀
I’m definitely one of those people who swears by Lutris and even went to the trouble of figuring out how to run games from it automatically sandboxed and have mine configured to run them with Firejail set for, amongst other things, no network access (it looked into it because I wanted to make sure any pirated game wouldn’t hack my system, but it also works well to stop official versions of games from doing any funny business - mainly privacy invasive stuff - so I have it set up as default for all games).
I too was holding back from having Linux as my main by the lack of availability of games that would run on Linux - and I’ve been playing around with Linux and even using it professionally since the early 90s - so I’m very happy with how this transition from Windows to Linux turned out for me and, like you, almost all of the games that I know won’t work are games I don’t have interest in playing anyway (mainly because the Online Multiplayer experience for AAA games nowadays is horrible even when compared to the 2000s and early 2010s, worse compared to LAN gaming in the 90s).
- Comment on Steam Machine 3 months ago:
Well, my Steam collection isn’t all that big (I mostly buy from GoG) plus I’ve only changed to Linux about 6 months ago, so out of the 6 Steam games I have tried so far in Linux, only for 1 (The Sims3, an EA game from 2009) has it failed to run from Steam whilst a pirated version ran perfectly fine with Lutris and Wine.
If I remember it correctly since the very beginning this game was problematic even in Windows because of its excessive DRM and if you look at ProtonDB, most recent experiences reported with the Sims 3 are either negative or problematic.
I’ve tweaked a lot of problematic games to get them to run in Linux (mainly GoG games with Wine and Lutris, though one of the 6 Steam games I’vbe tried require tweaking in Steam to get it to run) plus I know enough about tweaking Wine to get pirated games to run in Lutris (Lutris doesn’t have install scripts for downloaded “releases” like that, so they often requires tracking in the logs the missing DLLs and figuring which version to install or even if the problem requires forcing use of the native DLL in WINEDLLOVERRIDES) so it’s not as if by now I’m devoid of experience at tweaking that stuff.
In summary, my total rate for problems running Steam games under Linux is 33.3%, half of which I could solve with tweaking and half I could not, though it’s a pretty small sample so the error margin is large.
For comparison sake, with Wine and Lutris out of maybe 20 games, looking at my notes - because I write the tweaks down for future reference - 5 required tweaking (so around 25%) and only for 1 of those (10% off the total) I failed to get it to run properly.
Compared to the last time I tried gaming on Linux (maybe a decade ago), it’s incredibly good.
- Comment on Steam Machine 3 months ago:
In some cases my 0 minutes played are because I bought it in Steam but had to go get a pirate version to play it in Linux (via Lutris and Wine rather than Steam and Proton) since the Steam version didn’t work in Linux but the pirate one did (probably something to do with the game’s own DRM, which in the pirate version has been cracked)
Which, IMHO, is more sad than just buying a game because it’s cheap and never actually getting around to playing it.