I remember when Proton launched it was like magic playing games like Doom and Nier Automata straight from the Linux Steam client with excellent performance. I do not miss the days of having the Windows version of Steam installed separately.
AFAIK Doom runs natively
Absolutely! I play mainly two games. DayZ and Eve Online. Both run way faster on my Debian 12 rig compared to running on Windows 11.
Granted, it took a while to figure out how to self-sign the Nvidia driver (secure boot). But once that was sorted it was smooth sailing.
Not only it works very often but one can even check https://www.protondb.com before buying to make sure it does work. It also works for VR games. I recently tried a brand new game, supposedly "Windows only", and it worked without any tinkering. I then updated ProtonDB to clarify so that others could play too. It's simple I didn't boot on Windows to play for years now. I'm also traveling today and instead of bringing a laptop I bring my SteamDeck to play, to work I'll also bring a BT keyboard.
TL;DR: it works, even with VR, and ProtonDB can help to identify problems
Honest question: if you’re not a Steam user, what does Proton do that wine doesn’t just as easily? I’ve played games in wine prefixes for years now, but haven’t bothered with Proton or PlayOnLinux or any of the other wine front ends. Are they worth it?
Steam is a dependency for official proton builds at least, but there are wine builds with the proton patches added in. Base wine will end up getting a lot of them too.
In the case that proton works, you install game via Linux steam and just play. Maybe override proton version and add launch arguments like dll overrides if needed for things like mods or nitpicky performance tuning.
Base wine will generally get the same improvements eventually. I use it via bottles for the odd windows program. I often need to use other custom wine builds for some of the more annoying programs. For games outside of steam, builds like wine-ge have all the relevant proton additions without the steam dependency.
Proton is essentially a fork of wine thats fine tuned by devs bankrolled by Valve/steam to optimize it to work for any and every game they can (so that it works with the Deck which is linux and relies on proton alot). AFAIK regular ol' wine is more of a general emulator that in my exerience is hit or miss when it comes to getting games running. Proton almost always succeeds where regular wine fails especially if its a big bulky AAA game with multiplayer and stuff such as Elden Ring. Someone on github maintains builds of wine based off cutting edge proton experimental for Lutris. You can find it here
I switched to Linux on my gaming PC about five or six years ago and tried a couple of different distros. Manjaro was the first one that worked really well for me, and I played through the original RAGE and Mass Effect using that setup, but for the last couple of years I've used POP!_OS, after Manjaro broke a couple of times. I'm never going back to Windows, mostly thanks to Proton. Even Elder Scrolls Online works really well using Proton.
Who do we thank for this? Steam or who is behind making proton viable? I guess they have donated a bunch of money for this.
I think codeweaver are also involved.
I think this may well be the thing that, at long last, eventually leads to the end of the Windows hegemony on PC. Linux compatibility being a prerequisite for running on the default configuration of the Steam Deck. Gaming is the Microsoft OS's last real stronghold.
And I honestly love valve for taking wine which is an impressive project on it's own and making it even better.
Hint: :q!
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