News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux by matt123456789 on Friday March 05, 2021 @10:27AM (#26357848)
It does create a dangerous market pressure, but entirely by accident. Valve has developed an amazing piece of software in Proton and made it freely available, but offered no support for developers. Proton is an enormous library papering over an equally enormous API gap between Windows and Linux. Normally when game developers use such components (like engines) they pay a licensing fee, so that when something breaks, if it’s the licensed component’s fault, they can expect support in fixing issues. Since Valve doesn’t offer a paid support option to devs, they are in a difficult position - Proton is by far the easiest way to get games running on Linux, but can’t be officially supported without incurring the cost and overhead of bringing on a team of Proton specialists to ensure compatibility.

I’m not in this area professionally so maybe I have a few things wrong here.

Re:Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux by sandworm101 on Friday March 05, 2021 @10:32AM (#26357920)
Proton is not a ground-up valve product. It is an implementation of WINE, a project that has been around for a long while. Valve made it pretty and easy to use, integrating wine into their launchers, but it isn't entirely their project.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

Re:Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux by Ericson2314 on Friday March 05, 2021 @09:29PM (#26364687)
Valve has been contracting https://www.codeweavers.com/, the main people behind Wine, a good deal, so they do deserve more credit than at might first appear.