Yes, and a lot of the focus of wine dev's reflects this. I'm presuming under the hood Steam is contracting the core wine devs as well.

Yes, Valve contracts Codeweavers

Which by the way, are hiring developers: https://www.codeweavers.com/about/jobs (General Wine Developer + Software Support Engineer), I'm not affiliated, just like to game on my Steam Deck and more people making it even better, would be nice for me personally :)

I am willing to agree. I am not exactly a super casual user, but I ran into issues with setting up Wine for some games. Proton, by comparison, allowed me to play Fallout 3, Final Fantasy XI and Adom with no special settings ( although admittedly, Adom technically did not need that treatment ). It is crazy how good it has become.

Just for proton work alone, Steam gained a lot of goodwill from me. And that is not to diminish Wine. There is clearly a need for a tool that has the ability to run custom verbose scripts, but Proton mostly solved the gaming piece.

It can't diminish wine, because the work flows mostly from folks employed by codeweavers who contribute to proton, and then when fixes can be generalized, they get merged back into wine proper.

What exactly is the difference between Wine and Proton?

I just use Wine, mostly with older games from GOG.com, and it seems to work alright in all but a few exceptional cases (and has for long before Valve got involved with Proton).

Proton is both a friendly fork of Wine + a wrapper around Wine + forks of libraries and tools used by both Wine & Proton. Some of the forks are more blessed & tested versions than forks.

Source is here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

Notice that includes a lot of git submodules; the big one is Wine, but it also includes forks of dependencies such as ffmpeg.

I don't know what they did exactly, but it sounds way, way better than regular Wine. Like, it's a coin toss whether a game works in regular Wine at all, and another coin toss for whether it works well. Even the Steam client is ultra glitchy in Wine. Which makes sense, it's really hard to emulate a Windows environment.

Wine is major part of Proton, so if it works on proton it's usually possible to get it working on wine. (Changes to Proton branch of wine are regularly incorporated back into Wine).

What proton is - its a tested distribution of wine and its libraries AND nice wrapper around wine, that helps setting everything up so it just works.

If you want to get games working on linux, proton is the easiest and best way to go. But if you want to get some of the programs running, that are not supported under proton, wine might work.

Ok. So when I'm having issues with a game, probably I'm missing whatever version of a lib I need, or running Wine on M1 Mac is bringing its own challenges.

Steam does a few things at once to make this system work so well. There's just Wine itself and Valve-sponsored work and improvements to it, the automatic usage of DXVK and similar newer translation-to-Vulkan systems for DirectX support vs. Wine's classic alternatives, there's Steam automatically creating wine prefixes per-game, there's a separate but related container system, the "Steam Linux Runtime" that allows both Proton and native Linux games to have a stable, known set of libraries to target and support vs. the dizzying array of distributions and versions that otherwise typifies supporting Linux.

On the other hand, having that corporate support and isolation from the system sometimes cuts both ways: stock Proton often has worse support for audio and video codecs than a classic Wine install with the proper system libraries, because Valve actually has to worry about patents and licensing for them. They've come up with a system where the layer they otherwise use for sharing cached shaders can also share transcoded media files, but it's not always a seamless experience.

tbf what makes proton unique is that they mostly not use forks and instead work with upstream and just pin point their dependencies and use cherry-pick after they forked a major.

What does "fork of wine" mean concretely? As in, what does Proton give me that Wine doesn't? The way you make it sound is that it's a "Wine distribution"; is that correct? Or does it do more?

It's not really a fork, more like a distribution as you might be familiar with it, or built on top of Wine. Without Wine, there probably wouldn't have been any Proton.

I think parent mean "fork" in the strict sense that there are two source codes "versions" of Wine: upstream, which is the official wine you get when doing `apt-get install wine`, `pacman -Ss wine` or whatever. Then there is Valves own clone of that same codebase, but with additional patches on top of it. Many changes are game specific, at least in the beginning, but many are also generalized and eventually "upstreamed" to the official Wine repository.

So in a way, they maintain their own fork with their own set of patches, and some of those patches makes their way to the "original" Wine while some don't.

Integer upscaling, for a start.

> There is clearly a need for a tool that has the ability to run custom verbose scripts, but Proton mostly solved the gaming piece

Proton can only run Steam games, right? So Wine has its place for all other games.

Proton can be used to run non-Steam games. The standard way to do it is to add the game to Steam via "Games | Add a non-Steam Game to my Library" and then enable Proton after it is added.

But Proton can also be run outside of Steam.

You can add any other executable into Steam and run it on proton that way. I used it for non-game applications with great success. Proton can also be installed and used without Steam, although the process was so involved last time I checked it was easier to use Steam as a launcher even if you have no need for it otherwise.

Oh, that's good to hear.

Yeah building proton yourself is a tad involved. Very doable, but typically a lot easier to just "add" the executable to steam as a non-steam game.

Oh, as a non-gamer I wasn't aware of this but from what you're saying and from looking it up quickly it seems like a real boon for Linux gamers!

Valve's interest is in selling the Steam Deck handheld, which is an Arch Linux PC that just defaults to a friendly console UI, playing Windows games transparently through Proton. It's probably the best example of average consumers using full-blown desktop Linux.

ChromeOS is probably more widely used, but yeah. And Steam Deck must be by far the largest use case for Wine.

Calling ChromeOS Linux is like calling Android Linux. It's barely passable in that it derives from it, but there are so many things different.

SteamOS has the benefit of being basically entirely open and modifiable. Heck, it has KDE Plasma for its desktop mode.

Android is Linux, just not GNU/Linux :)

Yeah, the GNU disambiguation is relevant now. Years of interjecting for a moment have paid off.

Yeah, except for the whole steam part of it, which includes the input stack. You can build far more of ChromeOS from open source than SteamOS.

For now, you can draw the line for what he means at GNU since SteamOS is that while ChromeOS is not. But if someone made a GNU/Linux that holds your hand everywhere like ChromeOS, it would probably be "not real Linux." So maybe the better designation is "Linux for nerds."

I can't say enough how much of an advancement to Linux gaming Valve and Proton has been. The fact that I can pick up my steam deck and play 99% of PC games flawlessly is amazing compared to the state of Linux gaming a decade ago.

Proton is so good that it probably erased 90% of the vanilla Wine gaming community, and if you ask anything about running a Steam game on Wine, the answer is "use Proton." Which is a problem for Mac users wanting to run games (Proton is Linux-only), but then again there was never much of an expectation for that.

Nah, even Wine is quite good these days. Lutris doesn't bundle Proton but still works quite well. I guess really the secret sauce is more DXVK. It's kinda nuts how like 10 years ago we went from maybe 10% of games working well on Wine to 10% of games don't work well under Wine.