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Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
An idiots guide to setting up Minecraft on Steam Deck / SteamOS with controller support
How to install extra software, apps and games on SteamOS and Steam Deck
I see no point in separating Proton from Wine in the first question. Do you need to ask about every Wine fork or modification then? What about wine-esync, wine-staging or even wine+dxvk? All that, including Proton can be called Wine and derivatives.
Question about Steam Play makes sense as a separate category. It focuses not on the tool, but on the use case of integration with Steam client and also interest of people to attribute Steam purchases to Linux usage.
Those who use any variant of Wine (including Proton) but don't use Steam Play will answer Yes (Wine) / No (Steam Play). Those who use Steam Play (which implies Proton) will answer Yes / Yes. This provides a distinction in stats for both cases and you can see total Wine usage.
Last edited by Shmerl on 26 Nov 2018 at 5:54 pm UTC
I think this will even be more confusing, except for people that knows all the in's and out's of wine and its variations. Do you think that people that play "The Wintcher 2" using E-ON by VP should answer the Wine question with "yes" too? You are technically correct, but I don't think it helps here.
I guess 90% (may be more) of all people talk about Steam Play when they write Proton.
Last edited by jens on 26 Nov 2018 at 6:06 pm UTC
eON isn't using Wine at all. If you think some question is confusing, then question should have a good clarification.
As far as I understood eON by VP is a heavily stripped down version of wine with obviously lots of tweaks for a specific game.
Last edited by jens on 26 Nov 2018 at 6:08 pm UTC
No, it's an independent project. They used some ideas from Wine to improve their performance, but not the code.
Last edited by Shmerl on 26 Nov 2018 at 6:51 pm UTC
Alright, thanks for the clarification.
Shmerl makes a good argument for separating 'Wine+derivatives' and 'Steam Play-Proton'. That should be fine.
Before making any changes though, I'd recommend taking a moment to think about the survey itself.
What sort of data are we collecting, and for what purpose? Is it illustrating meaningful stats in its current state?
For example, AMD drivers was mentioned. While an interesting topic in itself (to some at least), perhaps it's unnecessarily complicated to separate all the open source options, unless there's a valid reason to investigate the various drivers usage specifically.
I'm all for Keeping It Simple Sugarhoneybabycakes.
This is what I would suggest too. :)
Last edited by jens on 26 Nov 2018 at 8:43 pm UTC
Not exactly. You suggest to in the first question to exclude Proton. That's a different question from Wine+derivatives. It is actually more complicated to ask "do use Wine or derivatives, but not Proton?" than "do you use Wine or derivatives?".
Using your method combined with proposal to make the second question about Steam Play, some who use Proton but not Steam Play will answer no to both questions which makes zero sense if you actually want to evaluate Wine usage.
Last edited by Shmerl on 26 Nov 2018 at 8:57 pm UTC
Not sure, but I don't see the need to conflate the two. For example @adamhm's scripts use Proton, so anyone using them is potentially using it. Not sure if Lutris uses Proton as is in some cases. But there is no need to assume that no one does.
This is what I wrote:
- Do you use Wine (excluding Proton via SteamPlay)?
- Do you use Steam Play?
Note the "via SteamPlay". Furthermore I wrote "something in the line of", thus I know that the wording is not perfect. Don't know why you seem to be so keen to make your point.
Anyway, enough said. @dpanter's wording sounds just fine and keeping it simple is usually the best choice. :)
Last edited by jens on 26 Nov 2018 at 9:54 pm UTC
This is even more complicated. Better to keep it simple.
1. Do you use Wine or derivatives?
2. Do you use Steam Play?
Questions are pretty self explanatory.
Sounds fine :)
Technically, proton is wine (with modifications).
Logically it's not, as it's run through the native Linux Steam client. The clueless user doesn't even know.
If you use proton outside Steam, it's more towards wine again, but it's a concious decision to use proton instead of vanilla wine.
So proton is a hybrid...
Imho the question "did you use wine" should mean, have you used any wine version from winehq.org using your own prefix or via lutris or via playonlinux? Maybe this has to be added as a footnote for clarification.
If people would like to reflect that they are using wine under the hood via proton, a question like, did you use the new Steam Play 2.0 and/or enable it for all games? Though that's more a statistics for nerds (which we obviously are) :)
For game devs it's more important to see, on which platform their games are bought. And is was possible to make a windows(/mac)-only game count as a Linux sale before proton, e.g. if you bought it through the Linux Steam client and didn't play it for the first week or so.
In the end you could argue, you won't have to check the wine question in the survey as you haven't used wine explicitly and Proton is treating games like native Linux games from a devs perspective. Technically it's different of course.
Last edited by Corben on 27 Nov 2018 at 8:58 am UTC
Not if you use it without Steam client. Then you run it same way as any other Wine variant. So it's not Proton that's an unusual use case, but Steam Play (which uses Proton).
This was covered above by proposing two questions. One about Wine and derivatives (this should be including Proton) and one about Steam Play (specific use case).
Last edited by Shmerl on 27 Nov 2018 at 7:42 am UTC
The two questions should aim to distinguish between if you are using a compatibility layer explicitly (wine, external proton) or passively (Steam play, internal proton).
And I would even think that if it's clear that the "wine" option is meant to be using wine/proton explicitly and outside the Linux Steam client... then the second question is not needed. We are playing games on and through Steam. On Linux. Without tinkering with setting them up. Counting as Linux sales when bought. That's the "normal" way for the gamer. Just hit the install button in Steam and play the game... on Linux.
But I realize people want to point out, that they are playing now games that are using the new Steam Play feature. So yeah, another checkbox is needed. Though Proton remains a special case, as it's comparable to eON, which we don't have an extra checkbox for. The only difference between Proton and eON from a users perspective is, you are able to tinker with it and apply it to any game you want.
I haven't tried to use Proton outside Steam yet, is it easy to use? Is there a significant benefit to use Proton instead of wine?
No need for two questions for that. Second question covers it. If you aren't using Steam Play, you'll say no for the second one. First question should cover all Wine use cases. That's the point of having a different question.
Just because you are used to it, doesn't make it a "normal way for the gamer". I.e. for DRM-free gamers, it's not normal for instance.
I see no point in using it without Steam, since it has Steam specific stuff, but it's not really hard to use (without Steam those parts are not utilized). See @adamhm's srcripts.
Last edited by Shmerl on 27 Nov 2018 at 12:26 pm UTC
What I'd like to know personally, assuming I was to make a survey like this one, is whether Steam users on Linux (1) work with what they get, i.e. install the client and only play games (or run software) that run out of the box with one button install, etc., and don't care for Steam Play at all, (2) or if they make that one extra step to enable Steam Play for all games including ones out of the official whitelist if they happen to have any in their Library, (3) or if they do even more and install Steam via wine. Or maybe do two of those three. And that's only among Steam users and only those who don't dual boot to other OS and run Steam there. Above said, all those questions become irrelevant for people who only play native games available in their distribution repositories, or compile games and software from sources, or install and run from manually downloaded packages and binaries, or reach for external tools like wine, Lutris, PlayOnLinux, stand alone version of Proton, Cedega, DosBOX, vmware, VirtualBox, PCSX4, Nestopia, VBA, Anbox and whatever else comes to mind to emulate other OS and run their non-native games and software without Steam at all. But this survey doesn't make that distinction. Arguing about the wording of two questions in a generalized survey makes little sense when there should be many, many more questions branched and only asked for specific audiences. This survey was made for hardware info and doesn't even do this well as you can e.g. select Nvidia as your GPU manufacturer and any AMD or Intel GPU as the specific model. I don't think anyone should expect it to collect non-hardware data accurately without major changes.
Last edited by cprn on 28 Nov 2018 at 2:03 pm UTC
- Add a Steam Play question, which will appear before the Wine question to help prevent confusion. This way it's fresh in people's minds that they've answered it before being asked about Wine.
- Slightly adjust the Wine question to make it clear that it includes Proton outside of Steam. I will word it in such a way to include any and all Wine variants.
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 28 Nov 2018 at 9:52 am UTC