Today marks 6 years since Valve decided to change everything, especially for Linux fans, with the announcement of Steam Play Proton. Thanks to it, the Steam Deck and Desktop Linux gaming have continued to thrive. Want a Proton beginner's guide? Got you covered at this link.
Heck, the Steam Deck never would have been a thing without Proton. Could you imagine it? Trying to market a Linux handheld without the vast majority of games people want to play? It was also only in February this year that Valve actually decided to give it a logo too.
Pictured - Proton's official logo
Thanks to all the work put into Proton from Valve developers, contractors and everyone who contributes to Wine development that Proton is based upon, we have a ridiculous amount of games where you can just click the Play button and forget about everything else in Steam.
Going by the official Valve Proton GitHub, there's been 66 releases of Proton during this time, and that's not counting all the interim updates to Proton Experimental and Proton Hotfix for quick game-specific fixes. The Proton changelog has seen 388 changes, although some will be text corrections, that's again showing just how much goes into it. It's an incredible amount of work when you think about just how many games are on Steam, and developers really love to do some weird stuff that Valve often has to work around. And let's not forget the likes of CodeWeavers, who employ people to work on Wine and Proton.
As for the current state of Desktop Linux and Steam Deck gaming overall…
Looking over the current numbers on ProtonDB, the community website where anyone can report how games work: there's 22,002 games reported to work by at least one person, 13,297 by at least two people and 9,751 that has three or more reports.
Going by Valve's own Steam Deck Verified system there's 5,297 rated Verified and 10,646 rated Playable.
Both ProtonDB and Valve's own ratings are only a small slice of Steam though, which has over 100,000 according to the Game tag on SteamDB. There's only so many games Valve can test officially and that people can report to ProtonDB, so there's likely thousands of games not reported by anyone that will just work out of the box with Proton.
Pictured - HELLDIVERS 2 on Linux
It's pretty amazing that we can play the likes of HELLDIVERS 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Black Myth: Wukong, Grand Theft Auto V, Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout 4, Balatro, ELDEN RING, Hades II, Dead by Daylight, No Man's Sky and so many more at the click of a button in Steam now.
Now we just need more anti-cheat support, including from developers who already use anti-cheat that is supported to actually enable it. This is really the last major hurdle.
So here we are again, happy birthday to Proton, 6 years strong enabling gaming on Linux and Steam Deck to be an incredible thing.
Be sure to follow the Steam Play RSS feed for all Proton-related updates!
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
A few porting studios died along the way but the end goal has pretty much always been multi platform game dev, and wine/proton et al. sure is making linux market more enticing.
Last edited by a0kami on 21 August 2024 at 8:28 pm UTC
Linux_Rocks Aug 21
Philip (doitsujin) Rebohle might be the person behind all this by being a Linux user and excellent programmer who just wanted to play a DX11 anime game that did not work on Wine!
Last edited by woox2k on 21 August 2024 at 9:09 pm UTC
Comandante Ñoñardo Aug 21
MekaDragon Aug 21
pleasereadthemanual Aug 22
What makes me wonder... is it possible that one guy is to "blame" here? Valve knew what wine was but did not spend much effort into making games compatible with it and tried to get companies to release native ports instead. When dxvk became a huge success Valve seemingly instantly jumped onto that bandwagon and released proton (by hiring the one guy behind dxvk afaik) Is it possible that when DXVK released, some guys in Valve went on like "Hey this is awesome, we should take this route to compatibility instead" and that's how it started?
Philip (doitsujin) Rebohle might be the person behind all this by being a Linux user and excellent programmer who just wanted to play a DX11 anime game that did not work on Wine!
It's always the anime fans XD. No, just joking. Huge props to Philip!
Yet we can now play more games than ever before on our favorite OS. Be it on PC handhelds, where Valve managed to create the best experience with Steam OS, we can play VR (currently all games are working again, at least for me)... and so much more. On the marketshare sites and Valve's own stats page Linux has outperformed Mac since a while now.
People install Linux on Windows only PC gaming handhelds with Chimera OS, bazzite, etc because it's the better experience.
Wow. Thanks Valve, thanks to all contributors, what a time to be alive as a Linux gamer.
Philip (doitsujin) Rebohle might be the person behind all this by being a Linux user and excellent programmer who just wanted to play a DX11 anime game that did not work on Wine!
In G-Man voice: "The right man doing the right thing at the right time can make all the difference in the world"
- "Imagine if Valve built-in something like Wine and made gaming experience transparent for non-Linux games?"
He laughed back then, and today he owns a Steam Deck
What makes me wonder... is it possible that one guy is to "blame" here? Valve knew what wine was but did not spend much effort into making games compatible with it and tried to get companies to release native ports instead. When dxvk became a huge success Valve seemingly instantly jumped onto that bandwagon and released proton (by hiring the one guy behind dxvk afaik) Is it possible that when DXVK released, some guys in Valve went on like "Hey this is awesome, we should take this route to compatibility instead" and that's how it started?
Philip (doitsujin) Rebohle might be the person behind all this by being a Linux user and excellent programmer who just wanted to play a DX11 anime game that did not work on Wine!
It's always the anime fans XD. No, just joking. Huge props to Philip!
Not just "an anime game", he wanted to play NieR: Automata. This game is the gift that never ends giving.
Who would've thought Linux gaming would become what it is today with Steam Play Proton and I'm glad for its existence because without it, I would've never imagine playing the many games I have on my Steam Deck.
It's crazy that it's been 6 years since it started and it's come a very long way from the time I first tried it out on an old gaming laptop with my small Steam library of games (which has since grown by leaps and bounds) that ended up not working at the time to working great now
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