They’ll streamline better over time. These open source WINE frontends/orchestrators may as well have 2 eras, before and after Proton. Before Proton they had little developer interest so development was slow. After Proton, influx of users and more developers interest in working on open source Linux gaming tools and Lutris rapidly got better and Heroic popped up. PlayOnLinux got left to historic obscurity in the history of Linux gaming
So I’m not concerned about Steam reliance. Everything outside of Steam is so much easier because of Valves open source contribution and the growth of the community. Pretty much because of Valve, Lutris/Heroic/etc became better at a faster pace and will continue getting because of what Steam did for Linux gaming in the past decade
Has anyone had any luck replicating their Proton setup outside of Steam? Or simply just running a Proton game outside of Steam after getting it set up using Steam?
I have run many Windows games outside of Steam.
I prefer to set up each one manually: Create a Wine prefix, install the game (or copy it from an existing installation), install a few key libraries like DXVK and a Visual C++ runtime, make a launch script with game-specific environment settings or launch options. Tools like Lutris and Bottles can automate much of this, in case you need a little help or just find a GUI more convenient.
This is my usual approach to non-Steam games (especially GOG), but even Steam games can be convinced to work offline with the help of a Steam emulator. It wouldn’t work with a game encumbered by DRM (e.g. Denuvo) unless a cracked version could be located, but in my experience, that’s a minority of Steam games that I categorically avoid in the first place.
So, I’m not worried about my game library vanishing if I ever lose access to Steam for whatever reason. Most (if not all) of it could be recovered with a bit of effort.
Think I have something like 16k hours across all my PC games, with EU5 having the most at ~1.7k, I’ll never understand how someone can have more than 10k in one game.
My most played games like Terraria are well under 1K. Even this was before I become a parent and started working full-time.
These days if I put more than 50 hours into a game its considered a lot. I just finished the Oblivion Remastered and literally this was the only game I played for many weeks, with a playtime of ~45 hours.
Some people are afraid of trying new things. And they also don’t mind doing the exact same thing over and over.
So they play repetitive games like Call Of Duty, Rocket League, LoL, Dota, Counter Strike, … where every match is the same gameplay. And they don’t get bored, even after 10k hours.
If they were to play Terraria, they would be the ones mining the entire map as a “challenge”
PvP is inherently not repetitive due to the fact you will be interacting with many many different people over your gameplay sessions. And people are random, inconsistent, and weird.
Also, some people like honing a particular skill. It’s not really about being afraid to try new things, but rather trying to be better at one thing.
that’s true to a degree, but not for 10k hours, 10k hours is literally the amount of time people use as a benchmark for slogging away at something until you master it and i can’t think of any FPS game that is quite that varied unless you just play a new map every day
I use Heroic more than I use Steam. It comes with a wine manager built in for Proton-GE, and if you have Steam Proton installed it can access that too. I use Proton Plus to get GE-Proton on Steam but I don’t even have to do that for Heroic.
I use Steam only for games purchased from Steam and Heroic for Epic, GOG, etc…
Heroic makes it much easier to manage games. Custom prefixes for each game with winetricks, mangohud checkbox, environment variables and so on. If the interface was better/modern with some sort of tabbed layout, I would use it for my Steam games as well.
As the only platform that cares about gamers I would say it’s your only choice under Windows also. Unless you pay for boxed versions and then rip/crack them so your not messing with physical media constantly, but then disk space becomes and issue fast.
It is a bit of weighing the convenience of Steam dealing with your catalog of games, making them all just a download away, and keeping them outside of Steam and needing to come up with your own currarion method. And if you are buying (licensing it - because apparently nobody actually owns their games) the game outside one of these storefronts, you still have DRM to deal with most likely anyway.
Yes. However, before they started supporting and prefering linux, and working on proton then getting any game working on linux was a real mess and the average person couldn’t do it for most games.
Sadly most other games stores in the digital space like gog don’t give a shit about linux, thus there is still no galaxy on linux, nor are their preservation efforts coming to linux for a long time.
Yeah, I set up heroic launcher to play some games from GOG, but achievements didn’t work when I tried it and save sync was kind of buggy. So for GOG just stuck to playing on Windows, since I do want my achievements and time tracked.
I wish other big platforms tried more in trying help escape Windows instead of just being bystanders and not even bothering with Linux launchers themselves.
Yeah, it is. There is even a cloud sync feature now (though it’s still in beta, mostly works). Only thing missing is limiting download speed. Apparently GOG need to do that through gogdl.
For the games that natively run on Linux I don’t see any difference in how they’re preserved. Haven’t encountered anything that doesn’t run on modern systems.
With that said they could get an easy win by making a Linux version of Galaxy and borrowing Proton to run non-Linux titles.
I’ve run Proton without Steam for a few games. You’ve pretty much got the same code that Steam uses and most of their changes make it upstream eventually, so they’re not holding you hostage with being able to run your games. It just might get less convenient. There are other Linux game launchers that have good compatibility.
Steam and the company behind it have done wonders for Linux. They’ve given publishers a reason to care, they are providing strength and resources to fix bugs and libraries they care about, and generally have done very well in sharing their contributions with the community.
I do think this is a valid concern that we need to keep in mind, but I don’t think that we are at risk just yet. Valve is a business but as businesses go, they’re pretty cool.
Yes. But there is nothing we can do about it more than party that whenever it turns to shit their open source contributions are able to stand on their own
Yeah that’s kind of huge tbh. I honestly hadn’t read that much about Proton. Like that fact that it’s open source.
Just remember all the discussions from the early days of Steam on Linux where some were miffed about running non-free software. I then figured that it was a necessary evil to have games work with less hassle. The games themselves are largely closed source as well, so it’s kind of moot that Steam is also.
Yeah, well familiar with wine going back over 10 years of using Linux as primary OS with the occasional foray into getting my games running on Linux. Most of this time I have just kept a copy of Windows available for games though since it’s been way too much hassle getting things to run until the last couple of years.
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