I never got Proton working on my main distro (Debian), so I probably fall into this category. I did use Wine, but Wine is a lot harder to set up, and never ran games as well as Proton did.
Here is my major gaming history, since I started on Linux in 2007. Yes, I really could focus on a single game for years back then.
2007: Starcraft, in Wine
2007: Nethack, native
2011: Morrowind and Oblivion in Wine
2012: Minecraft, native
2014: sgt-puzzles, native
2016: Steam, got hundreds of native Linux games.
2017: Briefly got Steam and Path of Exile working inside a Wine instance.
2022: Steam deck, with the specific purpose of being able to run Proton on it.
2023: New Ubuntu installation, and Proton finally worked on my PC.
Today, I still prefer native Linux games. I mostly only use Proton when peer pressure for a multiplayer game required it. But I never use Wine any more.
Everybody? That thing with coloured bubbles? The network thing with all the OSs? The thing where you had to guess the position of things with lasers in a grid, all the breakout clones, innumerable tetris, doom (or was that in Irix?). Also there were lots of games if you installed the games packages. Like Mille Bornes (or whatever it was called in English) or hangman, or many other crowd pleasers.
Take me back to the Irix days, remind me what the 3D racing game was called, the cars were all round and there were five? rails you could hop between. The background was space, maybe?
There was another game, a first-person shooter where TVs with hair screamed at you.
Available for Linux, Windows, web browser (javascript or java applet), Android, IOS, and… uh, Palm OS apparently.
The thing with coloured bubbles could be several things here. The network thing is probably net or netslide. The thing with the lasers and the grid is probably blackbox
After Steam officially released its native Linux client I played Half Life 1, 2 and “Brutal Legend” because they all had native Linux ports before proton was a thing. Before that I remember playing games like Sauerbraten (quake like fps), Battle for Wesnoth (my wife and I still play this together), Frozen Bubble, LBreakout2 and several other Linux native games.
I remember that! I had Unreal Tournament 2004 and it technically had a native Linux version but it wasn’t on the CD. You had to extract most of the files from the CD and go download the Linux executable file from the unreal website to drop into the installation folder.
I looked at Whiskey but as far as I can see, that’s just… a Wine wrapper and not related to Proton.
I mean I appreciate the comment, thanks, but I have Wine installed via Homebrew and it works without any real problems.
Proton is just Wine from Valve. They add their own fixes and patches and whatnot and have an “experimental” branch you can try with games that don’t work right away, but it’s just Wine. Everything Valve does to Proton eventually makes it way back upstream to Wine proper. One reason Valve may not make it available for MacOS themselves is because they’re basing their SteamOS on Linux, and while MacOS and Linux are both Unix “like”, MacOS was/is more based on BSD, so the system calls may not always line up or work exactly the same when translating them. I do think however that Proton, or a modified version of it at least, is what Apple’s game development kit thingy leverages.
Everything Valve does to Proton eventually makes it way back upstream to Wine proper.
Ah okay, that’s nice. I wasn’t completely sure about that. At least if that’s the case and the projects are so related, I’m wondering why Proton doesn’t work on macOS. I could have imagined the code bases to start to differ more and more.
But I mean, I’m fine with Wine (or to be exact the Wine/Crossover version I can get with Homebrew).
Ah man good times there. I just had classic wow running on my steam deck, hooked up to a custom server. So much fun and surprisingly playable and good since the deck has enough buttons to map everything to.
Took me multiple attempts and multiple weeks to get cs 1.5 running on red hat around 2000. I still remember searching and downloading random rpms online. If I’m not mistaken the website was called meatsource or something like that.
Anyway, we have come a long way since then but the inner workings are the same.
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