Petteri Pyyny
30 Jul 2021 4:02
Ever since Valve started embracing Linux as a gaming platform back in 2012 when company added Linux support for its
And that is, actually, a quite good thing. Why?
Instead of manually porting their games from Windows / Xbox platform to Linux, several big name developers have recently announced that Valve's Proton emulation layer is now so good that there is no need to make separate Linux ports of the games.
Valve launched the Proton platform baci in 2018 and apparently it has gotten so good at running Windows games on Linux that several big name development companies have decided to cherish it. According to the developers, by using Proton, there is virtually no performance loss when running Windows games on Linux - and obviously, dropping native Linux ports completely frees up development resources for other tasks.
Proton itself is based on open-source Wine Windows emulator that allows running Windows software on Linux. But Valve has improved the Wine with its Proton, focusing solely on gaming experience and to ensure that games run on Linux - and that they actually run smoothly.
Games like A Total War Saga: Troy were about to be ported to Linux, but quite soon the developers opted to use Proton instead. Similarly, Frozenbyte is now telling players to use Proton in order to play their games.
Game developers now simply need to ensure that their games behave correctly when running on Proton rather than to develop a completely new port of the game for relatively small gaming platform that Linux is.
Obviously, the upcoming Steam Deck gaming console will speed up transition to Linux gaming, too. Steam Deck is based on Valve's customized Linux, so it is in game developers insterests to ensure their games run on Linux if they want to capitalize the huge interest the Steam Deck has already managed to create before its release.
There's a community-driven project called ProtonDB which lists major games and how well they work on Linux, using Proton emulation layer.