this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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Who played on linux before proton? (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Kids these days don't even know about TuxRacer?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Loved that game

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I still play it on my Android TV.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

WoW runs well under Wine without much trouble.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

And it has for like 15 years.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

It was, if you were born in the 21st century.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Some of those games sound like Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

TVs with hair screamed at you.

I can't decide whether those were my teenage years or just bad dreams. Or maybe both.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I'm like 17% sure it wasn't just a fever dream.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, it wasn’t anything like the meme

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Back in my day, the only thing in /usr/games was fortune, and we liked it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Wasn't Playonlinux for the longest time the easiest option to run games under linux?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

It was a good way to satisfy common dependencies for Windows games.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Quake III Arena also had a native Linux version.

And Quake, Quake 2, Descent, UT, Tribes 2.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Was not expecting brutal legend to be the game overturning technological norms

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Alpha Centauri baby! Still one of my favourite games, I wonder if it still works

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Works for me through Heroic Launcher

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I sometimes wish Proton was also available on macOS… But Wine is good enough I guess, and still works great for most games :)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Valve contributes a lot to Wine too

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What you are looking for is called Whiskey :) There's also a paid app that does it for macbooks with pre-Apple silicon

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

WoW in 00s, OpenTTD, Tux Kart

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

(Super) Tux Kart just got wild in the past years :O

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Me. Minecraft worked just as well under either OS.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Just a fyi. Java edition works just as well under windows, linux and macos.

The newer bedrock edition works only on windows and consoles.

Kids where easier to exploit with a game store then linux users who remember the old days i guess.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

For bedrock on Linux I've had good luck with mcpe launcher, I use it to play on a friends realm

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Interesting, great to hear that it does work for those who want it.

Still wont touch bedrock with it with a 10m pole.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

I feel it, I prefer Java but I just go where my people are. for what it's worth MCPE the store is broken, so it's subjectively a better experience 😂

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