Valve Announces STEAM for LINUX Proton: Windows to Linux compatibility layer

Skyfireblaze said:

Okay this is very interesting, great on Valve for doing this! :D

Now my big question though, how is NTFS reading and writing nowadays in Linux? Because I'm not going to convert my combined 4TB of data drives to exFAT or any other filesystem and this is literally the biggest reason why I rarely care about dualbooting Linux or macOS, I won't install things twice or have duplicates. I know NTFS reading and writing is possible for ages but in the past it sooner or later always became a mess with corrupted partitions and whatnot.

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In Ubuntu NTFS is the recommended filesystem for sharing files on a partition between Windows and Ubuntu. I don't believe there any issues with NTFS writing in Ubuntu these days.

I dual boot kuntunu on one SSD, with Windows on another and have a 3TB NTFS HDD that I access and write to in both OS. I haven't encounted any issues yet.

I have a 3rd SSD that is literally my Gog / Steam / origin library also that is also NTFS.

RevenantAxe said:

MS will do something to block it and they should as I don't like Linux. I'm Windows guy :)

This will not attract huge mainstream attention. Most PC gamers are tuned to Windows and ppl don't switch easily . This method is still too complicated for average PC gamer.

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Why and how should they "block" it? What the fuck are you talking about?

Xharos said:

But why would anyone? SteamOS is not designed for desktop usage, it's designed for Steam Machines and for custom-built console-like PCs that you might wanna have in your living room or whatever. It's just Linux but with...less stuff? For regular desktop usage there's no reason to use SteamOS instead of just installing Steam on any normal distro

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You can have a desktop on steam os .


I guess I'm in the minority of building a pc just for gaming and nothing else. I have other PCs for everything else.
Steamos would be less of a hassle for people just interested in gaming.

RevenantAxe said:

MS will do something to block it and they should as I don't like Linux. I'm Windows guy :)

This will not attract huge mainstream attention. Most PC gamers are tuned to Windows and ppl don't switch easily . This method is still too complicated for average PC gamer.

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This might be one of the most pathetic displays of fanboyism in this forum, and that's saying something

Bjones said:

Why not just use a separate hdd just for a Linux install? It's well worth not having the hassle of all that and sooner than later a windows update will destroy your bootloader anyway.

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Oh I will install Linux itself on a separate partition on my old 7200rpm NCQ HDD with a Linux Filesystem (my 120gb SSD is too small to hold two OSs) but I have all my Steam games on 2x 2TB data-drives formatted as NTFS and I don't want to install my Steam games twice so I want Steam on Linux to actually find the games on my existing NTFS drive.

impingu1984 said:

In Ubuntu NTFS is the recommended filesystem for sharing files on a partition between Windows and Ubuntu. I don't believe there any issues with NTFS writing in Ubuntu these days.

I dual boot kuntunu on one SSD, with Windows on another and have a 3TB NTFS HDD that I access and write to in both OS. I haven't encounted any issues yet.

I have a 3rd SSD that is literally my Gog / Steam / origin library also that is also NTFS.

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Nice, that's very reassuring to hear, thank you! :)

Hope that something else can be available for non-vulkan compatible GPUs as well, as this is using DXVK. I tried some older dx9 game on my sandy bridge laptop that run fine in Windows, but not booting at all under Steam Play

This would explain why so many of the games on the spreadsheet seemed to run better on DXVK than Proton.

even ubuntu distro is not friendly in therms of drivers and full compatibility with hardware, and of course... get ready to pray if you have any problem.

impingu1984 said:

In Ubuntu NTFS is the recommended filesystem for sharing files on a partition between Windows and Ubuntu. I don't believe there any issues with NTFS writing in Ubuntu these days.

I dual boot kuntunu on one SSD, with Windows on another and have a 3TB NTFS HDD that I access and write to in both OS. I haven't encounted any issues yet.

I have a 3rd SSD that is literally my Gog / Steam / origin library also that is also NTFS.

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There are no issues with Linux and NTFS, but reading from an NTFS partition on Linux can be slow. For games this can be a problem.

Nappael said:

There are no issues with Linux and NTFS, but reading from an NTFS partition on Linux can be slow. For games this can be a problem.

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I actually only game in windows (and it is the use I have for Windows) currently so the 3rd SSD in NTFS for the game library isn't a issue.

If I switch to Linux (for gaming) and therefore dump windows you can bet your ass I won't be using NTFS ;)

As Proton is updated, how do we apply it to Steam? Are we to compile the source releases on github ourselves?

So I tried Fallout 4 and it worked, but with occasional stuttering and a bit of erratic mouse behaviour (which seemed to be tied to the stuttering). No joy with DOS2.

Running Xubuntu 18.04 on a Core i5 4670, 16gb RAM, GTX760, Corsair 500gb SSD. I think I'm still on the 390 geforce drivers though, so I should try getting the 396 and see if that helps.

Hilarious_Bearious said:

So I tried Fallout 4 and it worked, but with occasional stuttering and a bit of erratic mouse behaviour (which seemed to be tied to the stuttering). No joy with DOS2.

Running Xubuntu 18.04 on a Core i5 4670, 16gb RAM, GTX760, Corsair 500gb SSD. I think I'm still on the 390 geforce drivers though, so I should try getting the 396 and see if that helps.

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I'm not sure if the fix has been applied to Steam Play yet. Maybe the stutter you are getting is from the accidental debug build?

Nappael said:

I'm not sure if the fix has been applied to Steam Play yet. Maybe the stutter you are getting is from the accidental debug build?

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That would make sense. An update got pushed right before I tried, but the notes didn't reference the Proton debug issue being fixed so you might be right.

Even though it wasn't exactly playable, it was pretty damn close considering I'd done absolutely no tweaking and was running on very high.

While I don't think Steam "independence" in windows will always be in jeopardy I can see why it's important to Valve to invest in initiatives like that, specially the options they have at making their own OS and bring the library they already build.

For the consumer though, at least in the short term, I don't think this would change much, unless the user already is a mainly linux driver and resort to windows only to game, more power to options nonetheless.

HarryDemeanor said:

Pretty cool stuff. Hopefully it will lead to native ports down the road.

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Translation and virtualization layers rarely translate to native ports, usually they cannibalize them since you have no reason to add yet another platform to support and still can reap it's benefits. Unless you offer them as a starting point to bring people to your own development platform and even that has some historically mixed results.

Bjones said:

so Is no one just installing steamos?

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I'm waiting for 3.0 myself.

RevenantAxe said:

MS will do something to block it and they should as I don't like Linux. I'm Windows guy :)

This will not attract huge mainstream attention. Most PC gamers are tuned to Windows and ppl don't switch easily . This method is still too complicated for average PC gamer.

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PC gaming is way more accessible that it has ever been. But I still maintain that if people are going for PC gaming and still want it to be a "plug and play console plus" experience they are missing out on what it is.

PC gaming brings options and freedom, one of those is the freedom to choose a OS. Can you see Sony or Nintendo allowing you the option to pick a OS (Well Sony did kinda with PS3 but you couldn't play games etc and they removed that option later but still).

You can free of the any companies will as to how play your games in a way you can't with consoles... You have choices of different storefronts that actual distribute the content, on console you are limited to one digital distribution platform or physical... You mod games, fix them even, you can even run games on OS or hardware that was never intended (Emulation, below minimum requirements or running windows games in Linux for example)

By just sticking to Windows and steam or whatever you are actually limiting yourself.

I'm a long time PC gamer since the DOS days in the 90s so I'm use to having fiddle around and it's never been easier than today, but if you put in the extra effort and learn about this extra level of freedom provided to you it's quite liberating compared to a console ecosystem today.

The more people that do this the better it will...

Wanting MS to "Block" this is just ignorant fanboyism... and yet is exactly what Tim Sweeney was warning about with UWP and MS when everyone was accusing him tinfoil hattery...

If people buy into MS that much just buy an Xbox.... I for one long for the day PC gaming is completely uncoupled from MS which is just via DIrectX these days...

RevenantAxe said:

MS will do something to block it and they should as I don't like Linux. I'm Windows guy :)

This will not attract huge mainstream attention. Most PC gamers are tuned to Windows and ppl don't switch easily . This method is still too complicated for average PC gamer.

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This post takes the dumbass award right now.
This is some top 101 astroturfing for Microsoft.

Do you have Microsoft shares or something?

Lukas Taves said:

Translation and virtualization layers rarely translate to native ports, usually they cannibalize them since you have no reason to add yet another platform to support and still can reap it's benefits. Unless you offer them as a starting point to bring people to your own development platform and even that has some historically mixed results.

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I think it's more that it solves the chicken and egg scenario of Linux needs more games to get more gamers, but needs more gamers to get more games. If the body of Linux gamers grows enough, more devs may be inclined to make a native Linux version to be more competitive on the platform.

Also a lot of the popular modern game engines like Unreal, Crytek, and Unity can compile to Linux natively. There may be a bit of additional fixing and tweaking required for the additional platform, but it's not like a ground-up port in the old days.

LuxCommander said:

Cool! I'm already in the process of getting a CentOS partition together for a few of my media applications (Resolve and Houdini), anyone have any experience using that particular distro with this yet? If not, I'll probably start looking into it this weekend and report back with results.

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I wouldn't recommend CentOS for gaming. RHEL/CentOS is made for long term, 'stable' usage such as for datacenters or enterprise. It's going to work against you on a gaming system when you want newer, faster kernels, newer graphics drivers, up to date web browsers and applications, etc.

If you like the Red Hat environment, Fedora is a much better choice. Note that it still isn't optimal for gaming compared to Ubuntu or Arch, but if you're already comfortable with Red Hat it may be worth using anyway. You might just have some extra configuration to do with stuff like SELinux and adding custom repos for Nvidia drivers vs. the Ubuntu situation where it mostly works without touching a CLI.

DOMO GYU said:

That's not something I would recommend. The filesystem that is used by Windows is NTFS. You debian can read and write to NTFS, but not nearly in the same manner that your Windows does. It would probably work, but at some point you'd run into trouble with that setup and could even damage the Windows partition to a point where you'd have to reformat it.

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NTFS support has been stable in ntfs-3g for many, many years now. The only major issues are that it will be slow relative to XFS/ext4 and other native filesystems, and it doesn't support UNIX permissions so the data on it will be less secure (but no less so than the same data on Windows). You also need to make sure it's being mounted as your user/group so Steam has total access to the disk (this might be fixed later, not sure why Steam cares who owns it if it already has write access).

Nostremitus said:

Ok, I rolled back to python 2.7, installed MESA 18.1.5 for the better Vulkan support, and still nothing.

I'm trying vanilla Skyrim which, according to the google doc, works... but I still get nothing. No launcher, no... anything. Steam just stops downloading for a moment, then starts back. Nothing else happens when I try to play.

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You downloaded it on a native Linux drive or is this over NTFS?

SK4TE said:

How secure is Linux these days?

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That's... Hard to answer. Any system can be hacked if a hacker has a sufficient time, resources, skill and access. And yes, there are Linux hacks and malware out there.

HOWEVER.

• Proprietary OS's like Windows and MacOS rely on security through obscurity; people don't know where the big bad exploits are (including the creators) so they can't be exploited. However, if a malicious party finds an exploit before the developers or security researchers, they can use it to their heart's content. On the other hand, the bugs and flaws in Linux code are open for the world to see, so exploits can be quickly found and patched
• A Windows user is clicking around in the GUI at a higher level of privilege than a Linux user, meaning they can more easily run a malicious executable which infects their system.
• In Linux you typically install software from repositories that are known and cerified, you aren't just running random .exe's off dodgey sites.
• Linux desktop users are such a small group (and on average a bit more tech savvy I'd wager) that they're not worth going after when compared to the gigantic Windows userbase full of uninformed users who may not be up to date on security patches etc.
• At the end of the day, a system is only as secure as the person using it. If you're dumb enough to click on a phishing link in an email and send your credit card details to a Nigerian prince, being on a locked down BSD behind 7 proxies will not save you.

So to answer your question, I'd say Linux is very secure, but not bulletproof (largely due to the bit between the keyboard and the chair).

Arkanius said:

This post takes the dumbass award right now.
This is some top 101 astroturfing for Microsoft.

Do you have Microsoft shares or something?

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On the upside, in made me look to see if there's an ignore feature. Not only is there one, but it even blocks all quotes.

I'm not one to use the block feature, but sometimes something is so outrageously stupid, it just tells you all you'll ever need to know. We can only hope he's getting paid for this non-sense.

I was curious as to why Valve made yet another fork of Wine to do this. Researched into it, apparently it's because the Vulkan stuff will never be merged into mainstream Wine because it's written in C++ and the Wine project will only merge C code.

RevenantAxe said:

MS will do something to block it and they should as I don't like Linux. I'm Windows guy :)

This will not attract huge mainstream attention. Most PC gamers are tuned to Windows and ppl don't switch easily . This method is still too complicated for average PC gamer.

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Really now, because your post history doesn't suggest you care that much about the future of the PC market at all, and you are more concerned with Xbox games:

RevenantAxe said:

Looks nice.

Wish it was on Xbox. Xbox button prompts but no version for xbox :(

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Are you perhaps only interested in Windows due to W10 play anywhere?

Now, about your post:

I like the implication that you think Microsoft have the authority to block third party programs running on operating systems which are not theirs. If that was true, then add that to the list of reasons why Microsoft are bad for the open nature of PC gaming.

Spoiler: They have no fucking authority to do that, and efforts like this to remove their stranglehold are good for everyone interested in the platform.

This is a genuine great news!

Assuming a lot a games will be compatible. :P

FyreWulff said:

I was curious as to why Valve made yet another fork of Wine to do this. Researched into it, apparently it's because the Vulkan stuff will never be merged into mainstream Wine because it's written in C++ and the Wine project will only merge C code.

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Valve's official reason is that the fork includes many customisations which are good for games, but could break compatibility or harm performance for non-gaming tasks.

Valve are sending a lot of their changes upstream, too.

Nappael said:

Really now, because your post history doesn't suggest you care that much about the future of the PC market at all, and you are more concerned with Xbox games:



Are you perhaps only interested in Windows due to W10 play anywhere?

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These posters really need to be treated like the console warriors they are.

Any word on Arch compatibility? Steam works pretty well running the native games on my setup, haven't had the opportunity to test Proton cause none of the games I own are compatible yet.

This seems like huge news

Serif said:

Any word on Arch compatibility? Steam works pretty well running the native games on my setup, haven't had the opportunity to test Proton cause none of the games I own are compatible yet.

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Arch won't be getting "official" support (because Valve only internally test Ubuntu and SteamOS), but many people from /r/linux_gaming and contributors to the compatibility spreadsheet are using Arch or Antergos and it seems to work.

Anyone run into issues on Ubuntu? Tried the Last Remnant and the game won't launch. No error message or anything, even when launched through the terminal. Same has been the case on every game.

Tmespe said:

Anyone run into issues on Ubuntu? Tried the Last Remnant and the game won't launch. No error message or anything, even when launched through the terminal. Same has been the case on every game.

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Have you checked:

- Python 2.7 installed
- Video drivers are fully up to date, following instructions from: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/blob/proton_3.7/PREREQS.md

RevenantAxe said:

MS will do something to block it and they should as I don't like Linux. I'm Windows guy :)

This will not attract huge mainstream attention. Most PC gamers are tuned to Windows and ppl don't switch easily . This method is still too complicated for average PC gamer.

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Good thing Valve is a private company and not a publicly traded corporation, so MS can't just throw boatloads of money to acquire Valve. This post just reeks of corporate apologia.

Alexandros said:

Could you explain the process in a little more detail? It seems like the safest approach.

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Yeah, no problem.

On Windows:

• Right click the start button and click 'Disk Management'
• In the bottom section you'll see all of your hard drives listed (including USB devices). Right click the largest partition on the drive you want to install linux on and click 'shrink volume'.
• Shrink the volume by however much room you want, with the minimum I'd suggest is 30-50GB
• You're done on the windows end, you've created a spot to install linux without deleting or damaging anything on your secondary drive.

On Ubuntu/Mint/Flavor of choice:

• Boot from USB you put your linux OS on, it'll live boot into the OS.
• On the desktop will be an option to install Linux. Follow all of the instructions like normal till it starts mentioning partitions.
• It'll give you three options, to either automatically install on the same drive as windows, to overwrite windows, or to do a custom setup. Click custom and continue
• Now we need to create 2 new partitions on that empty space we made. The first will be the swap partition, 10GB or so should be fine. Then create a partition with the rest of the free space and make it an Ext4 format.
• Now click on that Ext4 partition and hit next and continue following the install instructions like normal.

In your bios:

• Last real step, set your bios to boot from your Linux drive.
• When you start your computer going forward you can either manually set your boot drive (usually F8 or F2 on bios) and select the drive you want, or you can continue to boot from the Linux drive and the bootloader on that drive will have an option to go to windows.

Nappael said:

Have you checked:

- Python 2.7 installed
- Video drivers are fully up to date, following instructions from: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/blob/proton_3.7/PREREQS.md

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Already did the video card drivers. Seems Python 2.7 helped somewhat. At least now I'm stuck at preparing to launch instead of nothing happening.

Edit: Seems other games are working now, so might just be an issue with The Last Remnant. Thanks!

Nappael said:

Valve's official reason is that the fork includes many customisations which are good for games, but could break compatibility or harm performance for non-gaming tasks.

Valve are sending a lot of their changes upstream, too.

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It is, but it's also a fact that Wine just plain won't take one of the main features (VKDX) because it's in a language they don't approve for trunk.

I usually dislike forking+rebrands for a company to officially adopt code, but this is one of those times it's absolutely needed.

Tmespe said:

Already did the video card drivers. Seems Python 2.7 helped somewhat. At least now I'm stuck at preparing to launch instead of nothing happening.

Edit: Seems other games are working now, so might just be an issue with The Last Remnant. Thanks!

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Good to know you got it working!

Seems strange that TLR is causing problems though, as it is one of the officially supported games. Maybe there's a bug that'll be fixed soon, or there's something I'm missing.

FyreWulff said:

It is, but it's also a fact that Wine just plain won't take one of the main features (VKDX) because it's in a language they don't approve for trunk.

I usually dislike forking+rebrands for a company to officially adopt code, but this is one of those times it's absolutely needed.

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I'd also argue that VKDX is almost completely orthogonal. It doesn't replicate any functionality that already exists in Wine, and it doesn't need any direct hooks into anything Wine (you can run it on Windows!).
It would make some sense to manage it as a separate project even if it was possible for Wine to integrate it.

Fantastic news! Hope this will work for all games in the end and we are not going to wait for decade.

Durante said:

I'd also argue that VKDX is almost completely orthogonal. It doesn't replicate any functionality that already exists in Wine, and it doesn't need any direct hooks into anything Wine (you can run it on Windows!).
It would make some sense to manage it as a separate project even if it was possible for Wine to integrate it.

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Also true

Oh man I want to install Linux on my PC for dual bootings sake but my SSD is so small...hmm...I guess I could make a partition in the SSD for the Linux itself and then a second partition on my hard drive for games and stuff?

Denuvo is blocking Sonic Mania to launch Linux. I wonder if I can launch it by letting it do the check on a windows VM first. Also yeah Denuvo :)

Vash63 said:

I wouldn't recommend CentOS for gaming. RHEL/CentOS is made for long term, 'stable' usage such as for datacenters or enterprise. It's going to work against you on a gaming system when you want newer, faster kernels, newer graphics drivers, up to date web browsers and applications, etc.

If you like the Red Hat environment, Fedora is a much better choice. Note that it still isn't optimal for gaming compared to Ubuntu or Arch, but if you're already comfortable with Red Hat it may be worth using anyway. You might just have some extra configuration to do with stuff like SELinux and adding custom repos for Nvidia drivers vs. the Ubuntu situation where it mostly works without touching a CLI.



NTFS support has been stable in ntfs-3g for many, many years now. The only major issues are that it will be slow relative to XFS/ext4 and other native filesystems, and it doesn't support UNIX permissions so the data on it will be less secure (but no less so than the same data on Windows). You also need to make sure it's being mounted as your user/group so Steam has total access to the disk (this might be fixed later, not sure why Steam cares who owns it if it already has write access).



You downloaded it on a native Linux drive or is this over NTFS?

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Native Linux. I removed my other drives before installing Linux on it's own SSD.


Edit: Also cross-posting from the Linux gaming thread.

I'm clearly doing something wrong. I installed The Last Remnant, one of the officially supported games and it's doing the same thing. I get the pop-up that it's going to run in Steam Play, then nothing happens. A few seconds later the downloads start back up and it;s as if I never clicked it. It doesn't even show up in the log that I tried to start a game.

Ideas?

PC:
Ryzen 1700X CPU
32GB 3000MHz RAM
Intel 240GB SSD
R9 290X GPU
Ubuntu 18.04 on it's own native SSD

I've installed Python 2.7
I've Updated MESA
I've opted out, then back in to the beta...


Any other ideas?

Lol - or you know you could just install windows ;)

Arkanius said:

This post takes the dumbass award right now.
This is some top 101 astroturfing for Microsoft.

Do you have Microsoft shares or something?

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Even as astroturfing it doesn't make sense because MS has embraced Linux as a platform in recent years. They added bash shell support to Win10 just for the hell of it.

So, how feasible is it to use this for the majority of games, and then use a VM for any remaining 'trouble' games? Would I be able to, say, run most of my day to day usage in Ubuntu and then have a VM for remaining apps?

My main issues are going to be with Lightroom, and probably PUBG, but I'm not sure how much performance is lost running in a VM.

Brawly Likes to Brawl said:

Even as astroturfing it doesn't make sense because MS has embraced Linux as a platform in recent years. They added bash shell support to Win10 just for the hell of it.

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Fucking Powershell is on Linux now.

itsamiracle said:

Denuvo is blocking Sonic Mania to launch Linux. I wonder if I can launch it by letting it do the check on a windows VM first. Also yeah Denuvo :)

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Really? I thought we had people in the thread who had no issues running it.

Nappael said:

Good to know you got it working!

Seems strange that TLR is causing problems though, as it is one of the officially supported games. Maybe there's a bug that'll be fixed soon, or there's something I'm missing.

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It's a bit strange. I will debug it a bit more to see if I can find out what's up.

Hope they will add support for running non-steam games eventually. I will keep dual-booting for now, but think I will spend the majority of time on my linux parition now. WoW also works really well through Lutris. 100 of the 170 games in my Library have native support. Linux gaming has come really far the last couple of years.

itsamiracle said:

Denuvo is blocking Sonic Mania to launch Linux. I wonder if I can launch it by letting it do the check on a windows VM first. Also yeah Denuvo :)

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I thought I saw someone else say that Sonic Mania ran fine.

famikon said:

except users won't migrate on Linux anyway.

Bump this thread in 1 year from now and you'll see similar chart as of now:

Some people here are really out of touch with reality. 5 years ago basically the same posters celebrated SteamOS release as a huge Linux victory and here we are :)

Listen, there's no games on Linux because there's no market for that. Simple is that.
You could push the whole Steam library to Linux and people will still choose Windows instead.

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Umm...I am very sure most gamers will switch to steam OS if that's the case.