Valve announces Proton - improving gaming on Linux with open source software

[Deozaan]

Looks like everyone who has ever said something like "I'd transition to Linux if it weren't for my huge Steam library" may soon^TM be transitioning to Linux!

In 2010, we announced Steam Play: a way for Steam users to access Windows, Mac and Linux versions of Steam games with a single purchase. More than 3000 of the games that have been added to Steam after that point have included Linux support, with more titles being added every day. Since then, we've continued to look for ways to make more titles easily accessible to Linux users.

[...]

[T]oday we are releasing the Beta of a new and improved version of Steam Play to all Linux users! It includes a modified distribution of Wine, called Proton, to provide compatibility with Windows game titles.

[...]

Proton, the tool that Steam Play uses to provide Windows compatibility, contains a custom version of Wine as well as additional libraries developed alongside it. It's fully open-source and available right now on GitHub!

[wraith808]

Well, depends on if Wine actually supports all of the games.  Some aren't supported, right? 

[Deozaan]

Well, depends on if Wine actually supports all of the games.  Some aren't supported, right? 

Right. But that's the point of Proton. They're working on adding support to more and more games via Proton.

[Edvard]

My first question was why the fork if it's open source?  Then I read this part:

Modifications to Wine are submitted upstream if they're compatible with the goals and requirements of the larger Wine project; as a result, Wine users have been benefiting from parts of this work for over a year now. The rest is available as part of our source code repository for Proton and its modules.

The Git repo has a file called LICENSE.proton that is fairly minimal at the moment, but appears to establish Valve's governance over the project.  So it's technically open source because well... the source is right there on Github, but it violates section 8 of the OSD, and doesn't conform to any "Free Software" license as defined by the EFF.  I don't see any real-world problems with either of those, but it does explain why Proton is a fork rather than simple collaboration with the Wine team.

Carry on...