I’ve recently moved my whole game library over to Linux and stopped dual booting. Everything runs great on Linux, I just run it through Steam’s Proton layer.
Therein lies the problem. Even my non-Steam games I run through Steam since it’s so convenient with Proton. My experience with using straight up wine, winetricks, Lutris etc. had been much more clunky in comparison and less reliable for getting things running.
While it’s working fine for now, what do I do if I’m offline and Steam decides this is one of those days offline mode doesn’t work? What if I get banned from Steam?
Has anyone had any luck replicating their Proton setup outside of Steam? Or simply just running a Proton game outside of Steam after getting it set up using Steam?
Yeah, Proton runs outside of Steam in Heroic and Lutris. That’s basically what the umu project is about. I think it works in Bottles as well.
Almost everything Valve has done for Linux gaming is open source and will remain even if they go away and lock everything down tomorrow.
Yeah that’s kind of huge tbh. I honestly hadn’t read that much about Proton. Like that fact that it’s open source.
Just remember all the discussions from the early days of Steam on Linux where some were miffed about running non-free software. I then figured that it was a necessary evil to have games work with less hassle. The games themselves are largely closed source as well, so it’s kind of moot that Steam is also.
Proton is mostly a fork of Wine which has been used for decades to run Windows software on Linux. Valve didn’t do all the hard work by themselves.
Yeah, well familiar with wine going back over 10 years of using Linux as primary OS with the occasional foray into getting my games running on Linux. Most of this time I have just kept a copy of Windows available for games though since it’s been way too much hassle getting things to run until the last couple of years.