Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
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Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
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https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/ULWGL
From the github:
Truly a xkcd moment!
I hope this guy is being well paid, he's killing it.
Now we have to talk about that project name...
People are gonna end up forking this just to change the name :: facepalm::
Its linux.
People will fork shit for the dumbest of reasons.
UwUGL
Why?
This GE guy is doing some seriously good stuff for the Linux community! Gonna leave his pateron below incase people want to donate to to his Glorious Work!
Dude is making fucking $1,080/month off a free software project. I hope he's satisified with the work he is doing for everyone in the community. Cheers for even better days to come!
Any chance someone can ELI5 this for me? I've been trying to game on Linux and I'm frustrated / confused enough with wine / lutris / proton an debugging their weird setups and interactions as it is.
Right now it's a PoC (proof of concept, a rough implementation of an idea), to emulate launching games from other stores as if they were launched from steam using proton.
What this could be used for is to create a new Linux launcher, where you setup proton once, and launch all games using this launcher.
This simplifies usage for you as the end user, since you would only need to install the launcher, and it sets up ProtonGE, and you're done. It also enables simple Proton usage for other games (Epic, Lutris, whatever).
Additionally it helps unifying development. Windows games under Linux have a lot of moving parts: there's Proton as a compatibility layer. There's integration between steam, proton and your system (sniper/vessel). There's protonfixes which is game specific changes in proton. Each of which itself consists of components and stuff I've missed. In short, it's complicated. Unifying all this components with one tool, with one battle tested installation and compatibility and with a single source of truth in development could be another big step in Linux gaming.
TLDR - potentially a new launcher for games under the Linux, enabling any game to be played using proton, when supported, not only steam games.
I'm guessing it would be a CLI launcher that Heroic, Lutris, etc would use internally. As in, it wouldn't replace those tools, it would just make running games more consistent across those tools.
So you'd still use Heroic, Lutris, or whatever you're happy with, the experience would just be more consistent across those services so you could file bug reports in one place.
I don't think that the current tools will be using it internally, since this would require the tools actually supporting the CLI launcher, and in the best case we would have something like the proton config in steam in every tool separately again.
I think that you will need to have your launcher installed, but you will have this new launcher as your entry point, from which you will start your games using proton from the linked project.
But - it's a PoC right now, maybe both ways will be possible.
From a wishful perspective, it would be super neat if this new launcher would hook into the installed regular tools, and automagically make those use the preconfigured proton runtime it brings. Shouldn't this be possible using LD_PRELOAD?
I'm mostly interested in hopefully not having multiple copies of Proton/WINE installed. I'd have maybe 3-4 for compat, instead of copies for each launcher I happen to use (e.g. Heroic vs Steam vs Lutris, etc).
Ok that sounds really interesting then, hoping it will be ready for wide adoption soon! Thanks for the explanation
That sounds absolutely incredible if it's pulled off. It would certainly make gaming on Linux even more accessible to people not comfortable with Linux.
Read the GitHub page. I don't understand all of it, but what I think I understand sounds great! Proton would be available without Steam!
What's all of this stuff about "protonfixes" though? What is "protonfixes"? And how is it better with this new launcher?
Wine attempts to translate Windows calls into Linux, its developed by Codeweavers whose focus is/was application compatibility.
Valve took Wine and modify it to best support games, the result is called Proton. For example:
Someone built a library to convert DirectX 9-11 calls and turn them into Vulkan ones, it was written in C++ and is called DxVK.
Wine has strict rules on only C code and their directx library handles odd behaviour from old CAD applications.
Valve doesn't care about that, they care that the Wine DirectX library is slow and buggy and DxVK isn't. So they pull out Wines and use DxVK.
There are lots of smaller changes, these are 'Proton Fixes', sometimes Proton Fixes are passed on to Wine. Sometimes they can't but discussion happens and a Wine fix is developed.
Fairly accurate except that Wine predates Codeweavers. They do contribute to Wine but Codeweavers did not make Wine.
Codeweavers makes CrossOver, a paid product.
Its basically bugfixes for specific games through proton. Different fames need different fixes, so you cant just make a general fix for some bugs if they only exist in one game. The new launcher promises to make one database for those fixes where all the launchers can fetch their data from instead of everyone having to do their own thing and having to fix each game separately.
@simple could you explain why this is worth getting excited about, to a guy who plays windows games on Bottles and has no idea what a proton fix is?
