Is Proton good or bad for Linux gaming?

>Running via wine will never be as good as native for obvious reason,
yeah sometimes its even better to be fair though this is the case only with 10+ year old games

>yeah sometimes its even better to be fair though this is the case only with 10+ year old games
Exactly. "Sometimes" is simply not good enough for majority of users.

Almost any will do unless you go with the most tryhard distros.

technically, most Linux games only support Ubuntu. the one time I had a problem with a Linux game and I tried to contact technical support they told that only Ubuntu is supported (but the community did help me later, its just official support that was shit)

However, Ubuntu is bloated as fuck. you can get better performance by using a minimalist OS like Arch.

>Or will any one do?
Any would do really. Distro is only the starting pack. there is nothing stopping you from picking Ubuntu and trimming the fat down to Arch level, or vice versa. its pointless work to do such a drastic change like Ubuntu-Arch when you can just start with the one you like best but you totally can.

Proton itself didn't actually change too much, the most significant component (DXVK) having been available with upstream Wine prior to its release.

But overall I would say Wine/Proton/Steam Play is a pretty clear net-positive. I don't think Wine/Proton realistically change the likelihood of native versions of games in the present moment: most high-profile games that have native versions always worked with Wine as well, some work BETTER with Wine than the native version. And then there's thousands of games where the chance of getting a native version is flat zero and where backwards compatibility on par or greater than Windows 10 actually gives Linux gaming an edge. Moreover, while I never had trouble setting up prefixes myself and for me it's only a convenience (although a welcome one), Steam Play is probably a big deal in terms of making Linux gaming mainstream accessible, and that adoption in my eyes outweighs all the perceived harms.

people seem to have chosen Manjaro as the close-to-bleeding-edge distro.
Manjaro is ancient african word that means "I can't configure Arch"
This joke currently fits Manjaro/Arch combo much better than it does Ubuntu/Debian
But otherwise just look at top 10, maybe top 20 most popular distros and see which of them is the most appealing to you.
Just keep in mind their update/development philosophies.
Mint is the third one in update chain (Debian -> Ubuntu -> Mint), so it has much older versions of programs.

Being subpar at running games also won't give you the users.

thanks for the info valve marketing team

but heres the thing, it doesn't have to run subpar. WINE suffers the performance issues when it needs to translate Windows specific API to Linux API. if the developers were to use an API like Vulkan for example from the start it would trim down the performance penalty considerably.

Realistically, there's no difference. People tend to talk about Linux market being fragmented, but unless you deliberately set out to use something truly exotic like Gentoo with esoteric compilation settings, all contemporary distributions use the same core components and the differences amount to something trivial like the installer, package manager, update model (rolling release vs point release; bleeding edge features vs stability), kernel compilation settings (you can switch kernels, Ubuntu users for example might want to use Xanmod kernel because the default, even in desktop version of Ubuntu, is optimized as though it was for server workloads), and default software (most prominantly the desktop environment, but you can install whatever desktops in whatever distribution).

I basically said Valve didn't do much: they funded DXVK development and that's all good, but other than that the situation in terms of compatibility basically hasn't changed in any way compared to what we had with Wine previously. Wouldn't a Valve marketer try to overplay their hand instead?

speaking of which, can someone explain to me why Valve cares about Linux?
are they too enlightened for us to understand?

>why Valve cares about Linux?
It is free for them
They want to control your PC/operating system. No more Microsoft.
Except they failed miserably with SteamOS

The costs are in the grand scheme of things trivial. They have a couple of people on their payroll working on it: Linux market is small relatively speaking but it's still pretty big in absolute terms, so even if it means ten percent something increase in sales due to increased goodwill, that pretty much makes up for whatever they are paying.

Moreover, promoting Linux gaming is a lot about promoting the adoption of open standards like Vulkan, which probably would be better for the PC gaming market by large (and subsequently for Valve, who take a nice slice of that pot), and it's a good backup plan to have should Microsoft try to monopolize the market with Windows app store or something.

>Realistically, there's no difference.
there is no difference to us who already mastered the UNIX wizardry to the point where we can manipulate all Linux systems as much as we desire (this should probably be called distro-bending)
To normalfags and even less tech saavy people the differences between distros can seem quite significant.

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>They want to control your PC
>Except they failed miserably with SteamOS
SteamOS is console OS, it's meant to just boot up Big Picture Mode.
SteamOS did not take off because OEMs completely fucked up Steam Machines.
And Valve is still slowly developing it, so they probably haven't completely given up on the concept of Steam Machines.

Valve shills gonna use a lot of beautiful words to say it but only really come down to they get spooked by the Windows store. The shitty launch of Steam OS and Steam machine after in response to Windows 8 proved this.

Daily reminder Nanami was for built for Touko's cock

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user, why would you post this?

Why wouldn't I?

Because this is a blue board!

And?

God I wanna suck futa cock so bad!

holy shit and then we joke about macfags being homOSeXual
Linux community might not have that many good looking girls, but that didn't make us completely fuck up our sexual orientation

No, it's good. Linux is fragmented, this is a good thing when you have the source, bad if you have to release closed source binaries.
However if you have a reference target for said binary and an OS provided compatibility layer then the problem is straight up solved.
The ONLY thing that's wrong with Proton is that windows is a hell of a thing to provide a compatibility layer for. The ideal would be a fixed linux gaming API so that you aren't dealing with glibc hell from all those random closed source linux native builds in steam over the last few years. Windows maintains a relatively high level of binary compatibility for literally decades of windows .exes. Linux can't be arse maintaining a stable binary API between kernel releases, so there HAS to be an interface layer, and proton fulfils that need until some autist manages to make a real OpenSource one.

>linux talking about homosexuals
>when /g/ is crossdressing central
shiggy diggy

several reasons

A)They want to tap the Linux and Mac gaming market, and nurture it because right now theres no competition there, its a blue ocean without Epic Games or anything like it. yes its tiny now but if they manage to grow it they'll be the only serious player there with their biggest "competitor" being GOG
B)SteamOS, their weak attempt at making a Steam "console" is based on Linux.
C)Microsoft is pushing their own Microsoft storefront, which threatens Steam. so its their way of saying "Fuck you" Microsoft.
D)It gives them good PR. for something which isn't really that much money since most of the heavily lifting is done by people outside of Steam (SteamOS is based on Debian, Proton is based on WINE)

>They want to tap the Linux and Mac gaming market
The what?