I remember when Proton launched it was like magic playing games like Doom and Nier Automata straight from the Linux Steam client with excellent performance. I do not miss the days of having the Windows version of Steam installed separately.

  • newIdentity@sh.itjust.works
    68·
    1 year ago

    Remember the wine days where proton didn’t exist? Barely any game was playable.

    We got from unplayable to “download and play” within 5 years

    • Tau@sopuli.xyz
      18·
      1 year ago

      Or you went from hell and back trying to install all the dependencies with winetricks

    • gens@programming.dev
      8·
      1 year ago

      Warcraft 3 worked better then on win. At that time more then half of games worked (newest aaa-est usually had problems). Just before proton almost all games worked (with some winetricks black magic). Valve did help, but there’s more to the story.

      • Clbull@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        I had the opposite experience. WarCraft III would frequently soft lock my PC forcing a reboot, plus you couldn’t use the mouse to move the camera because the game couldn’t detect the mouse going to the screen edge, forcing you to use the arrow keys.

        Some versions of Wine also wouldn’t allow you to connect to Bnet, requiring a rollback to a previous version from months prior.

        • gens@programming.dev
          2·
          1 year ago

          I put -opengl on the end of it and it worked great. Wasn’t on release, but later when dota was popular.

          • Clbull@lemmy.world
            1·
            1 year ago

            Of course I would’ve forced OpenGL. DXVK didn’t exist at the time and DirectX 8 or 9 games were unplayably laggy back in 2007. Apparently you could run DirectX apps with near-native performance by sourcing the necessary Windows DLL’s but that would involve piracy?