Proton is detrimental to Linux as a gaming platform

The old days

I have this vivid memory stuck in my head. It is late 2010, right at the start of a cold Polish winter. It is dark and windy outside. I am sitting at my then-girlfriend’s room with a laptop and playing Revenge of the Titans, a fast-paced tower defence indie game with a good sense of humour. Most importantly, I am playing on Linux and the game runs natively.

I bought Revenge of the Titans as part of Humble Indie Bundle 2, a gaming initiative aiming at rising popularity of indie games, which back in 2010 were considered more of a curiosity rather than serious gaming experiences. Aside from the already mentioned Revenge of the Titans, Humble Indie Bundle 2 consisted of five games - Machinarium, Osmos, Cortex Command, and, possibly the most famous of them all, Braid - that could be purchased by paying as much (or as little) as one wanted. Perhaps most surprising of all, the games were available for all desktop platforms (Windows, Linux, macOS) and were DRM-free. This was groundbreaking and for me, as a Linux user, being recongnized as a first-class customer was a big deal.

What did gaming on Linux look like in 2010? Well, it wasn’t great. It was rare to see a major title ported to Linux, though it did happen. Id Software was at the forefront of providing quality Linux ports for their games. In fact, one of the reasons I switched from using Windows to Linux around 2004 was that on my dated PC Quake III performed better on Linux than it did on Windows. I really want to stress this: frame rates were higher on Linux! In 2010 indie games had not gained popularity yet, but a handful of titles that existed often had Linux ports. Finally, there was Wine, which allowed launching some of the Windows games.

The fact that Humble Indie Bundle provided funding for the developers to port their games to Linux and macOS¹ felt like an important step towards adopting Linux as a first-class gaming platform. The future of Linux gaming seemed bright.

How Proton eliminated native Linux builds

Fast-forward 13 years to 2023. What does Linux gaming look like today? At first glance it might seem things got better. Last year Valve, owner of the world’s most popular gaming platform Steam, released Steam Deck, a Linux-based portable PC. For years Valve has pushed for the ability to run Windows games on Linux. To this end in 2018 Valve released Proton, a fork of Wine with a custom set of patches and a bundle of extra libraries such as dxvk. Proton ships with Steam Client and can be used on Linux to run Windows-only games. There is a set of games that have been certified to run with Proton, but it is also possible to run games that received no such certification - you’re just not guaranteed they will actually run.

This might sound good at first, but for me this push for Proton resulted in degradation of gaming experience on Linux. First and foremost, Proton is closely tied to Steam, and that is a platform I just refuse to use due to its inherent DRM. I like to own things I pay for, and that is not the case with games purchased on Steam. I would lie if I said I have never bought a game on Steam, but I certainly can’t remember when was the last time I did.

Secondly, the existence of Proton became an excuse for the developers not to publish native Linux ports. See here and here for examples, and this interview with Ethan Lee for some more insights from an experienced Linux porter. I can’t recall when was the last time I played a non-indie game natively. I think it was Alien: Isolation². Even indie games, which in the past used to fight for every customer they can, usually don’t have a Linux port these days or deliver that port a long time after the game’s original release. One good example is Into the Breach, a highly-acclaimed indie title which was released in February 2018 and had a Linux port over two years later in April 2020.

It seems to me that Valve has gained quite a big following in certain parts of the Linux community, and that many people consider the current state of affairs to be a good one. One of the most commonly seen arguments is: “If a game runs fine on Proton then there is no point in making a native port”. The problem with this argument is that the if premise of this statement is false. A lot of games do not run well, or at all, with Proton. Moreover, even if a game runs fine on the release, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will stay this way. In the past there have been many situations when changes introduced in a game patch or Proton broke a game.

Proton supposedly can be run without a Steam client, which to some extent would invalidate my earlier criticism of being tied to one particular storefront. However, despite multiple attempts, I have never succeeded in doing that. I tried running Proton standalone, just like I run Wine, as well as using various frontends such as Lutris and Heroic. Every single time the only result was me wasting several hours of my time. Note that I am somewhat knowledgeable and have experience with things such as compiling Wine with custom patches applied to run specific games. I am willing to put the effort into getting games to run on Linux, but so far I had no success with Proton and had only wasted my time.

Whining about Wine

Aside from Proton there is also Wine. As typical for an open source project, it is being distributed through distribution repositories, making it trivial to install and run. However, gaming experience with Wine is not all that great.

Firstly, Wine suffers from the same problem as Proton, where an update can completely break a previously working game. My favourite example is Starcraft II, a major game that has been on the market since 2010 and not long after its release was marked as Platinum in Wine AppDB compatibility list. Since then it has been broken multiple times either by new game patches or changes to Wine. Just take a look at that compatibility list linked above - some people rate the game as running perfectly, while others mark it as garbage. I personally was hit by a patch that broke Starcraft II earlier this year and was only saved by a determined redditor who found an obscure workaround to the problem.

Windows compatibility that Wine aims for is a moving target. As such there is little stability in Wine, and whether things work for you or not is often down to pure luck. My personal success rate in the last two years is maybe around 30%. The most recent game I tried to run was System Shock remake. Surely enough, many people report it as running perfectly out of the box under vanilla Wine, but I had no such luck and gave up after numerous attempts that took me several hours (around a third of the time needed to actually finish the game). This is all despite a hardware configuration that had no problems running the game under Windows at 60FPS on highest detail settings. The best I could get under Wine was running System Shock in slow motion at around 5 frames per second³.

Anyway, while Wine is great for preserving old games, it isn’t really a good gaming platform for currently released games.

Better tomorrow was yesterday

In this post I only scratched the surface of the problem, but I wanted to get my opinion out there: in the long term the existence of Proton hurts Linux as a gaming platform.

Of course one might ask whether the lack of native ports is really caused by Valve? Perhaps Linux is too small a market and porting games to it is not financially viable? When writing this post I read several interviews with indie developers who release their games on Linux and they all consistently claim that a Linux release, when done right, is profitable and not a problem to maintain (see here and here).

One interesting point I came across while doing research for this post was that having poorly made Linux ports can be even worse than not having them at all (for example, this reddit post). This is certainly a valid point and I am not arguing for having just any kind of native ports. I want to see good ones, such as ports released by Id software in the early 2000s.

All of this is particularly sad, given that creating a native Linux port was never as easy as it is today. Many game engines support Linux out-of-the-box and the primary thing a developer needs to do is not shoot themselves in the foot by using Windows-only middleware. I personally had great experiences with Haxe language and heaps.io engine during a game jam, when me and my friends managed to create builds not only for Windows, Linux, and Mac, but also a native ARM build for Raspberry Pi. Granted, heaps.io is not a mainstream game engine, but it has several great success stories, most famous of which is Dead Cells. Most importantly, Unity does support Linux.

I do not have much hope that the trend of not supporting gaming on Linux will reverse anytime soon. For now I am forced to play on Windows a lot more frequently than a decade ago, and it feels like a huge step back for Linux.

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