Linux Gaming @lemmy.ml simple @lemm.ee 10 mo. ago

GloriousEggroll announces new project to unify Proton runtimes

https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/ULWGL

From the github:

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR OTHER LAUNCHERS (lutris/bottles/heroic/legendary,etc):

everyone can use + contribute to the same protonfixes, no more managing individual install scripts per launcher
everyone can run their games through proton just like a native steam game
no steam or steam binaries required
a unified online database of game fixes (protonfixes)

Linux Gaming @lemmy.world simple @lemm.ee 10 mo. ago

GloriousEggroll announces new project to unify Proton runtimes

68 comments

relevant xkcd
- Finally, a good meme to call out this NPC response
  
  This is beautiful
- It really depends whether he got the devs of "Lutris, Heroic, Legendary, Bottles, etc." to agree to use the unified runtime before starting this project. As long as he gets most of the big players to join then it will actually become the only standard worth using.
  
  Based on the currently Bottles dev's plans to create Bottles Next, my guess is no
- I'm not sure how it's relevant. Was anyone else even trying to make a standard? They were mostly just all doing their own thing.
- From the naming it's clear that GE wants this to be the new standard, but it's not really a new standard. This is porting Steam's launcher, which already exists, to non-Steam clients.
- Yeah - that was my worry.
  
  Unification of standards only works if everyone agrees to use it and only it (i.e. mobile phones and USB C), otherwise you're just adding another one to the pile.
  
  This is a bigger issue for hardware than software. This is why we can use heroic, proton, lutris, or whatever. And most programmers who can offload a part of their code onto another project that is doing the job well will. That's exactly how Linux started.
  
  My worry is Valve will look at the project and shut it down. Remember, Valve doesn’t care about your Linux, it only cares about money. Not having users on their Client side platform means less revenue and less ads to show.
- Hopefully will not be the case. Depends on whether buy-in from Heroic, Bottles, and Lutris maintainers have been secured
  
  Considering the fact that they're already relying on GE's version of wine, I don't see why they wouldn't move on to this when it's stable.
- This was my first thought as well
- Exakt denselben witz habe ich auf dem Zwietracht von Proton-GE auch gemacht haha
  
  Lass uns schütteln die Hände
  
  Kennste ja: 2 Dumme, 1 Gedanke. xD
Glorious
- Eggroll
  
  with extra lettuce please
This is great. Proton is getting a lot of testing just based on Steam's userbase and it is backed by Valve. We also have a lot of data on proton's performance and potential game-specific fixes in the form of protondb. Making sure that non-Steam launchers can use all that work and information is crucial to guaranteeing the long-term health of linux gaming. Otherwise it is easy to imagine a future where proton is doing great but the other launchers are keep running into problems and are eventually abandoned.

One thing that I am curious is how this handles the AppId. If this AppId is used to figure out which game-specific fixes are needed, then it will have to be known. Do we have a tool/database that figures out the AppId from the game you are launching outside of Steam?
- I hope it makes pirated games easier to launch on Linux. 👍 I've got about 5 different games I've yet to play cos I can't be arsed looking into Proton command line flags.
no steam or steam binaries required

The best
That's great news. Praise be the glorious Eggroll!
- He is truly doing the Lord's work!
I've been waiting a long time for this!
Needs a better name tho. How about Unilaunch?
- United Launch Alliance
But can we run it on windows
- Given Proton can actually be faster on some windows games, there might be a legitimate use case for this.
  
  It would also be useful for developers to use for testing. Low friction access to a Linux runtime environment would make it a lot more reasonable for Devs to support Linux as well.
  
  That's mostly down to DXVK, not Proton in general. You can't really translate Windows API calls from Windows to ... Windows. It wouldn't change anything. Running games with Vulkan might though, especially with Intel Arc for example.
- With WSL it might be possible
- Cute 😏
Meanwhile PortProton which did similar thing long time ago :)
- ..so did Lutris, Bottles, ZentryWine and like 8 others. That's why we created yet a new program to unify them all!
  
  (To be fair, I like the fact we have choices, and hope this project takes off, but yea..)
  
  Sounds like this would be easier to setup and use than Lutris though - dunno about everyone else but I'm always so very confused trying to get non-steam games running on linux, with all the custom paths, simulated folder structures and prefixes while steam apparently does it on its own out of the box.
respect 🫡

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