[deckard1]

> almost every game on Steam has a quick accessible rating that lets me know if it works fine on Linux

Sure, it's more convenient that Valve runs Steam and can put the rating right there. But let's give WineHQ a bit of credit here. They have a database going back more than a decade now, telling you how games run on Linux.

The effects of Valve getting into Linux gaming are definitely noticeable. But the Wine team deserves a boatload of praise too. I was playing World of Warcraft back in 2007 and it was a flawless experience.

> rush to get games ported to Linux actually is happening

I'm not really sure about this. By having Proton/Wine at such a high quality, most devs are just going to target Windows. Because why bother? They will probably ensure their games run good under Wine and that's where it ends. Nowadays I'm totally okay with that. Lutris is great, Wine is actually easy to use. It's the best time to be a Linux gamer.

[badsectoracula]

> let's give WineHQ a bit of credit here [..] But the Wine team deserves a boatload of praise too.

The Wine team deserves a ton of praise that IMO is often directed to Proton BUT WineHQ has always been a useless experience for me. It needs a massive cleanup since it contains data from ancient versions of Wine, there is barely enough information to figure out what is going on and the whole "bronze, silver, gold, etc" rating is completely subjective with people rating something "bronze" because a pixel is off in some application and something "gold" despite being unable to use some major functionality.

Sadly ProtonDB seems to be going the same way, the main saving grace right now is that it doesn't have all the baggage accumulated over decades (and it is focused on games - Wine still has to get all Win32 APIs for UIs, etc working for regular applications that Proton doesn't have to care beyond whatever little functionality is used for launchers) but still has the whole subjective thing (a favorite case of mine is Rage[0] which has lots of comment about broken textures etc with others saying that the game works fine - and it takes some searching to figure out that the people who are fine have Nvidia GPUs while the people with issues have AMD GPUs - while in a few cases, people recommend the game while at the same time mentioning the textures are broken!).

[0] https://www.protondb.com/app/9200

[0cf8612b2e1e]

Huge pet peeve of mine on WineHQ + ProtonDB - number of people who say, "Works for me, I just had to use the BingoBangoPatch_v3". No indication at all of what BingoBangoPatch is, where I could get it, how to set it, etc. Too much shorthand allowed without providing real configuration guidance.

[freewizard]

That's the value of Valve's official SD rating I assume. Basically a reliable but conservative Valve official rating plus an adventurous ProtonDB rating, you as a user have the freedom to choose your own risk level and time investing to tinker. To me this is best compromise one can hope for.

[tomnipotent]

> But the Wine team deserves a boatload of praise too

About 2/3 of Wine commits are from CodeWeavers, so praising the Steam team (CodeWeavers) is praising the Wine team.

[pr0zac]

CodeWeavers isn't part of Steam is it? I thought they just collaborated with developers at Steam on Proton?

[account42]

Yes, CodeWeavers are an independent company that has been developing Wine longer than Valve had any interest in Linux games. However AFAIU Valve does contract them to work on Wine/Proton now so a decent amount of their work is probably funded by Valve.

[dataangel]

> But let's give WineHQ a bit of credit here. They have a database going back more than a decade now, telling you how games run on Linux.

But it so often was wrong :P I tried to use wine a lot between 2007 and 2010 and constantly ran into apps that were supposed to work no longer working, because regressions happened a lot. When you play a game on steam deck and exit it periodically asks you, "This game is marked Steam Deck Verified. Is that consistent with your experience?" and they really keep tabs on it.

[account42]

But WineHQ also shows which Wine version it worked at so if you wanted to you could get that Wine version. And the same also applies to Proton, it's just hidden from you when you use Steam.

[frostiness]

If you look at the list of top sellers, new arrivals, upcoming games, and games on sale, most if not all of them have native Linux support, which is something you absolutely could not have said just a few years ago. In my experience, at this point bad Linux ports are more of an issue than a lack of them.

I agree though honestly, if Proton works fine and the game runs under it, I'd much rather have that than a bad native Linux port. Plus, I have a lot more trust in Proton to keep things compatible than Windows.

[kaba0]

> I'm not really sure about this. By having Proton/Wine at such a high quality, most devs are just going to target Windows

insert win32 is the only stable linux API blogpost