[noirscape]

Proton is Wine with some extra patches; the main project has some pretty hefty requirements in terms of coding standards to reduce possible regressions, which means that on the whole it can be pretty slow to get compatibility.

Gaming is just one subsection of the Win32 API that doesn't touch on all parts of said API. Proton basically has a bunch of extra patches that might introduce a regression in upstream Wine but won't in the context of videogames.

Proton patches also usually get upstreamed when they reach "proper" maturity/are fully tested if I'm not mistaken so long-term, Proton benefits the rest of the wine ecosystem too. As for the open source contributors - Valve iirc just hired some of the previously self-employed wine developers and the guy who got I think it was a Vulkan compat layer working on Linux.

I'm pretty sure Codeweavers has the same model although I don't think they upstream patches nearly as much? They're also very much more targeting business customers on Apple devices who need to run some obscure (usually old) Windows program rather than the entire scope of Win32 software.

Basically it's best to look at proton the way you sometimes get a "next generation" fork of a popular piece of FOSS - higher dev speed and more features, however more focused into keeping a single area working than on the overall health of the upstream (which does get contributed back to for the features that help the upstream).

[a1o]

CodeWeaver is the major force behind wine, wine devs that aren't volunteers are employees of CodeWeaver, aren't they?

[em-bee]

most likely, although by now they also may be employees of valve. but valve is also working with codeweaver.

btw: i consider codeweaver somewhat the unsung hero of the linux desktop.

there is no other company in this world that stakes their success entirely on the success of the linux desktop, or maybe on the demise on the windows desktop, because wine is the only software tool that will never ever be useful running on windows.

[jamesgeck0]

> wine is the only software tool that will never ever be useful running on windows

Intel was actually including Wine code in their Arc graphics drivers to translate DirectX 9 calls to Vulkan, because they didn't have performant native DirectX 9 drivers. It's a pretty common trick for Arc users to drop the latest DXVK DLL into the directory of a game that is having issues with the graphics card.

Using Wine DLLs is also a good way to resurrect games built on the obsolete DirectDraw API on modern versions of Windows.

[em-bee]

that's interesting. i didn't know that. thank you.

[arp242]

> I'm pretty sure Codeweavers has the same model although I don't think they upstream patches nearly as much?

According to Wikipedia "all changes made to the Wine source code are covered by the LGPL and publicly available", but I don't really know from first-hand experience.