[dj_mc_merlin]

Red Hat has more name recognition (at least for now). Even though the GE fork of Proton is way more technically impressive for one person than a Red Hat job IMO. Creating a fork of a public tool maintained by a large company with a team that actually gets popular is something.

edit: Proton itself is also a massive achievement that often gets overlooked. Somehow emulation on a grand scale with many edge cases and optimizations can run 95% of Windows games, at near native performance and often with multiplayer. If you think of Linux gaming in, say, 2014, this is kind of insane.

[xyzzy_plugh]

Just a bit: it's not emulation but compatibility. Proton (and Wine) implement and/or translate calls made by Windows programs without requiring any virtualization or emulation. In some ways it's closer to an open-source implementation of Windows and its runtime.

After all, Wine (on which Proton is layered atop) stands for "Wine is not emulation."

[dj_mc_merlin]

Fair enough, it's in the name.

I still treat it as black magic since it just kind of slowly started almost always working in the last 5 years. As if some great curse was lifted and we were freed from the shoddy install scripts and long debug sessions etc. etc.

[reactordev]

I would have laughed at you and said there’s no way to get all the FOSS developers to implement a win32 shim like this. Here I am now, foot in mouth, because it was done by people who had a vested interest, Valve et al. It’s like if someone said: “Hey kid, 10 years from now you’ll be on the moon.” and then, a decade later, you’re literally on the moon doing science or moonwalks to Michael Jackson or potato farming.

[geraldhh]

afaik valve did mostly package and polish the components like wine and dxvk when making proton but the bulk of the w32 api was implemented by foss dev's in the decades before

[paines]

Exaxctly. The one really big thing, at least for me, was making controller/joypad usage easy or more less hazle free. Before that, you had to do that manually which was a PITA

[HeckFeck]

Gabe used to work on Windows, he has a long memory.