It’s amazing what a difference a little bit of time can make: Two years after kicking off what looked to be a long-shot campaign to push back on the practice of shutting down server-dependent videogames once they’re no longer profitable, Stop Killing Games founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner appeared in front of the European Parliament to present their case—and it seemed to go very well.
Digital Fairness Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act/F33096034_en
Entire Linux gaming happened because one guy wanted to play Nier Automata on it. Don’t underestimate some one guys.
Source?*
*In a “I’m interested in the story” sense rather than a “PROVE IT” sense.
DXVK was the last (IMO) major key in enabling proper Linux gaming.
Here’s a short interview with the creator of DXVK.
Prior to this Wine was able to run some simple Windows applications, but games (which heavily rely on GPU acceleration) lagged quite a bit behind since DirectX is a Windows exclusive graphics API. Instead, on Linux we have Vulkan which is similarly feature rich, but an open standard. DXVK translates DirectX API calls to Vulkan, which GPUs on Linux can understand, similar to how Wine translates Windows syscalls to the Linux alternatives. Even though Wine existed for a long time, DXVK’s development started quite a bit later.
To be absolutely clear, wine could run many games just fine, I was playing WOW, Starcraft 2, and many others perfectly. However, Directx 11 was new, and wine had a harder time with itml. DXVK Was created specificially to run DX11 Games in WINE, and is amazing, but it wasn’t just “some simple applications” at the time
What a thoughtful and concise overview of the situation. Thank you.
According to this source the guy is called Philip Rebohle and he wrote a translation layer called DXVK that lets you run DirectX stuff on Vulkan.
Wine doesn’t seem to be related to that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)
Edit: it is, see comments below
It is.
Very roughly, think of DXVK as a plugin for WINE, that dramatically enhances its capabilities with 3D rendering.
Then Proton is essentially a further refinement of WINE, DXVK, other things.
However Proton is a refinement just for gaming. Other kinds of applications may run worse on Proton than on Wine.
True!
And technically, there many many variants of Proton, some bleeding edge, some more stable, some highly specified to work with particular games.
Theres also uh, soda, used by Bottles… which is… kind of a hybrid between standard WINE and Proton…
And then if we get into all the specific possible dependency packages, other more specific sort of modules… it gets very complicated very fast.
Wine makes Windows applications work in Linux. Wine solved a lot of issues with translation, but most Windows games use DirectX for their graphics, which is proprietary to Windows.
DXVK translates DirectX to Vulcan (Open Source graphics API used in Linux), allowing GPUs on Linux to run DirectX games.