Will a native Linux Version ever exist?

[Fat Jesus]

Proton already exists but a Native Linux Version of Baldurs Gate 3 could clean up alot of issues and frustration from Linux and Steam Deck users. a Mac version exists so why not a Linux port

[leech]

Originally posted by Notch:

Originally posted by Mister W.:

Proton already exists but a Native Linux Version of Baldurs Gate 3 could clean up alot of issues and frustration from Linux and Steam Deck users. a Mac version exists so why not a Linux port

Who ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cares? Dozens of people? Fix it yourself, no give's a rat's ass about these systems.

Pretty sure more people care about them than care about you or your opinion. Why even post something so useless? People are going to want what they want, has nothing to do with you, now does it?

[L3wt]

Why the fock would you play games on linux? Wouldn't you be using it for what it's good at like unconstrained power computing? You're just proving you can make something run like a pregnant whale in mud with its tail cut off.

[leech]

Originally posted by L3wt:

Why the fock would you play games on linux? Wouldn't you be using it for what it's good at like unconstrained power computing? You're just proving you can make something run like a pregnant whale in mud with its tail cut off.

Maybe I hate Windows?

[L3wt]

Aight aight. I got nothing against dudes living in a tent inside of the gym. You got my respect.

[HiveX]

Originally posted by leech:

Originally posted by LucidFlux:

I'm playing on Arch Linux using Proton and it's worked flawlessly. Haven't had any issues in my 250 hours of gameplay.

I have the random graininess on faces, both with DirectX11 and Vulkan (on an AMD / Debian Sid system)

Aaand, it just crashed on start up :P

Don't think a native version will get rid of every problem, you're just opening another can of worms.

Look at CS2, they had sound problems and the mouse input makes problems with multi monitor setups.
They fixed the sound problem the day after they released it, but these are just examples.

Even if devs would provide us with native builds, bug fixes will also be low priority on Linux.

Proton is fine by me.

[leech]

Originally posted by L3wt:

Aight aight. I got nothing against dudes living in a tent inside of the gym. You got my respect.

Amusing, since I own my own house... you realize you can make way more money knowing Linux than you can with Windows, right?
(In case you were attempting to make a pun on Windows... okay, I hate Microsoft. How they slip in things that absolutely no one wants into their operating systems is pretty disgusting.)

[DrZann]

Would be nice if I could play on my work computer.
+1

[leech]

Originally posted by HiveX:

Originally posted by leech:

I have the random graininess on faces, both with DirectX11 and Vulkan (on an AMD / Debian Sid system)

Aaand, it just crashed on start up :P

Don't think a native version will get rid of every problem, you're just opening another can of worms.

Look at CS2, they had sound problems and the mouse input makes problems with multi monitor setups.
They fixed the sound problem the day after they released it, but these are just examples.

Even if devs would provide us with native builds, bug fixes will also be low priority on Linux.

Proton is fine by me.

When you talk to developers who start their code base out with intentions to be cross platform, they end up with more stable releases overall (as each OS will show different things happening from that code.) Larian's only attempt at a native release was not one they worked on from the beginning, so they had quite a few issues with releasing it, and ultimately only released the updated version for Linux. It worked amazing well, they did an awesome job at it.

[Klauth]

Originally posted by leech:

Originally posted by Notch:

Who ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cares? Dozens of people? Fix it yourself, no give's a rat's ass about these systems.

Pretty sure more people care about them than care about you or your opinion. Why even post something so useless? People are going to want what they want, has nothing to do with you, now does it?

He actually has a point. No-one cares about native linux ports except for half a dozen of people.
As I said, such ports are dead in the water now ...

[leech]

Originally posted by Klauth:

Originally posted by leech:

Pretty sure more people care about them than care about you or your opinion. Why even post something so useless? People are going to want what they want, has nothing to do with you, now does it?

He actually has a point. No-one cares about native linux ports except for half a dozen of people.
As I said, such ports are dead in the water now ...

Weird, considering there are studios still making Linux native ports... Just like for some reason people make mac ports... I see little reason to do that either, as you never know when Apple is just going to make an OS change that breaks everything... (which by the way is likely the reason Aspyr is too busy to fix the mac/Linux Civ6 native port).

I really want to know who in the Linux community hurt you, as you seem rather hostile to anyone asking for a port...

[C]

I guess there is some misunderstanding.

From a strict technical point of view, a game running on Proton does not run very differently from a game running on Windows. I'm talking in terms of how it accesses the hardware, etc. It will be a process, talking to the kernel indirectly through a library, talking through the graphics card through an API that gets converted to native GPU code and so on.

So on Windows your program uses a high-level API (relatively speaking) called Win32, which gets converted to native (NT) kernel calls. With Proton you use that same API (Win32) which gets converted to native (Linux) kernel calls. Same way of running the game, just different kernel. Similar story with graphics code, you use some high(ish)-level API like Direct3D, which gets converted to native GPU code. Some details change but it's effectively a very similar way of accessing the hardware.

So the people who want "native" ports need to explain exactly which APIs they would prefer instead. glibc instead of Win32? It's hardly a better solution for games (or for anything...) In fact quite an inferior solution. And not all Linux systems use glibc anyway, some are built using other libc implementations. For graphics, OpenGL or Vulkan instead of Direct3D? Sure, that's quite possibly preferable (and already supported, I play the Vulkan version of this game), but factually if you have a stable implementation of Direct3D on Linux (which we now have) then there is no fundamental difference.

Proton *is* the de-facto native run-time for Linux games. That's what Valve is saying, that's what some Linux vendors (Canonical) have also concluded. Yes, the Proton APIs originate from the Windows world, but so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ what? OpenGL did not exactly originate from the Linux world either.

TL;DR there is nothing that is magically *more* native than Proton. There is no known way that would be significantly faster or more stable. The Valve developers accumulate hundreds of man years of expertise running games on Linux and after spending 2 decades on that problem they came up with Proton. They ship their own console running on Proton. Do you know better than they do?

[leech]

Originally posted by corentin:

I guess there is some misunderstanding.

From a strict technical point of view, a game running on Proton does not run very differently from a game running on Windows. I'm talking in terms of how it accesses the hardware, etc. It will be a process, talking to the kernel indirectly through a library, talking through the graphics card through an API that gets converted to native GPU code and so on.

So on Windows your program uses a high-level API (relatively speaking) called Win32, which gets converted to native (NT) kernel calls. With Proton you use that same API (Win32) which gets converted to native (Linux) kernel calls. Same way of running the game, just different kernel. Similar story with graphics code, you use some high(ish)-level API like Direct3D, which gets converted to native GPU code. Some details change but it's effectively a very similar way of accessing the hardware.

So the people who want "native" ports need to explain exactly which APIs they would prefer instead. glibc instead of Win32? It's hardly a better solution for games (or for anything...) In fact quite an inferior solution. And not all Linux systems use glibc anyway, some are built using other libc implementations. For graphics, OpenGL or Vulkan instead of Direct3D? Sure, that's quite possibly preferable (and already supported, I play the Vulkan version of this game), but factually if you have a stable implementation of Direct3D on Linux (which we now have) then there is no fundamental difference.

Proton *is* the de-facto native run-time for Linux games. That's what Valve is saying, that's what some Linux vendors (Canonical) have also concluded. Yes, the Proton APIs originate from the Windows world, but so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ what? OpenGL did not exactly originate from the Linux world either.

TL;DR there is nothing that is magically *more* native than Proton. There is no known way that would be significantly faster or more stable. The Valve developers accumulate hundreds of man years of expertise running games on Linux and after spending 2 decades on that problem they came up with Proton. They ship their own console running on Proton. Do you know better than they do?

Proton will never be considered native... because win32 API is not a native API to Linux. Not sure why you're not grasping that and instead just throwing out a word salad. DirectX (They dropped the Direct3D moniker long ago and it just was sucked into DirectX as a branding) is closer to SDL1/2/3 in the Linux world, but has no NATIVE implementation in Linux, which is why Vulkan and OpenGL are more Native.

For origins of OpenGL... it originated with SGI and Mesa itself originated from the Amiga.

Officially, Proton only supports a small tiny subset of games! Literally, if you turn off the 'just play everything that is Windows with Proton' it is a tiny list of officially supported titles. And they didn't spend 2 decades developing Proton... They had to wait until the Wine base was getting to a state they could implement it within Steam. Hell, I remember suggesting it like a year before Proton was available. I also remember when Wine could barely run Notepad, and even that at the time was impressive!

[Klauth]

Originally posted by leech:

Originally posted by Klauth:

He actually has a point. No-one cares about native linux ports except for half a dozen of people.
As I said, such ports are dead in the water now ...

Weird, considering there are studios still making Linux native ports... Just like for some reason people make mac ports... I see little reason to do that either, as you never know when Apple is just going to make an OS change that breaks everything... (which by the way is likely the reason Aspyr is too busy to fix the mac/Linux Civ6 native port).

I really want to know who in the Linux community hurt you, as you seem rather hostile to anyone asking for a port...

Well, you'll have to tell me which studios are still doing Linux ports, actually. Aspyr seems to have stopped this...

And no, I'm not hostile nor hurt, it is just I don't see the point to have Linux or Mac ports for games. It makes no sense from an economical standpoint. So, that's why nobody is doing them anymore.

But I'd like of course to game on Linux since I despise Windows so much, but just ... it unfortunately doesn't make sense.

[leech]

Originally posted by Klauth:

Originally posted by leech:

Weird, considering there are studios still making Linux native ports... Just like for some reason people make mac ports... I see little reason to do that either, as you never know when Apple is just going to make an OS change that breaks everything... (which by the way is likely the reason Aspyr is too busy to fix the mac/Linux Civ6 native port).

I really want to know who in the Linux community hurt you, as you seem rather hostile to anyone asking for a port...

Well, you'll have to tell me which studios are still doing Linux ports, actually. Aspyr seems to have stopped this...

And no, I'm not hostile nor hurt, it is just I don't see the point to have Linux or Mac ports for games. It makes no sense from an economical standpoint. So, that's why nobody is doing them anymore.

But I'd like of course to game on Linux since I despise Windows so much, but just ... it unfortunately doesn't make sense.

Ha, I think it is the other dude that seems like he personally takes offense when someone asks for a port.
There are still quite a few indie developers that release native versions. Feral and Aspyr just did ports they mostly had to make contracts to do the ports, which seems to me to be a bad business model all around, since if a bug pops up on one of them, then who do you go to? Is it a porting bug, or a bug in the original game? Then there is the patching differences... it's always been better to get the original developer to do the port.

The funny thing is Valve have been working on Proton for Linux, but I'm kind of surprised it's not available on macOS, then again Apple I think decided they should just do it themselves... then again I think Apple was hoping their Apple Arcade would catch on... it has not.

But yeah, I still see a steady stream of games coming out for Linux, just not the AAA games. Hell, X-Plane is huge and still does a native Linux release.

[Dank Sidious]

Originally posted by Gyrmadet:

it is almost hilarious that a Mac version exist and a Linux one doesn't

Let's be fair here. Mac users in general need way more handholding than Linux user to do anything. You can trust that Linux users aren't completely computer illiterate, because people who gravitate towards Linux tend to be a bit more on the PC/tech enthusiast side of things.

Of course I don't count Steam Deck among that, but valve has that verified for steam deck marker for games that are "pick up and play" and deck is designed to be simple to use. You absolutely cannot rely on mac user being capable of doing anything other than knowing how to use apple software on mac.