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THIS ISSUE: Valve’s game-changing Proton turns five Kernel 6.5 hits the streets Vim creator dies Happy birthday to Debian
Valve’s launch of Proton in August 2018 changed the face of Linux gaming for ever. Linux numbers on Steam are also “through the roof”.
Wind the clock back just five short years to early 2018. Valve’s gaming Steam Machine had just been removed from its online store after failing to sell in sufficient numbers. There were various reasons for this, but the biggest culprit was that Steam Machine was using a Linux operating system, which wasn’t compatible with most Windows games.
Valve did try to be more platform-agnostic by offering Steam Play. One of the perks of this was that if players bought, say, the Windows version of a game, they could also access the Linux version. Still, most developers declined to go to the trouble of creating Linux versions of Windows games, so it was little use to players.
Valve’s next move was a game changer to end all game changers. Partnering with CodeWeavers, the two companies jointly developed a beefed-up fork of the Wine compatibility layer to create Proton.
Initially, Proton was only compatible with a small number of Valve-selected titles but over time, it’s allowed many more Windows games to run virtually flawlessly in Linux. The ProtonDB, which tracks such things, reports over 11,000 titles for Windows and other platforms can run in Linux thanks to the Proton compatibility layer.
What does this mean specifically for Linux gaming? It’s clear that the power and customisability of Proton was a major reason for Valve to release its Steam Deck in 2021, which runs on SteamOS, a variant of Arch Linux.
Shortly afterwards, Valve released its own Deck Rating system to score how well the Steam Deck running Proton worked with Windows games. As of June 2023, there were over 10,000 titles rated as either Verified o
