Valve has little control on what other companies target. Their previous push for native gaming produced very little results: Valve ported all their titles, a few minor publishers released native titles and some porting companies ported some AAA titles, but it was only a drop.
Proton has caused a significant increase in Linux playable games. The side effect is that it effectively killed porting companies.
edit: also all porting companies were effectively using their proprietary equivalent of proton (although often inferior) .
TBH running through a Win32/DX API shim isn't much different than running through SDL, yet Linux games using the SDL are considered "native" but Win32 games running through Proton are not?
(the Win32 and DX APIs are also much more straightforward to use than wrestling directly with X11, Wayland, Vulkan and the Linux audio API flavour of the month)
Yet Proton game work better and with greater performance than most native ports, which are created once by third-party teams (i.e. Feral), never properly tested or rarely updated.
Soon Wine will have Wayland support and 99% of those ports that no one is willing to update will remain stuck on X11.
Good luck running a >20 year old native Linux game on a modern Linux distro without recompiling.
A Proton like layer would also totally make sense on Windows, assuming that support for older Windows APIs is better in Proton than on Windows itself (which isn't a far fetched assumption).
All of this already exists on Windows. They're already drop in DLL replacements that smooth out compatibility with older versions of graphics APIs among other APIs. And old support for old games actually isn't that bad on Windows 11. No one has heard of this game, but I could just boot up the old Japanese PC game Abyss Boat and it kind of just works. If I use a DLL replacement or something like dxwnd or dgvoodoo2 it's even better.
With a Direct Draw replacement like the one from WineD3D your game/software is not better; the game literally stop beings a Power Point presentation and gets fully playable.
But, by default, you'll get a slideshow in a game that would run screamly fast under a Pentium 3 and a Windows release from its era.
Not Valve's fault that user-space Linux is run by a bunch of unpaid headless chicken with no overarching vision, sense of momentum and direction, while Win32 is a rock-stable API that games are already using.
Until there is a Linus figure that coordinates the userspace and organises a common platform API with long term support for closed-source software, Proton is the only pragmatic choice.
Valve want to get off Windows ASAP, not necessarily waste money chasing windmills driven by silly ideology that native is better.
I love Linux, I have used it for 25 years, and even I accept that native games run WORSE than their Proton counterpart.
> unpaid headless chicken with no overarching vision
systemd, GNOME, mesa etc all have developers who are being paid by companies for their work (Red Hat, Microsoft, Canonical, SUSE etc). That said, you're not wrong on the 'no overarching vision' part, see Wayland.
> Linus figure that coordinates the userspace and organises a common platform API
Flatpak with the freedesktop runtimes are just this, that said some companies (e.g. Canonical) are trying to sabotage these efforts and Ubuntu not shipping with Flatpak is the biggest hurdle.
Flatpak is not a common userspace library, just a set of sandboxed functions (i.e. portals).
What we need is something that groups Qt/GTK, pipewire, part of systemd, part of flatpak, part of Wayland into a single library, a bit like Win32 is. And the guarantee that it remains stable even for closed source projects. For example Linux is free to change its internals and requires everything to be open, so drivers can be adapted whenever the APIs change. This is not good enough for a desktop API.
Maybe because there is a large backlog of old games that will never be ported to Linux? Have you considered that game developers and not valve are responsible for providing a Linux port of their game and so far have managed to do a worse job than a DirectX implementation for Linux?
The collective time spent on developing proton is probably less than a dozen high profile Linux ports.
The latest commit to proton 9.0 is three weeks ago. The latest commit to an experimental branch is 3 days ago and it is just an update of a wine version and no other commits. A lot of proton commits just update a version here and there.
The focus is certainly not on proton. It is simply very cheap to work on it, because it is highly effective. The steam deck probably cost them more software and hardware developer hours than proton.
It's unfortunate but win32 has stable ABI. Such thing can't be really said about glibc and dynamic linking. Many old linux game binaries simply don't work or need tinkering to get them work.
the majority of users have no idea what OS is actually running on their steamdeck and don't want to worry about it.
Proton makes it possible to maintain a large library of older games on the platform.
Like any Steam user since Half-life 2, I must have accumulated over a hundred games in my library.
I think Valve knows better than we do what users want.
So? How is a game fully running on Proton not a native game?
Wine's version of the Windows API isn't conceptually different from any other cross-platform technology here. You could make a similar purity argument against using the Unity engine since most of its games end up being primarily on Windows too.
