If it were a “first-class citizen” there would be native Linux games
This was my thought exactly. Proton’s emulation of a windows game doesn’t count as “first class experience”. It’s second class at best, but still better than literally nothing at all.
It’s second class at best, but still better than literally nothing at all.
The native ports have frequently been terrible, both in performance and compatibility (missing graphical features etc). Proton is better than those ports, but worse than a native version using Vulkan and 100% of features supported correctly.
Proton and Wine are not emulators.
So while I take your point, I feel it’s important to distinguish the difference here where emulators have a lot of negative connotations.
While I agree that proton on its own doesn’t make gaming on Linux a “first class experience”, it does sometimes perform better than the original native “first class” Windows OS that the game was originally intended to be played on. Which is just funny, but also shows all the work that has gone into proton.
Game devs need more Linux players before they make major industry wide changes, but proton makes those numbers have a chance of increasing by making the games playable on Linux.
Another reason why I wouldn’t call gaming on Linux a “first class experience” yet is controller and input driver issues. Which can be worked around like if I open a game I bought on gog through steam and use the steam input methods but I shouldn’t have to use steam to play a gog game with a controller.
This was my thought exactly. Proton’s emulation of a windows game doesn’t count as “first class experience”. It’s second class at best, but still better than literally nothing at all.
The native ports have frequently been terrible, both in performance and compatibility (missing graphical features etc). Proton is better than those ports, but worse than a native version using Vulkan and 100% of features supported correctly.
Proton and Wine are not emulators. So while I take your point, I feel it’s important to distinguish the difference here where emulators have a lot of negative connotations.
While I agree that proton on its own doesn’t make gaming on Linux a “first class experience”, it does sometimes perform better than the original native “first class” Windows OS that the game was originally intended to be played on. Which is just funny, but also shows all the work that has gone into proton.
Game devs need more Linux players before they make major industry wide changes, but proton makes those numbers have a chance of increasing by making the games playable on Linux.
Another reason why I wouldn’t call gaming on Linux a “first class experience” yet is controller and input driver issues. Which can be worked around like if I open a game I bought on gog through steam and use the steam input methods but I shouldn’t have to use steam to play a gog game with a controller.