While native Linux ports used to be necessary to bypass early compatibility issues with Wine — the translation layer used to run WIndows software on Linux — they have quickly become a rarity. Proton has effectively killed off native Linux builds. And that change is for the better, even if Linux gaming still has one enemy Proton can’t beat.
Before Proton was a thing
The Wine Project and more
Before there was Proton, there was Wine. Technically speaking, Proton is a fork of Wine with a few optimizations and patches to improve gaming performance, and the project was popularized by Valve’s push toward Linux.
Either way, both are free, open-source compatibility layers that allow Windows programs to run on Unix-like operating systems. Wine has just been around for longer.
While there are open-source versions of Windows applications (such as LibreOffice for the Microsoft Office suite), they often suffer from compatibility issues. This also includes games, which follow the standard Windows executable format.
The solution, then, was a translation layer. Interestingly, the process is not emulation (as you’d know from its full name, Wine Is Not an Emulator) and instead works by translating Windows API calls into equivalent Linux system calls in real time.
This is what makes it so fast, and there have been instances of games running through Wine outperforming a native build on Windows using equivalent hardware.
Proton has seen immense growth in recent years, and most games just work out of the box with no tinkering involved. Of course, there are outliers — like the dreaded anti-cheat, but things mostly just work fine these days.
Native Linux ports of games are still being released
But a rarity
Before Proton took off, native Linux ports of games used to be a lot more common. Sure, there weren’t all that many to begin with, but it used to exist, with barely any being released in the present.
Games like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the Tomb Raider “reboot” trilogy, and others had native Linux ports that in no way used Proton. That’s not the case anymore, and it’s kind of a shame, to be honest.
If done right, a native Linux port should be able to run slightly better than a Windows executable through Proton. There is simply less overhead to deal with — even if the effort to make it happen no longer seems worth it.
It’s also really nice to have native apps for a platform.
Although it’s not like native builds have disappeared entirely. Far from it, in fact, and we’ve had some wonderful launches with the likes of Baldur’s Gate 3 and Counter-Strike 2 coming to mind.
It’s still not the norm, and in most cases, even a tad worse than running the game through Proton.
Proton is usually more performant
More to do with game optimization
Proton has also consistently outperformed a native Linux port across multiple titles. Counter-Strike is a good example: it’s recommended to run the Windows port using Proton for better, smoother performance.
Does this mean Proton is so good that it invalidates the need for native builds? Not really, and this is not because of Proton either. Gamedev is a very resource-intensive endeavor, and in most cases, it just doesn’t make sense to add a separate team to build and optimize a Linux port of a game that only a handful of players will play.
While Linux adoption has been growing, it is far from the majority here, and it’s just not worth catering to such a small, niche audience.
Which is why Proton turned out to be so popular. It basically checked all boxes and let Linux gamers play Windows-only builds without any setup. This meant that there was simply no need for teams to develop a separate Linux port of the game either.
You just deploy a single build and have it run through Proton (in most cases), as if it were running natively on Linux. There have always been compatibility issues, but they have been addressed over time, and upstream progress has been quite rapid.
Probably for the better
While I’ll always lament the loss of more Linux-native apps, I am willing to make an exception for games. There is simply no other way to get mainstream adoption going without something as versatile as Proton.
Without it, gaming would never have seen such success on Linux. Proton has been quite literally game-changing, and probably one of the best things to happen to the Linux desktop in a while.
- Brand
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Valve
- Operating System
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Windows, Mac, Linux
Steam is a digital video game storefront and program developed by Valve that allows gamers to purchase, play, and mod their titles all through one convenient program.
