Who played on linux before proton?

Yeah I did. God bless WineDB.
Steam before proton was okay for stuff like Fallout 3. Needed some hackery with Wine prefixes and getting the right DLLs in there but eventually worked. Older GoG games like Alpha Centauri were fine with DosBox.
Proton is great. Cyberpunk 2077 on Ultra.

It was rough. I basically gave up on playing 3D games on Linux for the longest time and used a dualboot. Much less hassle.
What convinced me was when they verified Apex Legends, which was a game I was not expecting to be verified at all. Turns out Proton secretly got really good in all that time.
- It's hit or miss. A gold rated game on protondb performed terrible when I used a keyboard and mouse. Everything was smooth, but looking around was studdery. Even worse, the game failed to properly capture my mouse, so I kept getting stopped when my "cursor" hit the edge of the screen. I literally could not look around.
  
  the stutter has to do with mouse capture too.
  on my side changing to exclusive fullscreen helps, hope it helps you too!

Back when you had to install steam in wine and then for a while you would have native steam and wine steam in the same distro install. Now it's so easy that I figure anyone talking shit about gaming on Linux only plays those rootkit anticheat shooters or hasn't played games since having kids or something and have become one of those people that are shocked to hear what they thought were current gen consoles are actually really old already.
- I actually found an old /home drive of mine this week where I had exactly this setup, so painful.
  
  Trying to find the correct steamapps folder for the particular instance of the game and going through all the dot folders and wine folder structure... that hasn't actually improved much now that I think about it.
  Gaming on Linux in general has improved a lot more than the pollution levels in my town at least.

My 1999 setup running Slackware while playing Loki's Civ CTP
- How many hard drives you have in that beast? I see enough ribbon cable to wrap a gift
  
  Old story: There was a sale at a big box Electronics store on Seagate Barracuda SCSI-2 Wide 9.1GB drives and I bought 6 of them to give me a 40GB RAID-5 on an old mylex dac960 scsi raid card. Bigtime storage in 1999.
  Those fed my 3:1 ratio mp3 sharing site that my uunet bot advertised haha.
- Around that time too, UT99 shipped with Linux binaries on the friggin cd
- First i thought you had a cat hiding there.
- I fished a tower like that out of a dumpster and built my first gaming PC in that and ran Gentoo on it about 2005. Played CS 1.6 and WoW and had better performance in Linux than Windows at the time.
- What is that console looking thing in the bottom right corner?
  
  Sylvartas is right, it's an old flatbed scanner.
  
  Could be a scanner
- That’s one tall tower.
- Pure art!

My first attempt to switch to Linux for my primary desktop was in 2007, and ended when my attempt to run WoW via WINE mostly worked, but had a weird an completely unfixable audio delay.
Proton (and Valve's efforts on SteamOS and the Steam Deck more generally) have been an absolute godsend for Linux as a usable daily-driver.

PlayOnLinux was a good friend. Sometimes.
- Except for all the bad runability reports made to winehq by its users to the appdb
- Isn't it now?

I would never have considered gaming on Linux until the Steam Deck came out. When reviews said it's actually awesome, I became convinced to try it. Basically, the deck pushed me over the edge to ditch Windows altogether. So suck on that, Satya! No wonder MS is trying so hard to stop other OEMs from making Linux handhelds.
- Proton got me to dump Windows... NGL Windows 11 and Lemmy did help push me over the edge. I use Ubuntu btw.
  
  Lol u stole the Arch mantra... I use arch btw.
  Ubuntu mantra should be something else like "snaps are my homies"
- For real. I've been a pretty steady Linux user all my adult life and gaming was barely ever an option unless the game was built to run in Linux. When proton came out I gave it a shot and was blown away.

Wine and Cedega back in the early days, I played WiW in the Vanilla days on Suse Linux. My first foray into Linux was 2002 on a system that was decent for the time. I have fond memories of the first time I got my GeForce 3 card actually doing hardware acceleration. glxgears rendered hundreds of FPS.
- cedega
  
  Yeah, this definitely makes me feel old. 😅

Since 2012! PlayOnLinux was the closest thing to Proton then.
- Actuslly wine was closest thing to proton, play on linux was nothing but a front end for managing wine software

Me. Minecraft worked just as well under either OS.
- Just a fyi. Java edition works just as well under windows, linux and macos.
  The newer bedrock edition works only on windows and consoles.
  Kids where easier to exploit with a game store then linux users who remember the old days i guess.
  
  For bedrock on Linux I've had good luck with mcpe launcher, I use it to play on a friends realm

Kids these days don't even know about TuxRacer?
- Loved that game
  
  I still play it on my Android TV.

I bought Tomb Raider 2013 because it was Linux native. Nowadays I recommend people to play the Windows version.
I remember that Unreal Tournament 2003 came with a bootable Linux CD to play the game.
- I have the original CD release of UT2004, it has a full Linux installer and worked well on a Dell E5400 running Ubuntu back in 2008-2010 when I was attending LAN perties
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein also had an official Linux port in 2002-ish.
- Still have the quake 3 Linux tin box around here somewhere...

My last foray into Linux gaming was back in the early-2010s, and I was mostly just trying to get EVE Online to run unsuccessfully. I was running a laptop that was top if the line (in 2009) and my PCs were cobbled together from old Dells and HPs donated by family and friends or retired and given away by my company IT team.
Steam on Linux was nice, and would show you which games in your library had Linux native versions to install. I held out on that and browser gamed for a while. Played a lot of Runescape and Minecraft. Taught myself to code a bit, but didn't really get anywhere with that.
Eventually I had money and time to put together a "proper" gaming PC, and of course I put Windows on it since I wanted to get an NVidia graphics card as I'd had so much trouble with the AMD drivers on my laptop.
Ran Windows for gaming and kept Linux on the laptop since then. First PC ran Win7, which i loved. Next one ran Win 8, which I hated. Current one was running Win 10, which was meh, and I've only soured on it over time. Made the switch back to Linux last week after I got tired of M$ constantly asking me if I want to try Copilot on /both/ my work and personal PCs.
Proton is fucking great. Never going back. The old laptop is still running strong after 15 years. It's got BunsenLabs installed at the moment.

I mean… does Tuxracer and Wesnoth count?
- yes, it does
- When I was growing up, my dad had a phase where he was experimenting with Linux. He had several installs over the years, Red Hat, Gnome(?), Ubuntu…I remember spending hours playing Tux Racer, SuperTux, Pingus, Chromium BSU…good times.
  
  I’m your father, from a different family.

Took me multiple attempts and multiple weeks to get cs 1.5 running on red hat around 2000. I still remember searching and downloading random rpms online. If I'm not mistaken the website was called meatsource or something like that.
Anyway, we have come a long way since then but the inner workings are the same.
- Freshmeat

I used to play StarCraft II in Wine back in like 2010.
- I read this and was like “pffft….starcraft 2 didn’t come out in 2010 , it was waaaay later”
  Then I checked and was like “Well fuck me”

After Steam officially released its native Linux client I played Half Life 1, 2 and "Brutal Legend" because they all had native Linux ports before proton was a thing. Before that I remember playing games like Sauerbraten (quake like fps), Battle for Wesnoth (my wife and I still play this together), Frozen Bubble, LBreakout2 and several other Linux native games.
- Quake III Arena also had a native Linux version.
  And Quake, Quake 2, Descent, UT, Tribes 2.
  
  I remember that! I had Unreal Tournament 2004 and it technically had a native Linux version but it wasn't on the CD. You had to extract most of the files from the CD and go download the Linux executable file from the unreal website to drop into the installation folder.
- Was not expecting brutal legend to be the game overturning technological norms

I have been playing on Linux for years before proton.
WoW, HL, Fallout, Diablo, Quake, RimWorld to name a few.
- Yah, I used to WoW on linux when I played. Pissed my guildies off because some patches I'd have to reboot before every boss attempt. But eventually it got pretty bulletproof.
- Back in 2008 or so, for a few patches WoW actually ran better under linux than windows because of some bug.

So much minecraft and kerbal space program. They were two of the very few games that ran naively and had cracked Linux files available on public trackers. I had to put a minimum of 1000 hours of minecraft using the clit mouse that old Dell laptops used to have. I hate that they got rid of those and now the only modern laptops with the clit mouse are Lenovos which I hate. Lenovo ruined ThinkPads.
- The what mouse?
  
  the clit mouse
- I had a laptop with a clit mouse when minecraft first came out. Never got the hang of it and would steal one of those mice with the trackball on the bottom from my dad's desktop instead

Alpha Centauri baby! Still one of my favourite games, I wonder if it still works
- Works for me through Heroic Launcher

minecraft and team fortress 2 for 3 years.
end of list.

I remember playing Minecraft on Ubuntu 14.04, does that count?
- yes, it does
  Minecraft is the first game I played on Linux

I ran a half-life dedicated server on Linux for years!

Hey, Nexuiz rocked.

I don't get it. Is she excited before proton because it was exciting if something actually ran?
- she's excited because running games before proton was difficult
  but your option is also good
  
  So excited about the challenge, like running the game is a different game than the game?
- I got a manic vibe, like a similar energy to when you've been modding a game for 20x longer than you've actually played it, except in this case, it's not a choice.

Everybody? That thing with coloured bubbles? The network thing with all the OSs? The thing where you had to guess the position of things with lasers in a grid, all the breakout clones, innumerable tetris, doom (or was that in Irix?). Also there were lots of games if you installed the games packages. Like Mille Bornes (or whatever it was called in English) or hangman, or many other crowd pleasers.
- Some of those games sound like Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection
  Available for Linux, Windows, web browser (javascript or java applet), Android, IOS, and... uh, Palm OS apparently.
  The thing with coloured bubbles could be several things here. The network thing is probably net or netslide. The thing with the lasers and the grid is probably blackbox
- Take me back to the Irix days, remind me what the 3D racing game was called, the cars were all round and there were five? rails you could hop between. The background was space, maybe?
  There was another game, a first-person shooter where TVs with hair screamed at you.
  
  TVs with hair screamed at you.
  I can't decide whether those were my teenage years or just bad dreams. Or maybe both.

Beta Minecraft accounts for at least half of all my gaming. I'd be just fine without proton.

I first gamed on Linux in a time where Humble Indie Bundles weren't a thing yet and Wine was still very limited. Console emulators and some older native ports was all that was available. Oh and I walked uphill, both ways.
- While playing with a long extension cord

Circa 2015-2016. I was still dual booting Win 10 and Ubuntu at the time. It was a pain in the ass.

I started using Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 and at the time I was really into the game Jedi Academy. It used OpenGL and thus ran fairly well on Wine. I upgraded from an NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX420 to an ATI Radeon X1600Pro and the ATI drivers were absolute garbage so I kinda gave up on Linux gaming for a while. I was set on going NVIDIA on my next PC but around that time AMD bought ATI and opened up their documentation, leading to rapid improvements in the open source AMD drivers. Went with a Radeon HD 5870 and not long after I built that PC I was gaming in Wine again, though poorly on non OpenGL games still. Then Steam for Linux officially released and a lot of native games became available but I was still running Windows Steam in Wine as native Steam didn't play Windows games. Then the Gallium Nine project offered a way to play DX9 games with significantly improved performance and I played a lot of Skyrim on Linux as well as a lot of other DX9 games. Then Vulkan happened and soon DXVK and Proton and the modern Linux gaming landscape evolved quite rapidly until we got to where we are today.

No one is mentioning Tux Racer? Blasphemy!

Wasn't Playonlinux for the longest time the easiest option to run games under linux?
- It was a good way to satisfy common dependencies for Windows games.

I once got The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion to run on Ubuntu, but some strange Bethesda bugs managed to creep into the experience. There was a giant 2D tree taking up a chunk of the skybox that I couldn't get rid of, so I made it headcannon when I was playing it.
Luckily when I tried it on the Steam Deck not too long ago, this bug was no longer present.
- So, what you're saying is you had an early access build of Elden Ring?

I was playing Quake 3 and Unreal Torunament 2003 in the early 2000s, they had native versions. One of the first mainstream Linux gaming pioneers.
I used to use Second Life on Linux too with a third party client.
- The first half of the 2000s was a lot better for Linux gaming than the second half. That time period after game companies stopped releasing anything for Linux but before Wine became realistically usable was very dark.
- Quake 2 also had a Linux port, as did Return to Castle Wolfenstein. iD Software was one of the few early supporters of Linux for commercial games.

I sometimes wish Proton was also available on macOS… But Wine is good enough I guess, and still works great for most games :)
- Proton is just Wine from Valve. They add their own fixes and patches and whatnot and have an "experimental" branch you can try with games that don't work right away, but it's just Wine. Everything Valve does to Proton eventually makes it way back upstream to Wine proper. One reason Valve may not make it available for MacOS themselves is because they're basing their SteamOS on Linux, and while MacOS and Linux are both Unix "like", MacOS was/is more based on BSD, so the system calls may not always line up or work exactly the same when translating them. I do think however that Proton, or a modified version of it at least, is what Apple's game development kit thingy leverages.
  
  Valve contributes a lot to Wine too
  
  Everything Valve does to Proton eventually makes it way back upstream to Wine proper.
  Ah okay, that's nice. I wasn't completely sure about that. At least if that's the case and the projects are so related, I'm wondering why Proton doesn't work on macOS. I could have imagined the code bases to start to differ more and more.
  But I mean, I'm fine with Wine (or to be exact the Wine/Crossover version I can get with Homebrew).
- What you are looking for is called Whiskey :) There's also a paid app that does it for macbooks with pre-Apple silicon
  
  I looked at Whiskey but as far as I can see, that's just… a Wine wrapper and not related to Proton.
  I mean I appreciate the comment, thanks, but I have Wine installed via Homebrew and it works without any real problems.

WoW in 00s, OpenTTD, Tux Kart
- (Super) Tux Kart just got wild in the past years :O
- Ah man good times there. I just had classic wow running on my steam deck, hooked up to a custom server. So much fun and surprisingly playable and good since the deck has enough buttons to map everything to.

I played WoW Cataclysm around 2011 with wine. It worked but thats it.
- I can relate. I was playing whatever the first expansion was. Karazhan or something. 2007? 2008?
  First kubuntu, then opensuse, then arch BTW.

Played WoW when it first came out with WINE. It was miserable. We had to mess with configs, install hacked patches, manually start jobs with scripts. And every patch broke something so you had to start from scratch again.
This was probably 2004/2005?

Who remembers Cedega. Had a lot of fun on that, both playing and configuring to play. Think I was running Fedora, or was it Mandrake/Mandriva. Man I remember having the drive to distro hop weekly at one point

I tried to get Wine working for STALKER before Proton. Never managed lol

What about xbill? Why is noone mentioning it?
- Bunch of kids, the whole lot of them!

I was in the beta for the original World of Warcraft and restarted when it officially launched. This was 20 years ago, so memory is fuzzy, but somewhere along the way I was playing it in wine exclusively under Linux. Game updates were common and frequently broke wine, but I kid you not a patch was available within 24h. Yes, this forced me to compile my own wine, but it wasn't that difficult then. Together with "checkinstall" I could maintain a clean .deb package from the source code.
Some links I found in a quick search showing the challenges:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-games-33/world-of-warcraft-in-wine-success-485886/
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-311551-start-0.html
To be honest, keeping the game running in Linux sometimes felt as a fun side quest!
After that I was mostly able to play all my games in Linux, with some exceptions, obviously, that sometimes required me to install windows.

I never got Proton working on my main distro (Debian), so I probably fall into this category. I did use Wine, but Wine is a lot harder to set up, and never ran games as well as Proton did.
Here is my major gaming history, since I started on Linux in 2007. Yes, I really could focus on a single game for years back then.
2007: Starcraft, in Wine
2007: Nethack, native
2011: Morrowind and Oblivion in Wine
2012: Minecraft, native
2014: sgt-puzzles, native
2016: Steam, got hundreds of native Linux games.
2017: Briefly got Steam and Path of Exile working inside a Wine instance.
2022: Steam deck, with the specific purpose of being able to run Proton on it.
2023: New Ubuntu installation, and Proton finally worked on my PC.
Today, I still prefer native Linux games. I mostly only use Proton when peer pressure for a multiplayer game required it. But I never use Wine any more.

Oh yeah. Back in the late 90s I played all the games ported by Loki Games. I played the native quakes, portal 1 & 2. And using regular Wine and some winetricks I played about 300 hours of Skyrim and completed Mass Effect 1,2,3.
- Yep. Unreal Tournament was also great and Neverwinter Nights.

I liked playing osu! on Linux through Wine since it offered much lower audio and input latency than you could achieve on Windows. Minecraft has also always been a safe bet on Linux (unless you enabled shaders, then it just turned into a visual abomination for just about every shaderpack).
Generally OpenGL games weren't too bad, DirectX however... the biggest change here was DXVK rather than Proton.
Never thought we'd get to where we are now.

There was still Wine, and PlayOnLinux helped further, but when I looked for a game I wanted to play on WineDB, there was no guarantee it even had an entry, and if it wasn't listed as "platinum", the chance of you experiencing any reported issue was very high.
Not to mention, playing Steam games that weren't native was an impossibility.
Thankfully I was more of a console gamer at the time, and I got a lot of enjoyment out of the few games that received Linux ports - like Team Fortress 2!

Unreal Tournament 2k4 on one of the earlier Ubuntus, back when ShipIt was still a thing. Most have been around 2005 or 2006, as I used it in my mom's flat which I moved out of in 2006.
I also played some games on an old version of Suse Linux back in 2001 or so? Maybe earlier? There was this game where you had to manage public transport in a city. Looked for that game recently but nothing came up. Also Kartoffelknülch back then. I tried to get some distributions running (like Mandrake) but only Suse somewhat worked. Being 14 and English not being your mother tongue doesn't help with documentation when nobody in your family knows stuff about computers.
- It’s not OpenTTD maybe?
  
  Definitely not
  The fact that I can't seem to find traces of this game online makes me think that maybe my memory is wrong? But also hard to find information from back when the internet wasn't flooded with stuff

Can you imagine not having depth perception because of your hairstyle?
- Or being an anime body
  
  Or existing in 2D

I guess I'm behind in times as wouldn't emulation cause the game to be slower on Linux than on Windows?
I tried switching to Linux when I was a kid, but figured out quickly that my scrap computer could only play my games natively. I'm not sure how it wouldn't always be slower on Linux unless the game was built for Linux.
- deep inhale
  WINE IS NOT AN EMULATOR
  It is a translation layer. All it's doing is intercepting syscalls embedded in the executable process by presenting what looks like an interface for the kernel it is trying to call, but is actually a translation layer to the true host kernel, mapping the Windows syscalls to their near-equivalent for the Linux kernel. This differs from emulation as the calls are being translated at a higher level whereas emulators translate the low level machine code sent to the processor.
  So Proton and Wine essentially just pretend to be the core Windows processes and services a Windows environment provides to applications. It's a Windows interface to a Linux kernel on the backend. And virtually every syscall on Linux will always be faster than on Windows/NT. So you get faster syscall responses with a neglible and wholly insubstantial added overhead that I would reckon is hard to quantify because it is in fact so damn small that the only way I can think of to observe it is to attach a debugger, which slows down the application process notably so that human's can peer into the execution stack.
  TL;DR: no, Windows applications have theoretically been faster on Linux than they ever were on Windows since Wine's inception.
  
  I think you mean:
  Wine is not an emulator ^is ^not ^an ^emulator ^^is ^^not ^^an ^^emulator ^^^is ^^^not ^^^an ^^^emulator ^^^^is ^^^^not ^^^^an ^^^^emulator ^^^^^is ^^^^^not ^^^^^an ^^^^^emulator ^^^^^^.......
  
  really did not expect today to be my turn to recite the infamous WINE homily. Whoever sends out the t-shirts, I'm a men's x large, hopefully there are still some of that size unclaimed
  
  Thanks for the information, no need for the deep inhale lol.
- One would think that, but I've seen many claims that it actually runs faster. I wouldn't know personally, I haven't used Windows in 5 years
  
  So from my experience, I replaced my 8+ year old omen laptop with an MSI 3 years ago then installed garuda on the omen. Tested some games on each and the performance was similar until graphics were set to ultra just dye to the hardware difference. Before installing linux that laptop performance was struggling, so it really breathed life back into it and made it viable again. Hell my wife uses it to play stardew valley now and I used it to play ffxiv a few times.
  
  Maybe it's a case of less bloat in Linux over Windows?
- Others replied about WINE translation layer, but once binary is loaded in memory the kernel juat runs the code it does not care that it is linux or windows code, because to the systembit is chip instructions. It is why LinuxOS was fully able to run DOS way back when
- It's not really emulation. It's running on the same architecture and most of the windows libraries can be used as is with mostly only the win32 library that needs to be wrapped. That already existed for years as wine. It's mostly graphics and peripherals that are broken.
  The most important thing proton added to improve gaming was a DirectX translation layer that translates to Vulcan and also loads of fixes and additions to wine.
  Not a lot of games run faster but apparently in some situations, the Vulcan precompiled shaders seem to run better than native windows, although that probably means they could make their native version better as well. For older games, the Vulcan translation layer is a lot more efficient and faster than native. Also CPU and IO heavy games might run faster on the Linux kernel.

Yeah, it wasn’t anything like the meme
- Back in my day, the only thing in /usr/games was fortune, and we liked it.

Basically some Source games, Gog's offerings and Guild Wars in-between rounds of tuxkart
- Insert Tuxkart music

My eve online circa 2008-10 was on Linux, as well as other not-entirely well remembered attempts dating back to around 2005, when I was more interested in spinny cube desktop. Fglrx and I were well acquainted, but not quite friends.

I hated Windows 8 enough to put up with it at the time. It's nuts how much things have improved since then.

Ah yes, mostly Portal and Portal2 and LBreakout2

WINE IS NOT AN EMULATOR