this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Oh no, Proton is not just "WINE with extra steps", Proton is the directX to Vulkan translator, and unlike previous attempts, its so good that some games perform better than on Windows. Not to mention that Valve managed to solve the problems around anti-cheats and all of this works with minimal tweaking. If it were as simple as you say, somebody should've already done their own proton before Valve, also, in this case there were no community forks of it, that allows to use its power without the need to launch Steam (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/wine-ge-custom). And yea, Proton is FOSS. Nice of them, to make a revolution and then just let the people actually have it, don't you think? If, for example, Take Two were like this, most of modern games could've had beautiful procedural character animations powered by Euphoria engine.
DRM is unethical indeed, yet, to use them or not is the choice of the dev. Ban modern DRMs today and what you'll achieve is that companies will try to squirm around and use something even more dirty. Also DRMs are already not the shittiest malware big companies trying to install on your machine, it would be anti-cheat. Why noone talks obout them? There are methods to detect cheaters without installing a rootkit spyware on all the end-users PCs.
Lol. Sorry, but the games and DRM are not why. The most important reason to it is that we're losing proprietary software's technologies. Technologies that might help advace our modern day of living. Also because what they're restricting is basically a knoledge, and knowledge shoud be free, not because your poor ass can't own their games.
And Proton is the example that Valve contributes to FOSS community, unlike literally every other major game company, even CDPR.
Thats not even all of it to why i stand on my point, Steam prices are also the most humane, especially if we mention all this bunch of sales steam is famous for. They were there from the beginning, even though they could've done something similar to PSN in terms of pricing policy, given that steam was and still kinda is de-facto monopoly, since other game stores on pc have only the fractions of steam's profits at the most.
But WINE does exactly that, it translates different Windows APIs. I've been using it to play games (including Steam games) way before Proton was released. It has existed for 30 years now. Proton came 25 years later and according to Wikipedia:
You can see for yourself that it uses WINE and other software that WINE also uses, like DXVK: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton
If this is truly their achievement, then it is impressive.
If there is a revolution, then it seems that it's mostly an achievement of WINE, DXVK and other developers. It is great that Valve contributes to Free Software, though. But that doesn't change they fact that they also make proprietary software, which is unethical and they are doing it to attract people to their proprietary platform. WINE is licensed under a Copyleft LGPL license, so it's also possible that Valve had no other choice in this case. Since last I checked even SteamOS was proprietary, there are good reasons to doubt their intentions.
I talk about it, but most people don't care about stuff like that at all.
My argument was that people deserve to be able to control their computers and to do that, they need to be able to control the software. Your reason is very important too. You can watch Richard Stallman's talk for more: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM
That is true.
What you are saying is true, but before Steam became popular, it was possible to buy used games on physical media for cheap. Now even physical copies of PC games have Valve's DRM, so I blame Valve for destroying the used games market on PC (on consoles it still exists).
Maybe you're right and I'm romanticizing the evil there. I will remain thankful to Valve tho. I never managed to view proprietary saftware as something particularily evil, tbh, but rather as an annoying obstacle we should eventually overcome.
It's not easy to have freedom when you are a gamer. Steam and Epic Games Store are both proprietary (but for Epic you can use Heroic Games Launcher) and so are most games. There aren't that many libre games and maybe around 10 of them are good. I hope that will change in the future.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/Ag1AKIl_2GM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.