I wonder how much of Proton development is really Valve and how much is originally Wine contributors though. Fortunately Wine is GPL afaik and requires modifications to be contributed back to the community. So even if it is a cheap way for Valve to gain customers, it means there is a chance contributions flow back and forth between Proton and Wine.
The investment into linux gaming isn't only wine thought. They are working behind the scenes into fixing the rough edges and creating a smooth experience.
They pushed publishers to develop linux ports, they hired developers, they created a linux gaming distribution (steamos and the "failed" steamos console) and do their own research and development like ACO [0].
Proton in the end is "only" wine bundled with a good patchset and preinstalled debendencies, but even in the beginning you could get a good gaming experience out of the box that you only got through manual patching and tuning with wine.
I agree that steamos hasn't been a big success in the market, but I'm pretty sure Valve intended it as negotiating leverage - BATNA [1] - when Microsoft came out with Windows Store.
So long as Microsoft isn't declaring "No app stores except ours" or "30% cut of sales to us, no exceptions" steamos has been a success from Valve's point of view :)
I would argue Proton is a bit more than 'only' Wine and that it also includes projects like DXVK/D9VK. These make many, many more games playable at decent performance than would be possible with Wine's own solution.
Yeah counted dxvk as patch. Wine has it's own work on dx over vulkan and you can easily use dxvk with wine as well. It's the default for most of my wine prefixes.
Tbh I even got a wrapper script to try games with proton when they don't run well with wine just to see if it works any better and the wrapper is mostly setting environment variables and reading paths.
> I wonder how much of Proton development is really Valve and how much is originally Wine contributors though.
Both! They gained the advantage of 20 years of work on Wine before they started distributing it. Now they're continuing to push Wine forward by funding further development. Most work on Proton is sent to upstream Wine first, and is then merged back into Proton. All of this is visible in the public repositories.
This is exactly how open source should work :) Valve's Linux team are good open source citizens, you can rest easy.
