Linux Gaming

The kickoff meeting for Vulkan was hosted by Valve. Like everything it’s not only Valve, but they had their fingers in this too. Valve is just one of the companies/groups that is pushing linux ports and vulkan support.

Valve is mostly moving interests of big game companies with steam machines and steam deck. Steam machines flopped, but initially they made companies consider ports. The success of steam deck will likely result into them paying more attention to not break wine/proton.

I feel like attributing this to Valve is really disrespectful to the folks who developed wine for decades

Honestly, it feels like comments like this are just intentionally missing the big picture, or just don't understand any of what Valve actually do.

It's been said by comments elsewhere, but Wine was really not good years ago. It was difficult to use, obscure as you had to seek it out and know what to do. Valve funded DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, various extra Wine patches and pushed it all together into Proton with Q&A testing, regular upgrades for big games to get them working ASAP and put it in front of millions easily directly in the Steam client.

and more recently also Vulkan

Which once again, Valve massively helped push and even hosted the early discussions on it.

It's a collaborative effort. The Wine and Vulkan projects have all done a lot and deserved credit for doing massive, amazing things. But for Linux gaming specifically, Proton has absolutely changed the landscape, and if Valve continues down this path, will make Linux an ever better gaming platform. So I don't think it's unfair to say thanks to Valve.

Not only have they sunk significant resource into making Linux gaming more viable, they've released Proton under BSD and seriously pushed developers to make Linux-compatible binaries. If Linux continues it's slow upward trend in popularity, Valve will be in large part to thank.

At least initially this was mostly DXVK though, which is a project that was secretly funded by Valve after it showed some promising initial results. Edit: but I agree that WINE deserves more credit.

I feel like attributing this to Valve

What exactly do you mean by "this"? The post is about the 5 year anniversary of Proton. Also, why do you consider crediting the developers of Wine disrespectful? I just can't follow.

Of course Proton wouldn't have been possible without all the many years of work that went into the Wine project in the first place, and everyone who contributed to Wine should be applauded for their effort. Valve has funded a lot of extra work though to get things like DXVK and VKD3D-Proton for the translation from Direct3D to Vulkan into a state where performance can be really great! Valve also funds work on Linux graphics drivers, Linux kernel work and the list goes on.

Thank you. I found this post disrespectful, and insulting. Valve have started contributing to a long running project. Which is great, but there has been tremendous work over the years before valve, and even still

You're right. So many people to thank here. One thing you cannot deny is that Valve is one of few companies that loves gaming on Linux and it deserves a huge credit.