My hope is that community-developed Proton forks reach a point where they can stand on their own without Steam and Valve, perhaps as a component of or a sibling to Lutris, to conveniently run games from other platforms too.
I’ll admit that I don’t have a clear idea of how that would look or come about. It’s hard to beat the convenience of having the compatibility tool built directly into the launcher like in Steam, with individual prefixes and settings for different games if they have different requirements.
Well, that exists and works well. Proton GE exists and works outside of Steam, and it’s quite easy to manage. A lot of these improvements make their way back to WINE as well, so that’s a thing.
But what really sets Steam apart, at least for me, is:
selecting the right Proton version for a game
Steam infrastructure like Steam Input, so games “Just Work” with controllers
Those are a bit harder to separate. That said, running EGS or GOG games through Heroic directly works fine most of the time, so we’re already there for desktop, kb+mouse use. So if Valve goes evil, we have options.
My hope is that community-developed Proton forks reach a point where they can stand on their own without Steam and Valve, perhaps as a component of or a sibling to Lutris, to conveniently run games from other platforms too.
I’ll admit that I don’t have a clear idea of how that would look or come about. It’s hard to beat the convenience of having the compatibility tool built directly into the launcher like in Steam, with individual prefixes and settings for different games if they have different requirements.
Well, that exists and works well. Proton GE exists and works outside of Steam, and it’s quite easy to manage. A lot of these improvements make their way back to WINE as well, so that’s a thing.
But what really sets Steam apart, at least for me, is:
Those are a bit harder to separate. That said, running EGS or GOG games through Heroic directly works fine most of the time, so we’re already there for desktop, kb+mouse use. So if Valve goes evil, we have options.