Not everything in Linux ecosystem is pleasant. There are issues that plague the community driven development and maintenance of the various components in Linux ecosystem, and depending on the features being used, things that were working fine may suddenly give up, for no fault of the user. In the last 2 posts, I shared some excellent experiences I have had with Gaming on Linux. Let me also share the other side of the coin today.
3/n. Broken Proton releases ruin the Linux gaming experience
Steam’s Proton is the way to play Windows games on Linux. A decade ago, this was magic, but now not so much. Wine had been for a long time, extending compatibility to executables built for Windows (a completely different OS architecture) one application at a time. Back in the days when I was in college, being able to run just Winzip through Wine also seemed to be a heavenly achievement. Nowadays, Wine can run AAA games with ease (conditions apply).
Proton is a wrapper on Wine aimed at making the configs one-click for the user. It creates wine config per game, including synthetic Windows filesystem. It is a project by Valve, and have come leaps and bounds over the years. However, Proton is very moody; some versions work for some games but not for others.
Proton 3.16.x was a pretty stable version, followed by 4.11.x. However, 5.0.x seems to be breaking stuff that were working perfectly fine. There are known issues like “Proton does not like NTFS”, support for ESYNC (not sure why they cannot turn the damn thing off by default), fuzzy support for the Steam Overlay (a Valve product by the way), etc. However, it is not acceptable when Steam updates itself automatically, installs the latest Proton (even if it is a major release), then breaks a perfectly working game just because it can. You need to manually select the older Proton version (thankfully they don’t uninstall it) and it starts working again – which means the issue is not with my system but the latest release.
You might be thinking now – “Meh, big deal. You just need to select another option in a dropdown”. That is really not the point of this post. When the new version was updated, I did not see any message from Steam that some games may stop working, try this if so, etc. I have to spend time on the internet to search for the issue, then make the changes. I have better things to do as a consumer. It is not their business to waste my time.
I am not being ungrateful here. If it was a new, “early access” product, 0.x version, I get it. But this is the 5th “major” version, was perfectly working before, which they did not bother to test properly. Clearly, the quality of testing done before releasing a major version is poor. The last thing any software application wants is regression – i.e. breaking something that was working before. In any software company, new features are often not released if regression tests fail (i.e. if a regression is found on the new build).
Now, unlike many community driven projects, Proton has the backing of Valve, a not so small company. And Valve does want the gaming community to not be dependent on its Big Neighbor of Seattle. However, it fails to shine over the typical mindset of the community in general, when developing a Linux product or its next major release.
Somehow developers think that product/ user experience is immaterial to the user, and it is okay to release a broken product just because it is free (there is no warranty anyway). If you point to them these flaws, they snap at you that they are working for free, so you should just take the code yourself and fix it. As if the user is just sitting in his mother’s basement without any real work and with all the time in the world. When you complain, apart from being called names you will also be given the “advice” of paying for Windows and be done. It is beyond the comprehension of these p*****s that criticism is the first step of improvement. If you cannot accept criticism, how can you grow?
And why cannot I complain without personally contributing to the code base? I am a consumer. Wouldn’t it be my “choice” (holy grail of the community) whether I want to contribute or not? Tomorrow if I watch a movie, I cannot criticize the performance of an actor because I cannot act? Or cannot criticize a footballer because I don’t play football?
Yes the above two examples generate income, unlike our developers. But here is the thing. If I pay for an open source software product (remember open-source and free are orthogonal), are these developers mature enough to provide a warranty or own it up? No. They will need a business focused management over them to do so, like Red Hat. Because individually they don’t care.
No product would have survived so many broken releases like Linux ecosystem does. Any complain, criticism, will still not be looked upon, but instead shelved with a comment that “fix it yourself if you think it is broken”. This is really the ONLY reason we are yet so see the year of Linux Desktop.
Hello, new world! 