The FSF celebrates four decades of software freedom with a new president and the LibrePhone initiative for privacy-focused mobile computing.

The project, developed in partnership with veteran free software developer Rob Savoye, aims to create a fully free and open mobile platform, from the firmware to the operating system.

  • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
    4·
    2 days ago

    When Proton started, it was kind of a joke, killed the Steam Machine idea in large part because the game compatibility was so limited. A decade later, we have a multi billion dollar handheld PC market lead by the Steam Deck, a Linux handheld that can play tens of thousands of Windows games without issue, in some cases with better performance than their native platform.

    Proton’s existence did not overlap the existence of the Steam Machine program, like at all. Proton’s initial release was on the 21st of August 2018. Steam Machines were first released in 2015 and had been delisted from Steam entirely by April 2018.

    Wine existed back then, sure, but Steam Machines didn’t benefit from DXVK, VKD3D, or any of the myriad per-game and gaming-oriented tweaks that Valve and Codeweavers have made to Wine in the version bundled with Proton. For most people, the prospect of using Wine on a Steam Machine was a huge pain at best. Valve’s official position at the time was that they were helping pay for Linux ports of games.

    • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.mlM
      2·
      13 hours ago

      Fair point, I thought Proton went back farther than that.

      I think my overall point is right still though, Linux gaming (native or otherwise) has become not just viable, but in some cases objectively superior to gaming on Windows in terms of raw performance. Pretty amazing, and in even less time than I originally thought lol.

      • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
        2·
        3 hours ago

        Yeah. It’s improved by leaps and bounds since DXVK and VKD3D came into existence. Wine was already incredibly robust and powerful with like 20 years of development on it, so Proton combining Wine with those other 2 projects for better DirectX support and then also managing Wine prefixes and tweaks automatically brought us from “if you’re persistent and tweak a lot of settings a good chunk of games work” to “most games just work”, and now even “if a game doesn’t work on Linux now it’s because the devs are blocking it actively”

        And of course, Valve’s active financial support and direct contributions to all of the projects involved has improved the reliability and performance of all of the tech involved by leaps and bounds.