The point I’m making is that with its process Lutris + Wine are scaling up much faster to seamlessly make all sorts of Windows games Click & Play in Linux, than Steam can or even will try to (don’t expect Steam to get around to cover older games that aren’t successful AAA titles).
It’s the same old same old, open source software solution vs closed corporate software solution that happens in so many other domains: the open source one starts clunky and quirky and it will always tend towards the side of “giving users enough rope to hang themselves with” (too many option, many very powerful) whilst the closed corporate one will from the very start be slick and easier to use but very limited when it comes to what users can do to customize it or even fix it when it doesn’t work, but over time and if it manages to survive the open source one will be better and far more capable and flexible than the corporate one simply because contributions to it scale up with interest in it and number of users whilst that’s not so for the corporate one.
It’s what you see with for example Blender vs Adobe’s suit of 3D modelling programs or Linux vs Windows (if it weren’t for the well entrenched ecosystem of Windows-only applications, I doubt Windows would still be around).
That’s why I think something like Lutris + Wine are the future, not Proton integrated into the Store application of Steam.
But really what I’m asking for, as a customer, is for GOG to do this work for me before I buy. Because it’s all open source, there’s nothing stopping them. Valve pumped a bunch of money into the projects to improve things for everyone, but they’re still doing more work on their end.
Valve is a much, much bigger company than GoG, plus Valve’s Linux strategy is really a “have our own console on the cheap” strategy.
But yeah, GoG should be doing more for gaming on Linux, maybe not as much as Valve but proportionally so. At the moment they’re doing almost nothing at all: they have Linux offline installers available for games which do support Linux directly, but that’s it.
So whilst I find it unrealistic to expect that GoG should be contributing to gaming on Linux as much as Valve, I do agree they should be doing more.
PS: Mind you, I’m not trying to make the case that GoG is perfect and Steam is shit, I’m trying to make the case that open and flexible to use is better than closed and tightly integrated with a specific store, which is why I generally prefer GoG with their offline installers, as well as Lutris + Wine (quite independently of GoG) and would be happy enough even if Lutris had no GoG integration since long before moving my gaming rig to Linux I had the habit of downloading and using the offline installers and did not at all use GoG Galaxy.
If there’s one thing that 30 years of being a Software Engineer have taught me is that you want your system to be as decoupled as possible from any business, because even if they are nice at the moment that’s no guarantee that at a later date they won’t leverage people having their systems integrated with theirs to take advantage of their customers (the phenomenon of enshittification being a good example of that).
Oh, absolutely.
The point I’m making is that with its process Lutris + Wine are scaling up much faster to seamlessly make all sorts of Windows games Click & Play in Linux, than Steam can or even will try to (don’t expect Steam to get around to cover older games that aren’t successful AAA titles).
It’s the same old same old, open source software solution vs closed corporate software solution that happens in so many other domains: the open source one starts clunky and quirky and it will always tend towards the side of “giving users enough rope to hang themselves with” (too many option, many very powerful) whilst the closed corporate one will from the very start be slick and easier to use but very limited when it comes to what users can do to customize it or even fix it when it doesn’t work, but over time and if it manages to survive the open source one will be better and far more capable and flexible than the corporate one simply because contributions to it scale up with interest in it and number of users whilst that’s not so for the corporate one.
It’s what you see with for example Blender vs Adobe’s suit of 3D modelling programs or Linux vs Windows (if it weren’t for the well entrenched ecosystem of Windows-only applications, I doubt Windows would still be around).
That’s why I think something like Lutris + Wine are the future, not Proton integrated into the Store application of Steam.
But really what I’m asking for, as a customer, is for GOG to do this work for me before I buy. Because it’s all open source, there’s nothing stopping them. Valve pumped a bunch of money into the projects to improve things for everyone, but they’re still doing more work on their end.
Valve is a much, much bigger company than GoG, plus Valve’s Linux strategy is really a “have our own console on the cheap” strategy.
But yeah, GoG should be doing more for gaming on Linux, maybe not as much as Valve but proportionally so. At the moment they’re doing almost nothing at all: they have Linux offline installers available for games which do support Linux directly, but that’s it.
So whilst I find it unrealistic to expect that GoG should be contributing to gaming on Linux as much as Valve, I do agree they should be doing more.
PS: Mind you, I’m not trying to make the case that GoG is perfect and Steam is shit, I’m trying to make the case that open and flexible to use is better than closed and tightly integrated with a specific store, which is why I generally prefer GoG with their offline installers, as well as Lutris + Wine (quite independently of GoG) and would be happy enough even if Lutris had no GoG integration since long before moving my gaming rig to Linux I had the habit of downloading and using the offline installers and did not at all use GoG Galaxy.
If there’s one thing that 30 years of being a Software Engineer have taught me is that you want your system to be as decoupled as possible from any business, because even if they are nice at the moment that’s no guarantee that at a later date they won’t leverage people having their systems integrated with theirs to take advantage of their customers (the phenomenon of enshittification being a good example of that).