- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I really don’t like Epic personally, but this is still pretty huge. Linux and SteamOS have come a long way. CEO Tim Sweeney has always been very negative towards the idea of Linux support, so Epic changing that stance would suggest that Linux/SteamOS has finally become too big of a market to ignore.
I would be genuinely shocked if they actually manage to do anything remotely substantial to make games run on Linux. This sounds more like them jumping late on the Steam train (pun intended) as they have been doing up to this point.
Yes, I expect they’ll just make a Linux client and rely on UMU or some other open source project to actually get them to run.
I don’t expect them to meaningfully push the Linux platform forward as Valve has done.
tim will probably whine that you have to add the ppa manually and “linux is blocking our store”.
They can rely on an open source project called Proton.
Proton is really meant to work through steam, UMU is meant to replicate how reliably games run through steam+proton without steam. There’s a reason that heroic and all the other game launchers are switching to UMU as the default for running games.
My basic understanding is that, in addition to proton, steam provides a set of Linux runtimes, to make sure that the converted system calls from proton always match up with the correct standardized runtimes on the Linux system, regardless of distro. They also provide winetricks/protontricks as needed for games. There’s also some system variables passed to tell proton/etc that the game is running through steam and has this setup. Finally steam distributes shader caches, which both improve performance, and bypass proprietary video codecs by replacing them with open source friendly video files.
UMU is basically replicating all of this except the shader/media distribution, hopefully allowing games to run as reliably outside of steam as they do inside of it.