Packaging Proton

Project Discussion
1

Here is the license Proton uses:

Reading the README it looks like it would be easy to build. I would like to package this myself if it is allowed to be.

1 Like
2

Is there a lot of value in packaging Proton? We already package wine. I believe Proton is trying to merge all it’s changes into wine. Even if not do we have a lot of people interested in running Proton outside of Steam?

3

I myself would like to run proton without steam. I don’t know if it is a popular thing to do. I dont know if it is documented on how to do it.

4

Proton by itself doesn’t do anything. You use it to run windows programs. It is a tweaked version of wine. How much difference there is from wine I don’t know. To me, Proton is only useful if I’m trying to run program X and it doesn’t run on wine but does run on Proton. Do you have that case?

I’m not saying you can’t package it if that is what you want to do. I package mingw-libgamerzilla even though no one other than me uses it to my knowledge. If Proton is heavily divergent from wine and runs many games it can’t, I would be all for it. I don’t think that is the case but haven’t looked into it.

5

It’s a fork of wine with many fixes and enhancements making it better for video games. I am almost certain proton runs many games wine can’t or if wine does it will have enhancements to run better than on wine. Right now though, the list of games is basically just ‘what is on steam’. It could be expanded to gog, humble bundle, etc if a stand alone package was made.

6

We seem to have differing opinions on Proton. I think of it as being wine with a small number of improvements which are being moved back into wine. You think of it as a bigger set of changes. You might be right. Feel free to package it. Wine is split in multiple packages. I don’t know if packaging Proton would require similar treatment.

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This license is (word-for-word; I checked just to be sure) the 3-clause BSD license. This is one of the fundamental non-copyleft licenses and good in Fedora.

So it’s not really a matter of whether you can, but whether it’s useful. :slight_smile: It’s probably a good idea to do a proof-of-concept in Copr.

8

Proton is largely useless without Steam. For example, the SteamAppId environment variable set by the Steam Client is used to create per-game wineprefix and apply game-specific workarounds in Wine. Also Steam handles installation of win32-side dependencies, like directx and vcrun. The proton script does rather complex prefix setup, which also likely won’t work outside Steam.