4 comments

  • jamies 3 hours ago
    For those curious, Proton is included with Steam, but GE's Proton includes many tweaks, improvements, and yes, rebasing on the latest upstream versions of many packages. For many games running in Linux GE Proton tends to be better than Valve's default Proton. GE Proton also includes features earlier than Valve, like FSR3 -> FSR4 upgrading, etc.

    CachyOS makes also makes a Proton that's similar but different from GE's. There's also Valve's Proton betas, Proton Experimental (which is often updated within days of major releases).

    ProtonDB.com is a great resource for finding out which "Proton" works best for a given game.

    • Ferret7446 2 hours ago
      Saying "many" games work better with GE is misleading I think, though perhaps technically true. The vast majority work out of the box with regular Proton. Reaching for GE is definitely the exception rather than the rule in my experience.
  • yincrash 7 hours ago
    It's interesting to read that an entire video streaming rework was done with AI, but likely won't be upstreamed because of the upstream policy on AI gen code. I wonder if that will ever be re-done using the plan GE outlined in the release notes.
    • yincrash 7 hours ago
      Also really excited about this because there are several games that get kind of borked because they get stuck on an intro video before you get to the game menu without doing any winetricks.

      > With all of that work done, I am happy to say all of the games listed above now have functional video playback with NO winetricks needed and NO dll overrides needed. No quartz,no dshow, no amstream, no lavfilters, no klite, no rsx3d, no wmp9, no wmp11, etc. -- All the functionality previously needed from those overrides is now patched directly into wine for the listed games that needed them, and the protonfixes that were previously added have now been removed since they are no longer needed.

      • ThatMedicIsASpy 5 hours ago
        Yeah the big left 4 dead clone (forgot the name) had video playback issues for me.
    • hackingonempty 7 hours ago
      It might come to be that maintainers have to begin accepting llm-authored or llm-assisted contributions just to maintain control of the project. Otherwise users will gravitate towards forks that offer the functionality they want.
      • worble 6 hours ago
        They very specifically do not accept AI contributions because there is no way to tell if it's just regurgitating parts of the various Windows source code leaks from over the years ad-hoc, which would be a very costly mistake to make if Microsoft were feeling litigious.
        • timschmidt 2 hours ago
          The remedy for unintentional infringement is generally to remove the infringing code and cease distribution. That used to be a serious issue when rewriting the offending code might take years. But these days? Rewriting any offending code is a matter of specifying the interfaces and setting Claude / Codex to work. Risk of incorporating derived code might go up with accepting LLM submissions, but cost of recovering from them seems to have dropped accordingly, at least on the technical side.
        • cedws 4 hours ago
          Tech companies shouldn’t be able have it both ways and say that copyright doesn’t apply to LLM-generated code only when it benefits them.
          • Ferret7446 2 hours ago
            They likely won't, once precedent setting judgements start coming out
          • bigstrat2003 4 hours ago
            And yet, they likely will be able to. The law doesn't have much hold on the rich.
        • cwillu 4 hours ago
        • Chaosvex 6 hours ago
          On the other hand, it'd be absolutely fascinating to see how that'd play out. The ramifications could be huge.
        • charcircuit 4 hours ago
          That would be something Microsoft would have to prove in court and not that the AI came up with a similar approach on its own. ReactOS never got sued despite its similarity to Window's code.

          Also not all Wine code is related to reverse engineering.

        • hackingonempty 5 hours ago
          More reason to ditch C, C++, and C#!
          • cwillu 4 hours ago
            The language wine is written in is irrelevant, the source is still tainted.
      • mostlysimilar 5 hours ago
        Or it might come to be that rejecting LLM-authored or LLM-assisted contributions becomes a badge of quality, and users gravitate to them to avoid buggy, inconsistent, or non-performant versions of the same software.
        • cwillu 4 hours ago
          There's no need to guess, the reasoning is clearly laid out:

          “Don't use an LLM tool to generate code. There's no guarantee that the training material of that LLM respects our Clean Room Guidelines, or that its output is compatible with the LGPL.”

          --https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...

        • PalmPilotProMax 4 hours ago
          The allure of being just good enough where the bling and hype of features outshine hidden bugs may win out socially.
      • Krssst 5 hours ago
        Doesn't wine have various rules to remain a white-room implementation?

        Not sure using LLMs which have possibly been trained on leaked Windows sources would be compatible with that. But that's just speculation, I wonder if LLMs possibly using leaked sources for training has been looked into. (probably legally difficult as the investigator would have to access the leaked sources too...)

    • charcircuit 6 hours ago
      I've implemented several missing features and fixed several compatibility issues in wine using LLMs. It works very well for the use case.
  • dwroberts 6 hours ago
    Might be useful to provide some context on why this fork is interesting or relevant
    • zamalek 3 hours ago
      It has fixes and features not in the official proton, but most importantly, proprietary codecs.
    • hparadiz 4 hours ago
      This guy works for red hat and his code is already constantly merged to upstream. His version is simply more bleeding edge. Also he's already somewhat famous in Linux gaming circles.
    • drnick1 4 hours ago
      I had the same question. Why is this needed? Valve already ships a Proton 11.0 (Beta) version in the Steam client.
    • simoncion 6 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • dwroberts 6 hours ago
        I have not needed any of these features to use proton on the games I own so I’m still none the wiser as to who the target is for this or what the context of this fork/its possible merging is
        • simoncion 5 hours ago
          > I have not needed any of these features to use proton on the games I own so I’m still none the wiser as to who the target is for this...

          ...it's people who need these features and fixes? If you don't need them, then you don't need them, and you don't care about this.

          With the addition of this comment, it seems like your commentary here boils down to "Why would I need this fork of this project that solves a specific set of problems that I neither have nor have bothered to understand?".

          I do agree that it's reasonable to not waste time learning about problems you don't have, aren't really important if you don't have them, and that you're not interested in learning about, so don't make the mistake of believing that I'm throwing scorn your way.

  • breatheoften 1 hour ago
    The "program produces this trace, reproduce it after changing xyz" loop is imo -- a kind of programming primitive for the current agent capabilities ... I've found technique like that really effective as well.

    It's interesting because there's a part of me that sometimes thinks "hey look this pattern is pretty effective -- I wonder if this a nascent abstraction on the path toward reasoning about how to use these tools in effective ways" -- while another part of me thinks "six months from now, you won't ever have to do this or if this is a useful technique the agent will just apply it on its own when relevant" ...