[Colchester] Valve Steam Beta on Linux Mint 19 with WINE Proton

[Wayland Sothcott]

Hello Colchester Linux User Group,

There has been a massive improvement in gaming on Linux this week.
Windows games now play perfectly. OK not all.

I've built a test machine with the following spec to try this out;
Hardware
ASUS P5Q motherboard with a Xeon X5450 patched for 775 at 3.4GHz
8GB DDR, 120GB SSD, Radeon R9 290x.

Software
Latest Linux Mint 19 Cinnamon
Latest AMDGPU-PRO with Vulkan
Latest WINE 3.15
Latest Steam Beta for Linux

Performance
Cinebench 360
Uningine Superposition 4320

It's actually quite easy to get this installed. It is important to build 
the machine from scratch for this as it needs quite specific software of 
the latest version. The only tricky bit is editing the Linux version 
file to trick AMDGPU installer to think you're running Ubuntu. 
Everything else went in pretty much as per the instructions on Github.

Running Cinebench was a good test for Wine as it's only available on 
Windows. I ran the Linux version of Superposition.

Installing Steam was as easy as clicking the install button on 
Steampowered website. You do have to activate BETA mode so that even 
unapproved Windows games will attempt to load.

I was able to run Uningine Heaven Windows version on DX11 at 40fps but 
the Linux version on OpenGL was more like 70fps.

I have some steam games which were Windows only which ran perfectly. 
Steam uses it's own version of Wine optimized for Linux called Proton. 
This is installed automatically.

Conclusion, Valve have opened up a vast number of Windows games for 
Linux. They just have to work their way through them to approve them. 
Developers will now be ensuring their games are Steam Proton compatible. 
With Vulkan on both Windows and Linux coding natively for both has also 
got easier. More people will be ditching Windows 10 for Linux now.

What do you think?

Regards,
Wayland.