they forked the existing project wine and submit patches back to it. they didn't build it from scratch. the wine project is a herculean feat of engineering and the more I learn about it, the more shocked I am that it exists. Microsoft implemented the inverse translation layer in WSL2, which allows linux programs to run in windows - with a major caveat: wine executes native windows binaries whereas WSL still requires recompiling executables into a compatible format (last I checked anyways).
I think so far most of it has gotten upstreamed. at least, I can play most I try (not very many, granted... rarely in the mood) with plain wine. but my understanding from the project is that Valve tries to upstream fixes once they're deemed reliable enough and as long as they don't pose problems for other applications.
Admittedly for their specific use case proton goes way beyond wine
Actually no; proton is almost entirely wine. It's really like 90% the community (wine contributors over a span of three decades), 8% a german developer on his free time (the one that implemented dxvk, which is 99% of the magic in proton), and like 2% valve (and mostly because they started to pay said german dev).
This is the culmination of 30 years of community contributions, almost entirely by volunteers, without profit motive. Valve did very little beyond adding a bubblewrap-based sandbox to improve reliability a bit - though they did speed up things those past few years, admittedly.
Steam made a compatibility layer that makes Windows games work better on Linux. Lots of games that aren't made for Linux run great with it.
they forked the existing project wine and submit patches back to it. they didn't build it from scratch. the wine project is a herculean feat of engineering and the more I learn about it, the more shocked I am that it exists. Microsoft implemented the inverse translation layer in WSL2, which allows linux programs to run in windows - with a major caveat: wine executes native windows binaries whereas WSL still requires recompiling executables into a compatible format (last I checked anyways).
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I think so far most of it has gotten upstreamed. at least, I can play most I try (not very many, granted... rarely in the mood) with plain wine. but my understanding from the project is that Valve tries to upstream fixes once they're deemed reliable enough and as long as they don't pose problems for other applications.
Actually no; proton is almost entirely wine. It's really like 90% the community (wine contributors over a span of three decades), 8% a german developer on his free time (the one that implemented dxvk, which is 99% of the magic in proton), and like 2% valve (and mostly because they started to pay said german dev).
This is the culmination of 30 years of community contributions, almost entirely by volunteers, without profit motive. Valve did very little beyond adding a bubblewrap-based sandbox to improve reliability a bit - though they did speed up things those past few years, admittedly.
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