wine VS Proton

Compare wine vs Proton and see what are their differences.

Proton

Compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components (by ValveSoftware)
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wine Proton
35 1,448
2,900 22,655
3.0% 1.9%
9.9 9.6
about 23 hours ago 5 days ago
C C++
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

wine

Posts with mentions or reviews of wine. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-09-02.
  • Why SciPy builds for Python 3.12 on Windows are a minor miracle
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Nov 2023
    Sometimes when a detail of Windows isn't documented, the Wine source code can be useful. Have you tried looking at it for details of win64 SEH? For example:

    https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/blob/master/dlls/ntdll/e...

    https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/blob/master/dlls/msvcrt/...

  • RIP, WordPad
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Sep 2023
    Source code: https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/tree/master/programs/wor...
  • DirectX 12 Support on macOS
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jun 2023
    It's Wine with some special sauce (Apple couldn't reuse VKD3D because they chose to invent Metal rather than stick with OpenGL/Vulkan so they had to build their graphics translation themselves). Crossover is built on the same technology. In fact, Apple's brew script literally links to Crossover's sources: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apple/homebrew-apple/main/...

    Things like the crypto API should be implemented if you can find the reference for your specific API calls here: https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/tree/master/dlls/crypt32

    Apple's version of Wine is aimed at developers, though. It shouldn't take too long for someone to make an app or script to easily set up environments with the developer runtime, but I doubt they'll support it as well as Valve supports Proton. If your application of choice doesn't need any fancy graphics, there's a decent chance Wine/Crossover can already run it anyway, no need to mess with Apple's SDK.

    With the M2 Max outputting 28fps at 1080p (screenshot linked), I wouldn't expect too much from the gaming performance of this thing, though.

  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2023)
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 May 2023
    Not the OP, but Github's stats on https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine say the current Wine codebase is 95.1% C, 0.3% C++
  • Show HN: Generate commit messages using GPT-3
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2023
    Take a look at Wine's commit log. It's really well curated. https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/commits/master
  • Looking to build a stripped down linux distro with *only* wine 🍷 !!
    1 project | /r/linuxquestions | 29 Jan 2023
  • Wine GE proton 7-33 released
    3 projects | /r/linux_gaming | 31 Oct 2022
    Fixes Overwatch 2 game freeze after a few seconds in game. After a long bisect it was found that wine-mirror/wine@4bf9d24 from upstream wine wine 7.13 and higher needed to be backported.
  • how do I install anomaly on linux?
    1 project | /r/stalker | 17 Oct 2022
    git clone https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine \ cd wine \ ./configure \ make \ make install \ wine ./Anomaly.exe
  • Rust on linux - update
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 25 Aug 2022
  • Proton troubleshooting in the Internet (tm) manner?
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 29 Jul 2022
    Well, I personally can't confirm nor deny that (the only "old" game I play is Plants vs Zombies (2009), and surprisingly it still works great with latest Proton). But the reality is that Wine/Proton are very large and complex projects, developed by pretty much just reverse engineering Windows; Couple this with the fact that a lot of changes happen in-between versions (especially in Wine), and even though an one-line change fixes an issue, it might end up breaking something, elsewhere. My point is, it's almost inevitable not to break stuff eventually. This is why Valve gives us older Proton versions to choose from.

Proton

Posts with mentions or reviews of Proton. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-22.
  • A New Era for Mixed Reality
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Apr 2024
    The "Metaverse" is a complete joke, and among gamers, Valve has a way better reputation than Meta. Why would they want to dilute that brand?

    They already have their own platform (Steam), OS (SteamOS), VR headset (Index), their own Windows translation layer (Proton, https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton), their own partnership with cloud gaming (Steam Cloud Play using GeForce Now , https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming), etc.

    IMO: As someone with thousands of games on Steam, there's no way in hell I'd want that linked to Facebook. I think they eventually removed the requirement to have a FB account to use a Quest, but they still require a Meta account. Yuck.

    This reeks of Facebook recognizing the Metaverse as the failure that it was and opening it up because it's no longer relevant...

  • Kerbal Space Program 2 is not playable on Linux with Proton
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Feb 2024
  • Proton, a fast and lightweight alternative to Apache Flink
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2024
    Or Valve's Proton[0], a tool for playing Windows games on Linux.

    https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

  • Proton 8.0-5 (Valve/ValveSoftware/Steam/SteamPlay/Wine/WineHQ/Linux/VideoGame)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2024
  • Red Dead Redemption not working
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 11 Dec 2023
  • Cyberpunk Issues
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 11 Dec 2023
  • Updated my citybuilder Trappist, switched to Vulkan, is anyone still dependent on OpenGL?
    1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 10 Dec 2023
  • NTFS messes up
    1 project | /r/pop_os | 10 Dec 2023
    Did you mount it with the correct flags?
  • How do I use multiple hard drives on Kubuntu for steam?
    2 projects | /r/Kubuntu | 10 Dec 2023
    there is a hack to try and use your existing windows game install from an NTFS drive, but i don't recommend it as steam will try to save file names that are not allowed on NTFS...plus ext4 is faster.
  • Game crashes within 10 seconds of launching unless I reinstall from scratch
    2 projects | /r/satisfactory | 9 Dec 2023
    From a quick search, here's what I found. It looks like you're encountering some common issues that can occur with games running on Linux through Proton, especially with the recent updates to games like Satisfactory that might affect compatibility. The log entries you're seeing related to D3DCompile2 failing to compile shader and the issues with Ternary operator and LinearToSrgbBranching not being defined, suggest that there's a problem with shader compilation. This can often be related to the version of Proton or the graphics drivers you are using. Some users have reported that the game does launch with the -vulkan option but with graphical glitches and lower performance, which indicates that the Vulkan renderer is working but possibly not optimally on your setup. From the discussions in the community, users have suggested ensuring that the latest drivers for your graphics card are installed and, if using an Intel GPU, that the Mesa drivers are up to date since Intel XeSS references were found in the logs. If you're using NVIDIA graphics, make sure you have the latest drivers and possibly set the PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 %command% to enable DLSS if you're under Vulkan. If you're using an Optimus laptop with both Intel and NVIDIA GPUs, make sure your Optimus setup is correctly configured. Some users have found success by specifying DXVK_FILTER_DEVICE_NAMES=GeForce to force the game to use the NVIDIA GPU. It's also worth noting that if you're encountering issues with DirectX 11, you might want to try forcing the game to use DirectX 10 if possible or look into DXVK configurations that could resolve compatibility issues. Lastly, if none of these solutions work, you could try running a trace with apitrace to gather more detailed logs that might point to the specific issue. If you're still stuck, it would be a good idea to report the issue to the Proton GitHub page or seek further assistance in the game's community forums where others might have encountered and solved similar issues. For more information and to find others who might have resolved similar issues, check out the community discussions on GitHub​​, Steam Community​​, and the DXVK GitHub page​​.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing wine and Proton you can also consider the following projects:

winapps - Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration.

lutris - Lutris desktop client

vkd3d-proton - Fork of VKD3D. Development branches for Proton's Direct3D 12 implementation.

proton-ge-custom - Compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components

wine-tkg-git - The wine-tkg build systems, to create custom Wine and Proton builds

dxvk-async

Whisky - A modern Wine wrapper for macOS built with SwiftUI

mf-install - Media Foundation workaround for Wine

Whisky - A modern Wine wrapper for macOS built with SwiftUI [Moved to: https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky]

yuzu - Nintendo Switch emulator

wine-mono

gamescope - SteamOS session compositing window manager [Moved to: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope]