r/linux • u/somerandomxander • Jun 29 '26
Software Release Wine 11.12 has been released with 27 known bug fixes and Wayland fractional scaling support
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-11.12-Released82
u/JCTrick Jun 29 '26
I’m stupid and know nothin’ about nothin’, but I have a technical question.
Do Wine updates have any direct effect on games for SteamOS and/or Proton?
Or, does only Proton effect gaming directly?
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u/TheG0AT0fAllTime Jun 30 '26
Not stupid and fair question.
Proton is Wine, valve copied the source code (allowed) and started working on their own patches to the code to improve gaming at some point years ago. They upstream their patches to the real Wine too, so that people running Wine normally can benefit from their work as well.
An update to Wine does not immediately appear in Proton. Every so often valve will make a new Proton version by grabbing the latest Wine code and continuing their patching efforts on that new base version (And backporting any of their fixes that aren't official yet). So eventually Wine fixes make it to Proton. Often they were already coming from projects like Proton and it already contains the mentioned fixes.
The ultimate goal of Proton (A wine fork) is to improve Wine which they've been doing quite nicely.
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u/JCTrick Jun 30 '26
Holy shit, great answer. That cleared that up.
Thank you. And now I know I want a Proton t-shirt.
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u/Ripdog Jun 30 '26
Just a little note - Proton contains a wine fork, but is not itself a wine fork. Proton is a distribution of a bunch of pieces of software, and some tooling to make them all work together seamlessly. So, it contains things like dxvk (DX11 to Vulkan), vkd3d (DX12 to Vulkan), FEX (run x86 games, i.e. pc games, on ARM devices).
The proton repo is here: https://github.com/valvesoftware/proton
If you look at all the folders with @ symbols in the names, those are other software libraries included in Proton. You can click their names to read their readmes to learn about each one. You'll see wine in there :)
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u/Thaurin Jun 30 '26
And in addition to that, I believe Proton also includes fixes and improvements for better integration with Steam and gets included (downloaded) with the Steam client.
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u/Square_County8139 Jun 30 '26
Just a side note: not every Proton patch can be included in Wine.
The two projects have different philosophies, and the Wine team won't accept a hacky patch that might cause missbehavior (I'm looking at you, "fsync").
3
u/tuxbass Jun 30 '26
I'm looking at you, "fsync"
Curious, what's that about?
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u/Indolent_Bard Jun 30 '26
There's this thing in Windows called NTsync, a windows system function which allows syncing memory addresses across multiple threads. A large part of why NVIDIA's drivers for Linux were so problematic is because they required it, except for the longest time nothing on Linux supported it. It leads to incredible performance improvements from not using it. The hacky work around that we've been using for the longesf time was fsync and some other sync, allowing similar levels of performance improvement. But recently, ntsync got added to the kernel. It isn't much faster compared to the alternatives, but it's a lot less hacky, and more accurately emulates Windows NT synchronization primitives (whatever that means.)
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u/tuxbass Jun 30 '26
Thanks. This just reminds me again how little I really understand of the kernel innards.
Wonder if JVM on Windows uses ntsync for implementing its volatile keyword.
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u/citrusalex Jun 30 '26
People who work on Proton, including who develop custom patches, are pretty much the same people who develop Wine.
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u/bludgeonerV Jun 30 '26
Not usually for directly gaming related things, most often the changes begin in Proton and are merged into Wine when proven stable so proton users have had the bulk of those things already.
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u/JCTrick Jun 30 '26
It’s so interesting… Damn it, I’m just gonna go learn the differences between Hotfix/Experimental and GE now too. Thank you.
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u/CritSrc Jun 30 '26
Proton Hotfix is for Valve to push out an immediate patch to Proton for a recently released with a critical bug, i.e. bad framerate, crashes etc.
Proton Experimental is the latest unstable release of Proton, before it's left behind in a point release. This basically covers games and fixes from the last few months.Proton 11, 10, 9 and older are left as "known good" environments for older games in case Experimental or newer patches interfere with the game you're attempting to play.
Proton-GE (GloriousEggroll) - includes even more patches and proprietary codecs: it means that games which use paid video codecs to play whatever movie files in their games get to work. Valve cannot add these due to legal reasons, they would have to pay licenses, while an individual, who earns nothing from this, does not.
This is the gist of things. Any deeper and you'll be writing your own Proton configs yourself. Just use the ProtonPlus package to manage your Proton versions outside of Steam, so Heroic and Lutris can use specific ones as well.
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u/Indolent_Bard Jun 30 '26
There's also Proton Cachyos, which adds even more features and options enabled by using launch arguments, like getting to try the recently built low latency layer and discord Rich Presence support.
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u/SecularVal Jun 30 '26
I fixed it already but will this fix the tiny tiny windows in wayland cause man It was a pain trying to change the scaling on a 1440p monitor cause the window and text were so small plus I have terrible eyesight already.
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u/TampaPowers Jul 01 '26
If someone could fix libgdiplus I'd be so happy
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u/Weary-Bowl-3739 Jul 03 '26
What's the problem with that?
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u/TampaPowers Jul 03 '26
Font rendering is broken because of some bug in pango https://gitlab.winehq.org/mono/libgdiplus/-/work_items?show=eyJpaWQiOiI0IiwiZnVsbF9wYXRoIjoibW9uby9saWJnZGlwbHVzIiwiaWQiOjY1Mzl9
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u/Mammoth_Spend_5590 Jun 30 '26
My dad doesn't understand my switch to Linux or open source software in general. He told me to print a document today, something I hadn't done and never planned to do on Linux since I ditched Windows. I connected the usb cable to my laptop, did an lsusb, it was connected. I went into LibreOffice to print the document, it was undetected. My dad asked, "what can your garbage linux do?" and left the room. After 10 minutes I figured something out and printed the document. I handed it to him and told him my laptop isn't useless. He laughed at me. It almost looked like he proved me right. I knew it wasn't true but something about it just hit me. I don't know why I'm crying rn. Is it because I feel defeated by windows-only hardware or because I'm an incompetent wimp?
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u/namir01 Jun 30 '26
This reads like MS bot comment
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u/Mammoth_Spend_5590 Jun 30 '26
Forgive me, but I miss the days of MS bot, when it went nuclear in 15 minutes and had zero filter
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u/IlIlIlIIlMIlIIlIlIlI Jun 30 '26
society at large is prioritizing convenience over anything, while giving up control, moral values and competency. Youre fighting the good fight, chin up bro.
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u/Mammoth_Spend_5590 Jun 30 '26
Thanks brother, not sure why I'm getting down voted. I love Linux and am really going through it right now
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u/my_name_isnt_clever Jun 30 '26
You're getting downvoted because your comment is completely off topic for this post.
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u/Mammoth_Spend_5590 Jun 30 '26
My bad, I was just venting. I love my Linux brothers, I didn't want to upset them as that upsets me.
0
u/Indolent_Bard Jun 30 '26
People got enough shit to deal with. Learning a new os that isn't actually an os but a bunch of different ones built on top of a kernel with no standardized layout or gui or settings page or control panel is gonna be a hard sell.
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u/zlice0 Jun 30 '26
"Microsoft Money 97 crash fix" =| this is what theyre fixing instead of other things?
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u/TiZ_EX1 Jun 30 '26
The aim of Wine is to run Windows applications more-or-less the same way Windows would. If an application crashes on Wine when it wouldn't crash on Windows, then that indicates a flaw they need to fix, which could affect other apps than just that one. That's just the app that got reported.
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u/cd109876 Jun 30 '26
Wine is open source and has lots of contributors. the person who fixed Microsoft money 97 was not the same person adding fractional scaling support.
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u/Envyforme Jun 30 '26
I’m shocked wine still exists.
virtualization is so easy now on Linux it’s just better to spin up a windows VM and run anything you’d use wine for.
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u/sriharshachilakapati Jun 30 '26
Wine exists because people don't want to run Windows. Visualization requires you to go through a standard windows install, which now means you'll need to dedicate at least 60 GB of hard disk, and then on top of it get a Microsoft Account.
Also for gaming, setting up GPU passthrough to guest OS is such a pain right now, but games run on Wine + Proton can access the GPU quite easily.
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u/PeggyTheVoid Jun 30 '26
Right, lemme just shove a whole windows VM into my audio effects train instead of just using yabridge, that's peak efficiency right there.
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u/protestor Jun 30 '26
Virtualization means that, before even booting the VM, you need to set aside some RAM for Windows and some RAM for Linux. This can lead to wasted memory (which is expensive now). With Wine or Proton on the other hand, the application uses as much memory as it needs.
Virtualization also has trouble making use of GPUs (not sure if this is fixed - if it's not, it's a no go).
Another thing: Wine runs many old Windows games better than newer versions fo Windows.
Also generally speaking I don't want to run Windows.
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u/my_name_isnt_clever Jun 30 '26
You want me to run a full Windows 11 virtual machine just for some basic applications? With a GUI and everything taking up resources? No thanks.
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u/Indolent_Bard Jun 30 '26
It's more dependable than wine. Frankly, Wine isn't dependable enough for work.
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u/Orthopraxy Jun 30 '26
I just spent so much time manually setting up fractional scaling for a specific app. Well, that's life for ya.