Lutris 0.4.19 released, Proton thoughts

The initial plan to ship 0.5.0 after 0.4.18 changed when some pretty serious issues where found with the runtime. Lutris 0.5.0 still needs a lot of work and keeping the 0.4.x branch alive is necessary at that point. This release merges some features that were only available on the 'next' branch in the Git repo, mostly fixes related to the runtime loading. 

Also, a widely requested feature was to have an up to date list of DXVK versions in the options, this is now the case thanks to @matthewkovacs' pull request!

Another big change with this version is the ability to push updates for winetricks, the version we ship is now able to install .NET 4.7.1 (thanks to @Tk-Glitch's patch) and 4.7.2 (which is included in the latest winetricks version).

With this release out, it is now time to focus on the website and push a few features to make contributor's lives easier. This is the goal of the BIg Moderator Update, which will be pushed incrementally over the next few months.

The client will also receive a future update soon with 0.4.20, where 25 issues are to be resolved.

Needless to say, the past few weeks have been crazy, with the mention of the project on large Youtube channels such as Linus Tech Tips and Level1Techs, or established news outlets like Forbes!

And obviously, there's the announcement of Proton and SteamPlay which came as a total shock! When the initial rumors of a compatibility layer were around, I didn't believe it would be a Wine solution, seeing as too hackish. But, looking at the current state of Wine, I have to admit that we have come a long way (and now I better understand why, with the backing of a giant such as Valve). Over the past few weeks, I had running games such as Tekken 7, Battlefield 1 and Grand Theft Auto V. Even Fortnite runs very well whenever Epic Games doesn't kick Linux users out with their anti-cheat. The current combo of Wine esync 3.15 + DKVK 0.71 works amazingly and provides an unsurpassed level of compatibility with Windows games! Having Valve leverage Wine's and DXVK's technology for their compatibility layer is the best scenario for Linux gaming in general. This allows Vulkan to keep up with the current games, and not be dependent on a few rare native ports to push the specifications. For example, games such as Quake Champions and The Witcher 3 are pushing some features in the Vulkan specs, this also helps with the evolution of Mesa and the Nvidia drivers. 

Like Valve said in their announcement, game publishers will be able to focus on future titles, running natively on Vulkan, instead of focusing on porting older titles. Let's not forget that Valve does not only focus on Wine but is also working on fixing display managers on Linux, with Keith Packard (Xorg developer, currently employed by Valve) promising the elimination of tearing in future display servers.

Another side effect of SteamPlay is that it greatly simplifies the integration with Steam itself, not forcing users to maintain two separate installs of Steam on the same machine. That's in the eventuality where all games are SteamPlay compatible of course. I encountered a few games that couldn't run with SteamPlay but would run without issue using Lutris (Darksiders 1, Dmc Devil May Cry, Batman: Arkham Series, ...). In many cases, some games will benefit from being installed in Lutris.

Keeping up with all the evolutions of Wine during the past few weeks hasn't been an easy task but now that Proton is out, it looks like we have a bit stabilized our stack while growing the project a lot. 

The support from the community has never been this good and I'm starting to see an increasing amount of patches on Github and an increasing amount of pledges on Patreon which is very encouraging for the future of the project! Thank you all for making Lutris a reality!