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Proton instead of Wine?

aaronfranke

Tue Nov 05, 2019 2:02:45 am

Hello Zorin developers and users,

One of the features of Zorin listed on the home page is this:

Compatible.
Your office documents, music, videos and photos simply work. You can even run many Windows apps using Wine.

If Zorin's goal is to be compatible, wouldn't it be great if Zorin shipped Proton instead of Wine? Proton is a fork of Wine created by Valve which contains Wine, many other tools such as DXVK, D9VK, FAudio, and it also contains many patches directly over Wine. Generally speaking, a lot more Windows software runs on Proton than on Wine.

P.S. I also noticed that on the page that the "Wine" link leads to, you recommend PlayOnLinux. However, PlayOnLinux has been deprecated. The PlayOnLinux developers have started development from scratch on a project called Phoenicis, and also Lutris is really common for such things. However, for games, people usually just use Steam since it has Proton built-in now.

Swarfendor437

Tue Nov 05, 2019 8:03:17 pm

I think that Zorin will support such packages but I think it has made the right decision NOT to include WINE. A much better solution from a security point of view is to run Windows 7 inside of Virtual Box which is what I do with 32-bit version. Once you have backed up a snapshot of the VB Virtual Hard Drive it is simple enough to restore Windows more or less instantly should it ever come unstuck. As a guy on YouTube pointed out, now that WINE is no longer present it is more secure than those GNU/Linux distributions that do include WINE. Personally I will have nothing to do with WINE or any derivative:

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=14806

aaronfranke

Tue Nov 05, 2019 8:28:10 pm

Swarfendor437 wrote:I think that Zorin will support such packages but I think it has made the right decision NOT to include WINE. [...]

Yeah, I agree that Wine is inherently insecure. I moreso meant provide Proton packages rather than have it pre-installed by default, but installing should be easy if users want to do that.

Aravisian

Wed Nov 06, 2019 3:07:43 am

I am glad you asked simply because I never heard of Proton in this sense and I did not know PlayonLinux was deprecated. I never really use PoL.
I rarely use Wine, but even so, it can occassionally be useful. I will look into Proton.