proton-cachyos and others Proton sources

[Delor3an91]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

No possibility to add a GitHub Proton source.

Describe the solution you'd like

1. Add the proton-cachyos GitHub as another source to download and install their Proton versions.
2. Add the possibility to manually add a GitHub Proton repository.

Thank You for your amazing work!

Wish You well

[DavidoTek]

Sorry for the late reply.

As you pointed out, the version of Proton does not provide any binary releases. There are two possible approaches:

1. Implement a compatibility tool module (ctmod) that downloads the sources and builds them on the users machine
2. Request that proton-cachyos (and other tools too for that matter) provide pre-build binaries

I think it makes the most sense to build each tool only once and go with approach (2) in the case of proton-cachyos. Furthermore, the compilation takes a while and that would not be ideal for the user experience.

I understand that there are compatibility tools that are not used by many and that it can be interesting to build individual forks/branches/tags. I don't have spare time to build such a ctmod at the moment but I'm open to accepting a PR if someone builds it. It could work by supplying a local folder or a URL+commit in a custom popup that opens once the Install button in the install dialog is pressed.

[loathingKernel]

The reason proton-cachyos exists is because we wanted a version that didn't depend on the Steam runtime, but is running on the host system outside of pressure-vessel. As such it contains modifications that wouldn't allow it to be built as a redistributable until now. Recently we decided to start providing Steam Linux Runtime based releases which can be found here. At this point it is not decided yet that we want to keep doing this. If this is going to become a regular release, I will let you know.

[DavidoTek]

we wanted a version that didn't depend on the Steam runtime, but is running on the host system outside of pressure-vessel

What is the reason for this? I assume you're doing that so it uses the optimized libraries of CachyOS?

Recently we decided to start providing Steam Linux Runtime based releases which can be found here. At this point it is not decided yet that we want to keep doing this. If this is going to become a regular release, I will let you know.

Okay. That would change a lot as it would allow us to use the existing mechanisms of ProtonUp-Qt.

---

1. Implement a compatibility tool module (ctmod) that downloads the sources and builds them on the users machine

One thing that came to my mind if we decided to add the build from source feature: The compilation has to run on the host as the library versions inside the Flatpak are different than the ones on the host.

[loathingKernel]

What is the reason for this? I assume you're doing that so it uses the optimized libraries of CachyOS?

That is one reason, the other is using more recent toolchains to leverage different ISA levels, proton-cachyos as a distro package is also available for x86-64-v3 and znver4. The third reason is that is easier for us to modify the environment to test stuff. We have done experiments with waylanddrv, ntsync etc, which would require for us to modify the Steam runtime to do normally.

One thing that came to my mind if we decided to add the build from source feature: The compilation has to run on the host as the library versions inside the Flatpak are different than the ones on the host.

If I might chip in here, the SLR version of proton-cachyos is built using a GH Actions workflow, which could be modified to build any other version. It might be an option for self-hosted Proton builds.