Proton Glorious Eggroll? Behind such an… original name hides a solution that is at the heart of many Linux gamers who like to tinker a little with Windows games on Steam.

As you all know, Proton is Valve’s official compatibility later for Windows games on Steam, a mix of WINE and other technologies like DXVK. Proton is updated on a regular basis by Valve and their partners (CodeWeavers, Philip Rebhole and more folks) to merge improvements, fixes, and new functionalities as well.

Yet this is not enough to support all games out there. For example, Resident Evil 2 Remake did not work well with the original Proton build (cutscenes were missing, and there was an infinite loading loop after the petrol station level). This is where Proton GE comes in: based on Proton, GE extends the regular Proton install with:

• The most recent releases of vanilla WINE
• FFmpeg enabled for FAudio by default
• All of Proton’s patches ported over to be applied to WINE, as well as Wine-staging and VKD3D
• Vulkan child window patch (see the issue at the time)
• Protonfixes integration (has various scripts to run winetricks on games that need them)
• Various WINE hotfixes for WINE functionality that fix regressions per version
• Various Wine/Proton hotfixes for Wine/Proton functionality that fix regressions per version
• DXVK compiled with async for faster shader compiling

Proton GE is a custom Proton build made by Thomas Crider who happens to be a Red Hat engineer, and a maintainer of the Wine-Staging project. In other words, Proton Glorious Eggroll is kind of the next version of Proton ahead of the release - as bleeding edge as you can get, with better compatibility and sometimes better performance too.

Installing Proton GE as the custom Proton version to use for this game instantly fixes all of these issues and make the game run perfectly, videos included. The result is, not only does using this make Resident Evil 2 Remake playable, it also enables other titles like Injustice 2 and Mortal Kombat 11 to work.

Now, how to install Proton GE if you want to try it out?

1. Download a release from the Releases page on GitHub.
2. Create a ~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d directory if it does not exist.
3. Extract the release tarball into ~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d/.
4. Restart Steam.
5. In the game options, select “Steam Play” and there you can change to a specific version of Proton, including the new Proton GE that you have installed.

While the manual process works fine, you may want to try a semi-automated script that does most of the work for you:

https://github.com/el-ajedrecista/proton-ge-custom-updater

Just git clone the repository, launch the script, and it will get the latest Proton GE version for you.

We will talk again about ProtonGE very soon at more length, stay tuned.