Proton prefixes use "steamuser" as the system username

[DragoonAethis]

There are games like Doki Doki Literature Club that read the system username and use it in interesting ways inside the game. Proton prefixes always use "steamuser" instead of the user's choice, breaking certain game elements. Using the current username should be possible as well. (Perhaps this should be done in per-title configuration?)

[ryao]

That is because of this hack:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/commit/c31fff3533fe8d9285a7f971108ae2b7adfa6deb

Perhaps it should be reverted a 3rd time.

[Djhg2000]

From the number of reverts and reverts of reverts there's been on the issue I think there's a debate on how to handle usernames in Proton.

I'd argue using the system username probably isn't as good of an idea as it is on Windows. *nix usernames are conventionally short and lowercase, often reflecting your actual name. This could lead to an unintentional information leak in online games, especially those who do not let you change it (like Burnout Paradise). Ideally the username would be configurable in case some game decides the username cannot match the name of the Steam user. On the other hand just reporting the name of the Steam user should be fine, AFAIK.

[Zero86Sk]

Can conform this happens in Blur as well.

[thunder1410]

Maybe an option under steam play to chose between system name, steam name or custom?

[WeebyMcWeebface]

I think there is an option of whitelisting games to specific systems information, similarly to how android permissions work. It could spoil some intentions of certain games.

There is also the perspective of "This is expected information for games to have about the system being run on".

In that regard, I believe Valve should make it universal: "Games have access to system information by default on all platforms." or "Games have no access to system information on all platforms" ... by default, to be set by user, or promted on first launch of a game. Similarly to how EULA's work.

[aeikum]

Like @Djhg2000 noted, we tried to fix this, but it broke a bunch of stuff, so we reverted it. It's complicated for a number of reasons, and privacy isn't really one of them. The primary problem is Wine isn't really built to handle multiple usernames in one prefix. Since we pre-create a prefix at build-time, it needs a username at that point, and it can't be changed later at run-time.

It's not impossible to fix any of this, but we ran out of time (note the timestamps on those commits) and made a judgment call. It would be nice to fix.