Rosenzweig, known for her Panfrost and Apple M1/M2 GPU driver work is now contracted by Valve to work on graphics driver development! Sounds like great news for Valve’s push for Linux gaming.
Valve is basically carrying Linux gaming. While no one should trust a corporate entity, their actions speak pretty loudly. Thanks, Valve.
Valve knows they need to provide an alternative to windows if they want to stay relevant. Windows + XBox exclusives could kill their business model if they allowed it to happen. And they’ve been trying to improve Linux gaming for over a decade now.
That threat definitely kicked this whole thing off. With Windows 8, Microsoft made moves for a Windows App store only version of Windows. It didn’t pan out for them, but had it it would have effectively killed Valve at the time.
I think Windows 12 will likely renew that push. Valve has positioned themselves to resist it, and in Microsoft does do a strong push in that direction, it is possible they will lose the PC gaming market, in large part thanks to Valve’s work.
Many are resistant to trust a corporation, and I agree, but Valve isn’t a normal corporation of that size. They are owned by one guy, and as such his choices are the only ones that matter. As long as he keeps making the right choices and Valve doesn’t go public or sell out, they will likely continue being a good shepherd of PC and Linux gaming.
Yep, Gabe’s long term vision is key. If they were a public company Wall Street would be pressuring them to kill the Linux stuff for short term profit, without any care of where that would leave them strategically in a few years.
I do worry about what would happen to Valve after Gabe. I trust him, but corporations outlive their owners eventually.
Rightly so, see this current Thread: Microsoft wants to move Windows fully to the cloud
Windows 365 is a service that streams a full version of Windows to devices. So far, it’s been limited to just commercial customers, but Microsoft has been deeply integrating it into Windows 11 already. A future update will include Windows 365 Boot, which will enable Windows 11 devices to log directly in to a Cloud PC instance at boot instead of the local version of Windows.
If Microsoft really wants to slowly kill “local windows”, Valve would be fucked if there is no way for gamers to game locally.
It’ll be hard enough to compete with “performance on demand” anyway, at least until Microsoft pushes the pricing back up after luring everyone in.
See Netflix, everyone loved it, no-one bought DVDs/BlueRays, and now everyone hates Netflix for raised prices, going after password-sharing, cancelling shows etc.
I expect exactly the same with “cloud PCs”
The decade of work is starting to show for real. Many other tech companies have tried to break into new market “segments”, but often pull the plug after the product isn’t an instant hit. Valve had similar stumbles at first, but took what worked and tried to make that useful for as many people as possible.
Complete opposite of stadia, etc. which didn’t really amount to anything after the initial failure.
Well yeah but is it a bad thing in this case? I mean, one of the main reasons devs don’t support Linux is because it’s a small community and it doesn’t seem worth the time and money to support it. It’s fantastic that Valve is spending the time, resources and money to improve gaming on Linux, which is obviously a smaller market than Windows in a lot of cases. Yes, the main reason is probably because that makes their Steam Deck more viable and thus increases sales for them. But this benefits the entire Linux ecosystem, so I don’t think that really matters.
Valve knows better than to put all of their eggs into one basket. Microsoft has signalled that they’re slowly but steadily moving towards a Windows + Xbox walled garden ecosystem, and while we’re not there yet, it is coming and Valve know that it could kill them off when it does.
I was so skeptical of staying on steamos instead of replacing it instantly with windows for the deck, but compatability has been great and relatively easy to get working for even games that aren’t verified.
Big difference from when they tried the steam machines and game compatibility with Linux back then.
So long as Gabe is at the helm, I’ll bet they’ll keep being rad. Once he’s gone, though, the enshittification will undoubtedly begin.
Valve are putting all this effort and money behind a Windows alternative. It’s our responsibility to use it!
I do and it’s awesome, I very rarely need Windows now, like twice a year lol.
It’s easily anticheat for me; I’d still like to play genshin or paladins but their anticheat either makes it very difficult/risky (bans) or just impossible
It is the coolest thing to see a major corporation contributing so much to Linux gaming. Linux gaming is more viable than ever and it’s amazing!!!
I’m so torn about valve. It is after all a proprietary platform. I use it since always and have hundreds of games and just know they’ll all be gone at some point in the future. No word about making steam client open source, not even talking about something like decentralized proof of ownership etc. (For obvious reasons)
That said: they do incredible work for Linux. Their games have been Linux compatible since ages! And actually play well on Linux. Their client works flawlessly. And what they have done with proton is just flat out incredible. As you say Linux gaming is awesome currently and has not been that exciting for a long time. In short they do awesome work, I’d just wish they were a little bit open sourceier.
@afunkysongaday @Nyla_Smokeyface they did say that they’d make a system to allow you to still access your games if it were to ever shut down.
I’m gaming with no issues in Linux desktop, since the arrival of the steam deck
I decided about three years ago to give “100% Linux” gaming a go for a few months, since I was fed up with Windows shitting itself on a dual-boot system, see how I got on. Never went back. It does help that I’m not in to MMOs or things which require anti-cheat, since that’s a stumbling block, but it’s rare that I even check protondb before purchases now, nearly everything just works and it keeps getting better.
I wish Linux worked with anti-cheat Most games I play have some kind of anti-cheat, haven’t used Linux for anything but school and work (cybersecurity) for the past 10 years… before that I didn’t have a gaming PC so I had a Linux laptop and I’m excited to get rid of windows
Has Valve’s work on SteamOS so far affected any of the other distros positively in some way? Are the improvements transferable or is it all just for SteamOS?
Did you set the Hashtags yourself? Sorry but I find them pretty annoying.
Lets take the imaginary program Y. It is free open source software with the GPLv3 license. If Valve wants to include Y in SteamOS, they are free to do so. Any time Valve makes changes or fixes to Y, they are legally required to provide the source code of their changes, as stated in the GPL license included with Y.
A lot of programs have this license (or a similar one), which forces corporations to contribute back to FOSS projects.
Some Valve-made components in SteamOS are truly “SteamOS only”, but a good amount of fixes to non-Valve programs are submitted “upstream” (to the original project). Due to the nature of Linux, it might be possible to copy the few non-foss components in SteamOS and directly use them in another distro.
Alongside forced contributions due to licensing, Valve contributes a lot of code to “gaming” programs on Linux, such as Wine or DXVK. They also make some SteamOS components FOSS, including Gamescope for example. Valve is (currently) doing a lot of work “for the community” rather than for direct profit.
Mainly their creation of Proton, and contributions to DXVK and WINE have helped Linux gaming become possible on any distro.
Before SteamOS could become a thing Valve made HUGE effort to make Linux useful for gaming. All the games everyone can now easily play on any x86 Linux distribution - that was possible, in a big part, by Valve efforts. Driver improvements, compatibility layers (not just Proton, but also improvements in the upstream wine), etc.
And they do continue the improvements, not just for their own Linux systems.
Almost nothing Valve has worked on is only for SteamOS, other than packaging and distributing SteamOS itself. They’ve upstreamed kernel patches, RADV patches, KDE patches, etc which affects all desktops. Not to mention the open source tools like Gamescope and Fossilize, the latter of which is used automatically on all Linux PCs playing Steam games, and their contributions and funding to Wine and other projects. Even the new Steam big picture UI, which was initially only available on SteamOS, is now broadly available.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Valve is carrying Linux gaming these past few years. It has been a downright renaissance.
