Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/znxb9y/valve_is_paying_100_opensource_developers_to_work/

by raybb • 4 years ago

630 278 4 years ago

old.reddit.com

divs1210• 4 years ago

One of the reasons I love Valve.

raybb• 4 years ago

Direct link to the interview where this was said: https://www.theverge.com/23499215/valve-steam-deck-interview...

cowmix3• 4 years ago

I bought Steam games and a Steam Deck just to support Valve... and I'm not really a gamer. However, the Deck has turned out to be a pretty good computing device.

yellow_lead• 4 years ago

I was thinking of doing this - how do you like it? How's coding on it?

cowmix3• 4 years ago

I keep it docked (mostly) and it works great.

My ONLY beef is that the AMD drivers do not work 100% with Blender so you don't get the accelerated Cycles rendering. Otherwise, it is great.

bsurmanski• 4 years ago

Not op, but I bought one. It's essentially a Linux laptop with a control interface built in. For emulators and steam games, it's really nice to have an option to play on the tv (with the dock). I don't see it being an especially nice coding experience; you'd need an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor. And without a dock, all it has is a single USBC port. Though it has a full KDE desktop, so it should be feasible.

capableweb• 4 years ago

I'm using one from time to time to do some programming on minor projects. Works pretty well, although it's not as fast as the laptop or desktop (obviously) that I have.

But it's pretty lightweight and handles games well, so if I go on trips somewhere, sometimes I just bring the Deck + small keyboard to do emergency fixes on, and for that, it works very well.

andrewparker• 4 years ago

The deck plus the OEM dock with mouse, keyboard and monitor makes for a nice, cheap Linux desktop that you can grab-and-go to play games. The dock is really seamless, always works right away. If you're programming, I wouldn't recommend Deck without the dock.

horsawlarway3• 4 years ago

Doable on the device itself (Although I wouldn't bother without at least an external keyboard).

Full KDE desktop based on Arch (/ is read-only by default, but this can be disabled)

it Really shines when plugged into external monitors/dock. In particular, I have a couple USB-C displays that provide usb-hubs - I plug a single usb-c cable into the top of the thing and have a great little mini-workstation machine.

Does 4k displays just fine and is very responsive for the size. It's basically replaced the linux laptop I would drag along on trips. If I need a workstation it suffices, and I can plug it into hotel room tvs really easily to watch whatever I want.

Basically - hard to argue with the value proposition given it only costs $500 and I get a great little portable workstation. That fact that it does an excellent job with games is just cream on top.

conradev• 4 years ago

It's definitely great to support Valve in their efforts, but you all might be interested in GPD's lineup of small computers, because many of them have built-in keyboards:

https://gpd.hk/product

hellotomyrars3• 4 years ago

If you're going to properly sit down with it somewhere it works fine. But you're going to want external keyboard/mouse, and most likely a bigger display. You'll need a hub/dock if you want to plug in more than one USB-C device.

Honestly a laptop makes a lot more sense in general for that still. You just pull it out and everything you need is there. But if the versatility of the device is appealing to you then it might make more sense. I have used it for traditional computing with a keyboard/mouse and portable monitor, but it is quite cumbersome to do so. But I value it much more and primarily as a portable games system. As an aside, the trackpads are great and for me the thing that sets it apart from any of the similar systems, but in desktop mode they aren't nearly as good or useful by comparison. Though it might be possible to change the way they work in desktop mode but the basic way it hooks input by default makes them pretty dumb trackpads.

ekianjo• 4 years ago

That's not news. We have known that for years.

bdhcuidbebe• 4 years ago

News flash. This is not a news site.

hacym2• 4 years ago

Hacker News…

stavros• 4 years ago

Weird, I could have sworn I saw a news flash on it somewhere.

tb_technical• 4 years ago

And as a result they have an amazing cross platform product

Spivak• 4 years ago

Proton is way better than it has any right to be and single handedly made Linux a viable gaming platform. The odds of any particular game working on Linux is higher than Mac now.

djcannabiz• 4 years ago

Yeah one of the reasons I decided to take the plunge and install Linux on my macbook is the compatibility with 32 bit games (risk of rain in particular).

autotune• 4 years ago

As I have a M1 MBP I am probably going to have to have a separate gaming laptop, or possibly Steam Deck in the future, for quite some time.

TillE• 4 years ago

Proton is really remarkable, considering there have been several commercial gaming-focused products based on Wine going back many years, and none of them are nearly as good.

Apple has made a bunch of decisions that really hurt gaming on macOS, which is frustrating. Starting with the $99/year fee just for app notarization, which deters tiny indie games from being released on macOS. This has a persistent long-term effect as those same developers make bigger games.

And on the other end of the scale, they're still using Metal as their own modern graphics API, so everyone has to either use a third party compatibility layer (MoltenVK), or use their engine's least-mature, least-well-tested rendering backend. Either way performance is pretty much guaranteed to be worse than it could be.

sph5• 4 years ago

There is no competition. Linux now runs 95% of games, macOS probably not even half that.

npteljes9• 4 years ago

Well, it's standing on the shoulder of a giant. Wine has been going strong for 29 years now, counting from its initial release. What I really appreciate in Valve's contribution is the integration and UX work they have put in it. It's just a breeze to use Steam and Proton, I can hardly imagine it being even more simple. Which, of course, was not the case with the original Wine, although Winetricks, and other projects like Lutris made it a lot easier.

haunter• 4 years ago

Linus at DebConf 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=310&v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc&feature=yo...

I’m on a record saying, that maybe Valve will actually save the Linux desktop. And it’s actually not because I think games are important! I don't care, I don't play games. I think some people do, so games maybe important. But the really important issue is I guarantee you Valve will not make 15 different binaries. And I also guarantee you that every single desktop distribution will care about Valve binaries. The problem is Valve though build everything statically linked and it creates huge binaries. And that's kind of sad but that's what you have to do right now.

yazzku3• 4 years ago

"I don't play games, I think some people do."

Multi-billion dollar industry raking in higher profits than Hollywood and that at this point is an unregulated online casino for teens.

Yeah, some people do...

zopa• 4 years ago

Well, yeah. His comic timing’s not the best but I think that was meant to be the joke.

candiddevmike• 4 years ago

Id rather have static binaries than a flatpak/snap for "universal distribution", personally.

amelius7• 4 years ago

Snap really sucks because it forces you to have a /home/user/snap folder on the same filesystem as /. If you don't have that (e.g. home folder symlinked to another filesystem), then snap starts breaking in very weird ways.

https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/limitations-in-snapd/9718

This actually means that at some point I will have to move away from Ubuntu.

kaba02• 4 years ago

Either static or dynamic is fine, package management has to be solved at another layer a la Nix.

zeta0134• 4 years ago

Given the choice I prefer native package -> AUR package -> AppImage -> Flatpack, in that order. (snap, you'll notice, is absent)

Arch is pretty good at making the native packages work, so that's always ideal. The community is generally pretty good at competently packaging AURs, and they'll do it for slightly less free things, so that fills a lot of gaps. AppImages and Flatpaks are great when they work, but opaque and difficult to diagnose when they don't :/ And snap is just... unpleasant. It's insistence to auto update separately from my package manager has really turned me off of it's whole ecosystem. No thanks.

bombolo9• 4 years ago

appimage > flatpack > snap

rowanG0772• 4 years ago

I agree static binaries or at the very least something akin to nix where every binary has a pinned dynamic lib.

rubicks• 4 years ago

Please, $DEITY, deliver us from this hell wrought by Canonical.

hnarn2• 4 years ago

Unless we’re talking about embedded systems (and most of the time, not even then I’d guess for portable gaming devices for example), what is the actual drawback of these “huge” binaries?

Wasn’t the reason to separate binaries and libraries in the first place to conserve disk space? They are then clearly versioned to signal that you can’t expect just any version of the library to work with the program you wrote.

The trade-off in using more disk to contain “an application” to “a binary” seems fine to me, if you’re not sacrificing anything else.

The only drawback I can think of is that it makes very minor patches, like security fixes, to the library impossible, which is a nice thing to have I guess, but on the other hand you’re now giving the library maintainer the capability to crash your application, and since that would presumably go through some kind of review and rebuild of the application in the first place to avoid crashes against the new library code, why does it matter if the lib is a part of the actual binary or not?

Is it really down to nothing but bandwidth and disk usage, or am I missing something here? Because if it is, and “blob binaries” becomes the norm, I’m sure you could still figure out partial patches somehow to conserve bandwidth and IO, while still keeping the binary essentially a built monolith.

Maybe one argument is that abandoned programs can still be “patched” in a way because a library it depends on fixes an issue that library was responsible for, but doesn’t that seem pretty risky to begin with to run software that is no longer being patched?

Indeed what constitutes “software” just seems to be multiple pieces in one case, and one piece in the other, no?

The biggest case against “vendoring”, which in my mind is similar to “huge” binaries, that I can think of at least is that it gives developers a false sense of security to not have to think about keeping libraries up to date: but aren’t they already equally able to be sloppy about this when the libs are separate?

sgjohnson3• 4 years ago

what is the actual drawback of these “huge” binaries?

The problem isn’t size. The problem is that with static linking it gets significantly more difficult to patch security vulnerabilities, because with dynamic linking, the vuln is gone once the underlying library is updated, however this wouldn’t happen with static linking.

pxc9• 4 years ago

Unless we’re talking about embedded systems (and most of the time, not even then I’d guess for portable gaming devices for example), what is the actual drawback of these “huge” binaries?

The functional package management/build system design instantiated by Guix and Nix shows that you can have the best of both worlds when it comes to static and dynamic linking, even without any form of containerization. Guix in particular has a feature called 'grafts' which implements a kind of hot patching for libraries in programs which are nominally dynamically linked but which in fact never search for libraries other than the exact versions they were built with.

So there's no need to choose between the portability of static linking or the efficiency and flexibility of dynamic linking. You can get all of those things together, today, for many thousands of packages.

If you're not familiar with the basic outline of these build systems, the idea is basically this:

  - every package gets installed to a unique, quasi-content-addressed location
  - each such location has its own FHS-like tree which gets treated as a prefix for that package at build time
  - every package gets manually pointed to each of it's dependencies' unique, full paths at build time

this ensures that each package always tries to load the libraries it was built with, and allows multiple versions of libraries to safely exist side-by-side, even when everything is dynamically linked.

To ship a package, you then just ship the whole dependency closure, which gives you the portability that motivates people to distribute static binaries.

Here's some info on Guix grafts, for an idea of how security updates can still be managed in such a system.

The official docs for grafts: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Security-Updates.ht...

Original blog post/announcement for the feature: https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2016/timely-delivery-of-security-u...

Detailed writeup of further implementation details: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/grafts-continued/

jnwatson• 4 years ago

Shared libraries can reduce load time as they might already be in page cache. There’s also potential for a small impact in reduced instruction cache misses.

On the other side, link time optimization on static libraries allows deletion of unused functions and more aggressive inlining, so you might get that performance back and more.

kabdib• 4 years ago

If we're talking about binaries for game titles, meh. Load time for the executable is utterly insignificant compared to the load time of a title's assets. Heck, shared libraries probably slow things down.

Typical games I have experience with were in the 5-20Mb range for executables, with tens of GB for assets. Most titles I looked at the performance of were terrible at scheduling I/O, often leaving 80% of their available disk bandwidth unused.

poulpy1232• 4 years ago

I just checked and I have 5600 binaries in my /usr/bin. They take an average of 100kb. If statically compiling them means an average of 50M that means 281gb.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 4 years ago

Space is cheap for now, so I'll accept that

arrakeen• 4 years ago

didn't valve mostly mitigate the fat binary problem with their soldier runtime set of shared libs?

AnIdiotOnTheNet4• 4 years ago

Yes, and then they realized that even that wasn't good enough because Linux Desktop ABIs are a shitshow, so they refocused on providing Windows ABIs instead to great success.

mrkramer2• 4 years ago

Why would I use Linux Desktop over Windows Desktop? Because it's FOSS, because of price, UX? I don't get it.

CBarkleyU• 4 years ago

It's like asking me asking you why I would drive a Mercedes over my BMW. How would you know? All you could do is to list a million things that are different on a Mercedes compared to a BMW and then claim every one of those differences makes a Merc better.

Is that what you expect to get as replies to your question?

zamalek• 4 years ago

I keep Windows around for Serif products and (currently, due to a Mesa bug) AOE 4. I use it for nothing else.

The amount of popups, nags, helpful hints, setup your system (which is nothing more than an interstitial to reset your browser to Edge+Bing) and other bullshit I get when logging in is mindbendingly infuriating.

This is after only being mostly away from Windows for a year. It's a shit product. I was merely a happy toad in some hot water. Things are much nicer once you actually climb out of the pot.

PostOnce• 4 years ago

All of the above.

It's free (along with everything in the "app store"), it's stable, it isn't infested with ads, and the browser and word processor work exactly the same for all normal users. The OS shouldn't matter much to regular people who just want a web browser and maybe a word processor.

It's really easy to use now. The installation process is far less arduous than Windows and you don't have to sign up for a Microsoft account or get nagged about not doing so.

I would really struggle to imagine someone having trouble doing all their normally-Windows-based (filesystem, office suite, web browser) work on a mainstream distro now, even for the most technically illiterate user.

If you're a power user though, it's like moving from a Corolla to an F-35.

bombolo9• 4 years ago

Why would I use Linux Desktop over Windows Desktop?

For example it doesn't keep installing "apps" that are just ads for netflix/spotify/tiktok/whatever without me ever having wanted them to appear.

ykonstant• 4 years ago

A tiny bit off topic, but for the record: video games are, for me, extremely important. They are my favorite art form and an oasis in a daily nightmare; if I were unable to play my favorite games, the system I am running would be completely useless. Fortunately, the kind of games I like run mostly fine on Linux.

Linux_Watcher• 4 years ago

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that excluding work related stuff gaming is very important to those who own a Windows PC.

pjmlp16• 4 years ago

They would do better by sponsoring native GNU/Linux games, or even ports from other POSIX like platforms like Playstation/Android, instead of playing OS/2 with Windows games.

belval• 4 years ago

That's not really true, native Linux games are a much harder sell for publishers because the proportion of users is just too low.

pjmlp16• 4 years ago

Hence why Valve should make the needful to change that, instead of "emulating" Windows.

iforgotpassword3• 4 years ago

Nah. Win32 is the only stable userspace ABI on Linux, so I'm glad they're supporting it. There's no point in supporting native ports of games that simply won't work anymore 4 years from now because everything else changed.

pjmlp16• 4 years ago

In another words, there is no money in GNU/Linux games.

0cf8612b2e1e2• 4 years ago

I try to purchase games on GOG where I can. You can purchase games with a Linux build that fail to run on a modern system. Meanwhile the Windows version will continue to be runnable in a VM/Wine. Frustrating when there is a Linux release available that I cannot run without some kernel kung-fu.

debugnik• 4 years ago

They actually did in the past, but they've realised that many game devs can't be trusted to maintain Linux builds as a second platform. They're often left outdated, require dependencies they didn't ship with or simply have worse performance than the Windows builds running on Proton.

These days they check both builds if available and suggest the devs which one to use by default; often the Windows builds over Proton are simply better than mediocre Linux support.

pjmlp16• 4 years ago

The same devs that most likely are also shipping Playstation or Android versions of their game....

pxc9• 4 years ago

It looks like this is getting a lot of hate, but I think there's clearly some truth to it. As an initial effort to bring a huge library of games to Linux, Proton is brilliant and a huge achievement. But it does feel less secure, in the long run, than having developers writing games for Linux as a first-class platform from the start.

Idk what the transition plan could look like, but eventually we should hope to see the Steam Deck treated like any other console with highly optimized, native ports, and then hopefully some of that can be reused for 'more native' general Linux ports.

scheeseman4863• 4 years ago

It isn't less secure, win32 programs have just as much as access as native binaries do. Valve also runs Proton in a container.

Not to say the current implementation is secure though, only that the use of Wine/Proton makes no difference.

Kiro• 4 years ago

Is Valve the only company in the world that is not universally hated by the HN and reddit crowd?

ROTMetro7• 4 years ago

No universal but I'm very much anti valve as they are among the few who continue to do business in Russia.

curiousgal• 4 years ago

If Russia is where you draw the line boy do I have news for you! If your standards were universal, you wouldn't be doing business with any company at all.

vlunkr2• 4 years ago

What would be the point in cutting regular Russian citizens off from video games? It may actually be a good way to communicate with them.

kilolima• 4 years ago

The best pirated game scenes are Russian, Valve exiting the market world mean very little. It's also a huge benefit to the rest of the world that Russian/ex Soviet culture has both very little respect for Western intellectual property laws and the technological abilities to make software and digital media easily available.

jeff_carr2• 4 years ago

Punishing people living under totalitarian rule might not be a good idea.

jimbob45• 4 years ago

JetBrains maybe?

pxc9• 4 years ago

also probably Tailscale

stusmall3• 4 years ago

Every now and then I see some brain-dead hand-wringing about them being an agent of the Russian state. I saw a lot soon after the war started. The other time I saw a lot was right after that hack that involved TeamCity.

HN and Reddit aren't hive minds and both hold a lot of diverse opinions. Nothing is universally loved on either. Today's society can longer agree on agree on fundamentals like if the earth is round or if democracy is good. So it isn't a huge surprise that not everyone has accepted The Infallible Glory that is the Jetbrains product roster (A little joking in that last bit.... but just a little. All praise CLion)

sgjohnson3• 4 years ago

Cloudflare?

ParetoOptimal5• 4 years ago

I personally dislike cloudflare for not dropping KF, not sure if that's a majority opinion.

jeff_carr2• 4 years ago

+1 for Cloudflare

Semaphor• 4 years ago

Another company is Fastmail. Usually loved on HN, not really talked about on Reddit (at least where I see it)

christophilus• 4 years ago

There are many. Mozilla isn’t universally hated. Apple is another.

I’d say Valve comes close to being universally loved here, though, and that is pretty unique.

zach_garwood• 4 years ago

Apple is a weird one from my perspective. I dislike Safari, but overall I'm pretty ambivalent about Apple in general. But most devs I've met IRL seem to despise them, while HN seems to mostly have a positive view.

moloch-hai3• 4 years ago

Somebody needs to step up to save Clang now that Google has more or less abandoned it.

saagarjha• 4 years ago

Google uses Clang for much of its production code and employs people to work on it. I don’t think saying that they’ve abandoned it is accurate.

moloch-hai3• 4 years ago

I hope you are right.

stusmall3• 4 years ago

It's been a (very) long time since I worked in Android OS land but at the time I could see effects of them actively moving projects from GCC to Clang. I always picked up the outsider impression that it was their preferred C++ toolchain. First I've heard of them abandoning it

smoldesu7• 4 years ago

Clang will be fine. It's based on LLVM, which will be actively maintained for as long as Rust exists, and Apple relies on Clang's functionality for pretty much all of their modern tooling. There's enough stakeholders to keep things moving smoothly, at least as far as I can tell.

cyber_kinetist2• 4 years ago

I don’t have any worries on LLVM, since it has become probably the biggest compiler backend with so many languages and tools depending on it. The problem lies within the Clang frontend, where people are worried that it might not catch up to the latest C++ standards since Apple and Google are now looking elsewhere to replace C++ (Swift and Carbon, respectively).

Clang not supporting new C++ features actually have some quite far-reaching consequences, since editors nowadays heavily rely on clangd for autocompletion and static analysis, and they too will be stuck past in time.

bluepizza• 4 years ago

Apple and FreeBSD use clang as their main C compiler, no?

BearOso2• 4 years ago

I assume you're referring to Google pushing the Carbon language? That uses LLVM as the backend, so they're basically adding more resources.

leeoniya• 4 years ago

i'm a big fan of companies paying and/or hiring OSS devs to continue working on OSS code.

(100% biased :D)

npteljes9• 4 years ago

There's nothing wrong with liking things. Go open source!

butz• 4 years ago

Thanks to Valve Linux is single OS on my home computer. Most of the games from my medium sized Steam library are working, and few that does not work today, will probably be fixed in the future. Need to mention that I do not play new AAA titles or multiplayer games, but I enjoy older games, and some of those are broken on modern versions of Windows.

npteljes9• 4 years ago

I had good luck even with newer titles. Right now I'm playing Red Dead Redemption 2, and it works like a charm, out of the box. Same flow as in Windows, even.

prettyStandard• 4 years ago

I played all of cyberpunk shortly after release on a 3950x and 3060ti on Steam+Proton+Ubuntu with very little problems. It did get very laggy in busy areas on occasion, but that was the exception not the rule. Obviously newer hardware helped, but it seemed Valve hurt the gaming experience less than CD Project Red did!

Not really a gamer. Cyberpunk is probably my high water mark at 90 hours. It's so nice to not to have to make major concessions to run Linux.

Valve you have earned a customer with me.

brundolf• 4 years ago

That's really impressive, considering Cyberpunk had so many issues even on officially-supported platforms

pxc9• 4 years ago

Single player gaming, indie gaming, and retro gaming are all gaming niches where I'd say that a smooth Linux experience with widespread support is 'already there'.

It's really only the (crucial) segment of big, trendy multiplayer titles where support is still really hit-and-miss. If gaming is essential to your social network, Linux may not be ready for you to entirely switch over.

But if you're someone whose social hobbies lie elsewhere who enjoys solo gaming, there are way more excellent Linux games ready for you to enjoy than there is time for you to play them.

sangnoir• 4 years ago

It's really only the (crucial) segment of big, trendy multiplayer titles where support is still really hit-and-miss.

I was disappointed when post-purchase Psyonix dropped official Linux support for Rocket League. However, the Proton support has been rock solid, and I'm yet to encounter any crashes, even after updates. The Linux binaries occasionally had regressions after an update.

darkteflon• 4 years ago

Yes, the only reason I keep a windows install around at all is for MW2, Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown with the boys.

From memory, Valve has also been supporting anti-cheat providers to port to Linux (or perhaps I have misunderstood and they will also run under Proton?), so there’s always a chance this will be solved in the next couple of years. The Steam Deck has been a great catalyst for that within Valve, it seems.

poulpy1232• 4 years ago

Afaik what I have seen with the steam deck the problems come mainly from old title that are probably not a priority or big new titles with anticheat or denuvo

63• 4 years ago

I guess I struggle to understand why Linux and Windows are always pitted against each other. At this point, they're both good for different things and dual booting is relatively easy. Storage is cheap and Linux is small. I've been dual booting for the last 5 years and I'm totally happy. I use Windows for gaming/media and Linux for development. I wish everyone would stop trying to fight this war as if only one operating system is allowed to exist.

samtheDamned• 4 years ago

Same, I got interested in trying it a couple years back and steam's support for games is what made it seem so accessible. I enjoy a mix of smaller games and AAA gaming but even it's AAA game support is impressive, I can play a good chunk of the CoD games and have been playing the recent battlefield and battlefront games with no issues. I've also been playing RDR2, GTA, DOOM, Borderlands, Cyberpunk, Shadow of War, Apex Legends, and many more with only a couple issues every once in a while, which is a tradeoff I'm willing to make. The only games I miss are Fortnite, Dead by daylight, and Rainbow 6 Siege, which I end up playing with friends using Nvidia Streaming.

AnIdiotOnTheNet4• 4 years ago

I really wish they would take some time to make their VR hardware work properly on Linux. Right now it is pretty much just that holding me back. It is sad that they are the company that gives a shit about Linux gaming and the only one that has a working VR headset for Linux, but only barely.

capitol_• 4 years ago

This is one of the main reason to why I buy all my games on steam.

freedomben3• 4 years ago

If anyone from Valve is reading this, I'm not a gamer at all, but I bought a (fully loaded) SteamDeck largely to support your efforts, and secondly to have a cool portable computer. It is (in about a week) going to become a game console hooked up to my TV. I could have got an xbox for much less the price, but the openness, power, and linuxyness of the steamdeck was too attractive to pass up :-D

Please keep it up! you're the heroes we need in this fight.

P.S. I'll be buying games from your store also as my kids are gamers

amelius7• 4 years ago

Hate to say this but if the SteamDeck becomes too popular compared to Desktop Linux, then that's an incentive for the company to make the software more closed again (not anyone's fault, but just how the world works). Better buy only the games if you want to support them.

demux• 4 years ago

Has anyone successfully run SteamDeck's version of arch on a pc for gaming+dev? I'm looking to do this but I'd love to hear anecdotes

trobertson• 4 years ago

HoloISO is what you're looking for: https://old.reddit.com/r/holoiso/

mgrandl• 4 years ago

You can simply use the steam decks UI on any Linux system and it works great on AMD. Hardware acceleration on Nvidia is somehow super messed up still, so not recommended for those just yet.

martin82• 4 years ago

I hope your kids are not expecting high end gaming experiences and are happy with simple indie games (which usually are the better games anyways), because the SteamDeck cannot and never will replace something like an XBox.

rimunroe2• 4 years ago

Eh, for me it’s largely replaced my extremely beefy gaming computer. I use the Steam Deck for so many games, including AAA titles like the Final Fantasy VII remake. It’s a shockingly good little device.

izacus• 4 years ago

Steam Deck comfortably runs high end AAA games like God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn and Cyberpunk 2077, in many ways with comparable performance of the base Xbox model.

Which makes sense since the hardware is similar.

So I have no idea what you're talking about, it can easily replace Xbox.

sph5• 4 years ago

This is one of those statements that are going to sound hilariously wrong in a few years, when third-party OEM will be able to put SteamOS on their custom hardware. The hard part was making Linux run games, and Valve has done it.

Xbox, PS and Nintendo won't die, but there will be a fourth player, and if anyone has to die first, it'll be Xbox, due to shrinking mind share and lack of third party titles.

camdenlock• 4 years ago

I continue to be terrified that some day in the future, in a moment of weakness, Valve will allow itself to be swallowed by Microsoft…

ThrowawayTestr2• 4 years ago

There's 0 chance of this happening at long as Gabe's around.

AnIdiotOnTheNet4• 4 years ago

Yeah, problem with that is that Gabe is human and won't live forever. I worry about what will happen to one of the greatest forces in keeping PC gaming not only alive, but relatively open and free from bullshit, when Gabe isn't around.

Sunspark• 4 years ago

Understandable concern, as documented here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE

hellotomyrars3• 4 years ago

I find it pretty unlikely, both because of Gabe, but also Valve prints money and is private. They don't have anything to gain by being bought by microsoft.

emersion2• 4 years ago

I'm one of the developers contracted by Valve to work on gamescope, wlroots, Mesa, the kernel, Wayland, etc. Really happy that my contracted work helps not only SteamOS, but very often the whole ecosystem. Examples include radv/amdgpu fixes, tearing page-flips, a re-usable library to make use of KMS planes, and the list goes on.

mylons• 4 years ago

is it public what they're paying these contractors?

vj636• 4 years ago

I recently interviewed for one of these open source dev positions (Proton). From what I could gather from my conversations with the hiring manager, its somewhere between 120K to 160K for C Devs.

robert_foss• 4 years ago

No, but why would it be. I'd expect a competitive pay.

jeppester2• 4 years ago

Can I ask how it's decided what you are working on?

Given the variety of the projects you've mentioned it could seem that you have some degree of freedom, but I might be mistaken.

emersion2• 4 years ago

Yeah, there is a lot of freedom, it's pretty similar to how an open-source project works. Pierre-Loup indicates what features would be nice to have (in gamescope or other projects), I can pick from that list. Or I can pick my own ideas and work on these. Or I can discuss with the other contractors, come up with an idea and coordinate our work. Sometimes I work on short-term bugfixes, sometimes I work on long-term plumbing efforts.

ffhhj• 4 years ago

GTA5 still crashes on an i7 with IrisXE graphics, latest Ubuntu, and latest Proton or Experimental. Hope they manage to fix it.

robswc• 4 years ago

Reminds me of that joke where the worlds entire computing system is perched upon a tool by a guy that lives in the middle of Nebraska.

Seems the field of people that could get this stuff working (some really awesome hacking) is so small... or rather, breakthroughs come from a few individuals.

Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

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