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.
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.
Yeah I keep telling people to enjoy it as long as they can, cuz with Gabe I’m not worried
I trust that they want my money
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.
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.
This sounds so unreal, especially for big company like Valve lol.
Its just sensible. Building their own os would take so much resources that they would have to successfully make a profit on it. Leveraging linux and the open source community allows them to make sure there is an alternative and gives them an os to use on their handheld device or any other they choose to make ensuring they can’t be cut out by a monopoly power. And all for pennies really.
I really appreciate that Valve seems to be ethical about the way they’re going about this, at least so far. I haven’t heard any bad news nor does it raise any “extend embrace extinguish” alarms. Rare for a company these days…
Well, Valve is a privately held company with a management that has a longer term vision than the next quarterly profits, so there’s that. Make it public and let the MBAs in and it’ll become shit in no time, which I sincerely hope will never happen.
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.
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?
Very yes. Not only are Steam and Proton usable on distros aside SteamOS, improvements from those regularly flow upstream into Wine, DXVK and also the Linux kernel itself.
