Valve Is A Wonderful Upstream Contributor To Linux & The Open-Source Community

3 years ago by const_void to c/linux

doctorcrimson 109 points 3 years ago

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trafficnab 35 points 3 years ago

I'm not trying to hate on Gabe Newell or Valve or anything (and not to say that it isn't a pretty objectively win-win) but I think there's some pretty easily explainable motivation behind this that isn't just "out of the kindness of their hearts"

I think the product they intend to sell is actually the software and services (there's a reason the Deck seems to be sold basically at cost), they're betting on these PC-based portable gaming devices taking off and being a viable segment of the market that other hardware companies will want to invest into, and if they do, what highly functional and easy to integrate (since it's all open source) operating system (and its subsequent game store integration) might they be more likely to use?

And why push upstream? They're by far the largest PC games provider, so more games running on more (Linux) devices can only really serve to financially benefit them

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Rednax 53 points 3 years ago

So if Gabe suceeds, we get a gaming ecosystem with different hardware sellers, all using a platform that other software sellers are not blocked from using (Linux)? And the only reason Valve wins, is because they invested into providing the best possible distribution platform on Linux?

This does not make them evil by any standard I know. It just sounds like a solid long term business plan.

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GodsKillerKirb 29 points 3 years ago

So if Gabe suceeds, we get a gaming ecosystem with different hardware sellers, all using a platform that other software sellers are not blocked from using (Linux)? And the only reason Valve wins, is because they invested into providing the best possible distribution platform on Linux?

Yes. 100% correct

I would also like to add that I think the main reason for the Steam Deck runs Linux is because Gabe Newell himself has literally stated that he loves Linux and FOSS, which results in only Gabe, but the majority, if not all, of Valve wanting Linux to be a the gaming platform that it deserves to be.

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Barbarian 13 points 3 years ago

There's also the fact that he was extremely worried about Microsoft trying to go the Apple route and restrict program installs to their store, including games. That would have killed Steam overnight. That's when the investment into Linux really started ramping up.

That's not evil or anything, but it is identifying a potential company-killing vulnerability and trying to reduce the impact somewhat.

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GodsKillerKirb 7 points 3 years ago

So if Gabe suceeds, we get a gaming ecosystem with different hardware sellers, all using a platform that other software sellers are not blocked from using (Linux)? And the only reason Valve wins, is because they invested into providing the best possible distribution platform on Linux?

Yes. 100% correct

I would also like to add that I think the main reason for the Steam Deck running Linux is because Gabe Newell himself has literally stated that he loves Linux and FOSS, which results in only Gabe, but the majority, if not all, of Valve wanting Linux to be a the gaming platform that it deserves to be. It also the reason why Valve forked WINE and made Proton.

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conciselyverbose 1 point 3 years ago

Well, he likes Linux

And doesn't trust Microsoft not to be anticompetitive and tank his business if they think they can get away with it.

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valkyrie 2 points 3 years ago

I think one of the main reasons that was missed here is that. Once Microsoft started pushing the windows store as a way to get software on windows Valve started making these moves for Linux. If Microsoft decided one day to lock all software to the windows store this is valves backup plan / bargaining chip.

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winterayars 17 points 3 years ago

I think Valve being a private corporation rather than publicly traded is a huge contributor to that. If they were publicly traded it wouldn't matter what Gabe thought, they'd have a legal obligation to make money for the shareholders and the way that has played out has been "legal obligation to consume the company's future for short term profit". As a private corporation they have the ability to think about the future

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GamingChairModel 11 points 3 years ago

That's not a requirement of publicly traded companies. Any corporation has the same obligation to put shareholder interests first, whether it's closely held (like Valve) or publicly traded but still under the founder's control (like Facebook) or publicly traded with no one owner that exercises significant control (like IBM). The court case that established that corporations have a duty to shareholders above everyone else (Dodge v. Ford Motor Company) involved a closely held corporation (not public) and also confirmed that the corporation's management can exercise its own judgment and discretion in prioritizing long term over short term gains, or vice versa.

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winterayars 1 point 3 years ago

eBay vs Newmark is the more apt reference, here. Also a private corporation, just with a profit seeking minority shareholder. The case ruled that the corporation has a social requirement to maximize that shareholder's value in financial returns. For public corporations it's generally held that this means profits.

What does "maximize shareholder value" mean if not profits? You can dress it up how you like but that's the way businesses treat it.

I guess it could mean Carl Icahn buying Apple stock then threatening action against them until they paid him but that's actually worse.

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GamingChairModel 1 point 3 years ago

What does “maximize shareholder value” mean if not profits? You can dress it up how you like but that’s the way businesses treat it.

It doesn't mean short term profits over long term profits, or dividends/buybacks over reinvestment, or anything like that.

The Delaware courts have repeatedly confirmed that majority shareholders, officers, and directors are allowed to do things like pay their employees bonuses, give corporate money to charity, demand less than the market-clearing, profit-maximizing prices, etc., even over minority shareholder objections that the corporation isn't properly maximizing shareholder value.

eBay v. Newmark doesn't change that. That was a fight about shareholder rights to buy or sell shares (or majority shareholder powers to prevent minority shareholders from acquiring or selling shares without the majority shareholders' approval), which directly affects the value of the shares themselves (without getting into the question of the corporation's obligation to grow that shareholder value in business operations). It's one step removed from what we're talking about, about the directors' power to control shares, rather than the directors' power to control the company.

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Gsus4 2 points 3 years ago

There was Artifact 🤦

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KpntAutismus 101 points 3 years ago

a good product is the best advertising. make linux usable as a daily driver, and people come flowing in from the shithole that is windows.

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MotoAsh 45 points 3 years ago

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AnonTwo 47 points 3 years ago

Linux is a usable daily driver if you’re tech savvy enough.

A daily driver shouldn't need you to be tech savy. There should just be an added benefit for being tech savy.

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AProfessional 33 points 3 years ago

Windows is not usable if you aren’t tech savvy. See young people who grew up on iOS/Android.

I think Linux is very good already and only improving.

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AnonTwo 10 points 3 years ago

Pretty sure those users you're talking about don't understand desktop controls in general, and would be even worse on Linux. Because when we talk about tech savy we're not talking about basic controls.

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kaba0 1 point 3 years ago

Meh, I have been using linux desktop exclusively for a decade now, and I have to disagree. It.. sorta works, but it has definitely many many shortcomings and edge cases where it just shits itself completely — that is, the userspace. The kernel itself is rock solid.

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cmnybo 10 points 3 years ago

Many distros are actually very easy to install and setup. The problem is that Linux is not preinstalled on most computers.

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kaba0 2 points 3 years ago

Now try to sign a PDF

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taj 4 points 3 years ago

To be fair, my husband is about as far from tech savvy as they come, and he's been running Linux for years on his laptop. Every 2-3 years I upgrade him. Sometimes just within distros (Ubuntu 12.04 to 16.04 say. Other times, I've moved him distros (to fedora) or back to Ubuntu. Otherwise? I don't touch his system. He's been happy for years.

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brayd 20 points 3 years ago

I disagree while agreeing. The biggest reason people use windows is simply because its pre-installed. That's the same reason people use Edge on Windows or Bing as their search engine. They get it preinstalled and don't know how to change it.

If you install anyone Linux and give them a simple and easy distro preinstalled they're usually fine with a few words about how to use it, update it and install stuff. Especially if they're not tech savvy because in this case they wouldn't know exactly how to use Windows either. I mean look at companies: how many employees use Windows in their daily work but still don't know how to actually usw windows? They get teached to use their software and tools but not the OS itself and have to figure things out on the OS level if they would want to change something on Windows too.

My observation was that people that are not tech savvy find it easier to understand some beginner friendly Linux distros than Windows.

If on the other hand a person is used to use Windows and knows how to actually use Windows it's harder for them to switch because things are just different on Linux. For me it's hard and annoying to use Windows which I have to do at work since February. Before that I used Linux in private my whole life, I used it in school because my school never used Windows as one of the few schools in my country and my last employer also used Linux. And from that perspective I can say that Windows is hard and not intuitive. It's just being used because it's being used. I guess you could compare it to Whatsapp vs Signal. From an objective standpoint Signal is better but most people still use WhatsApp because others use it and because it comes preinstalled on some Android phones.

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bou 2 points 3 years ago

@brayd I can confirm. I have installed Fedora Silverblue to a number of non-techies including my wife, her parents and several of her friends; I walked them through the system for a few minutes and explained basic operation. Most of them have been using it for years, never reported any sort of problem and even expressed being much more satisfied than before.

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pBaesse 1 point 3 years ago

Totally agree!

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Contend6248 7 points 3 years ago

It won't get more normie than SteamOS, it is literally console kind of simplicity with the option to switch to a full blown DE.

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MotoAsh 3 points 3 years ago

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AnonTwo 6 points 3 years ago

You'd have to check one of the side-distros. SteamOS itself has no official installer yet, only available pre-installed on steamdeck.

There are distros that are organized to recreate it for normal installation though.

Though to be fair, that's pretty "normie" to not have to experience the installation process at all. Most people will just use what shipped with their PC.

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Contend6248 6 points 3 years ago

Normies don't install any OS, they buy devices with it pre-installed and if they fuck their installation up, they search someone who does it for them. Which is (almost) impossible for them to do when the OS has it's root partition as read-only, like the SteamOS

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winterayars 3 points 3 years ago

It's also really difficult to get into if you don't already have an "in". Yeah, some distros are pretty easy to use but others aren't and figuring out which is which is pretty impossible for an outsider.

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kilgore_trout 2 points 3 years ago

This is why KDE has been focusing on hardware vendors for a while.

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MotoAsh 3 points 3 years ago

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Double_A 1 point 3 years ago

Linux is a usable daily driver if you're tech savvy enough.

So it's not..?

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MotoAsh 3 points 3 years ago

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Poopmeister 12 points 3 years ago

After I bought steam deck I installed linux on my desktop as a daily driver. Really happy with the results

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KpntAutismus 2 points 3 years ago

i currently run linux mint on an old laptop and try to use it every once in a while. it really is getting more competitive everyday. not ready to switch just yet, but i'm already mostly using open source software which could run on linux natively.

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randomaside 39 points 3 years ago

This platform is the best thing to happen in the computing landscape in a very very long time. If the Deck can become the target platform for developers due to the install base, we're going to see more legitimate gaming hardware and software come out alongside it.

There are a glut of gaming handhelds out there running android or windows but there are a few that rise to the top as the pinnacle of the platform. When a clear winner emerges, everyone else tries to be like it enough while having something new to offer.

This problem with windows (one of the many) is almost all the value ads like game hubs (i.e. ROG Armoy Crate) detract from the experience and almost provide a superficial "ooh she diff'rent" appeal.

With the contribution of their work back to the Linux community, imagine Asus deploying their own Linux OS that ran steam. They too would be inclined to contribute back to the larger ecosystem while providing actual added value of substance!

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here but I'm just so happy about the success of the steam deck that it makes me want to evangelize it in my spare time!

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verysoft 31 points 3 years ago

I cant even tell Steam Deck is Linux, it actually runs really well.

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trachemys 29 points 3 years ago

Oof

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berg 14 points 3 years ago

Right in the feels

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phx 7 points 3 years ago

Yeah. There are a few things like that. Other than catching the but screen you'd never know what OS is under the hood

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my_blackest_day 1 point 3 years ago

Not sure what do you mean by well, I found issue left and right on a regular basic.

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NegativeLookBehind 22 points 3 years ago

Microsoft: "Oh. Be a real shame if...Someone fucked that up, wouldn't it?"

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elouboub 10 points 3 years ago

Microsoft is a big contributor to the Linux kernel. It would probably not be in their interest to tank it as they'd lose customers from Azure.

But who knows, they might be stupid enough to try.

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AProfessional 12 points 3 years ago

They have no reason to hurt the kernel. They can continue making sure the desktop isn’t successful though. They continue to embrace DRM in Windows.

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BaumGeist 19 points 3 years ago

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autotldr 18 points 3 years ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

This shouldn't come as any surprise to any longtime Phoronix readers and dedicated open-source/Linux enthusiasts, but Valve with their work on the Steam Deck and SteamOS have been lifting the open-source ecosystem as a whole.

A talk this week at the Linux Foundation Europe's Open-Source Summit highlighted some of the great and ongoing contributions by Valve and their partners.

Alberto Garcia of the open-source consulting firm Igalia, which continues to collaborate with Valve on some of these Linux ecosystem improvements, talked at length around how SteamOS is contributing to the Linux ecosystem.

SteamOS is built atop Arch Linux with a GNU user-space and systemd, the desktop mode features KDE Plasma to which Valve has funded some improvements there, Valve's Steam Play / Proton that leverages Wine has been immensely valuable to Linux gamers and enthusiasts along with related open-source projects like DXVK / VKD3D-Proton, and then there's also they work they are doing around AMD color management / HDR.

Not just to the AMD graphics drivers for benefiting the Steam Deck's hardware but also to Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan and then other common infrastructure.

There has also been other efforts Valve has been involved in such on expanding case insensitive file-system support on Linux, various other kernel features, their Gamescope Wayland compositor, immutable software updates, and Flatpak.

The original article contains 366 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 41%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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Pantherina 8 points 3 years ago

Google, Meta and Samsung too. You can be 90% FOSS, 10% complete tracking. Thats enough

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rah -11 points 3 years ago

...whose product is closed source and non-free.

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HappyFrog 23 points 3 years ago

And? We can still be glad for their contribution.

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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linux

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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