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I wonder if this statement is mostly an attempt to get Ubuntu to reverse course. It seems unwise to pull support from the most popular distro if it could be sup

I wonder if this statement is mostly an attempt to get Ubuntu to reverse course. It seems unwise to pull support from the most popular distro if it could be supported with additional technical effort, such as bundling the libraries with Steam. Of course that's effort that Valve would likely prefer to spend elsewhere.

wolco 7y ago
I think Ubuntu will lose its status as most popular distro after 19.
- asark 7y ago
  This whole thing has been pretty funny. Valve: Here Linux, you finally have lots of video games, no silly BS, they just work. Ubuntu: Oh shit Linux might get popular, quick, we better break the video games! Valve: ...
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    That was after they realise that it boils down to 1% market size.
    - cwyers 7y ago
      Right. Valve wants gaming on Linux as a hedge against Microsoft. They are swimming in money from selling cosmetic items in TF2 and Counterstrike and DOTA. So they can subsidize a bunch of Linux development that has no short term revenue value because they view a single dependency on Windows as a threat to their Steam vig revenue. Canonical makes no money supporting Linux gaming. Their customers, their actual paying customers, want servers. So that's what Canonical is going to focus on.
      - pvg 7y ago
        I think most of their revenue is from their distributor's cut - even Valve can't sell $3.5 billion worth of TF2 hats.
  - pkaye 7y ago
    I think honestly Canonical is just "pulling a Redhat". Redhat walked away 20 years ago from the consumer market to focus on the server market (Fedora came much later.) Server is where they make money. They don't get any money out the video game market. The users don't give them any money. Neither does Valve. Nor the game developers. Nor the hardware developers. They need money to develop and maintain stuff and grow. They might reconsider if there is push from the server customers though.
    - kurtisc 7y ago
      My employer uses Ubuntu for most developers, meaning all our software is designed to work on the latest LTS Ubuntu and we (I assume) pay a significant amount for support. But the only reason we use Ubuntu is because it's more familiar to the average developer than RHEL.
      - pkaye 7y ago
        So ask your employer to convey an interest in maintaining the 32-bit library.
- dheera 7y ago
  I remember several years ago thinking that RedHat was the be-all end-all of user-friendly Linux distros. They were on a nice track back then and I could see them taking the Linux market by storm at one point. Then they started going off into this weird enterprise tangent, and that's about when Ubuntu came in and swept up vast amounts of the market, eventually including a lot of the enterprise folks. Ubuntu, too, has made some rash decisions at times. They cling to their sluggish developer-unfriendly Unity UI, randomly kicked out ffmpeg from 14.04 for political reasons, among other things. These kinds of rash decisions cost them every single time.
  - diegof79 7y ago
    I understand you. I was a RedHat user during 98-2002. At that time RedHat was the king of Linux desktop, and “the year of Linux desktop” was predicted multiple times. But in retrospective, I think that RedHat did a good move. Where is Mandriva/Mandrake Linux today? Even SuSe which is doing fine, didn’t have the growth of RedHat. It was sad for users hoping for the year of Linux desktop that never materialized; but a good business decision for RedHat.
    - dheera 7y ago
      To some extent Mac OS X was the "year of the *nix desktop". Not Linux, but it could just easily have been a Linux kernel instead of BSD if they wanted. Android is the Linux phone. 3 billion people are running a Linux kernel in their pocket right now. It did happen, just that it didn't unfold in the way that RedHat users originally imagined.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Linux aficionados keep giving Android example. The Linux kernel isn't exposed to app developers, only OEMs writing drivers. Google could switch it for something else tomorrow and beyond Google itself and the driver writers, no else would notice. Same applies to ChromeOS. As for Apple platforms, with each release POSIX APIs become less relevant with Objective-C/Swift/C++ replacements for them. So it is pretty much a pyrrhic victory.
- NikkiA 7y ago
  I think we'll see more 'ubuntu based' distros become 'ubuntu fork's.
blotter_paper 7y ago
Or maybe Valve feels like they have enough sway over gamers to be kingmaker in the realm of mainstream plebe linux?
pjmlp 7y ago
Given the amount of desktop Linux I pretty much doubt it has any major impact.
ThrowawayR2 7y ago
It almost certainly is but it's unclear whether it will work. Canonical is a surprisingly small company. Its revenues were $110M last year[0]; compare this to Valve, which had an estimated $4.3B in revenue in 2017 or Red Hat, which had $2.9B in revenue last year. Canonical has to keep a sharp eye on staying profitable and, the last anyone heard, their main focus was on their server distribution[1] because the bulk of their income was from server support contracts. Expending manpower on continuing to support 32 bit binaries probably isn't worth what it costs them regardless of what pressure Valve tries to apply. [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-ubuntus-financials/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-ubuntus-financials/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)#Business_plans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)#Business_p...
- jcastro 7y ago
  I think lots of people are missing the clear economic inbalance here. If you're gaming on Linux and you buy a game: The creator of the game gets a cut, the publisher gets a cut, Valve takes it's cut, NVidia/AMD/Intel got a hardware purchase in there at some point, the porter (Feral or whoever) gets a cut. The Linux distro gets .... absolutely zero. On top of that when things break, people blame the distro. I was at Canonical when we founded a community run PPA to maintain fresh Nvidia drivers, and we couldn't even secure the funding for _3_ GPUs for volunteer developers, we had to apply for community funds. All that so a handful of volunteers can do _years_ of free engineering work that is clearly Nvidia's job. They wouldn't even spot us 3 GPUs for the effort! It's sad, there are people on the Ubuntu desktop team that have been busting their asses for 15 years trying to make the desktop a thing. It's just not a sustainable unless people were overwhelmingly buying a ton of linux games.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    > On top of that when things break, people blame the distro. That's because it is often the distro's fault. That's one of the reasons it has been historically such a goddamned pain to port software to Linux: there are bunch of distros and no standards you can rely on. It's a non-platform.

wolco 7y ago

I think Ubuntu will lose its status as most popular distro after 19.

asark 7y ago
This whole thing has been pretty funny. Valve: Here Linux, you finally have lots of video games, no silly BS, they just work. Ubuntu: Oh shit Linux might get popular, quick, we better break the video games! Valve: ...
- pjmlp 7y ago
  That was after they realise that it boils down to 1% market size.
  - cwyers 7y ago
    Right. Valve wants gaming on Linux as a hedge against Microsoft. They are swimming in money from selling cosmetic items in TF2 and Counterstrike and DOTA. So they can subsidize a bunch of Linux development that has no short term revenue value because they view a single dependency on Windows as a threat to their Steam vig revenue. Canonical makes no money supporting Linux gaming. Their customers, their actual paying customers, want servers. So that's what Canonical is going to focus on.
    - pvg 7y ago
      I think most of their revenue is from their distributor's cut - even Valve can't sell $3.5 billion worth of TF2 hats.
- pkaye 7y ago
  I think honestly Canonical is just "pulling a Redhat". Redhat walked away 20 years ago from the consumer market to focus on the server market (Fedora came much later.) Server is where they make money. They don't get any money out the video game market. The users don't give them any money. Neither does Valve. Nor the game developers. Nor the hardware developers. They need money to develop and maintain stuff and grow. They might reconsider if there is push from the server customers though.
  - kurtisc 7y ago
    My employer uses Ubuntu for most developers, meaning all our software is designed to work on the latest LTS Ubuntu and we (I assume) pay a significant amount for support. But the only reason we use Ubuntu is because it's more familiar to the average developer than RHEL.
    - pkaye 7y ago
      So ask your employer to convey an interest in maintaining the 32-bit library.
dheera 7y ago
I remember several years ago thinking that RedHat was the be-all end-all of user-friendly Linux distros. They were on a nice track back then and I could see them taking the Linux market by storm at one point. Then they started going off into this weird enterprise tangent, and that's about when Ubuntu came in and swept up vast amounts of the market, eventually including a lot of the enterprise folks. Ubuntu, too, has made some rash decisions at times. They cling to their sluggish developer-unfriendly Unity UI, randomly kicked out ffmpeg from 14.04 for political reasons, among other things. These kinds of rash decisions cost them every single time.
- diegof79 7y ago
  I understand you. I was a RedHat user during 98-2002. At that time RedHat was the king of Linux desktop, and “the year of Linux desktop” was predicted multiple times. But in retrospective, I think that RedHat did a good move. Where is Mandriva/Mandrake Linux today? Even SuSe which is doing fine, didn’t have the growth of RedHat. It was sad for users hoping for the year of Linux desktop that never materialized; but a good business decision for RedHat.
  - dheera 7y ago
    To some extent Mac OS X was the "year of the *nix desktop". Not Linux, but it could just easily have been a Linux kernel instead of BSD if they wanted. Android is the Linux phone. 3 billion people are running a Linux kernel in their pocket right now. It did happen, just that it didn't unfold in the way that RedHat users originally imagined.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Linux aficionados keep giving Android example. The Linux kernel isn't exposed to app developers, only OEMs writing drivers. Google could switch it for something else tomorrow and beyond Google itself and the driver writers, no else would notice. Same applies to ChromeOS. As for Apple platforms, with each release POSIX APIs become less relevant with Objective-C/Swift/C++ replacements for them. So it is pretty much a pyrrhic victory.
NikkiA 7y ago
I think we'll see more 'ubuntu based' distros become 'ubuntu fork's.

blotter_paper 7y ago

Or maybe Valve feels like they have enough sway over gamers to be kingmaker in the realm of mainstream plebe linux?

pjmlp 7y ago

Given the amount of desktop Linux I pretty much doubt it has any major impact.

ThrowawayR2 7y ago

It almost certainly is but it's unclear whether it will work. Canonical is a surprisingly small company. Its revenues were $110M last year[0]; compare this to Valve, which had an estimated $4.3B in revenue in 2017 or Red Hat, which had $2.9B in revenue last year. Canonical has to keep a sharp eye on staying profitable and, the last anyone heard, their main focus was on their server distribution[1] because the bulk of their income was from server support contracts. Expending manpower on continuing to support 32 bit binaries probably isn't worth what it costs them regardless of what pressure Valve tries to apply. [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-ubuntus-financials/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-ubuntus-financials/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)#Business_plans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)#Business_p...

jcastro 7y ago
I think lots of people are missing the clear economic inbalance here. If you're gaming on Linux and you buy a game: The creator of the game gets a cut, the publisher gets a cut, Valve takes it's cut, NVidia/AMD/Intel got a hardware purchase in there at some point, the porter (Feral or whoever) gets a cut. The Linux distro gets .... absolutely zero. On top of that when things break, people blame the distro. I was at Canonical when we founded a community run PPA to maintain fresh Nvidia drivers, and we couldn't even secure the funding for _3_ GPUs for volunteer developers, we had to apply for community funds. All that so a handful of volunteers can do _years_ of free engineering work that is clearly Nvidia's job. They wouldn't even spot us 3 GPUs for the effort! It's sad, there are people on the Ubuntu desktop team that have been busting their asses for 15 years trying to make the desktop a thing. It's just not a sustainable unless people were overwhelmingly buying a ton of linux games.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > On top of that when things break, people blame the distro. That's because it is often the distro's fault. That's one of the reasons it has been historically such a goddamned pain to port software to Linux: there are bunch of distros and no standards you can rely on. It's a non-platform.