61 ms·

Thank You, Valve

766 points by kinduff 5y ago

raxxorrax 5y ago
Indeed. Valve established DRM to a degree many previously hoped it would get rejected. But they offered a decent service and proved that piracy is a service problem. What they did for Linux as a gaming platform is spectacular. Not many people use it yet, but Windows does look less and less like a dependable long term solution, especially with Microsofts other ambitions in that industry.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >What they did for Linux as a gaming platform is spectacular. Definitely yes, but let's not kid ourselves. Valve is not doing this from the generosity of their hearts or love for the Linux community, or the gaming community, but Proton and the Steam Deck are their future insurance policy against Microsoft coming after their profits in the future. The writing was on the wall, they saw how much money Epic was giving to Apple, and how many studios Microsoft owns, and with the direction Windows is going, in 10 years when Windows 12 drops, Microsoft could also push for a 30% cut on all Steam sales on Windows for example, and Valve is preparing themselves for such a scenario by pushing Steam to Linux full throttle. They want to make sure they reap all the profits from the Steam store and not have to share they pie with a middle man like the Epic vs Apple kerfuffle. That's the end-game here. Don't get me wrong, I'm still very grateful for what Valve is doing for Linux, but it's important to be aware of the motivation behind the actions, consider their potential end-game, and not get romantically attached to companies as there is no free lunch and companies are not your friends.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Oh please. Any time a company does something good. "Let's not kid ourselves. It's all for the money, honey!" Well yeah. That's what a company is. Companies are also people, and people make decisions, and those decisions are sometimes influenced by more than the mere bottom line. You can't read their minds, and it's the opposite of charitable to assume the worst. Fully agree about the rest though. It certainly makes business sense. But it took around a decade to maneuver themselves into this position, and it's pretty hard to believe they did it all solely for the green. I used to exchange MSN messenger messages with Zoid, one of their most productive Dota 2 programmers. (Boy that sounds like ancient history.) He didn't strike me as a person who was particularly ruthless and mercantile. Just a driven programmer trying to do good.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      I mean, Valve is still privately owned as far as I know, so wherever it’s going is entirely up to the mind of it’s founders. Edit: Tring to do good, and they made Dota 2?
      - sillysaurusx 5y ago
        1v1 sf mid scrub The history of dota is pretty fascinating. As someone who worked on Heroes of Newerth, I can vouch that https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ is pretty accurate, based on the reactions of all of my coworkers when it came out. So there's some juicy drama for you. It's true that Valve makes decisions based on money. But it's also true that they execute on them fantastically well. Far better than S2 could ever dream to achieve. It was wonderful to have a front row seat to the steamroller. In hindsight I wish I'd relaxed and enjoyed it more.
        oblio 5y ago
        I can believe almost everything else, and I imagine War3 mod making wasn't the "cleanest" thing ever, but this: > your first realization was that Abdul was a poor designer from here: https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ is almost categorically false. I've been playing Dota since... 2004, I was there almost immediately after the Eul/Guinsoo/Neichus stuff. I did research the previous versions a ton, out of curiosity. There's almost no comparison between Icefrog's additions to Dota and what came before. The other versions were brilliant in their concept but generally very poor in their execution. Icefrog added more brilliant concepts but primarily greatly cleaned up Dota mechanics and execution. He took an amateurish mod and made it have professional level execution. Maybe he sucks to work with in a team (really hard to believe, to be honest, considering the development and testing team he built around Dota and the changelogs, OMG, the changelogs; I'd rather think he might suck to work in a on-site team, because his online team management was pretty solid), but criticizing his management/design of Dota for so many years is really silly.
        sillysaurusx 5y ago
  - thomaslangston 5y ago
    And by extension our future insurance as consumers against Microsoft and X-Box as well.
  - Xelbair 5y ago
    I don't care for underlying motives as long as the results are aligned with mine. The end result is that landscape is better for the customer. I seriously do not get why people think that companies do 'good' for any other reason than money.
    - noirbot 5y ago
      I don't think anyone is implying they did it for any other reason. Only a bunch of people jumping on to a seemingly good thing a company did to be a killjoy about it. Yes, they're clearly doing this to help the Steam Deck and other projects. I'm sure that will make them money and I'm sure someone at the company will do something with that money that people object to. That's just the nature of living in anything beyond a barter economy with humans. I think most people (especially on HN) get that. We don't need 5 people to pop out and remind us of it every time a company does something. Unless it's obvious that there's a clear malicious intent hidden in what the company did, a lot of times it just feels like "How dare these people feel some joy. Capitalism must make everyone feel bad all the time."
      - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        >Only a bunch of people jumping on to a seemingly good thing a company did to be a killjoy about it. That's 100% the reaction here every time Microsoft launches something benefiting devs and consumers. Everything is scrutinized with skepticism. Why should other billion dollar tech companies get a pass? Or why the double standards? How do you think Valve would be towards consumers if they were to become a monopoly in the PC gaming sales space? Not knocking them, I'm just saying it's good to be paranoid when billion dollar tech companies are being too generous and benevolent with consumers, and not get romantically attached to these corporations.
        noirbot 5y ago
        I'm not saying that Valve should be above complaint. I'm also annoyed when people show up in threads about WSL or VS Code or whatever else that Microsoft does just to be like "Stop liking this, Microsoft is evil". I'm just saying that "But they're a company so nothing they do can be good" is a generic response without anything interesting behind it. You can post it on every thread about every action done by every company and it will be true. I'm not saying not to be paranoid, but unless the point is just "people can't enjoy things made by companies" maybe save the actual paranoia for cases where it's clear that the action is going to be a big downside. There's no call to action except "don't talk about this" or "why are you buying things from a corporation?" So much of it just feels mean-spirited to me. That there's literally no possible thing any company could do that wouldn't be spun as "well this is just good PR to cover up X evil thing they're doing." And that's maybe true, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage them to do good things and recognize them when they do them. It feels like a perverse joy in stomping on other people's happiness, even if it's justified. It's like showing up at someone's birthday and reminding them they're a year closer to death and debilitating old age diseases. It's true, but what does anyone gain by doing that. Are people on this forum A. unaware of corporate malfeasance or B. able to be persuaded from their current position on its dangers? I'd say that's almost never the case here.
  - mastax 5y ago
    > Definitely yes, but let's not kid ourselves. Valve is not doing this from the generosity of their hearts or love for the Linux community, or the gaming community, GOOD! That means our incentives are aligned, and the arrangement is much more likely to survive long-term.
  - yucky 5y ago
    >Definitely yes, but let's not kid ourselves. Valve is not doing this from the generosity of their hearts Something tells me Kroger doesn't sell me food out of the goodness of their hearts either, and I'm ok with that too.
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    Valve depends on indie devs and atm Valve's Steam is by far the best platform to release, distribute and manage your indie game.
  - ranguna 5y ago
    They could've choose to go proprietary with all their software, locked down proton, locked down their OS, locked down their hardware, locked down everything. But instead, proton is open source, their OS is based on one of the most open distros out there and they published a tear down guide (not the best guide, mind you, but it's trillions of year ahead any competition on their space). So yeah, they are doing it for the money, but they are one of the very few companies that understands that money come from users, and they seem to be doing very good for users. So don't kid yourself, it's not only for the money.
- nimajneb 5y ago
  I remember how difficult it was to setup Wine and to play a game, Valve made it much easier. I remember some games even with Wine, wouldn't run with complete compatibility or wouldn't work. Installing Steam on Linux is pretty easy.
- kristofferR 5y ago
  The Steam DRM is a joke, Steamless cracks it in seconds. It's about the level of the DVD CSS DRM.
  - sph 5y ago
    Steam is successful not because it's hard to bypass, but because it's so fucking convenient. "Piracy is a service problem." — Gabe Newell
    - gbersac 5y ago
      100% true. I don't pirate game because it's easier to just click buy on steam.
      - foxyv 5y ago
        Not to mention 99% of the cracked games out there come with fun little friends that will encrypt your hard drive for you and charge you a nominal fee.
        bool3max 5y ago
        Absolutely not true, as much as you'd want it to be.
        antifa 5y ago
        I've gotten a virus only twice in my life. Both times, it was an ad on the cyanide and happiness website. The worst thing that's ever happened to me from pirating games is the keygen having loud unexpected music.
        account42 5y ago
        > The worst thing that's ever happened to me from pirating games is the keygen having loud unexpected music. You mean the best thing, right? <3 chiptunes
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > Valve established DRM to a degree many previously hoped it would get rejected. Not sure what you mean by this. Steam offers DRM, but its use is not enforced. There are many Steam games that can simply be copied to another computer and run even without Steam.
iamricks 5y ago
Considering Valve is private, it's very impressive what Gaben has accomplished (and everyone who works there).
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  I doubt Valve would've achieved these things if it wasn't private.
- regnerba 5y ago
  Why does them being private make what they have done impressive?
  - snowgrove 5y ago
    They did it all without outside investors or stock sales.
    - toyg 5y ago
      Well, technically speaking we don't know if there are any outside investors. We only know Newell still holds most of the stock and controls it, and that significant chunks are owned by past and current employees.
  - vietvu 5y ago
    Money. By being private, they might have the freedom to do whatever they see fit, but without money, it must be tough sometimes.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      > but without money They do have money. They made tons from Half-Life etc. Then they now have a huge continual income stream from Steam.
      - Ekaros 5y ago
        And I believe the amount the made from Half-Lifes is peanuts compared to amount they are making with TF2, CS:GO and Dota 2...
chaps 5y ago
Absolutely. I've been stubborn in the past five years or so about Linux gaming where if a game doesn't work, I just don't play it. And as time went on in the past few years, more and more games just... started working out of the box. Maybe 30% of games worked a few years back and now probably 98% work. It's not always perfect (looking at you, borderlands 3), but it works in a vast majority of games I've played. If gaming is a reason preventing others from stepping into Linux based on experiences from even two years ago, definitely check it out again -- it's night and day. It's been incredible to see how quickly they've been able to make Linux completely viable for gaming. Now about my productivity..
- 29083011397778 5y ago
  > Looking at you, Borderlands 3 I must not have hit this yet - my girlfriend and I recently started playing through after finding it cheap on Greenmangaming, and it plays fine. Neither of us have super powerful PCs, just 6600XTs, but the level of bugginess (such as the game jumping to default monitor every so often) is about what I would expect for Windows too given how complicated modern games are.
  - chaps 5y ago
    Yeah, the specific issue is from the first mission where you have to watch a TV segment to continue. Problem is, the proton version isn't built with a package to play video files within the game engine itself. So while video files can be played during things like startup, that's about it. It's a fair amount of work to fix it and it makes noise in my steam setup.. and honestly, it's not that worth it to me.
riidom 5y ago
I feel like I am in a "late-game" stage of gaming. I have sort of an overview of what is going on, but a major percentage of games simply look not interesting (anymore) to me. The collection of games I end up playing is somewhere between special and weird, I'd say. And, to get back to the topic, for people in a comparable situation like me, Linux is a great alternative. So if hear or read other people comparing pros and cons of Win vs. Linux (or Apple vs. Linux), and gaming was the major drawback, think carefully if that applies to you as well. Having a pile of shame on Linux is as easy to do as on Windows, just it's smaller (which is good, right?). But having one at all means that you don't have a lack of games, but quite the opposite. Of course, when you deeply into AAA and big franchises, and need to play a game when it's published and everyone talks about it - then probably not.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  > I feel like I am in a "late-game" stage of gaming ... a major percentage of games simply look not interesting (anymore) to me. I dunno. The kind of games I like (puzzle-like, simulations, calm strategy) was mainstream once. At that time, the majority of the popular games was interesting. My tastes change in that I'm way more receptive to reaction games than I used to be. But not enough to prefer them. What places me on the same position you are on, but my actual tastes didn't change much since childhood.
- patrickk 5y ago
  > I feel like I am in a "late-game" stage of gaming. I have sort of an overview of what is going on, but a major percentage of games simply look not interesting (anymore) to me. I feel similar. I usually play slightly older AAA games with the bugs ironed out, indie or AA, or games 5-20 years old based on the amount of interesting looking mods available. Reliving games from your childhood with quality of life improvements, new game modes, campaigns and better graphics is a blast. Browsing the most modded games on ModsDB or NexusMods is great for inspiration. /r/patientgamers is good too. So many AAA developers and publishers are pushing out nonstop cash grabs with no respect for players, especially with sequels in previously beloved franchises. EA, Rockstar, Ubisoft etc are all at it. It was inevitable when gaming became so mainstream and more profitable than Hollywood.
erwincoumans 5y ago
And damn Valve for not supporting a 64 bit Linux Steam client. Having to mess with installing 32bit OpenGL drivers just for Valve, sometimes messing up the installation left a bad taste. At least give users the option to pick either 32bit or 64bit client. I'm sure many would happily drop 32bit games support for that. And people who want 32bit games pick the 32bit client. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/179#issuecomment-267790879 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/179#... "Please provide a 64-bit Steam package, so that those of us on 64-bit distros don't have to install a gazillion 32-bit packages."
- throwawayvibes 5y ago
- striking 5y ago
  This would also mean maintaining multiple runtimes, wouldn't it? That's not work I'd be excited to do.
- nullify88 5y ago
  There is a community contributed Steam Flatpak that isolates its dependencies away from the system. https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.valvesoftware.Steam https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.valvesoftware.Steam Seemed to do the job fine, ymmv.
- account42 5y ago
  > I'm sure many would happily drop 32bit games support for that. Really? There are still many x86-only games on Steam, tons of which probably won't ever be updated. And if Valve does not make that clear on the Store pages then they will receive part of the blame and support burden. I think what is more likely to happen is for Steam to come with it's own 32-bit dependencies that marshal to the 64-bit system GL/Vulkan/etc. The client itself might be ported to 64-bit too but that would not even be needed at that point. This is already partially the case today - the Steam runtime contains most required 32-bit (and 64-bit) libraries and Steam is already (optionally) using containers for games: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/tree/master/pressure-vessel https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/t... Presentation on this from 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrbWbBYAolo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrbWbBYAolo
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
In a very practical way, I agree with the thought behind the post. Still, I want to offer a counter, because as linux is becoming more and more popular ( I myself am an anecdote since I recently jumped to PopOS as my main driver ), I worry that it will become another Windows. Linux principles are slowly being eroded for the ease and convenience of the user. It is both awesome and awful. Convenience destroyed mobile to me.
- Karsteski 5y ago
  Can you elaborate? Would you prefer the Linux ecosystem to remain less user-friendly, to maintain whatever principles you have in mind? Also, what principles are you referring to?
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
    I think the biggest one is this: "Each Program Does One Thing Well." followed by: "Store Data in Flat Text Files." I can't really say new programs adhere to either of these principles. In fact, it seems those seem to be actively shunned. I enjoy PopOS and I still have Vietnam flashback to my very first linux install way back when ( I installed it next to Win95 and results were not fun since it was my dad's PC ), but some things were better.. even if they were less user-friendly. So yes. I think my real answer is yes -- it should be less user-friendly if that is the only way to maintain those pricinples.
    - Karsteski 5y ago
      I don't see why either of those things is contradictory to a good user experience, ngl
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      > I can't really say new programs adhere to either of these principles. In fact, it seems those seem to be actively shunned. They are being actively shunned, largely because they didn't actually work that well outside of running terminal programs that interfaced largely with ASCII text.
INTPenis 5y ago
Claiming <year> will be the year of the Linux desktop has become a running joke among me and my friends. So I wouldn't make such bold claims. But other than that I am completely on board with what the author is saying. I come from the same background. Until just a couple years ago I had a Windows PC solely for gaming. Now I can't remember when I last booted Windows on it. Another weird side effect of this gaming revolution on Linux is that I prefer X11 over Wayland. When Wayland became the default in Fedora I was on board, thinking it was the new cool thing. But gradually I realized that it's really not ready for the big time. I still need X11 to share my desktop on MS Teams (thanks Microsoft for that btw), and I still need it for most games.
- outworlder 5y ago
  > I still need X11 to share my desktop on MS Teams (thanks Microsoft for that btw), and I still need it for most games. Which GPU do you have? I can run most games on Wayland on AMD (including the likes of Cyberpunk). I still boot up Windows sometimes due to the lack of HDR support.
- hbn 5y ago
  > Claiming <year> will be the year of the Linux desktop has become a running joke among me and my friends. It's an inside joke across a much larger chunk of the PC gaming zeitgeist than your friend group! And it's what the author was referencing. But he didn't really make a claim, he said "hopefully"
  - airstrike 5y ago
    In fact, it was never really associated with gaming. It's arguably the most quintessential Linux joke since, I don't know, at least the early 2000s
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- sleepycatgirl 5y ago
  For me every year is year of the Linux desktop. How much progress it has made, is astonishing Also regarding Wayland, yeah, same. Then again, Wayland is pretty young, so I would say, give it 2-3 more years? Until then, X11. And there is many cute WMs on X11, but not wayland, soooo... I am stuck myself in X11 :D Alongside that, there is Pipewire. Yeah, right... Its quite impressive. It also fixed all my.. quirks/issues I had with Linux audio Anyway, every year feels better, and I am happy with that.
KptMarchewa 5y ago
I think the killer feature of the Steam Deck is that it makes Linux gaming desirable. In contrast to their earlier approach with Steam Machines, which made it merely approachable.
emersion 5y ago
To add on this: Valve works with upstream developers on upstream code, so their work benefits the whole FOSS ecosystem. They are funding a lot of kernel, Mesa, Wayland, Wine and KDE developers. (Disclaimer: I'm a Valve contractor.)
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Thanks for your effort too then! Good work! Extra well wishes if you work on the general kernel improvements or KDE tech, that stuff has made my life more enjoyable for close to 20 years or so.
- majewsky 5y ago
  Here's hoping that Valve's next round of investments in the stack puts some focus on the needs of streamers, on the basis that getting streamers into the SteamOS/Linux tech stack may introduce the topic to a wider audience. At this point, streaming to Twitch from my Sway desktop is working really well (thanks for that @emersion!), with the one frustrating exception of not being able to screen-capture individual windows.
Rooster61 5y ago
I dig most of this article, and I do applaud the work Valve is doing for the Linux gaming ecosystem, but I draw a line at supporting kernel level anti-cheat drivers. That trend in gaming bothers me to no end, and I refuse to knowingly install a game that features one. The presence of 15 year old script kiddies using aimbots does NOT IN ANY WAY justify having kernel level control over my machine, Linux or otherwise. Valve, and every other company that contributes to gaming in general, kindly stay the fuck out of our kernels. EDIT: I feel a few folks in the comments are getting mixed up between the concepts of DRM and kernel-level anti-cheat drivers. DRM is what keeps folks from pirating software, as well as diminishing the freedom of where and how you can install the software. It sucks, but I understand why it exists, and that isn't what I'm talking about here Kernel-level drivers, on the other hand, are drivers that run outside your sphere of influence (so-called user-space) and exist outside the checks and balances of your operating system that keep programs from doing whatever the hell they please. Add on the fact that these programs are black boxes by design, and all of the sudden a company essentially has free reign to do whatever they want with your machine under your nose. This is dangerous and unacceptable.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  But it should be an option for those that wants to play knowing there are probably fewer cheaters if they opt in. There will always be trade-offs in freedom when you try to implement rules to improve the freedom of those that want to play on a balanced playing field. This is true in society as well.
  - Rooster61 5y ago
    It's not freedom, its security. DRM is neither here nor there as long as its in user-space. It sucks for the consumer, but I understand why companies do it even if I don't like it. Kernel level drivers are a whole different can o' worms. A corporation could make my gaming rig into part of what amounts to a spyware botnet with me being none the wiser other than encrypted traffic coming OUT of my machine. Those drivers by design are black boxes, and there is no way to monitor what your machine is actually doing. That shit shouldn't be on mine or anyone else's system, especially under the premise of a "fair gameplay environment".
tapoxi 5y ago
Is it too little, too late? Microsoft now owns a lot of the biggest game franchises through the Activision and Bethesda acquisitions, and I wouldn't be surprised if they actively block Proton support by using UWP or Windows-specific anticheat.
- ruune 5y ago
  Didn't even think about that. A part of me wants to think of Xbox as this cool company that wont prevent Linux support. But Microsoft isn't necessarily know for being overly friendly towards Linux huh
- jamil7 5y ago
  > and I wouldn't be surprised if they actively block Proton support by using UWP or Windows-specific anticheat Surely this wouldn't make any sense for them strategically? They want as many people playing and making noise about the franchises they own as possible - especially multiplayer.
  - account42 5y ago
    No, they care about maximizing profit as a whole not about any individual franchises. Platform holders have shown again and again that they are willing to sink money into exclusives if it means they can make more money off their platform.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Possible. Although a lot of gaming companies that got bought never did amount to much after the acquisition. If Microsoft locks down their environment, I believe they are in danger of losing their dominance on PC. I have yet to meet a developer that likes UWP and I believe it is dead by now. There is WinUI 3, but I fail to see how they learned from their mistakes. They believe they can work it out with rebranding, but I heavily doubt it. Don't know if my info is current, but you can only deploy WinUI through their store. I just shorty looked into it, laughed a bit and went elsewhere. I have already left the MS stack behind completely.
  - 5y ago
Vermeulen 5y ago
As a game dev it surprises me the constant push from some Linux players to still make a native Linux version, considering how good Valve's Proton layer is. I don't think they understand that while making a new Linux build can be trivial (in Unity), dealing with all the support issues for that isn't. I don't have time to track down audio issues for some random Linux version for 0.001% of players Yet if I say I'll only support Proton on Linux I am inviting myself to constant hate mail
- NmAmDa 5y ago
  They are small subset of players because there are no wide support for gaming on Linux. If this change by game developers then this percentage will increase dramatically.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    There's no wide support for gaming on Linux Desktop because historically there hasn't been anything one could call "The Linux Desktop" for them to target. The landscape is so ludicrously fragmented that you can't rely on any software to be installed other than the kernel. Valve got around this by just packing their own runtime libraries with Steam.
    - Bigpet 5y ago
      It was pretty obvious when Stadia "made" devs port to Linux. When the economic incentive was there, the technology wasn't much of an issue.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        Staia presented a known system to target, not a fragmented mess of ever changing 'distributions' that don't even attempt to maintain binary compatibility for a single release.
        account42 5y ago
thrower123 5y ago
I still think it's a little odd that there is so much celebration of Linux as a semi-viable game platform, when no one makes native Linux ports anymore; they just target Windows, and then Proton provides a Windows API compatability layer.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Game (and other software) developers like to target stable APIs. Outside of the kernel, Linux has historically been incredibly unstable and fragmented. Vale shipped their own runtime libraries with Steam just to give native Linux game developers something consistent to target. If the Linux Desktop community solved that problem there might be more reason to make native ports.
  - account42 5y ago
    You keep repeating this but have you actually tried to distribute binary software for Linux? In what way has "fragmentation" made that harder?
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      A few links gathered from a quick google search as a primer: http://stevehanov.ca/blog/?id=97 http://stevehanov.ca/blog/?id=97 https://www.evanjones.ca/portable-linux-binaries.html https://www.evanjones.ca/portable-linux-binaries.html https://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2012/07/creating-portable-linux-binaries.html https://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2012/07/creating-portable-... https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Portable_GNU-Linux_binaries https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Portable_GNU-Linux_... https://github.com/wheybags/glibc_version_header https://github.com/wheybags/glibc_version_header In other words: there are a lot of steps and a lot of gotchyas to doing this that you're glossing over. Linux userland libraries are generally designed with the intention that an army of third-party maintainers will integrate all of this desperately developed software together and place it in a repo. Naturally every distribution wants to do things a little differently too, and they have a habit of changing it up every couple years. When you try to step out of that mold, even just to static link, things unsurprisingly become more difficult. Whereas Windows, Mac, Android, etc. have been designed since the beginning not to require that sort of thing and it is consequently a much, much more straightforward process. I'm curious why, since you seem to believe the process is so straight-forward, you think it is that so few people distribute a simple binary? Why were Flatpak and AppImage invented?
nameisname 5y ago
This is great but I still dislike that valve has no customer support whatsoever. They also offer no refunds for errors in their system. I've been in situations where I purchase something off the market and it says "could not find an item at that price" and purchases it anyway without updating the screen. This resulted in me having multiple of the same item and they wouldn't even acknowledge the issue. I'm anti steam until they fix their huge customer service black hole. There's no excuse.
- Kelamir 5y ago
  Sorry to hear about that. Valve has customer support though. On a request I had a few months ago I got responses promptly.
- genericlogic 5y ago
  I have refunded a number of items on steam for a number of reasons and all it took was filling out some online forms and waiting a bit. While I never spoke to a person I never had an issue. Steam also has a posted refund policy: https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/ https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/
- donatj 5y ago
  I’ve had a couple issues with steam purchases over the years, but support always corrected it right away and were helpful and friendly; even in the case where the issue was clearly my fault. Way more than I can say of Sony whose support I would describe as adversarial in my several encounters. Most recently, after fifteen years of using PSN, hundreds of purchases, thousands of dollars, my account stopped working with ANY of my credit cards or PayPal - all orders fail. Their advice? Will not fix, buy gift cards from Amazon.
Namidairo 5y ago
> Here we are today, waiting for the Steam Deck. Is that a figure of speech or a reference to the fact that the hardware preview coverage is dropping today (I believe)?
JamesMcMinn 5y ago
I am very excited by the Steam Deck and have paid for my place in the queue (hopefully some time this year). I am a long time desktop Linux user, however I also game and have either had to dual boot, or more recently, game inside a Windows VM because of DRM and unsupported games. The biggest issue I can can see with the Steam Deck, or more specifically, Linux on the Steam Deck, is Microsoft's Game Pass. It simply will not work on Linux, and at the moment, I spend more time playing game via Game Pass than I do via Steam. Microsoft have a very clear direction with their recent purchases of publishers and studios, and I worry that the lack of any sort of Game Pass support (without installing Windows) will hamper the Steam Deck. Of course, Valve are probably hoping that the Steam Deck will discourage Game Pass subscriptions since it eats into their market, but as long as Microsoft are also willing to sell games on Steam, I think having both options is the healthiest for PC gaming overall.
- yepthatsreality 5y ago
  First people complain that no one will use Linux because theirs no hardware. Then they complain they can’t use Linux because of the software support. We now have both and now people won’t use Linux because Microsoft acquired studio’s games will only run on Windows? That moving goal post doesn’t look good for the Switch or PlayStation platforms then.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    I mean, there are a lot of reasons not to use Linux still, just because Valve solved a few of them doesn't make any of the others illegitimate. I mean, christ, the desktop user experience is still pretty goddamned terrible, and the only reason I'm personally considering switching in the near future is that Microsoft is working hard to make Windows even worse.
    - R0flcopt3r 5y ago
      The desktop user experience suck on all platforms. Macos is ridden with bugs and inflexibility, Windows is just confusing to me, and Linux depends on which of the hundreds of experiences you pick. I game on Windows, work on Mac. Used fedora daily through uni and before.
pschastain 5y ago
Anybody else get a "Potential Security Risk" warning for the site? Using Firefox 96.0.3 under Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon
- account42 5y ago
  Firefox uses Google's "Safe Browsing" list for these warnings. As someone with a website I can tell you that Google gives exactly zero shits about removing false positives from that list and keeping them off. With the rise of barely verified machine learning algorithms used to feed the list you can expect this to become a more common occurence for independent sites. My personal suggesion is to disable the feature in your browser instead of letting a private corporation with no transparency or accountability gatekeep what you should consider safe.
KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
RIP Codeweavers.
- coldpie 5y ago
  Huh? We're doing pretty well, actually.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
    Oh I just thought it was sad the credit that should be going to you is largely going to Valve.
- gpderetta 5y ago
  Am I missing something? Doesn't valve pay Codeweavers to maintain Proton?
kache_ 5y ago
They've also made massive contributions in the open VR space
donatj 5y ago
I hope Valve brings something like they have done for Linux to macOS. I opened Steam the other day, and by default it’s filtered to only show the games my system can play. I was curious how many games I’d lost to Apple dropping support for 32 bit, I’d never looked before. I can play 94 of my 345 Steam games. My heart literally sunk when I saw this.
- Chris2048 5y ago
  But why? Shouldn't Apple be doing the work?
  - donatj 5y ago
    Apple dropped 32 bit support, it was intentional. They’re not going back on it. They have a long history of showing no interest in software preservation. Valve has the technology. Wine runs on macOS. Just need to apply it to Steam for Mac.
    - Chris2048 5y ago
      That's why Valve can do it, not why they should. If Apple treats its platform like this, let it rot.
      - p_l 5y ago
        According to some gamedev friends, Apple is the single worst platform they support (at least for anything that isn't Apple-only). And it's not just things like outdated APIs (OpenGL), but various tasks related to preparing a distributable program in this time (with codesigning etc.)
    - striking 5y ago
      I think you're missing the spirit of the question. If Apple doesn't want to wreck gaming on its platform, and if there are few gamers on Apple platforms, and supporting Apple platforms doesn't give Valve the upper hand against MS the same way supporting Linux would... Why would Valve bother? Why shouldn't it be on Apple to make it work? Maybe install Crossover and play the Windows versions of games through there?
dncornholio 5y ago
Thanks Valve, indeed. But no, 2022 will also not be the year of the Linux desktop. I compare Wine with ductape. It works but don't ask how. It's fine for casual gamers, but these are few. The year of the Linux desktop will only come when all the developers treat Linux as a native compilation target. When Linux has all the drivers. As long as games get "emulated" on Windows in Linux, people will always choose Windows.
- deadbunny 5y ago
  And how do you get to a big enough market share to become a default compilation target? I'd argue that Wine/Proton are a bridge to that. If you can make every game available on Linux via wine/proton then you would have to assume that every one of the Windows holdouts (Ok, most. Some people always find excuses) will swap to Linux as their primary machine, you can then, with reasonable confidence say "Linux has X marketshare" and then make a decision on whether that is worth your development time. I just don't think that marketshare is going to be anywhere near what it would require to become a default target and I say that as a die hard linux user.
  - dncornholio 5y ago
    I totally agree, I'm just debunking the year of the Linux Desktop hype. This has been sad so many times, and still not happening. Just as it's not happening this year. This is from personal experience because I was very excited about SteamCMD. But after trying to run some dedicated servers (for some sim-racing titles), I still got win32 binaries and had to run them thru Wine. Switched back to Windows because the performance was noticeable worse. Again, it's fine for casuals but for the average PC gamer a big no no.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > And how do you get to a big enough market share to become a default compilation target? The problem isn't even market share, it's that Linux Desktop doesn't constitute a targetable platform because it is so fragmented and unstable. This is why Steam has to pack in its own runtime libraries just so native Linux games have some kind of known base system. > Ok, most. Some people always find excuses Excuses? Like there's some kind of moral imperative to use Linux? People have reasons they prefer to use other environments. I've used Linux Desktops on and off for 20 years and I've watched statements like this consistently turn away interested users through this kind of dismissive bullshit.
amval 5y ago
Off-topic, but that is a really nice personal page, I really like the design :)
- kinduff 5y ago
  Thank you very much!
pdimitar 5y ago
All well and good and I support Valve's dedication as well. They are doing what everyone else is afraid of doing. Kudos! One thing: stay the hell away from my kernel. I use Linux for the freedom it gives me. If you are going to install a rootkit just so I don't aim-bot in your precious little game, the deal is off. I'll keep a close eye this year on how do you install Steam's layer on Linux. `sudo` will not be ever involved! If I can't install it just in my $HOME directory without kernel shenanigans then they'll get a huge "Nope!" from me.
w4rh4wk5 5y ago
Big thanks to DXVK at this point. Even when you are not running on Linux directly, having a DX11 -> Vulkan translation layer makes porting (older) games to other platforms so much easier. Of course, there are also other projects like FAudio that do an awesome job!
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
The only thing I miss on GNU/Linux is a good alternative to CheatEngine, with popular game scripts from FearlessRevolution.org - creative use of such scripts can tremendously improve (single-player) gaming experience. For example, I used to give a huge population boost to computer opponents in Rome: Total War, so they would be able to field big armies for me to crush. Without it they quickly depleted their manpower pool and after the initial clash the game turned into a tedious mopping.
- account42 5y ago
  Modding in general is something that scales with the platform popularity so anything that needs to be platform specific is still lacking on Linux. Another tool like Cheat Engine that has no Linux eqivalent is Flawless Widescreen [0], although Gamescope at least makes the games playable. https://www.flawlesswidescreen.org/ https://www.flawlesswidescreen.org/
txdv 5y ago
I think they started using their proton layer for dota2. I am lately experiencing lags during their heavy animations when presenting Arcana and special game modes, other than that it works fine. I have a lot of games since I buy 3 year old games for 5 dollars and most of them work fine. The newest games with special anti cheat systems probably do not work. But this is a huge step. They are ahead of the competition. If the competition wants to offer something better than Steam they now need to invest heavily in linux support which increases the costs of development significantly.
- coldpie 5y ago
  > I think they started using their proton layer for dota2. Nope, DOTA 2 is a native Linux game: https://steamdb.info/app/570/config/ https://steamdb.info/app/570/config/
  - flowless 5y ago
    Recently it switched to running via Proton if you had Steam Play enabled (and broke completely for me). Solution is/was to disable Steam Play and it will use native version.
    - coldpie 5y ago
      Hm, that's surprising to me. It's historically been that you have to enable Steam Play for a specific title to switch that one title over to using the Windows version via Proton. Possibly that changed so the global setting does it as well, but it would surprise me.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
Valve doesn't want your thanks - they want your money. Did the author even buy a Steam Deck?
- kinduff 5y ago
  I'm well aware it's a company doing things for profit, but the benefit to the Linux community is gigantic, as I stated on the post. Regarding the Steam Deck, I'm on the queue for the preorder, since still need to wait 18 days to do it.
  - rubyist5eva 5y ago
    I commend you for putting your money here your mouth is :) And I also agree that the benefit for the community is enormous as well. I am watching what Valve is doing very closely as an example of how commercial interests and free software can benefit eachother.
ekianjo 5y ago
Recently there has been 250 titles verified for the upcoming Steam Deck: https://boilingsteam.com/top-10-new-games-you-can-play-on-linux-with-proton-feb-2022-edition/ https://boilingsteam.com/top-10-new-games-you-can-play-on-li... While not technically "a console" it's still one of the best line-up ever for a new hardware launch, and it's probably going to be in thousands later this month.
- yepthatsreality 5y ago
  It already is thousands but the games just need to go through Valve hardware vetting. AppDB (WINE) and ProtonDB will give a better picture at what’s possible.
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    Valve vetting is also about the controls being usable for the Steam Deck, not just the fact that it runs.
nimbius 5y ago
its worth noting valves monumental effort was largely inspired by the release of the Microsoft store, which at the time (had it succeeded) would have had a significant impact on Valve. Valves support for Linux was a massive strategic success that almost certainly led Redmond to focus more attention on the cloud presence that runs online games and publishing services, instead of directly trying to EEE the playing field.
mijoharas 5y ago
Proton is absolutely amazing. I've started buying a few more indy titles to play a little bit, and they tend to "just work" most of the time now (which definitely didn't used to be the case). Even with a somewhat unusual system, and running wayland, the experience is fantastic. (NOTE: I also don't tend to buy triple A games on my computer, so that could obviously be an issue).
lnxg33k1 5y ago
I think it's more like of a intelligence thing, a lot of software houses in gaming have been working very hard to give windows a competitive advantage in terms of gaming experience in exchange for what? they've been enriching microsoft and proudly so thankfully someone understood that there is a system you can use for free to build cool stuff on top, that doesn't try to lock you in, doesn't exploit dominant positions to push other software on you, and doesn't come with a 5 kilometres long terms of services, I really am unable to understand why people just keep liking being microsoft's guinea pigs
sydbarrett74 5y ago
Kernel anti-cheat drivers are rootkits. Full stop.
fareesh 5y ago
As a consumer, Valve comes across like Google. They build products and features and then they often sit untouched, sometimes for years. They are terrible at communicating to their playerbase and even their contracted talent. The DOTA2 community has had to deal with these aspects of Valve for years. CS:GO is now also essentially a forgotten project, and within the span of just a couple of months, the FPS crowd is moving on to other newcomer games. This might be armchair speculation but it seems like since Google is making so much money from ads and Valve is making so much money from Steam, that their projects don't really get the kind of management and focus from the organization that is mutually compatible with the other stakeholders - customers, players, tournament organizers, businesses, etc. These are drops in the ocean compared to their real revenue streams. I guess as far as this particular story is concerned, I wouldn't be surprised if Valve just abandoned this project at some point too once it's launched, and moved on to something else. At least in this case they've done a great amount of work for open-source which is fantastic because others can build on their contributions. I don't really expect these aspects of the culture at Valve to change in this regard, as frustrating as it is from the outside, I'm sure it makes a lot more sense from the inside.
- ghostly_s 5y ago
  Huh? According to Wikipedia, CS:GO is a game which came out in 2012, still receives regular updates and has an active competitive community.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    Yeah and I don't see the comparison with Google either. Valve isn't known for killing profitable products. Steam Machines was just an experiment which came a few years too soon, the technology wasn't there yet, thus Proton and now the actual Steam Machines are a reality.
grae_QED 5y ago
At this point, Valve has yet to disappoint me. Even their failures, like the Steam Controller, were amazing pieces of tech. The Steam Deck is no exception. It's exactly what I've been wanting: a SFFPC that doubles as a portable gaming console with Linux natively installed. Bravo Steam!
gumby 5y ago
The way Valve works suggests this is less a policy of Valve the company than the desire of a few devs who work there.
quitit 5y ago
I'm fine with people praising Valve for utilising linux to advance their commercial interests. It's an example of a "win win" situation. However I notice on these forums in particular when other tech companies do similar it isn't seen so charitably. I speak with a slightly cynical tone because I've seen this story before - the catalyst to the changing public opinion has been less about what the companies actually do and more about when competitors emerge and engage PR campaigns to recast the incumbent as evil and the newcomer as a saviour. One should keep their eyes open to see if the same happens to Valve.
- account42 5y ago
  I think so far Valve's interest seem much more aligned with the average Linux gamer than any other company that I can think of. Valve has become a significant contributor to, the primary maintainer or themselves started development of: * The open source Vulkan driver for AMD graphics * DXVK, the DirectX 12 to Vulkan wrapper * Proton * SDL, a cross-platform support library for native development * Gamescope display server to wrap games that e.g. have bad support for your monitor resolution All of these are immensely useful even independently of Valves platform or proprietary software and this is by no means a complete list of the extend of their contributions. I don't think its unreasonable that they are praised even if their actions are ultimately self-serving.
LoveGracePeace 5y ago
I've been gaming happily on Linux for years. Top and/or good games like Dying Light, ARK. The rest I played using Wine with tweaks. Proton is great and Valve should be applauded but the future of gaming on Linux or Linux Desktop in general doesn't rest now on any one company and it never has.
nvarsj 5y ago
I'll be happy when I can finally delete my Windows partition, which is used exclusively to play games. I've already moved to Linux for a lot of stuff, because frankly, it just plays games better than Windows 10/11. For example, stepmania (a rhythm game) stutters like mad for me on Windows and I've never been able to figure out why - and the debugging process in Windows is akin to black magic. On Linux it just runs buttery smooth with 0 stutters. I can't wait until more games are native ported to Linux and/or run well in Proton, and I can finally use a single, good OS for everything.
roody15 5y ago
Agree, Thank you Valve. I play all my games on Arch machine at home. Last few years have been overjoyed with the amount of games that run excellent on my system. To me its a golden time for gaming on Linux!
ribit 5y ago
I vehemently disagree with sentiment expressed in the article. Sure, on the surface the work done Valve does significantly improve the state of Linux gaming. But this is not Linux gaming. This is Windows gaming under Linux. We need to think about the long-term effects, about maintaining a healthy ecosystem. I cannot imagine how delegating Linux and Vulkan to be a long-term emulator of DX12 and Win is supposed to be healthy. What about platform autonomy? Shouldn't we strive towards a future where Vulkan is a strong, independent API with its own voice and not just an interface for emulating DX12? And one where game developers actively want to support Linux as first class citizen and not just make Windows games and putting all the burden of compatibility on the maintainers of the emulation layer. The worst outcome of this is that the market share and quality of Vulkan implementations will diminish. WebGPU is a strong upcoming API contender on the mobile side, which IMO has a good chance of displacing Vulkan for many applications. And if DXVK works that well on Linux, more developers might end up choosing DX12 and only supporting Windows. Giving up autonomy and becoming a subordinate of a different technology stack is never a good idea. I mean, if this is the way how the Linux community wants to play, then why not make it official and just scrap Vulkan and have a DX-compatible API in place with IHV drivers?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  The Linux Desktop community has had 20 years to make Linux Desktop a reasonable, if not attractive, platform for gaming and game development and they have consistently and utterly failed at it. Valve did the only thing that was going to work.
  - ribit 5y ago
    That is true. Proton is a pragmatic solution. But it hardly a satisfactory solution, and I worry that it is not sustainable solution either. I do not really have a horse in the run personally, as I am not a Linux user (my platform of choice is macOS), but as a GPU programming enthusiast I dislike anything that gives Microsoft more power. And of course, let us not mistake Valve's intensions. They couldn't care less about Linux users. They are simply leveraging Linux as a low-cost platform to get into the console business.
tomphoolery 5y ago
Valve is great until they have to make a 3rd of something.
- account42 5y ago
  That's not a problem unless the number 3 is actually in the title.
deltaonefour 5y ago
Keep in mind valve is a business first. There interest is profitability. Its just that the direction of their interest happens to align with Linux. This is good, but if at some point in time it doesn't align, don't be surprised.

766 points by kinduff 5y ago

Indeed. Valve established DRM to a degree many previously hoped it would get rejected. But they offered a decent service and proved that piracy is a service problem. What they did for Linux as a gaming platform is spectacular. Not many people use it yet, but Windows does look less and less like a dependable long term solution, especially with Microsofts other ambitions in that industry.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>What they did for Linux as a gaming platform is spectacular. Definitely yes, but let's not kid ourselves. Valve is not doing this from the generosity of their hearts or love for the Linux community, or the gaming community, but Proton and the Steam Deck are their future insurance policy against Microsoft coming after their profits in the future. The writing was on the wall, they saw how much money Epic was giving to Apple, and how many studios Microsoft owns, and with the direction Windows is going, in 10 years when Windows 12 drops, Microsoft could also push for a 30% cut on all Steam sales on Windows for example, and Valve is preparing themselves for such a scenario by pushing Steam to Linux full throttle. They want to make sure they reap all the profits from the Steam store and not have to share they pie with a middle man like the Epic vs Apple kerfuffle. That's the end-game here. Don't get me wrong, I'm still very grateful for what Valve is doing for Linux, but it's important to be aware of the motivation behind the actions, consider their potential end-game, and not get romantically attached to companies as there is no free lunch and companies are not your friends.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Oh please. Any time a company does something good. "Let's not kid ourselves. It's all for the money, honey!" Well yeah. That's what a company is. Companies are also people, and people make decisions, and those decisions are sometimes influenced by more than the mere bottom line. You can't read their minds, and it's the opposite of charitable to assume the worst. Fully agree about the rest though. It certainly makes business sense. But it took around a decade to maneuver themselves into this position, and it's pretty hard to believe they did it all solely for the green. I used to exchange MSN messenger messages with Zoid, one of their most productive Dota 2 programmers. (Boy that sounds like ancient history.) He didn't strike me as a person who was particularly ruthless and mercantile. Just a driven programmer trying to do good.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    I mean, Valve is still privately owned as far as I know, so wherever it’s going is entirely up to the mind of it’s founders. Edit: Tring to do good, and they made Dota 2?
    - sillysaurusx 5y ago
      1v1 sf mid scrub The history of dota is pretty fascinating. As someone who worked on Heroes of Newerth, I can vouch that https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ is pretty accurate, based on the reactions of all of my coworkers when it came out. So there's some juicy drama for you. It's true that Valve makes decisions based on money. But it's also true that they execute on them fantastically well. Far better than S2 could ever dream to achieve. It was wonderful to have a front row seat to the steamroller. In hindsight I wish I'd relaxed and enjoyed it more.
      - oblio 5y ago
        I can believe almost everything else, and I imagine War3 mod making wasn't the "cleanest" thing ever, but this: > your first realization was that Abdul was a poor designer from here: https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ is almost categorically false. I've been playing Dota since... 2004, I was there almost immediately after the Eul/Guinsoo/Neichus stuff. I did research the previous versions a ton, out of curiosity. There's almost no comparison between Icefrog's additions to Dota and what came before. The other versions were brilliant in their concept but generally very poor in their execution. Icefrog added more brilliant concepts but primarily greatly cleaned up Dota mechanics and execution. He took an amateurish mod and made it have professional level execution. Maybe he sucks to work with in a team (really hard to believe, to be honest, considering the development and testing team he built around Dota and the changelogs, OMG, the changelogs; I'd rather think he might suck to work in a on-site team, because his online team management was pretty solid), but criticizing his management/design of Dota for so many years is really silly.
        sillysaurusx 5y ago
- thomaslangston 5y ago
  And by extension our future insurance as consumers against Microsoft and X-Box as well.
- Xelbair 5y ago
  I don't care for underlying motives as long as the results are aligned with mine. The end result is that landscape is better for the customer. I seriously do not get why people think that companies do 'good' for any other reason than money.
  - noirbot 5y ago
    I don't think anyone is implying they did it for any other reason. Only a bunch of people jumping on to a seemingly good thing a company did to be a killjoy about it. Yes, they're clearly doing this to help the Steam Deck and other projects. I'm sure that will make them money and I'm sure someone at the company will do something with that money that people object to. That's just the nature of living in anything beyond a barter economy with humans. I think most people (especially on HN) get that. We don't need 5 people to pop out and remind us of it every time a company does something. Unless it's obvious that there's a clear malicious intent hidden in what the company did, a lot of times it just feels like "How dare these people feel some joy. Capitalism must make everyone feel bad all the time."
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >Only a bunch of people jumping on to a seemingly good thing a company did to be a killjoy about it. That's 100% the reaction here every time Microsoft launches something benefiting devs and consumers. Everything is scrutinized with skepticism. Why should other billion dollar tech companies get a pass? Or why the double standards? How do you think Valve would be towards consumers if they were to become a monopoly in the PC gaming sales space? Not knocking them, I'm just saying it's good to be paranoid when billion dollar tech companies are being too generous and benevolent with consumers, and not get romantically attached to these corporations.
      - noirbot 5y ago
        I'm not saying that Valve should be above complaint. I'm also annoyed when people show up in threads about WSL or VS Code or whatever else that Microsoft does just to be like "Stop liking this, Microsoft is evil". I'm just saying that "But they're a company so nothing they do can be good" is a generic response without anything interesting behind it. You can post it on every thread about every action done by every company and it will be true. I'm not saying not to be paranoid, but unless the point is just "people can't enjoy things made by companies" maybe save the actual paranoia for cases where it's clear that the action is going to be a big downside. There's no call to action except "don't talk about this" or "why are you buying things from a corporation?" So much of it just feels mean-spirited to me. That there's literally no possible thing any company could do that wouldn't be spun as "well this is just good PR to cover up X evil thing they're doing." And that's maybe true, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage them to do good things and recognize them when they do them. It feels like a perverse joy in stomping on other people's happiness, even if it's justified. It's like showing up at someone's birthday and reminding them they're a year closer to death and debilitating old age diseases. It's true, but what does anyone gain by doing that. Are people on this forum A. unaware of corporate malfeasance or B. able to be persuaded from their current position on its dangers? I'd say that's almost never the case here.
- mastax 5y ago
  > Definitely yes, but let's not kid ourselves. Valve is not doing this from the generosity of their hearts or love for the Linux community, or the gaming community, GOOD! That means our incentives are aligned, and the arrangement is much more likely to survive long-term.
- yucky 5y ago
  >Definitely yes, but let's not kid ourselves. Valve is not doing this from the generosity of their hearts Something tells me Kroger doesn't sell me food out of the goodness of their hearts either, and I'm ok with that too.
- mrkramer 5y ago
  Valve depends on indie devs and atm Valve's Steam is by far the best platform to release, distribute and manage your indie game.
- ranguna 5y ago
  They could've choose to go proprietary with all their software, locked down proton, locked down their OS, locked down their hardware, locked down everything. But instead, proton is open source, their OS is based on one of the most open distros out there and they published a tear down guide (not the best guide, mind you, but it's trillions of year ahead any competition on their space). So yeah, they are doing it for the money, but they are one of the very few companies that understands that money come from users, and they seem to be doing very good for users. So don't kid yourself, it's not only for the money.
nimajneb 5y ago
I remember how difficult it was to setup Wine and to play a game, Valve made it much easier. I remember some games even with Wine, wouldn't run with complete compatibility or wouldn't work. Installing Steam on Linux is pretty easy.
kristofferR 5y ago
The Steam DRM is a joke, Steamless cracks it in seconds. It's about the level of the DVD CSS DRM.
- sph 5y ago
  Steam is successful not because it's hard to bypass, but because it's so fucking convenient. "Piracy is a service problem." — Gabe Newell
  - gbersac 5y ago
    100% true. I don't pirate game because it's easier to just click buy on steam.
    - foxyv 5y ago
      Not to mention 99% of the cracked games out there come with fun little friends that will encrypt your hard drive for you and charge you a nominal fee.
      - bool3max 5y ago
        Absolutely not true, as much as you'd want it to be.
      - antifa 5y ago
        I've gotten a virus only twice in my life. Both times, it was an ad on the cyanide and happiness website. The worst thing that's ever happened to me from pirating games is the keygen having loud unexpected music.
        account42 5y ago
        > The worst thing that's ever happened to me from pirating games is the keygen having loud unexpected music. You mean the best thing, right? <3 chiptunes
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> Valve established DRM to a degree many previously hoped it would get rejected. Not sure what you mean by this. Steam offers DRM, but its use is not enforced. There are many Steam games that can simply be copied to another computer and run even without Steam.

iamricks 5y ago

Considering Valve is private, it's very impressive what Gaben has accomplished (and everyone who works there).

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
I doubt Valve would've achieved these things if it wasn't private.
regnerba 5y ago
Why does them being private make what they have done impressive?
- snowgrove 5y ago
  They did it all without outside investors or stock sales.
  - toyg 5y ago
    Well, technically speaking we don't know if there are any outside investors. We only know Newell still holds most of the stock and controls it, and that significant chunks are owned by past and current employees.
- vietvu 5y ago
  Money. By being private, they might have the freedom to do whatever they see fit, but without money, it must be tough sometimes.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > but without money They do have money. They made tons from Half-Life etc. Then they now have a huge continual income stream from Steam.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      And I believe the amount the made from Half-Lifes is peanuts compared to amount they are making with TF2, CS:GO and Dota 2...

chaps 5y ago

Absolutely. I've been stubborn in the past five years or so about Linux gaming where if a game doesn't work, I just don't play it. And as time went on in the past few years, more and more games just... started working out of the box. Maybe 30% of games worked a few years back and now probably 98% work. It's not always perfect (looking at you, borderlands 3), but it works in a vast majority of games I've played. If gaming is a reason preventing others from stepping into Linux based on experiences from even two years ago, definitely check it out again -- it's night and day. It's been incredible to see how quickly they've been able to make Linux completely viable for gaming. Now about my productivity..

29083011397778 5y ago
> Looking at you, Borderlands 3 I must not have hit this yet - my girlfriend and I recently started playing through after finding it cheap on Greenmangaming, and it plays fine. Neither of us have super powerful PCs, just 6600XTs, but the level of bugginess (such as the game jumping to default monitor every so often) is about what I would expect for Windows too given how complicated modern games are.
- chaps 5y ago
  Yeah, the specific issue is from the first mission where you have to watch a TV segment to continue. Problem is, the proton version isn't built with a package to play video files within the game engine itself. So while video files can be played during things like startup, that's about it. It's a fair amount of work to fix it and it makes noise in my steam setup.. and honestly, it's not that worth it to me.

riidom 5y ago

I feel like I am in a "late-game" stage of gaming. I have sort of an overview of what is going on, but a major percentage of games simply look not interesting (anymore) to me. The collection of games I end up playing is somewhere between special and weird, I'd say. And, to get back to the topic, for people in a comparable situation like me, Linux is a great alternative. So if hear or read other people comparing pros and cons of Win vs. Linux (or Apple vs. Linux), and gaming was the major drawback, think carefully if that applies to you as well. Having a pile of shame on Linux is as easy to do as on Windows, just it's smaller (which is good, right?). But having one at all means that you don't have a lack of games, but quite the opposite. Of course, when you deeply into AAA and big franchises, and need to play a game when it's published and everyone talks about it - then probably not.

marcosdumay 5y ago
> I feel like I am in a "late-game" stage of gaming ... a major percentage of games simply look not interesting (anymore) to me. I dunno. The kind of games I like (puzzle-like, simulations, calm strategy) was mainstream once. At that time, the majority of the popular games was interesting. My tastes change in that I'm way more receptive to reaction games than I used to be. But not enough to prefer them. What places me on the same position you are on, but my actual tastes didn't change much since childhood.
patrickk 5y ago
> I feel like I am in a "late-game" stage of gaming. I have sort of an overview of what is going on, but a major percentage of games simply look not interesting (anymore) to me. I feel similar. I usually play slightly older AAA games with the bugs ironed out, indie or AA, or games 5-20 years old based on the amount of interesting looking mods available. Reliving games from your childhood with quality of life improvements, new game modes, campaigns and better graphics is a blast. Browsing the most modded games on ModsDB or NexusMods is great for inspiration. /r/patientgamers is good too. So many AAA developers and publishers are pushing out nonstop cash grabs with no respect for players, especially with sequels in previously beloved franchises. EA, Rockstar, Ubisoft etc are all at it. It was inevitable when gaming became so mainstream and more profitable than Hollywood.

erwincoumans 5y ago

And damn Valve for not supporting a 64 bit Linux Steam client. Having to mess with installing 32bit OpenGL drivers just for Valve, sometimes messing up the installation left a bad taste. At least give users the option to pick either 32bit or 64bit client. I'm sure many would happily drop 32bit games support for that. And people who want 32bit games pick the 32bit client. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/179#issuecomment-267790879 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/179#... "Please provide a 64-bit Steam package, so that those of us on 64-bit distros don't have to install a gazillion 32-bit packages."

throwawayvibes 5y ago
striking 5y ago
This would also mean maintaining multiple runtimes, wouldn't it? That's not work I'd be excited to do.
nullify88 5y ago
There is a community contributed Steam Flatpak that isolates its dependencies away from the system. https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.valvesoftware.Steam https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.valvesoftware.Steam Seemed to do the job fine, ymmv.
account42 5y ago
> I'm sure many would happily drop 32bit games support for that. Really? There are still many x86-only games on Steam, tons of which probably won't ever be updated. And if Valve does not make that clear on the Store pages then they will receive part of the blame and support burden. I think what is more likely to happen is for Steam to come with it's own 32-bit dependencies that marshal to the 64-bit system GL/Vulkan/etc. The client itself might be ported to 64-bit too but that would not even be needed at that point. This is already partially the case today - the Steam runtime contains most required 32-bit (and 64-bit) libraries and Steam is already (optionally) using containers for games: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/tree/master/pressure-vessel https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/t... Presentation on this from 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrbWbBYAolo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrbWbBYAolo

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

In a very practical way, I agree with the thought behind the post. Still, I want to offer a counter, because as linux is becoming more and more popular ( I myself am an anecdote since I recently jumped to PopOS as my main driver ), I worry that it will become another Windows. Linux principles are slowly being eroded for the ease and convenience of the user. It is both awesome and awful. Convenience destroyed mobile to me.

Karsteski 5y ago
Can you elaborate? Would you prefer the Linux ecosystem to remain less user-friendly, to maintain whatever principles you have in mind? Also, what principles are you referring to?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  I think the biggest one is this: "Each Program Does One Thing Well." followed by: "Store Data in Flat Text Files." I can't really say new programs adhere to either of these principles. In fact, it seems those seem to be actively shunned. I enjoy PopOS and I still have Vietnam flashback to my very first linux install way back when ( I installed it next to Win95 and results were not fun since it was my dad's PC ), but some things were better.. even if they were less user-friendly. So yes. I think my real answer is yes -- it should be less user-friendly if that is the only way to maintain those pricinples.
  - Karsteski 5y ago
    I don't see why either of those things is contradictory to a good user experience, ngl
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > I can't really say new programs adhere to either of these principles. In fact, it seems those seem to be actively shunned. They are being actively shunned, largely because they didn't actually work that well outside of running terminal programs that interfaced largely with ASCII text.

INTPenis 5y ago

Claiming <year> will be the year of the Linux desktop has become a running joke among me and my friends. So I wouldn't make such bold claims. But other than that I am completely on board with what the author is saying. I come from the same background. Until just a couple years ago I had a Windows PC solely for gaming. Now I can't remember when I last booted Windows on it. Another weird side effect of this gaming revolution on Linux is that I prefer X11 over Wayland. When Wayland became the default in Fedora I was on board, thinking it was the new cool thing. But gradually I realized that it's really not ready for the big time. I still need X11 to share my desktop on MS Teams (thanks Microsoft for that btw), and I still need it for most games.

outworlder 5y ago
> I still need X11 to share my desktop on MS Teams (thanks Microsoft for that btw), and I still need it for most games. Which GPU do you have? I can run most games on Wayland on AMD (including the likes of Cyberpunk). I still boot up Windows sometimes due to the lack of HDR support.
hbn 5y ago
> Claiming <year> will be the year of the Linux desktop has become a running joke among me and my friends. It's an inside joke across a much larger chunk of the PC gaming zeitgeist than your friend group! And it's what the author was referencing. But he didn't really make a claim, he said "hopefully"
- airstrike 5y ago
  In fact, it was never really associated with gaming. It's arguably the most quintessential Linux joke since, I don't know, at least the early 2000s
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
sleepycatgirl 5y ago
For me every year is year of the Linux desktop. How much progress it has made, is astonishing Also regarding Wayland, yeah, same. Then again, Wayland is pretty young, so I would say, give it 2-3 more years? Until then, X11. And there is many cute WMs on X11, but not wayland, soooo... I am stuck myself in X11 :D Alongside that, there is Pipewire. Yeah, right... Its quite impressive. It also fixed all my.. quirks/issues I had with Linux audio Anyway, every year feels better, and I am happy with that.

KptMarchewa 5y ago

I think the killer feature of the Steam Deck is that it makes Linux gaming desirable. In contrast to their earlier approach with Steam Machines, which made it merely approachable.

emersion 5y ago

To add on this: Valve works with upstream developers on upstream code, so their work benefits the whole FOSS ecosystem. They are funding a lot of kernel, Mesa, Wayland, Wine and KDE developers. (Disclaimer: I'm a Valve contractor.)

skinkestek 5y ago
Thanks for your effort too then! Good work! Extra well wishes if you work on the general kernel improvements or KDE tech, that stuff has made my life more enjoyable for close to 20 years or so.
majewsky 5y ago
Here's hoping that Valve's next round of investments in the stack puts some focus on the needs of streamers, on the basis that getting streamers into the SteamOS/Linux tech stack may introduce the topic to a wider audience. At this point, streaming to Twitch from my Sway desktop is working really well (thanks for that @emersion!), with the one frustrating exception of not being able to screen-capture individual windows.

Rooster61 5y ago

I dig most of this article, and I do applaud the work Valve is doing for the Linux gaming ecosystem, but I draw a line at supporting kernel level anti-cheat drivers. That trend in gaming bothers me to no end, and I refuse to knowingly install a game that features one. The presence of 15 year old script kiddies using aimbots does NOT IN ANY WAY justify having kernel level control over my machine, Linux or otherwise. Valve, and every other company that contributes to gaming in general, kindly stay the fuck out of our kernels. EDIT: I feel a few folks in the comments are getting mixed up between the concepts of DRM and kernel-level anti-cheat drivers. DRM is what keeps folks from pirating software, as well as diminishing the freedom of where and how you can install the software. It sucks, but I understand why it exists, and that isn't what I'm talking about here Kernel-level drivers, on the other hand, are drivers that run outside your sphere of influence (so-called user-space) and exist outside the checks and balances of your operating system that keep programs from doing whatever the hell they please. Add on the fact that these programs are black boxes by design, and all of the sudden a company essentially has free reign to do whatever they want with your machine under your nose. This is dangerous and unacceptable.

mensetmanusman 5y ago
But it should be an option for those that wants to play knowing there are probably fewer cheaters if they opt in. There will always be trade-offs in freedom when you try to implement rules to improve the freedom of those that want to play on a balanced playing field. This is true in society as well.
- Rooster61 5y ago
  It's not freedom, its security. DRM is neither here nor there as long as its in user-space. It sucks for the consumer, but I understand why companies do it even if I don't like it. Kernel level drivers are a whole different can o' worms. A corporation could make my gaming rig into part of what amounts to a spyware botnet with me being none the wiser other than encrypted traffic coming OUT of my machine. Those drivers by design are black boxes, and there is no way to monitor what your machine is actually doing. That shit shouldn't be on mine or anyone else's system, especially under the premise of a "fair gameplay environment".

tapoxi 5y ago

Is it too little, too late? Microsoft now owns a lot of the biggest game franchises through the Activision and Bethesda acquisitions, and I wouldn't be surprised if they actively block Proton support by using UWP or Windows-specific anticheat.

ruune 5y ago
Didn't even think about that. A part of me wants to think of Xbox as this cool company that wont prevent Linux support. But Microsoft isn't necessarily know for being overly friendly towards Linux huh
jamil7 5y ago
> and I wouldn't be surprised if they actively block Proton support by using UWP or Windows-specific anticheat Surely this wouldn't make any sense for them strategically? They want as many people playing and making noise about the franchises they own as possible - especially multiplayer.
- account42 5y ago
  No, they care about maximizing profit as a whole not about any individual franchises. Platform holders have shown again and again that they are willing to sink money into exclusives if it means they can make more money off their platform.
raxxorrax 5y ago
Possible. Although a lot of gaming companies that got bought never did amount to much after the acquisition. If Microsoft locks down their environment, I believe they are in danger of losing their dominance on PC. I have yet to meet a developer that likes UWP and I believe it is dead by now. There is WinUI 3, but I fail to see how they learned from their mistakes. They believe they can work it out with rebranding, but I heavily doubt it. Don't know if my info is current, but you can only deploy WinUI through their store. I just shorty looked into it, laughed a bit and went elsewhere. I have already left the MS stack behind completely.
- 5y ago

Vermeulen 5y ago

As a game dev it surprises me the constant push from some Linux players to still make a native Linux version, considering how good Valve's Proton layer is. I don't think they understand that while making a new Linux build can be trivial (in Unity), dealing with all the support issues for that isn't. I don't have time to track down audio issues for some random Linux version for 0.001% of players Yet if I say I'll only support Proton on Linux I am inviting myself to constant hate mail

NmAmDa 5y ago
They are small subset of players because there are no wide support for gaming on Linux. If this change by game developers then this percentage will increase dramatically.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  There's no wide support for gaming on Linux Desktop because historically there hasn't been anything one could call "The Linux Desktop" for them to target. The landscape is so ludicrously fragmented that you can't rely on any software to be installed other than the kernel. Valve got around this by just packing their own runtime libraries with Steam.
  - Bigpet 5y ago
    It was pretty obvious when Stadia "made" devs port to Linux. When the economic incentive was there, the technology wasn't much of an issue.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      Staia presented a known system to target, not a fragmented mess of ever changing 'distributions' that don't even attempt to maintain binary compatibility for a single release.
      - account42 5y ago

thrower123 5y ago

I still think it's a little odd that there is so much celebration of Linux as a semi-viable game platform, when no one makes native Linux ports anymore; they just target Windows, and then Proton provides a Windows API compatability layer.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Game (and other software) developers like to target stable APIs. Outside of the kernel, Linux has historically been incredibly unstable and fragmented. Vale shipped their own runtime libraries with Steam just to give native Linux game developers something consistent to target. If the Linux Desktop community solved that problem there might be more reason to make native ports.
- account42 5y ago
  You keep repeating this but have you actually tried to distribute binary software for Linux? In what way has "fragmentation" made that harder?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    A few links gathered from a quick google search as a primer: http://stevehanov.ca/blog/?id=97 http://stevehanov.ca/blog/?id=97 https://www.evanjones.ca/portable-linux-binaries.html https://www.evanjones.ca/portable-linux-binaries.html https://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2012/07/creating-portable-linux-binaries.html https://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2012/07/creating-portable-... https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Portable_GNU-Linux_binaries https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Portable_GNU-Linux_... https://github.com/wheybags/glibc_version_header https://github.com/wheybags/glibc_version_header In other words: there are a lot of steps and a lot of gotchyas to doing this that you're glossing over. Linux userland libraries are generally designed with the intention that an army of third-party maintainers will integrate all of this desperately developed software together and place it in a repo. Naturally every distribution wants to do things a little differently too, and they have a habit of changing it up every couple years. When you try to step out of that mold, even just to static link, things unsurprisingly become more difficult. Whereas Windows, Mac, Android, etc. have been designed since the beginning not to require that sort of thing and it is consequently a much, much more straightforward process. I'm curious why, since you seem to believe the process is so straight-forward, you think it is that so few people distribute a simple binary? Why were Flatpak and AppImage invented?

nameisname 5y ago

This is great but I still dislike that valve has no customer support whatsoever. They also offer no refunds for errors in their system. I've been in situations where I purchase something off the market and it says "could not find an item at that price" and purchases it anyway without updating the screen. This resulted in me having multiple of the same item and they wouldn't even acknowledge the issue. I'm anti steam until they fix their huge customer service black hole. There's no excuse.

Kelamir 5y ago
Sorry to hear about that. Valve has customer support though. On a request I had a few months ago I got responses promptly.
genericlogic 5y ago
I have refunded a number of items on steam for a number of reasons and all it took was filling out some online forms and waiting a bit. While I never spoke to a person I never had an issue. Steam also has a posted refund policy: https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/ https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/
donatj 5y ago
I’ve had a couple issues with steam purchases over the years, but support always corrected it right away and were helpful and friendly; even in the case where the issue was clearly my fault. Way more than I can say of Sony whose support I would describe as adversarial in my several encounters. Most recently, after fifteen years of using PSN, hundreds of purchases, thousands of dollars, my account stopped working with ANY of my credit cards or PayPal - all orders fail. Their advice? Will not fix, buy gift cards from Amazon.

Namidairo 5y ago

> Here we are today, waiting for the Steam Deck. Is that a figure of speech or a reference to the fact that the hardware preview coverage is dropping today (I believe)?

JamesMcMinn 5y ago

I am very excited by the Steam Deck and have paid for my place in the queue (hopefully some time this year). I am a long time desktop Linux user, however I also game and have either had to dual boot, or more recently, game inside a Windows VM because of DRM and unsupported games. The biggest issue I can can see with the Steam Deck, or more specifically, Linux on the Steam Deck, is Microsoft's Game Pass. It simply will not work on Linux, and at the moment, I spend more time playing game via Game Pass than I do via Steam. Microsoft have a very clear direction with their recent purchases of publishers and studios, and I worry that the lack of any sort of Game Pass support (without installing Windows) will hamper the Steam Deck. Of course, Valve are probably hoping that the Steam Deck will discourage Game Pass subscriptions since it eats into their market, but as long as Microsoft are also willing to sell games on Steam, I think having both options is the healthiest for PC gaming overall.

yepthatsreality 5y ago
First people complain that no one will use Linux because theirs no hardware. Then they complain they can’t use Linux because of the software support. We now have both and now people won’t use Linux because Microsoft acquired studio’s games will only run on Windows? That moving goal post doesn’t look good for the Switch or PlayStation platforms then.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  I mean, there are a lot of reasons not to use Linux still, just because Valve solved a few of them doesn't make any of the others illegitimate. I mean, christ, the desktop user experience is still pretty goddamned terrible, and the only reason I'm personally considering switching in the near future is that Microsoft is working hard to make Windows even worse.
  - R0flcopt3r 5y ago
    The desktop user experience suck on all platforms. Macos is ridden with bugs and inflexibility, Windows is just confusing to me, and Linux depends on which of the hundreds of experiences you pick. I game on Windows, work on Mac. Used fedora daily through uni and before.

pschastain 5y ago

Anybody else get a "Potential Security Risk" warning for the site? Using Firefox 96.0.3 under Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon

account42 5y ago
Firefox uses Google's "Safe Browsing" list for these warnings. As someone with a website I can tell you that Google gives exactly zero shits about removing false positives from that list and keeping them off. With the rise of barely verified machine learning algorithms used to feed the list you can expect this to become a more common occurence for independent sites. My personal suggesion is to disable the feature in your browser instead of letting a private corporation with no transparency or accountability gatekeep what you should consider safe.

KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago

RIP Codeweavers.

coldpie 5y ago
Huh? We're doing pretty well, actually.
- KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
  Oh I just thought it was sad the credit that should be going to you is largely going to Valve.
gpderetta 5y ago
Am I missing something? Doesn't valve pay Codeweavers to maintain Proton?

kache_ 5y ago

They've also made massive contributions in the open VR space

donatj 5y ago

I hope Valve brings something like they have done for Linux to macOS. I opened Steam the other day, and by default it’s filtered to only show the games my system can play. I was curious how many games I’d lost to Apple dropping support for 32 bit, I’d never looked before. I can play 94 of my 345 Steam games. My heart literally sunk when I saw this.

Chris2048 5y ago
But why? Shouldn't Apple be doing the work?
- donatj 5y ago
  Apple dropped 32 bit support, it was intentional. They’re not going back on it. They have a long history of showing no interest in software preservation. Valve has the technology. Wine runs on macOS. Just need to apply it to Steam for Mac.
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    That's why Valve can do it, not why they should. If Apple treats its platform like this, let it rot.
    - p_l 5y ago
      According to some gamedev friends, Apple is the single worst platform they support (at least for anything that isn't Apple-only). And it's not just things like outdated APIs (OpenGL), but various tasks related to preparing a distributable program in this time (with codesigning etc.)
  - striking 5y ago
    I think you're missing the spirit of the question. If Apple doesn't want to wreck gaming on its platform, and if there are few gamers on Apple platforms, and supporting Apple platforms doesn't give Valve the upper hand against MS the same way supporting Linux would... Why would Valve bother? Why shouldn't it be on Apple to make it work? Maybe install Crossover and play the Windows versions of games through there?

dncornholio 5y ago

Thanks Valve, indeed. But no, 2022 will also not be the year of the Linux desktop. I compare Wine with ductape. It works but don't ask how. It's fine for casual gamers, but these are few. The year of the Linux desktop will only come when all the developers treat Linux as a native compilation target. When Linux has all the drivers. As long as games get "emulated" on Windows in Linux, people will always choose Windows.

deadbunny 5y ago
And how do you get to a big enough market share to become a default compilation target? I'd argue that Wine/Proton are a bridge to that. If you can make every game available on Linux via wine/proton then you would have to assume that every one of the Windows holdouts (Ok, most. Some people always find excuses) will swap to Linux as their primary machine, you can then, with reasonable confidence say "Linux has X marketshare" and then make a decision on whether that is worth your development time. I just don't think that marketshare is going to be anywhere near what it would require to become a default target and I say that as a die hard linux user.
- dncornholio 5y ago
  I totally agree, I'm just debunking the year of the Linux Desktop hype. This has been sad so many times, and still not happening. Just as it's not happening this year. This is from personal experience because I was very excited about SteamCMD. But after trying to run some dedicated servers (for some sim-racing titles), I still got win32 binaries and had to run them thru Wine. Switched back to Windows because the performance was noticeable worse. Again, it's fine for casuals but for the average PC gamer a big no no.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > And how do you get to a big enough market share to become a default compilation target? The problem isn't even market share, it's that Linux Desktop doesn't constitute a targetable platform because it is so fragmented and unstable. This is why Steam has to pack in its own runtime libraries just so native Linux games have some kind of known base system. > Ok, most. Some people always find excuses Excuses? Like there's some kind of moral imperative to use Linux? People have reasons they prefer to use other environments. I've used Linux Desktops on and off for 20 years and I've watched statements like this consistently turn away interested users through this kind of dismissive bullshit.

amval 5y ago

Off-topic, but that is a really nice personal page, I really like the design :)

kinduff 5y ago
Thank you very much!

pdimitar 5y ago

All well and good and I support Valve's dedication as well. They are doing what everyone else is afraid of doing. Kudos! One thing: stay the hell away from my kernel. I use Linux for the freedom it gives me. If you are going to install a rootkit just so I don't aim-bot in your precious little game, the deal is off. I'll keep a close eye this year on how do you install Steam's layer on Linux. `sudo` will not be ever involved! If I can't install it just in my $HOME directory without kernel shenanigans then they'll get a huge "Nope!" from me.

w4rh4wk5 5y ago

Big thanks to DXVK at this point. Even when you are not running on Linux directly, having a DX11 -> Vulkan translation layer makes porting (older) games to other platforms so much easier. Of course, there are also other projects like FAudio that do an awesome job!

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

The only thing I miss on GNU/Linux is a good alternative to CheatEngine, with popular game scripts from FearlessRevolution.org - creative use of such scripts can tremendously improve (single-player) gaming experience. For example, I used to give a huge population boost to computer opponents in Rome: Total War, so they would be able to field big armies for me to crush. Without it they quickly depleted their manpower pool and after the initial clash the game turned into a tedious mopping.

account42 5y ago
Modding in general is something that scales with the platform popularity so anything that needs to be platform specific is still lacking on Linux. Another tool like Cheat Engine that has no Linux eqivalent is Flawless Widescreen [0], although Gamescope at least makes the games playable. https://www.flawlesswidescreen.org/ https://www.flawlesswidescreen.org/

txdv 5y ago

I think they started using their proton layer for dota2. I am lately experiencing lags during their heavy animations when presenting Arcana and special game modes, other than that it works fine. I have a lot of games since I buy 3 year old games for 5 dollars and most of them work fine. The newest games with special anti cheat systems probably do not work. But this is a huge step. They are ahead of the competition. If the competition wants to offer something better than Steam they now need to invest heavily in linux support which increases the costs of development significantly.

coldpie 5y ago
> I think they started using their proton layer for dota2. Nope, DOTA 2 is a native Linux game: https://steamdb.info/app/570/config/ https://steamdb.info/app/570/config/
- flowless 5y ago
  Recently it switched to running via Proton if you had Steam Play enabled (and broke completely for me). Solution is/was to disable Steam Play and it will use native version.
  - coldpie 5y ago
    Hm, that's surprising to me. It's historically been that you have to enable Steam Play for a specific title to switch that one title over to using the Windows version via Proton. Possibly that changed so the global setting does it as well, but it would surprise me.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

Valve doesn't want your thanks - they want your money. Did the author even buy a Steam Deck?

kinduff 5y ago
I'm well aware it's a company doing things for profit, but the benefit to the Linux community is gigantic, as I stated on the post. Regarding the Steam Deck, I'm on the queue for the preorder, since still need to wait 18 days to do it.
- rubyist5eva 5y ago
  I commend you for putting your money here your mouth is :) And I also agree that the benefit for the community is enormous as well. I am watching what Valve is doing very closely as an example of how commercial interests and free software can benefit eachother.

ekianjo 5y ago

Recently there has been 250 titles verified for the upcoming Steam Deck: https://boilingsteam.com/top-10-new-games-you-can-play-on-linux-with-proton-feb-2022-edition/ https://boilingsteam.com/top-10-new-games-you-can-play-on-li... While not technically "a console" it's still one of the best line-up ever for a new hardware launch, and it's probably going to be in thousands later this month.

yepthatsreality 5y ago
It already is thousands but the games just need to go through Valve hardware vetting. AppDB (WINE) and ProtonDB will give a better picture at what’s possible.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  Valve vetting is also about the controls being usable for the Steam Deck, not just the fact that it runs.

nimbius 5y ago

its worth noting valves monumental effort was largely inspired by the release of the Microsoft store, which at the time (had it succeeded) would have had a significant impact on Valve. Valves support for Linux was a massive strategic success that almost certainly led Redmond to focus more attention on the cloud presence that runs online games and publishing services, instead of directly trying to EEE the playing field.

mijoharas 5y ago

Proton is absolutely amazing. I've started buying a few more indy titles to play a little bit, and they tend to "just work" most of the time now (which definitely didn't used to be the case). Even with a somewhat unusual system, and running wayland, the experience is fantastic. (NOTE: I also don't tend to buy triple A games on my computer, so that could obviously be an issue).

lnxg33k1 5y ago

I think it's more like of a intelligence thing, a lot of software houses in gaming have been working very hard to give windows a competitive advantage in terms of gaming experience in exchange for what? they've been enriching microsoft and proudly so thankfully someone understood that there is a system you can use for free to build cool stuff on top, that doesn't try to lock you in, doesn't exploit dominant positions to push other software on you, and doesn't come with a 5 kilometres long terms of services, I really am unable to understand why people just keep liking being microsoft's guinea pigs

sydbarrett74 5y ago

Kernel anti-cheat drivers are rootkits. Full stop.

fareesh 5y ago

As a consumer, Valve comes across like Google. They build products and features and then they often sit untouched, sometimes for years. They are terrible at communicating to their playerbase and even their contracted talent. The DOTA2 community has had to deal with these aspects of Valve for years. CS:GO is now also essentially a forgotten project, and within the span of just a couple of months, the FPS crowd is moving on to other newcomer games. This might be armchair speculation but it seems like since Google is making so much money from ads and Valve is making so much money from Steam, that their projects don't really get the kind of management and focus from the organization that is mutually compatible with the other stakeholders - customers, players, tournament organizers, businesses, etc. These are drops in the ocean compared to their real revenue streams. I guess as far as this particular story is concerned, I wouldn't be surprised if Valve just abandoned this project at some point too once it's launched, and moved on to something else. At least in this case they've done a great amount of work for open-source which is fantastic because others can build on their contributions. I don't really expect these aspects of the culture at Valve to change in this regard, as frustrating as it is from the outside, I'm sure it makes a lot more sense from the inside.

ghostly_s 5y ago
Huh? According to Wikipedia, CS:GO is a game which came out in 2012, still receives regular updates and has an active competitive community.
- 1_player 5y ago
  Yeah and I don't see the comparison with Google either. Valve isn't known for killing profitable products. Steam Machines was just an experiment which came a few years too soon, the technology wasn't there yet, thus Proton and now the actual Steam Machines are a reality.

grae_QED 5y ago

At this point, Valve has yet to disappoint me. Even their failures, like the Steam Controller, were amazing pieces of tech. The Steam Deck is no exception. It's exactly what I've been wanting: a SFFPC that doubles as a portable gaming console with Linux natively installed. Bravo Steam!

gumby 5y ago

The way Valve works suggests this is less a policy of Valve the company than the desire of a few devs who work there.

quitit 5y ago

I'm fine with people praising Valve for utilising linux to advance their commercial interests. It's an example of a "win win" situation. However I notice on these forums in particular when other tech companies do similar it isn't seen so charitably. I speak with a slightly cynical tone because I've seen this story before - the catalyst to the changing public opinion has been less about what the companies actually do and more about when competitors emerge and engage PR campaigns to recast the incumbent as evil and the newcomer as a saviour. One should keep their eyes open to see if the same happens to Valve.

account42 5y ago
I think so far Valve's interest seem much more aligned with the average Linux gamer than any other company that I can think of. Valve has become a significant contributor to, the primary maintainer or themselves started development of: * The open source Vulkan driver for AMD graphics * DXVK, the DirectX 12 to Vulkan wrapper * Proton * SDL, a cross-platform support library for native development * Gamescope display server to wrap games that e.g. have bad support for your monitor resolution All of these are immensely useful even independently of Valves platform or proprietary software and this is by no means a complete list of the extend of their contributions. I don't think its unreasonable that they are praised even if their actions are ultimately self-serving.

LoveGracePeace 5y ago

I've been gaming happily on Linux for years. Top and/or good games like Dying Light, ARK. The rest I played using Wine with tweaks. Proton is great and Valve should be applauded but the future of gaming on Linux or Linux Desktop in general doesn't rest now on any one company and it never has.

nvarsj 5y ago

I'll be happy when I can finally delete my Windows partition, which is used exclusively to play games. I've already moved to Linux for a lot of stuff, because frankly, it just plays games better than Windows 10/11. For example, stepmania (a rhythm game) stutters like mad for me on Windows and I've never been able to figure out why - and the debugging process in Windows is akin to black magic. On Linux it just runs buttery smooth with 0 stutters. I can't wait until more games are native ported to Linux and/or run well in Proton, and I can finally use a single, good OS for everything.

roody15 5y ago

Agree, Thank you Valve. I play all my games on Arch machine at home. Last few years have been overjoyed with the amount of games that run excellent on my system. To me its a golden time for gaming on Linux!

ribit 5y ago

I vehemently disagree with sentiment expressed in the article. Sure, on the surface the work done Valve does significantly improve the state of Linux gaming. But this is not Linux gaming. This is Windows gaming under Linux. We need to think about the long-term effects, about maintaining a healthy ecosystem. I cannot imagine how delegating Linux and Vulkan to be a long-term emulator of DX12 and Win is supposed to be healthy. What about platform autonomy? Shouldn't we strive towards a future where Vulkan is a strong, independent API with its own voice and not just an interface for emulating DX12? And one where game developers actively want to support Linux as first class citizen and not just make Windows games and putting all the burden of compatibility on the maintainers of the emulation layer. The worst outcome of this is that the market share and quality of Vulkan implementations will diminish. WebGPU is a strong upcoming API contender on the mobile side, which IMO has a good chance of displacing Vulkan for many applications. And if DXVK works that well on Linux, more developers might end up choosing DX12 and only supporting Windows. Giving up autonomy and becoming a subordinate of a different technology stack is never a good idea. I mean, if this is the way how the Linux community wants to play, then why not make it official and just scrap Vulkan and have a DX-compatible API in place with IHV drivers?

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
The Linux Desktop community has had 20 years to make Linux Desktop a reasonable, if not attractive, platform for gaming and game development and they have consistently and utterly failed at it. Valve did the only thing that was going to work.
- ribit 5y ago
  That is true. Proton is a pragmatic solution. But it hardly a satisfactory solution, and I worry that it is not sustainable solution either. I do not really have a horse in the run personally, as I am not a Linux user (my platform of choice is macOS), but as a GPU programming enthusiast I dislike anything that gives Microsoft more power. And of course, let us not mistake Valve's intensions. They couldn't care less about Linux users. They are simply leveraging Linux as a low-cost platform to get into the console business.

tomphoolery 5y ago

Valve is great until they have to make a 3rd of something.

account42 5y ago
That's not a problem unless the number 3 is actually in the title.

deltaonefour 5y ago

Keep in mind valve is a business first. There interest is profitability. Its just that the direction of their interest happens to align with Linux. This is good, but if at some point in time it doesn't align, don't be surprised.