6 ms·

Valve is paying open source developers to keep Steam Deck playable

230 points by vincentchau 4y ago

leeoniya 4y ago
discussed at length 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34028682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34028682
tommica 4y ago
That's great! More companies should support OSS devs, as they are making a big profit from their labour
- gigatexal 4y ago
  Yeah I love this. Christmas came early for me when I heard this news. In my Fedora 36 gaming box with proprietary Nvidia drivers and games from steam every game just works. I don’t even think about it. They have gotten the whole proton stuff very seamlessly integrated. It’s beautiful.
  - xupybd 4y ago
    Wow are things that good now? It's been about a decade since I've played PC games. Linux support was not great back then. There were a few titles that worked well.
    - Alekhine 4y ago
      Night and fucking day, my friend.
    - intelVISA 4y ago
      Proton support is scarily decent now, Linux daily driver is reasonably feasible even for games, though you might run into some grief with EAC if you play MP titles.
    - ncallaway 4y ago
      It's really quite good. When I browse the steam store I tend to just assume that anything with a windows flag will at least be functional. If I'm purchasing a game that I plan to play exclusively on linux, I still tend to check proton DB before I click buy, but it's becoming more and more of an after-thought.
    - gigatexal 4y ago
      Yup. If it’s in Steam it just works. I play mostly shooters. I’ve been playing Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (Borderlands game) and it’s been glorious. The first 50 minutes of Tiny Tina's Wonderlands (Borderlands) on Linux and Review https://youtu.be/T_3sCcQksKQ https://youtu.be/T_3sCcQksKQ
    - therouwboat 4y ago
      You can check https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/ for game compatibility.
    - mwaitjmp 4y ago
      I ended up playing Elden ring on Linux rather than windows as it seemed to stutter a little. Hard to believe how far gaming on Linux has come.
    - sgtnoodle 4y ago
      It's gotten pretty good the last couple years, and it's improving at a very fast pace. Some games work flawlessly on the Steam Deck, but don't yet work for me in Steam on my desktop running Arch, though.
  - Toutouxc 4y ago
    I'm thinking of moving my gaming box from Windows to Linux, but last time I checked, things weren't as great on the hardware tuning side of things. I'm running a Radeon 6800 XT undervolted at stock clocks and 980 mV (+ custom fan curve) and I don't think I could keep it cool without the undervolt. How achievable is that in Linux these days? I'm also thinking of getting a steering wheel and getting back into race simming, are these kinds of peripherals well supported, or is it a game of chance?
    - raisin_churn 4y ago
      You want to check out CoreCtrl[0] for GPU undervolting. I'm not sure exactly what features are available for RDNA1-3, I remember reading an issue that some level of control was lost at some point, but granular clock/voltage control, fan curves, etc were all available for my Vega 56. [0] https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl
    - brenainn 4y ago
      https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl should do it. I've got a 6900XT and undervolting works fine. So does core clock and fan curve, but memory clock has issues: https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl/-/issues/139 https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl/-/issues/139 (edit: that issue is closed, so maybe it works now). As far as peripherals, sometimes it works better than windows and sometimes not great. I'd look up the specific wheel you plan to buy and see if it's supported or someone has built something to support it. For example, you've got piper (https://github.com/libratbag/piper https://github.com/libratbag/piper) for Logitech devices.
    - gigatexal 4y ago
      Looks like the undervolting was answered. As for the racing stuff I’m not 100% I’m sure there are Linux gamer subreddits that could help but I’d imagine if it speaks usb and the game supports it you’ll be fine.
    - sgtnoodle 4y ago
      I have a 6800xt. Undervolting works fine in Linux. You need to set a kernel option to enable it. Force feedback wheels work in Linux too. The "Linux" builds of games tend to have inferior or missing implementations, but running the windows binary through proton should work pretty well. The input layer in Linux is a bit fiddly; you need to set up obscure udev rules to eliminate dead zones for a steering wheel. I actually built a force feedback wheel from scratch as a hobby project. I developed the firmware in Linux originally, but switched to Windows so that I could more easily run force feedback test programs. When I bother to set it up, I am probably also setting up VR too. VR works in Linux pretty well these days too, but all the subtle reliability problems compound. On any given day, 80% chance of game launching * 80% of wheel working * 80% chance of VR startinf means it only works 50% of the time. So I just boot into Windows, which works more like 90% of the time.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Yeah, I should make a list of our dependencies and petition the bosses to give a shout-out in public to open source software and the debt we owe them, then get a budget for timed donations to all of those projects. I mean for example, the back-end systems gave way after a doubling of requests (energy company). As a result, they spun up projects to improve performance, on the one side by enhancing the existing (commercial, expensive) systems, on the other to replace these existing systems with newer ones. One thing they already achieved is to run API endpoints on lambdas, doubling performance (at least, I'm sure more can be achieved yet) and slashing costs by a factor of 60. While the lambdas are AWS proprietary, those too I'm sure use tons of open source software.
discardable_dan 4y ago
Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
raisin_churn 4y ago
I guess "software company pays software developers to develop software" was a less catchy headline. Soon we'll be finding out that Intel, Red Hat, and even Google have been paying developers to keep their products based on open source software working.
- kupopuffs 4y ago
  I never thought of Valve as big enough to require contractors. I think this counts as a sign of their ongoing transformation to be more than a game/even software company as they now own hardware and a platform for it
  - hackerman123469 4y ago
    I can't tell if you're serious about "Valve as big enough" Valve isn't some small indie company. They're not massive in terms of employee size, as they're only in the hundreds, but remember they have some of the biggest gaming tech stacks, such as Steam in itself, but also games like CSGO, which is arguably still one of the biggest fps games. No doubt they run those things solely by themselves without contracting some of the work outside of the company.
  - Agentlien 4y ago
    Valve used contractors and third party studios already for the expansions of the original Half-Life. They are now a corporation with hundreds of employees and equity in the billions of US dollars.
  - blitzar 4y ago
    I have a company with ~0 market cap and ~0 turnover. Funnily enough it doesnt have a full time accounting, legal team and IT team - those are all contracted out.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    I think they keep a low profile, being a private company and all.According to wikipedia they only had 360 employees (in 2016, that might be more if they opened up a hardware division. But the fact the numbers are from 2016 also underlines how it's a private, low profile company). I think it makes sense for them to stay smallish and outsource projects to contractors. It's a nice change from SF companies who raise funds, then are beholden to investors who Demand that numbers go up - including number of people they hired. There's been a correction of that at least this year, with tens of thousands of people losing their jobs in highly funded IT companies.
terminal_d 4y ago
That is exactly the right thing to do. Github (aka Microsoft) should take notice -- Valve could be a big software player in the next decade. "OSS dev payment pipelines / mentoring" is passé. Putting all their code into a LLM (of sorts) is not the way forward either. There's still a LOT of OS issues, and Valve seems to have surmounted a very large one, WITHOUT angering anyone.
- Vinnl 4y ago
  That last bit is interesting to me. If I was a previously-mostly-closed-source company trying to wade into open source, I'd be at least wary about being perceived as stomping in and dictating my will. Especially knowing how easy it is to overrun the (original) volunteer contributors that doubtlessly they're interacting with as well, when bringing in full-time paid developers. Yet, it sounds like they've managed? Possibly because there's a clear road forward that people generally align on, though even then, disputes about things like code architecture can easily arise.
  - faeriechangling 4y ago
    Valve has built up trust over a long long period of time and they can get away with things other businesses cannot.
    - 29083011397778 4y ago
      Until you said it, I hadn't realized just how big a factor this is. Replace Valve with nearly any other company in this space, and at least one person would have alluded to "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Valve built SteamOS and basically monopolized PC gaming (IMO by building a better product) - yet everyone loves them. Even the die-hard FOSS people don't rage about Valve's flaws, because Valve has shown they can strive for perfect and hit good enough along the way. I'm sure there's history I'm missing, and Valve / Steam undoubtedly has flaws. But while good will can take a long time to build, god has it helped Valve here.
      - 4y ago
BurningPenguin 4y ago
sgtnoodle 4y ago
This is one of the primary reasons I bought a Steam Deck. I happen to run Arch Linux on a zen 3 and RDNA 2 desktop, and quite like the idea of a team of engineers being paid to keep things running smoothly. Indeed, I've been actively following a freedesktop.org issue ticket tracking AMDGPU suspend/resume driver issues, and one of these developers found a regression while testing the next Steam OS Deck release. I've also been enjoying using the Deck. I'm currently playing through L.A. Noire, graphics settings maxed out. It's great being able to pick it up and start playing within seconds, the game running while suspended.
- nicolaslem 4y ago
  I applied the same logic as you when I picked my laptop (6800U so Zen 3 and RDNA 2, using Arch) but unfortunately it has not been a very smooth sailing. It works well enough for daily driving and the performance is amazing but the GPU glitches and crashes are frequent enough to be annoying. It seems that the firmware is to blame because only BIOS updates seem to fix the GPU bugs I encounter.
  - sgtnoodle 4y ago
    Did you muck with the kernel boot option to enable frequency and voltage adjustments? If so, the Arch wiki advice to set the bitmask to 0xffffffff will cause you problems. At some point they added an "async" driver mode that is incredibly glitchy, and it is enabled by one of those bits. That caused me grief for many months until I figured it out. I updated Arch wiki about a month ago, and provided a command to compute a bit mask that avoids setting unnecessary feature bits.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
> The Steam Deck is an incredible bit of hardware, but the software that underpins it is just as impressive. No shade on the journalist here: to me, the software is vastly more impressive. That it can run a vast library of high-end Windows PC games on a laptop SoC running Linux is an incredible feat of software. I wouldn't have believed Proton could work so well if I hadn't seen it happen. And all the tech is open-source :)
- friendlyHornet 4y ago
  Seriously, I can't describe the feeling the first time I used Proton back in the summer of 2018. I remember clearly that I was expecting the usual "everyone says it works but it will probably crash on my computer and I have to dig for a solution for 3 hours"-type of situation that we Linux users are use to But then I launched a game with it that I had struggled to run with the normal version of wine, and everything worked like magic, with only a few glitches. A large part of my steam library was working without issues even in 2018 with Proton and it only kept getting better It was like a dream come true. 2018 was the year I finally deleted my Windows partition because I didn't need anymore I often marvel st how awesome Wine is, even before Proton. The fact that we can translate Windows programs and sometimes run them without a single problem on a completely different platform speaks to the awesomeness of the software and the people who contribute to it. And proton takes it to a different level. Proton changed the whole linux gaming situation seemingly overnight. After they released the first public versions, all kinds of new possibilities opened And the fact that it's all open source and easy to use outside of steam (so not just steam exclusive) and the fact that valve devs are contributing to wine, the linux kernel and lots of open source projects just makes me so happy
  - merpkz 4y ago
    What was the game? I bought Steam Deck this October and my first impression was nothing but - holly fucking shit it works! This is because after many years of tweaking Wine to run what could be described old school games, I have already given up on the idea that Linux could be ever used for gaming, boy I am glad I was wrong, thanks Valve for Proton.
aktau 4y ago
Valve has earned my money this way. I wasn't on Steam for the longest time (among other reasons because I didn't own HW/OS combinations that could actually run things), but now I am. I'm playing even fairly recent games (Everspace, 2017) on my Dragonfly Chromebook (https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/steam-on-chromeos https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/steam-on-chromeos).
remorses 4y ago
This open source work also allowed Tesla to run games on their cars running Linux. Really cool stuff!
exoque 4y ago
What is Proton exactly? I thought it was an enhanced WINE.
- gpderetta 4y ago
  It is a patched wine + DXVK + steam integration.
irthomasthomas 4y ago
I'm not a gamer but I'm tempted to buy a Steam Deck just to show my support for the project. Although throwing some donations to the WINE or Proton devs might be better. Wine is a 30 year old project, but Valve's initiative has pushed it over the final mile, and transformed it from 'pretty good' to 'almost perfect'. Not only are most windows games now easily playable on linux, but many perform even better than on windows. This is due to windows games being locked to the API which they first targeted and that does not get updated. Whereas the linux stack can easily incorporate new improvements, and bug fixes. And, good news for non-gamers, this applies to most windows software. If you haven't looked at wine in a long time you should check it out. https://appdb.winehq.org/ https://appdb.winehq.org/ https://www.protondb.com/explore https://www.protondb.com/explore
- falcolas 4y ago
  To try and push you towards the Steam Deck side of the coin, you can escape to the desktop and use it as a normal computer, using a fairly simple USB-C dock (not apple’s, though).
- Rastonbury 4y ago
  The deck is the great entry point to casual games you can pick and up start and stop to be honest
kaapipo 4y ago
Taking a page out of Microsoft's book: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
- catfishx 4y ago
  Um, what? Is paying OSS devs something bad nowadays? Do you think they created proton to Extend and then "extinguish" Steam (which they can't because it is proprietary) or what?
  - turmeric_root 4y ago
    clearly valve is trying to extinguish the massive tux racer linux gaming community

230 points by vincentchau 4y ago

discussed at length 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34028682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34028682

tommica 4y ago

That's great! More companies should support OSS devs, as they are making a big profit from their labour

gigatexal 4y ago
Yeah I love this. Christmas came early for me when I heard this news. In my Fedora 36 gaming box with proprietary Nvidia drivers and games from steam every game just works. I don’t even think about it. They have gotten the whole proton stuff very seamlessly integrated. It’s beautiful.
- xupybd 4y ago
  Wow are things that good now? It's been about a decade since I've played PC games. Linux support was not great back then. There were a few titles that worked well.
  - Alekhine 4y ago
    Night and fucking day, my friend.
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    Proton support is scarily decent now, Linux daily driver is reasonably feasible even for games, though you might run into some grief with EAC if you play MP titles.
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    It's really quite good. When I browse the steam store I tend to just assume that anything with a windows flag will at least be functional. If I'm purchasing a game that I plan to play exclusively on linux, I still tend to check proton DB before I click buy, but it's becoming more and more of an after-thought.
  - gigatexal 4y ago
    Yup. If it’s in Steam it just works. I play mostly shooters. I’ve been playing Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (Borderlands game) and it’s been glorious. The first 50 minutes of Tiny Tina's Wonderlands (Borderlands) on Linux and Review https://youtu.be/T_3sCcQksKQ https://youtu.be/T_3sCcQksKQ
  - therouwboat 4y ago
    You can check https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/ for game compatibility.
  - mwaitjmp 4y ago
    I ended up playing Elden ring on Linux rather than windows as it seemed to stutter a little. Hard to believe how far gaming on Linux has come.
  - sgtnoodle 4y ago
    It's gotten pretty good the last couple years, and it's improving at a very fast pace. Some games work flawlessly on the Steam Deck, but don't yet work for me in Steam on my desktop running Arch, though.
- Toutouxc 4y ago
  I'm thinking of moving my gaming box from Windows to Linux, but last time I checked, things weren't as great on the hardware tuning side of things. I'm running a Radeon 6800 XT undervolted at stock clocks and 980 mV (+ custom fan curve) and I don't think I could keep it cool without the undervolt. How achievable is that in Linux these days? I'm also thinking of getting a steering wheel and getting back into race simming, are these kinds of peripherals well supported, or is it a game of chance?
  - raisin_churn 4y ago
    You want to check out CoreCtrl[0] for GPU undervolting. I'm not sure exactly what features are available for RDNA1-3, I remember reading an issue that some level of control was lost at some point, but granular clock/voltage control, fan curves, etc were all available for my Vega 56. [0] https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl
  - brenainn 4y ago
    https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl should do it. I've got a 6900XT and undervolting works fine. So does core clock and fan curve, but memory clock has issues: https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl/-/issues/139 https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl/-/issues/139 (edit: that issue is closed, so maybe it works now). As far as peripherals, sometimes it works better than windows and sometimes not great. I'd look up the specific wheel you plan to buy and see if it's supported or someone has built something to support it. For example, you've got piper (https://github.com/libratbag/piper https://github.com/libratbag/piper) for Logitech devices.
  - gigatexal 4y ago
    Looks like the undervolting was answered. As for the racing stuff I’m not 100% I’m sure there are Linux gamer subreddits that could help but I’d imagine if it speaks usb and the game supports it you’ll be fine.
  - sgtnoodle 4y ago
    I have a 6800xt. Undervolting works fine in Linux. You need to set a kernel option to enable it. Force feedback wheels work in Linux too. The "Linux" builds of games tend to have inferior or missing implementations, but running the windows binary through proton should work pretty well. The input layer in Linux is a bit fiddly; you need to set up obscure udev rules to eliminate dead zones for a steering wheel. I actually built a force feedback wheel from scratch as a hobby project. I developed the firmware in Linux originally, but switched to Windows so that I could more easily run force feedback test programs. When I bother to set it up, I am probably also setting up VR too. VR works in Linux pretty well these days too, but all the subtle reliability problems compound. On any given day, 80% chance of game launching * 80% of wheel working * 80% chance of VR startinf means it only works 50% of the time. So I just boot into Windows, which works more like 90% of the time.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Yeah, I should make a list of our dependencies and petition the bosses to give a shout-out in public to open source software and the debt we owe them, then get a budget for timed donations to all of those projects. I mean for example, the back-end systems gave way after a doubling of requests (energy company). As a result, they spun up projects to improve performance, on the one side by enhancing the existing (commercial, expensive) systems, on the other to replace these existing systems with newer ones. One thing they already achieved is to run API endpoints on lambdas, doubling performance (at least, I'm sure more can be achieved yet) and slashing costs by a factor of 60. While the lambdas are AWS proprietary, those too I'm sure use tons of open source software.

discardable_dan 4y ago

Isn't that how it's supposed to work?

raisin_churn 4y ago

I guess "software company pays software developers to develop software" was a less catchy headline. Soon we'll be finding out that Intel, Red Hat, and even Google have been paying developers to keep their products based on open source software working.

kupopuffs 4y ago
I never thought of Valve as big enough to require contractors. I think this counts as a sign of their ongoing transformation to be more than a game/even software company as they now own hardware and a platform for it
- hackerman123469 4y ago
  I can't tell if you're serious about "Valve as big enough" Valve isn't some small indie company. They're not massive in terms of employee size, as they're only in the hundreds, but remember they have some of the biggest gaming tech stacks, such as Steam in itself, but also games like CSGO, which is arguably still one of the biggest fps games. No doubt they run those things solely by themselves without contracting some of the work outside of the company.
- Agentlien 4y ago
  Valve used contractors and third party studios already for the expansions of the original Half-Life. They are now a corporation with hundreds of employees and equity in the billions of US dollars.
- blitzar 4y ago
  I have a company with ~0 market cap and ~0 turnover. Funnily enough it doesnt have a full time accounting, legal team and IT team - those are all contracted out.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I think they keep a low profile, being a private company and all.According to wikipedia they only had 360 employees (in 2016, that might be more if they opened up a hardware division. But the fact the numbers are from 2016 also underlines how it's a private, low profile company). I think it makes sense for them to stay smallish and outsource projects to contractors. It's a nice change from SF companies who raise funds, then are beholden to investors who Demand that numbers go up - including number of people they hired. There's been a correction of that at least this year, with tens of thousands of people losing their jobs in highly funded IT companies.

terminal_d 4y ago

That is exactly the right thing to do. Github (aka Microsoft) should take notice -- Valve could be a big software player in the next decade. "OSS dev payment pipelines / mentoring" is passé. Putting all their code into a LLM (of sorts) is not the way forward either. There's still a LOT of OS issues, and Valve seems to have surmounted a very large one, WITHOUT angering anyone.

Vinnl 4y ago
That last bit is interesting to me. If I was a previously-mostly-closed-source company trying to wade into open source, I'd be at least wary about being perceived as stomping in and dictating my will. Especially knowing how easy it is to overrun the (original) volunteer contributors that doubtlessly they're interacting with as well, when bringing in full-time paid developers. Yet, it sounds like they've managed? Possibly because there's a clear road forward that people generally align on, though even then, disputes about things like code architecture can easily arise.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  Valve has built up trust over a long long period of time and they can get away with things other businesses cannot.
  - 29083011397778 4y ago
    Until you said it, I hadn't realized just how big a factor this is. Replace Valve with nearly any other company in this space, and at least one person would have alluded to "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Valve built SteamOS and basically monopolized PC gaming (IMO by building a better product) - yet everyone loves them. Even the die-hard FOSS people don't rage about Valve's flaws, because Valve has shown they can strive for perfect and hit good enough along the way. I'm sure there's history I'm missing, and Valve / Steam undoubtedly has flaws. But while good will can take a long time to build, god has it helped Valve here.
    - 4y ago

BurningPenguin 4y ago

sgtnoodle 4y ago

This is one of the primary reasons I bought a Steam Deck. I happen to run Arch Linux on a zen 3 and RDNA 2 desktop, and quite like the idea of a team of engineers being paid to keep things running smoothly. Indeed, I've been actively following a freedesktop.org issue ticket tracking AMDGPU suspend/resume driver issues, and one of these developers found a regression while testing the next Steam OS Deck release. I've also been enjoying using the Deck. I'm currently playing through L.A. Noire, graphics settings maxed out. It's great being able to pick it up and start playing within seconds, the game running while suspended.

nicolaslem 4y ago
I applied the same logic as you when I picked my laptop (6800U so Zen 3 and RDNA 2, using Arch) but unfortunately it has not been a very smooth sailing. It works well enough for daily driving and the performance is amazing but the GPU glitches and crashes are frequent enough to be annoying. It seems that the firmware is to blame because only BIOS updates seem to fix the GPU bugs I encounter.
- sgtnoodle 4y ago
  Did you muck with the kernel boot option to enable frequency and voltage adjustments? If so, the Arch wiki advice to set the bitmask to 0xffffffff will cause you problems. At some point they added an "async" driver mode that is incredibly glitchy, and it is enabled by one of those bits. That caused me grief for many months until I figured it out. I updated Arch wiki about a month ago, and provided a command to compute a bit mask that avoids setting unnecessary feature bits.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago

> The Steam Deck is an incredible bit of hardware, but the software that underpins it is just as impressive. No shade on the journalist here: to me, the software is vastly more impressive. That it can run a vast library of high-end Windows PC games on a laptop SoC running Linux is an incredible feat of software. I wouldn't have believed Proton could work so well if I hadn't seen it happen. And all the tech is open-source :)

friendlyHornet 4y ago
Seriously, I can't describe the feeling the first time I used Proton back in the summer of 2018. I remember clearly that I was expecting the usual "everyone says it works but it will probably crash on my computer and I have to dig for a solution for 3 hours"-type of situation that we Linux users are use to But then I launched a game with it that I had struggled to run with the normal version of wine, and everything worked like magic, with only a few glitches. A large part of my steam library was working without issues even in 2018 with Proton and it only kept getting better It was like a dream come true. 2018 was the year I finally deleted my Windows partition because I didn't need anymore I often marvel st how awesome Wine is, even before Proton. The fact that we can translate Windows programs and sometimes run them without a single problem on a completely different platform speaks to the awesomeness of the software and the people who contribute to it. And proton takes it to a different level. Proton changed the whole linux gaming situation seemingly overnight. After they released the first public versions, all kinds of new possibilities opened And the fact that it's all open source and easy to use outside of steam (so not just steam exclusive) and the fact that valve devs are contributing to wine, the linux kernel and lots of open source projects just makes me so happy
- merpkz 4y ago
  What was the game? I bought Steam Deck this October and my first impression was nothing but - holly fucking shit it works! This is because after many years of tweaking Wine to run what could be described old school games, I have already given up on the idea that Linux could be ever used for gaming, boy I am glad I was wrong, thanks Valve for Proton.

aktau 4y ago

Valve has earned my money this way. I wasn't on Steam for the longest time (among other reasons because I didn't own HW/OS combinations that could actually run things), but now I am. I'm playing even fairly recent games (Everspace, 2017) on my Dragonfly Chromebook (https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/steam-on-chromeos https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/steam-on-chromeos).

remorses 4y ago

This open source work also allowed Tesla to run games on their cars running Linux. Really cool stuff!

exoque 4y ago

What is Proton exactly? I thought it was an enhanced WINE.

gpderetta 4y ago
It is a patched wine + DXVK + steam integration.

irthomasthomas 4y ago

I'm not a gamer but I'm tempted to buy a Steam Deck just to show my support for the project. Although throwing some donations to the WINE or Proton devs might be better. Wine is a 30 year old project, but Valve's initiative has pushed it over the final mile, and transformed it from 'pretty good' to 'almost perfect'. Not only are most windows games now easily playable on linux, but many perform even better than on windows. This is due to windows games being locked to the API which they first targeted and that does not get updated. Whereas the linux stack can easily incorporate new improvements, and bug fixes. And, good news for non-gamers, this applies to most windows software. If you haven't looked at wine in a long time you should check it out. https://appdb.winehq.org/ https://appdb.winehq.org/ https://www.protondb.com/explore https://www.protondb.com/explore

falcolas 4y ago
To try and push you towards the Steam Deck side of the coin, you can escape to the desktop and use it as a normal computer, using a fairly simple USB-C dock (not apple’s, though).
Rastonbury 4y ago
The deck is the great entry point to casual games you can pick and up start and stop to be honest

kaapipo 4y ago

Taking a page out of Microsoft's book: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

catfishx 4y ago
Um, what? Is paying OSS devs something bad nowadays? Do you think they created proton to Extend and then "extinguish" Steam (which they can't because it is proprietary) or what?
- turmeric_root 4y ago
  clearly valve is trying to extinguish the massive tux racer linux gaming community