6 ms·

> It's been great to see that Valve have been pushing so many of their improvements upstream rather than trying to keep them to themselves - long may it continu

> It's been great to see that Valve have been pushing so many of their improvements upstream rather than trying to keep them to themselves - long may it continue. Yes, the Linux team at Valve really understands how open source incentives align with their own. Since they & their contractors upstream almost everything they do, they don't have to maintain a diff, or even build most of the software they ship (they just use Arch packages for most stuff, as mentioned in the article). Unlike many proprietary companies who try to keep as much as possible in-house, Valve understands you get higher quality software with a lot less work overall when you work with and are friendly to upstream projects, even if it means a bit more work and negotiation up front. I was the creator & lead dev on Proton for its first 5 years (2016-2021), and from day 1 Valve understood that most of the work we did for them would be going upstream[1]. It wasn't even a conversation point in the early meetings. They've taken the same approach with every other OSS project they've worked with, and it shows in the great results & community relations. Valve is a great open source citizen. [1] E.g. https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/aeikum/2019/3/27/how-proton-helped-improve-wine-42 https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/aeikum/2019/3/27/how-proton...

solardev 3y ago
Do you think Mac gamers would ever see similar love, like Game Porting Toolkit integrated into Steam?
- coldpie 3y ago
  I don't know anything about Valve's future plans, and I don't know anything at all about that toolkit (it was announced after I stopped working on Wine). My gut feeling is it's unlikely. There was a lot of incentive to target Linux with this tech, even though it's a smaller market than macOS, because you can control the whole stack and do cool stuff like SteamOS, which is what allowed the Deck to happen. On macOS, all you can do is sell stuff to end-users, where you also have to compete with the Apple store, which is owned by Apple, who also make the OS. Apple has also shown they're a bad partner for game companies (nuking 32-bit support; crummy OpenGL support; no Vulkan support; shaky record on OS updates breaking stuff). My experience is there's generally a lot of bad feelings and skepticism about Apple and macOS in the gaming industry due to that record.
  - solardev 3y ago
    That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the explanation!
  - rollcat 3y ago
    > Apple has also shown they're a bad partner for game companies (nuking 32-bit support; crummy OpenGL support; no Vulkan support; shaky record on OS updates breaking stuff). My experience is there's generally a lot of bad feelings and skepticism about Apple and macOS in the gaming industry due to that record. In your opinion, what steps should Apple take, and in what order, to make Mac a compelling, long-term platform for third-party game developers? They're certainly showing some interest in making games happen (GPT, raytracing), but most of the efforts so far seem to be pre-aligned in their favour (Metal, Apple Arcade).
    - coldpie 3y ago
      I don't know that I'm the best person to ask, my scope is fairly narrow and definitely more Linux-focused (I don't even own a Mac). But, I think inventing a time machine so they can avoid making their partners write articles like this[1] would be a good first step. After that, stop putting out stupid special-snowflake APIs like Metal and adopt industry standards like Vulkan and OpenGL. Then build a 20-year track record of API and OS stability so game devs & users can expect their back catalog to continue to work. I dunno, man. They've burned a lot of bridges, and they are a small piece of the pie[2]. Not a lot of incentive for people to put up with their BS. [1] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6EF https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6... [2] macOS: 1.57%, Linux: 1.82%, Windows: 96.61% https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
- pmarreck 3y ago
  I was a long-time "Mac gamer" who held out until the very end (where I personally define "very end" as Blizzard releasing their first non-simultaneous-platform-released game, Overwatch). I'm here to inform you that that ship (with some notable exceptions, such as Baldur's Gate 3 releasing on Macs today, I think, which is FANTASTIC) has more or less sailed. Tim Cook is neither a programmer, nor a gamer, nor an open-source advocate, and every move Apple makes and has made since he took the helm shows where his priorities lie, and they're not in the AAA gaming market (and additionally, they're starting to be open-source-developer-hostile, IMHO). I think macOS would have achieved a ton more success (it would have basically become a better, more user-friendly Linux) had Apple open-sourced it and simply made Mac hardware the "reference" macOS hardware (between you and me, I also think this move would have instantly garnered Gabe's support), but it's simply not going to be. Apple likes their walled garden and their 30% App Store cut and their iOS-specific lame-games and their proprietary CPU/GPU/SoC architecture that is only being pried open by extremely clever individuals like Asahi Lina https://github.com/asahilina https://github.com/asahilina and Alyssa Rosenzweig (with zero help from Apple other than "leaving the door open," essentially... Which, by the way, they can still shut at any time...) I've become more of a Linux fan over the years but only after I found NixOS- which unfortunately has kind of a steep learning curve. The reason why I couldn't use Linux as a daily driver until NixOS is that Linux's huge customizability (and my need to experiment and explore!) also lead directly to huge opportunities to brick your system or just break things in general (which happened again, and again, and again for me, across many distros such as Ubuntu, Arch, Manjaro, Pop_OS, etc.). Linux is thus like a hugely customizable sports car without brakes or safety belts. NixOS gives you both of those, so you get to fly with the sports car, enjoy all the customizability, but if anything goes wrong (which it rarely does, thanks to NixOS's architecture), you can instantly roll back to any prior version of the OS and its declaratively-installed apps and configs. It's the best of all worlds, currently, completely open-source, but the learning curve is still too steep for most. (I have hope that a NixOS-derived more-user-friendly distro like https://snowflakeos.org/ https://snowflakeos.org/ may help here, but it will take time.) In parallel with that, gaming on Linux became "viable" (modding is still tougher than on Windows, but that will eventually be easier too) thanks to Valve's Proton efforts.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
ncallaway 3y ago
> I was the creator & lead dev on Proton for its first 5 years (2016-2021), Wow, than k you. I know it takes a village, and it’s always a team effort, but still thank you. My windows PC is gathering dust now. I only use my Linux laptop and steam deck now. If a game doesn’t run on Linux, I just won’t play it anymore. That’s a huge change, and I really appreciate it. Thanks to everyone who contributed.
- coldpie 3y ago
  Thanks, it was quite a ride! Definitely a team effort, not only developers, but also a fantastic QA team that puts a ton of work into polishing every single release. Also don't forget that Proton was built on top of 20 years of hard work on Wine before Valve even entered the picture. I know I'm not the only (ex-)Wine/Proton dev who posts here on HN :)
  - yomlica8 3y ago
    It bothers me a bit when I see the narrative on here that the introduction of the Steam Deck changed everything for linux gaming, but really it is a culmination of steady ongoing work that didn't even start with Valve. I've been primary linux gaming since probably about 2014. When Steam machines fizzled out Valve just quietly brushed it off and continued investing in the general concept.
    - xethos 3y ago
      > When Steam machines fizzled out Valve just quietly brushed it off and continued investing in the general concept. I remember being really disappointed when they did - I assumed gaming on Linux would be following the same path, because what the fuck kind of company breaks down a wall by repeatedly bashing their forehead into it? Steam machines did not do well, and instead of Valve saying "Maybe this is a money pit we should abandon", they just shoveled money into it until it was mostly full.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
danparsonson 3y ago
Side note: thank you for your contributions to Linux gaming - Proton helped me finally shed Windows as a base OS and I couldn't be happier about it.
ACS_Solver 3y ago
Thank you for your, and your team's, work on Proton! It's one of the biggest software leaps I've experienced. I'd been using Wine to launch games on Linux for more than ten years and across all those years, it remained inconvenient and success rates remained fairly low despite some definite improvement. Then with the first Proton release, most of the games I wanted to play... just worked. These days my default expectation has changed to games working well on Linux unless they have stuff like kernel-mode DRM (such as Denuvo) and I refuse to buy games using that anyway.

solardev 3y ago

Do you think Mac gamers would ever see similar love, like Game Porting Toolkit integrated into Steam?

coldpie 3y ago
I don't know anything about Valve's future plans, and I don't know anything at all about that toolkit (it was announced after I stopped working on Wine). My gut feeling is it's unlikely. There was a lot of incentive to target Linux with this tech, even though it's a smaller market than macOS, because you can control the whole stack and do cool stuff like SteamOS, which is what allowed the Deck to happen. On macOS, all you can do is sell stuff to end-users, where you also have to compete with the Apple store, which is owned by Apple, who also make the OS. Apple has also shown they're a bad partner for game companies (nuking 32-bit support; crummy OpenGL support; no Vulkan support; shaky record on OS updates breaking stuff). My experience is there's generally a lot of bad feelings and skepticism about Apple and macOS in the gaming industry due to that record.
- solardev 3y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the explanation!
- rollcat 3y ago
  > Apple has also shown they're a bad partner for game companies (nuking 32-bit support; crummy OpenGL support; no Vulkan support; shaky record on OS updates breaking stuff). My experience is there's generally a lot of bad feelings and skepticism about Apple and macOS in the gaming industry due to that record. In your opinion, what steps should Apple take, and in what order, to make Mac a compelling, long-term platform for third-party game developers? They're certainly showing some interest in making games happen (GPT, raytracing), but most of the efforts so far seem to be pre-aligned in their favour (Metal, Apple Arcade).
  - coldpie 3y ago
    I don't know that I'm the best person to ask, my scope is fairly narrow and definitely more Linux-focused (I don't even own a Mac). But, I think inventing a time machine so they can avoid making their partners write articles like this[1] would be a good first step. After that, stop putting out stupid special-snowflake APIs like Metal and adopt industry standards like Vulkan and OpenGL. Then build a 20-year track record of API and OS stability so game devs & users can expect their back catalog to continue to work. I dunno, man. They've burned a lot of bridges, and they are a small piece of the pie[2]. Not a lot of incentive for people to put up with their BS. [1] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6EF https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6... [2] macOS: 1.57%, Linux: 1.82%, Windows: 96.61% https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
pmarreck 3y ago
I was a long-time "Mac gamer" who held out until the very end (where I personally define "very end" as Blizzard releasing their first non-simultaneous-platform-released game, Overwatch). I'm here to inform you that that ship (with some notable exceptions, such as Baldur's Gate 3 releasing on Macs today, I think, which is FANTASTIC) has more or less sailed. Tim Cook is neither a programmer, nor a gamer, nor an open-source advocate, and every move Apple makes and has made since he took the helm shows where his priorities lie, and they're not in the AAA gaming market (and additionally, they're starting to be open-source-developer-hostile, IMHO). I think macOS would have achieved a ton more success (it would have basically become a better, more user-friendly Linux) had Apple open-sourced it and simply made Mac hardware the "reference" macOS hardware (between you and me, I also think this move would have instantly garnered Gabe's support), but it's simply not going to be. Apple likes their walled garden and their 30% App Store cut and their iOS-specific lame-games and their proprietary CPU/GPU/SoC architecture that is only being pried open by extremely clever individuals like Asahi Lina https://github.com/asahilina https://github.com/asahilina and Alyssa Rosenzweig (with zero help from Apple other than "leaving the door open," essentially... Which, by the way, they can still shut at any time...) I've become more of a Linux fan over the years but only after I found NixOS- which unfortunately has kind of a steep learning curve. The reason why I couldn't use Linux as a daily driver until NixOS is that Linux's huge customizability (and my need to experiment and explore!) also lead directly to huge opportunities to brick your system or just break things in general (which happened again, and again, and again for me, across many distros such as Ubuntu, Arch, Manjaro, Pop_OS, etc.). Linux is thus like a hugely customizable sports car without brakes or safety belts. NixOS gives you both of those, so you get to fly with the sports car, enjoy all the customizability, but if anything goes wrong (which it rarely does, thanks to NixOS's architecture), you can instantly roll back to any prior version of the OS and its declaratively-installed apps and configs. It's the best of all worlds, currently, completely open-source, but the learning curve is still too steep for most. (I have hope that a NixOS-derived more-user-friendly distro like https://snowflakeos.org/ https://snowflakeos.org/ may help here, but it will take time.) In parallel with that, gaming on Linux became "viable" (modding is still tougher than on Windows, but that will eventually be easier too) thanks to Valve's Proton efforts.
- smoldesu 3y ago

ncallaway 3y ago

> I was the creator & lead dev on Proton for its first 5 years (2016-2021), Wow, than k you. I know it takes a village, and it’s always a team effort, but still thank you. My windows PC is gathering dust now. I only use my Linux laptop and steam deck now. If a game doesn’t run on Linux, I just won’t play it anymore. That’s a huge change, and I really appreciate it. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

coldpie 3y ago
Thanks, it was quite a ride! Definitely a team effort, not only developers, but also a fantastic QA team that puts a ton of work into polishing every single release. Also don't forget that Proton was built on top of 20 years of hard work on Wine before Valve even entered the picture. I know I'm not the only (ex-)Wine/Proton dev who posts here on HN :)
- yomlica8 3y ago
  It bothers me a bit when I see the narrative on here that the introduction of the Steam Deck changed everything for linux gaming, but really it is a culmination of steady ongoing work that didn't even start with Valve. I've been primary linux gaming since probably about 2014. When Steam machines fizzled out Valve just quietly brushed it off and continued investing in the general concept.
  - xethos 3y ago
    > When Steam machines fizzled out Valve just quietly brushed it off and continued investing in the general concept. I remember being really disappointed when they did - I assumed gaming on Linux would be following the same path, because what the fuck kind of company breaks down a wall by repeatedly bashing their forehead into it? Steam machines did not do well, and instead of Valve saying "Maybe this is a money pit we should abandon", they just shoveled money into it until it was mostly full.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

danparsonson 3y ago

Side note: thank you for your contributions to Linux gaming - Proton helped me finally shed Windows as a base OS and I couldn't be happier about it.

ACS_Solver 3y ago

Thank you for your, and your team's, work on Proton! It's one of the biggest software leaps I've experienced. I'd been using Wine to launch games on Linux for more than ten years and across all those years, it remained inconvenient and success rates remained fairly low despite some definite improvement. Then with the first Proton release, most of the games I wanted to play... just worked. These days my default expectation has changed to games working well on Linux unless they have stuff like kernel-mode DRM (such as Denuvo) and I refuse to buy games using that anyway.