7 ms·

It's good to see an assumption I had, be validated. The assumption was that Linux would struggle to make a dent in the desktop market until it managed to make a

It's good to see an assumption I had, be validated. The assumption was that Linux would struggle to make a dent in the desktop market until it managed to make a tempting proposition for gamers. Projects like WINE tried, but there's just not enough you can do only with open-source contributors, with such a massive undertaking. I'm happy that a big company is finally backing this effort and with nvidia open-sourcing their gpu kernel modules, I'd say exciting times are up ahead :)

zem 3y ago
just to be pedantic, the valve devs are absolutely open source contributors, they just happen to be paid to do it.
- mcv 3y ago
  It's great that Valve is willing to pay them for it. It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary, but I can live with that. As someone who has just switched to Linux gaming, I've got to say it's working great. Maybe it's slightly less stable, but not by much, and performance is excellent.
  - zem 3y ago
    it was the opposite for me, I was tempted into getting the steam deck because it seemed like a fun device and an exciting new frontier for linux, and it's gotten me into gaming in a way I haven't been since college.
    - reuben364 3y ago
      When I got my SteamDeck, I thought I was going to do a lot more tinkering than I did gaming. I planned on getting NixOS working on it. I ended up just playing games and having fun just using the stock install.
    - stavros 3y ago
      I'm tempted to get one, but it's going to be sitting on a shelf, along with my Oculus Quest. Gaming is a thing that sounds nice in principle, but I rarely can get into it in practice.
      - zem 3y ago
        i was in the same boat - i wanted to enjoy games again, especially indie games, but i was mostly just buying them during steam sales and then never playing them. i bought the steam deck in order to see if it would be a more fun gaming experience than my laptop, and if not at least i'd have a fun linux device to tinker with. but it absolutely did get me back into playing (maybe an hour or so a day) and i've been enjoying it a lot.
        stavros 3y ago
        Hmm, that's very interesting. I'm exactly the same as you, I really like indie games but it's always "meh, I'd rather do something else". Maybe I'll borrow a friend's Deck for a weekend to try it, thanks!
  - close04 3y ago
    > It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary I think it's great that someone invests. That investments are necessary is no sadder than that salaries are necessary for your work. It's just a normal part of work/life where the alternative would be to do it for free, out of passion. But you also have to make a living.
    - zem 3y ago
      fully agree! I'm biased because I also work for pay on open source products but I think it's a great "rising tide lifts all boats" model of software development.
    - mcv 3y ago
      > That investments are necessary is no sadder than that salaries are necessary for your work. Well, that's also sad. I just wanted to say it would have been nice if the community would have been able to get this working more easily. But clearly it's too much work to do it without some dedicated fulltimers.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary, but I can live with that. People getting paid is a good thing.
    - mcv 3y ago
      But only because it is necessary. It would be better if we could be independent from commercial considerations.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        I don't know what that means. It would be better if everything were free?
        mcv 3y ago
        Well, yes. But what I mean is that it would have been nice if hobbyists were able to accomplish this without needing the help from a commercial entity. I'm a bit at a loss why some people here prefer commercialised open source over community-driven open source. I mean, I'll take it, and Valve did an amazing job, but there have been plenty of attempts to make this work before Valve stepped in, and it just didn't work that well back then, and it would have been nice if we didn't have to rely on Valve for this.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        This sounds the same as you wanting other people to do things for free. I don't know about nice, but I certainly wouldn't lament people being paid to do something.
        mcv 3y ago
        You're missing my point. The issue isn't money, it's dependency. Using Steam and the whole Valve-supported infrastructure still doesn't cost me anything. But what if Valve decides the Steam Deck isn't commercially viable for them?
  - Ferret7446 3y ago
    That's how reality works. In order to do something, resources must be invested. In order for resources to be invested, people must perceive value in the thing they are investing in. In order to do something big, many people must invest many resources, and they would only do so if they all see great value in the thing. In order to have resources to invest, all of the people must have excess resources that they have generated from previous endeavors. Remember, capitalism is merely the most efficient system we have for assigning limited resources across society.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - em-bee 3y ago
    It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary by now the linux ecosystem has received to much commercial investment to separate out what is community effort and what is not, but i believe that most of the polish that went into linux desktop applications and interfaces have some commercial investment in them. the problem is that for most volunteers 90% of usability is good enough. if it works for me, my work is done. on the other hand the imperfect is almost necessary to attract contributors. a perfectly working application is more likely to attract users but less contributors. and as soon as contributors work on something it becomes imperfect again. this is not to say that contributors mess things up, on the contrary, but most do just enough work to make it work for them, leaving the work to polish it up for other users to someone else. and i think that is perfectly fine. contributors should not be expected to do work that is of no benefit for themselves. the benefit of a polished application is almost always for non-contributing end users, which in turn is almost always a commercial interest.
    - mcv 3y ago
      That's absolutely true. Valve has added significant value and I love them for it. And the community is still doing great work tuning configurations for each game. One particularly great thing about Valve's support is that it benefits all games, and not just those on Steam. It's absolutely a great example of how open source helps everybody.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
It's interesting to see Apple basically imitating this with their porting toolkit. The net result is game developers being presented with two growing ecosystems for the same game simply by ensuring they stay compatible with both. With their VR stuff coming out soon, there could be a big push to get some games going there. Either way, if you are a game developer, ensuring the games work fine via proton and Apple's porting kit should be a no-brainer. Basically, it should just work mostly without too much effort. All you need to do is a bit of Q&A and maybe avoiding to use some stuff that is problematic or coming up with some workarounds for those things. Neither ecosystem is very big. But at the same time, growing your market by a few percent is always nice. It's big enough that not supporting that is becoming an odd choice to make. I've been using Steam on my Manjaro laptop for some casual gaming. The setup was pretty easy and I'm able to run most of my steam library. I'm not much of a gamer but I've bought some things over the years. And most of those things stopped working on macs. My guess is that Valve is starting to see a lot of Linux users with steam accounts that don't own a Steam Deck. It wouldn't surprise me if that's actually most of their Linux users. As for OSS, Wine is basically very successful thanks to efforts like this. Most successful OSS projects need active users and, like it or not, the private sector tends to be by far the largest stakeholder in these projects. Wine as a hobby project was basically a bit of a niche thing. They got a lot of amazing stuff done of course. But it was kind of a bit of a pain to set it up and use it and progress was slow. Also support for a lot of games was a bit lacking and very dependent on the community chasing that. Steam makes this super easy and they made huge progress with getting a lot of games working. More importantly, they are big enough that game developers themselves now care about compatibility. And that's of course more commercial users.
- Adverblessly 3y ago
  > My guess is that Valve is starting to see a lot of Linux users with steam accounts that don't own a Steam Deck. You don't have to guess, just look at the steam hardware survey - https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=linux https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=linux - 44.18% of Linux is SteamOS Holo (a.k.a. Steam Deck), while overall Linux is 1.82%. Since historically Linux usage hovered around 1%, I'm guessing that the Steam Deck by itself didn't drive any additional users to Desktop Linux (or at least not in huge amounts), though the 1% by itself is probably driven by Valve's efforts to improve Linux support.
maccard 3y ago
> The assumption was that Linux would struggle to make a dent in the desktop market until it managed to make a tempting proposition for gamers. I don't think that assumption has been validated, and I don't see that from this article. The premise of this article isn't that the steam deck is taking market share, it's that it's increasing compatibility of games on linux. More to the point, the steamdeck hasn't made a dent in the desktop market, see [0] it's a fraction of a percentage of _gamers_ never mind any other use cases. Don't read this as me saying this isn't progress, but we're still a far cry (pun intended) from a dent. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
- ajvs 3y ago
  Linux is now more popular than OSX according to those statistics. That's a decent milestone, and it's only going to grow as enshittification forces further downgrades in user experience, freedom and privacy in commercial OSes.
  - maccard 3y ago
    > Linux is now more popular than OSX according to those statistics. Linux is more popular than OSX _on steam_ according to those statistics. > it's only going to grow as enshittification forces further downgrades in user experience, freedom and privacy in commercial OSes. I think you're wrong here. Take a look at the wayback machine [0] for a history of this data. There was absolutely 0 growth in linux use over the past decade until last year. The thing that changed wasn't enshittifaction, it was a piece of hardware that provided a good user experience. It's nothing to do with windows/mac getting worse or less privacy focused, it's valve providing a smooth usable product that _happens_ to run linux. I'm curious if Proton's success causes a decrease in windows users and an increase in other distros, but right now that's not what we're seeing. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://store.st...
arp242 3y ago
> Projects like WINE tried, but there's just not enough you can do only with open-source contributors, with such a massive undertaking. Proton is basically just Wine, right? Aside from that CodeWeavers has been doing commercial Wine development for a long time. Almost all of Wine already existed before Valve got involved. Yes, they help out too, and that's great, but people are hugely over-crediting Valve (and here, hugely under-crediting all those open source contributors, who did the overwhelming majority of the work).
- 4death4 3y ago
  According to the article, Steam OS also uses two Direct 3D to Vulkan translation libraries. That’s obviously a big part of running a game.
  - arp242 3y ago
    Neither are written by Valve.
    - 4death4 3y ago
      Valve is a contributor, so that’s not an entirely true statement. And I was replying to your original statement that “Proton is just wine”, which again, is not true.
      - arp242 3y ago
        I never said "Proton is just wine". I said "Proton is basically just Wine". Leaving out that qualifier makes a big difference.
        4death4 3y ago
        Basically means: “in the most essential respects; fundamentally.” So in this case, no, omitting the word basically makes no meaningful change to the meaning of your sentence.
- 3y ago
em-bee 3y ago
the interesting thing for me is that my assumption was that linux gaming would not pick up until the desktop experience of installing and using games would improve, but i somehow missed that creating a separate "game desktop" would do the trick. i didn't consider before that it absolutely makes sense to keep games in their own environment which does make the task a bit easier. but this also validates another assumption of mine, that it would take funding probably driven by commercial interest (and here i was thinking of companies like redhat) to fix this.
pjmlp 3y ago
By "emulating" Win32 and DirectX, in detriment of native Linux features.

zem 3y ago

just to be pedantic, the valve devs are absolutely open source contributors, they just happen to be paid to do it.

mcv 3y ago
It's great that Valve is willing to pay them for it. It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary, but I can live with that. As someone who has just switched to Linux gaming, I've got to say it's working great. Maybe it's slightly less stable, but not by much, and performance is excellent.
- zem 3y ago
  it was the opposite for me, I was tempted into getting the steam deck because it seemed like a fun device and an exciting new frontier for linux, and it's gotten me into gaming in a way I haven't been since college.
  - reuben364 3y ago
    When I got my SteamDeck, I thought I was going to do a lot more tinkering than I did gaming. I planned on getting NixOS working on it. I ended up just playing games and having fun just using the stock install.
  - stavros 3y ago
    I'm tempted to get one, but it's going to be sitting on a shelf, along with my Oculus Quest. Gaming is a thing that sounds nice in principle, but I rarely can get into it in practice.
    - zem 3y ago
      i was in the same boat - i wanted to enjoy games again, especially indie games, but i was mostly just buying them during steam sales and then never playing them. i bought the steam deck in order to see if it would be a more fun gaming experience than my laptop, and if not at least i'd have a fun linux device to tinker with. but it absolutely did get me back into playing (maybe an hour or so a day) and i've been enjoying it a lot.
      - stavros 3y ago
        Hmm, that's very interesting. I'm exactly the same as you, I really like indie games but it's always "meh, I'd rather do something else". Maybe I'll borrow a friend's Deck for a weekend to try it, thanks!
- close04 3y ago
  > It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary I think it's great that someone invests. That investments are necessary is no sadder than that salaries are necessary for your work. It's just a normal part of work/life where the alternative would be to do it for free, out of passion. But you also have to make a living.
  - zem 3y ago
    fully agree! I'm biased because I also work for pay on open source products but I think it's a great "rising tide lifts all boats" model of software development.
  - mcv 3y ago
    > That investments are necessary is no sadder than that salaries are necessary for your work. Well, that's also sad. I just wanted to say it would have been nice if the community would have been able to get this working more easily. But clearly it's too much work to do it without some dedicated fulltimers.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary, but I can live with that. People getting paid is a good thing.
  - mcv 3y ago
    But only because it is necessary. It would be better if we could be independent from commercial considerations.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      I don't know what that means. It would be better if everything were free?
      - mcv 3y ago
        Well, yes. But what I mean is that it would have been nice if hobbyists were able to accomplish this without needing the help from a commercial entity. I'm a bit at a loss why some people here prefer commercialised open source over community-driven open source. I mean, I'll take it, and Valve did an amazing job, but there have been plenty of attempts to make this work before Valve stepped in, and it just didn't work that well back then, and it would have been nice if we didn't have to rely on Valve for this.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        This sounds the same as you wanting other people to do things for free. I don't know about nice, but I certainly wouldn't lament people being paid to do something.
        mcv 3y ago
        You're missing my point. The issue isn't money, it's dependency. Using Steam and the whole Valve-supported infrastructure still doesn't cost me anything. But what if Valve decides the Steam Deck isn't commercially viable for them?
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  That's how reality works. In order to do something, resources must be invested. In order for resources to be invested, people must perceive value in the thing they are investing in. In order to do something big, many people must invest many resources, and they would only do so if they all see great value in the thing. In order to have resources to invest, all of the people must have excess resources that they have generated from previous endeavors. Remember, capitalism is merely the most efficient system we have for assigning limited resources across society.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- em-bee 3y ago
  It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary by now the linux ecosystem has received to much commercial investment to separate out what is community effort and what is not, but i believe that most of the polish that went into linux desktop applications and interfaces have some commercial investment in them. the problem is that for most volunteers 90% of usability is good enough. if it works for me, my work is done. on the other hand the imperfect is almost necessary to attract contributors. a perfectly working application is more likely to attract users but less contributors. and as soon as contributors work on something it becomes imperfect again. this is not to say that contributors mess things up, on the contrary, but most do just enough work to make it work for them, leaving the work to polish it up for other users to someone else. and i think that is perfectly fine. contributors should not be expected to do work that is of no benefit for themselves. the benefit of a polished application is almost always for non-contributing end users, which in turn is almost always a commercial interest.
  - mcv 3y ago
    That's absolutely true. Valve has added significant value and I love them for it. And the community is still doing great work tuning configurations for each game. One particularly great thing about Valve's support is that it benefits all games, and not just those on Steam. It's absolutely a great example of how open source helps everybody.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

It's interesting to see Apple basically imitating this with their porting toolkit. The net result is game developers being presented with two growing ecosystems for the same game simply by ensuring they stay compatible with both. With their VR stuff coming out soon, there could be a big push to get some games going there. Either way, if you are a game developer, ensuring the games work fine via proton and Apple's porting kit should be a no-brainer. Basically, it should just work mostly without too much effort. All you need to do is a bit of Q&A and maybe avoiding to use some stuff that is problematic or coming up with some workarounds for those things. Neither ecosystem is very big. But at the same time, growing your market by a few percent is always nice. It's big enough that not supporting that is becoming an odd choice to make. I've been using Steam on my Manjaro laptop for some casual gaming. The setup was pretty easy and I'm able to run most of my steam library. I'm not much of a gamer but I've bought some things over the years. And most of those things stopped working on macs. My guess is that Valve is starting to see a lot of Linux users with steam accounts that don't own a Steam Deck. It wouldn't surprise me if that's actually most of their Linux users. As for OSS, Wine is basically very successful thanks to efforts like this. Most successful OSS projects need active users and, like it or not, the private sector tends to be by far the largest stakeholder in these projects. Wine as a hobby project was basically a bit of a niche thing. They got a lot of amazing stuff done of course. But it was kind of a bit of a pain to set it up and use it and progress was slow. Also support for a lot of games was a bit lacking and very dependent on the community chasing that. Steam makes this super easy and they made huge progress with getting a lot of games working. More importantly, they are big enough that game developers themselves now care about compatibility. And that's of course more commercial users.

Adverblessly 3y ago
> My guess is that Valve is starting to see a lot of Linux users with steam accounts that don't own a Steam Deck. You don't have to guess, just look at the steam hardware survey - https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=linux https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=linux - 44.18% of Linux is SteamOS Holo (a.k.a. Steam Deck), while overall Linux is 1.82%. Since historically Linux usage hovered around 1%, I'm guessing that the Steam Deck by itself didn't drive any additional users to Desktop Linux (or at least not in huge amounts), though the 1% by itself is probably driven by Valve's efforts to improve Linux support.

maccard 3y ago

> The assumption was that Linux would struggle to make a dent in the desktop market until it managed to make a tempting proposition for gamers. I don't think that assumption has been validated, and I don't see that from this article. The premise of this article isn't that the steam deck is taking market share, it's that it's increasing compatibility of games on linux. More to the point, the steamdeck hasn't made a dent in the desktop market, see [0] it's a fraction of a percentage of _gamers_ never mind any other use cases. Don't read this as me saying this isn't progress, but we're still a far cry (pun intended) from a dent. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

ajvs 3y ago
Linux is now more popular than OSX according to those statistics. That's a decent milestone, and it's only going to grow as enshittification forces further downgrades in user experience, freedom and privacy in commercial OSes.
- maccard 3y ago
  > Linux is now more popular than OSX according to those statistics. Linux is more popular than OSX _on steam_ according to those statistics. > it's only going to grow as enshittification forces further downgrades in user experience, freedom and privacy in commercial OSes. I think you're wrong here. Take a look at the wayback machine [0] for a history of this data. There was absolutely 0 growth in linux use over the past decade until last year. The thing that changed wasn't enshittifaction, it was a piece of hardware that provided a good user experience. It's nothing to do with windows/mac getting worse or less privacy focused, it's valve providing a smooth usable product that _happens_ to run linux. I'm curious if Proton's success causes a decrease in windows users and an increase in other distros, but right now that's not what we're seeing. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://store.st...

arp242 3y ago

> Projects like WINE tried, but there's just not enough you can do only with open-source contributors, with such a massive undertaking. Proton is basically just Wine, right? Aside from that CodeWeavers has been doing commercial Wine development for a long time. Almost all of Wine already existed before Valve got involved. Yes, they help out too, and that's great, but people are hugely over-crediting Valve (and here, hugely under-crediting all those open source contributors, who did the overwhelming majority of the work).

4death4 3y ago
According to the article, Steam OS also uses two Direct 3D to Vulkan translation libraries. That’s obviously a big part of running a game.
- arp242 3y ago
  Neither are written by Valve.
  - 4death4 3y ago
    Valve is a contributor, so that’s not an entirely true statement. And I was replying to your original statement that “Proton is just wine”, which again, is not true.
    - arp242 3y ago
      I never said "Proton is just wine". I said "Proton is basically just Wine". Leaving out that qualifier makes a big difference.
      - 4death4 3y ago
        Basically means: “in the most essential respects; fundamentally.” So in this case, no, omitting the word basically makes no meaningful change to the meaning of your sentence.
3y ago

em-bee 3y ago

the interesting thing for me is that my assumption was that linux gaming would not pick up until the desktop experience of installing and using games would improve, but i somehow missed that creating a separate "game desktop" would do the trick. i didn't consider before that it absolutely makes sense to keep games in their own environment which does make the task a bit easier. but this also validates another assumption of mine, that it would take funding probably driven by commercial interest (and here i was thinking of companies like redhat) to fix this.

pjmlp 3y ago

By "emulating" Win32 and DirectX, in detriment of native Linux features.