This is the best summary I could come up with:
This shouldn’t come as any surprise to any longtime Phoronix readers and dedicated open-source/Linux enthusiasts, but Valve with their work on the Steam Deck and SteamOS have been lifting the open-source ecosystem as a whole.
A talk this week at the Linux Foundation Europe’s Open-Source Summit highlighted some of the great and ongoing contributions by Valve and their partners.
Alberto Garcia of the open-source consulting firm Igalia, which continues to collaborate with Valve on some of these Linux ecosystem improvements, talked at length around how SteamOS is contributing to the Linux ecosystem.
SteamOS is built atop Arch Linux with a GNU user-space and systemd, the desktop mode features KDE Plasma to which Valve has funded some improvements there, Valve’s Steam Play / Proton that leverages Wine has been immensely valuable to Linux gamers and enthusiasts along with related open-source projects like DXVK / VKD3D-Proton, and then there’s also they work they are doing around AMD color management / HDR.
Not just to the AMD graphics drivers for benefiting the Steam Deck’s hardware but also to Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan and then other common infrastructure.
There has also been other efforts Valve has been involved in such on expanding case insensitive file-system support on Linux, various other kernel features, their Gamescope Wayland compositor, immutable software updates, and Flatpak.
The original article contains 366 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 41%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It’s been great, honestly. I had Garuda on a laptop I was using to stream from a local Desktop, and it worked better for Remote Play than Windows 10.
What is Linux & ;? Never heard of that distro before
You gotta be on the nightly-builds repo to get it.
They also distribute the largest closed source digital restrictions management system…
So? Valve’s launcher/drm are so much less intrusive than their competitors. They’ve demonstrated more openness to user customization and modding over the years than just about anyone else. If we didn’t have Valve, we would have more EA and Epic Games, do you really want that?
DRM isn’t evil, it’s just it’s current implementations and the fact that when the software is abandoned companies don’t remove it. There’s no end of life plan for their software
Also some forms in the past have been straight up evil.
I’ll never forget sending a letter to a dev because I lost their code wheel for a game I owned and they sent a letter back telling me to buy the game again ‡
I’d say that was my first step towards piracy
‡ Before anyone asks: No I don’t remember what game it was for or what company I sent it to, that was decades ago.
I don’t get this trend of finding someone identifying legitimate problems with the best available option and trying to have discussion on a discussion website and drowning them with “B-b-but everyone else is worse! If we didn’t have [lesser evil] then we would surely have [greater evil]! Why do you want [greater evil]???”
identifying legitimate problems with the best available option
Being closed source and using DRM aren’t necessarily problems. In Valve’s case, they aren’t at all. Valve’s DRM doesn’t hurt performance, and doesn’t stop you from playing their games offline.
Doesn’t that depend on game devs?
I mean, I can copy Baldur’s Gate on a PC where there’s no Steam at all and play it just fine, because the game itself doesn’t have any restrictions. If other games have DRMs I don’t think it’s Steam fault.
If you want to be totally free from DRMs you need to check GOG, if a game is there, it doesn’t have DRM, so neither the Steam version will.
I mean, I can copy Baldur’s Gate on a PC where there’s no Steam at all and play it just fine, because the game itself doesn’t have any restrictions
I don’t think so, no. You can do that with the gog version. With the steam version it’ll try to launch / connect to the local installed steam at startup, and fails if it cannot do so. You’d need to install a steam emulator like goldberg for it to work.
This is the case with most games (there are a few exceptions) on steam, even those that don’t enforced “strong” DRM. They want steam running. This is, by itself, a form of DRM.
You can do that with the gog version.
You can do that with Steam too, I know because I’m doing it. I have dual boot, I use Windows very rarely (I play on Linux) so Steam is not installed on it at all, I copied BG3 on it to try out mods because Mod Manager doesn’t work on wine for me.
I can assure you the game works perfectly fine without Steam.
With the steam version it’ll try to launch / connect to the local installed steam at startup
As you sure you’re using the right exe? bg3_dx11.exe and not some launcher?
Sorry, I should’ve clarified: I didn’t try it with BG3 (I use the gog version) - hence my “I don’t think so”; I simply assumed it wouldn’t work because that’s the case with like 99% of steam games.
This means Larian specifically implemented their calls to the steam API in order not to exit if it fails to connect; that’s indeed pretty good and in fact I know of only one other such exception to the rule: rimworld.
Ah ok.
I simply assumed it wouldn’t work because that’s the case with like 99% of steam games
That’s because the vast majority of games implement DRM unfortunately, BG3 does not, Witcher doesn’t either, any game that does not have any DRM can be played fine outside of Steam, tho there are not many.
DRMs are not Steam doing, it’s game devs.
You say it like there’s some hypocrisy going on. Yes, I donate money to charity, no, I don’t leave all my money on my porch. Hot take: people should be allowed to sell their creations.
