Arch Linux and Valve Collaboration
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to 
We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.
This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.
These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.
Some extra fun details from the staff discussions around this: Valve is not interested in control of the distro, but are mainly interested in funding work on projects that are chosen by Arch staff, and are already things that Arch staff wants to implement. The projects chosen are indeed things that Valve also want to be part of the distro's infrastructure, but the process has been totally in the hands of Arch staff.
I gotta say, it's been really cool to see Valve go through the process of considering OSS as not just a useful tool or worthwhile target, but as a robust collaborator.
First, they build and maintain their client on Linux, and build their games to run natively on Linux, learning that things aren't actually as difficult as it's commonly made out to be, and the things that are more difficult than they need to be can be fixed by working with and contributing to the existing community.
Then they consider building their own hardware, but try the half-way approach of building SteamOS on top of Debian, and depending on existing hardware vendors to build machines with SteamOS in mind, learning that there's a lot of unnecessary complexity around both of those approaches to that goal.
Then they learn how to develop and build 1st party hardware with the SteamLink and Steam Controller.
Then they put the lessons from the Steam Machine project into practice by dumping loads of time and effort into Proton, knowing that they won't have the market unless they can get Windows games to run on Linux in a reliable and seamless way.
Then they put all that knowledge and effort together to do the impossible: unite PC gamers of both Windows and Linux flavors under the banner of the SteamDeck, a fully gaming-focused, high-quality, and owner-friendly piece of kit that kicks so much ass that it single-handedly pulls a whole category of PC hardware out of obsurity and into the mainstream.
And what do they do with that success? Literally pay it forward by funding work on the free software that forms the plinth that their success stands upon.
Good on Valve.
I love that you can even edit the boot logos. Always a treat to see another one every time.
as, you can randomize them? huh, ill have to look into it
If you place multiple files in the boot video folder you can select them in the system options
Thanks; nice write up.
Valve is a Titan doing incredible work for the open source community and making money while doing so.
Successful open source software business model at work. Way to go.
I don't think FOSS represents a lot of how they make money, the money making is probably all closed source, so I don't think it's a good example. It's more like a for-profit company also doing so good quality charity work on the side. It's mostly good for their image and a way to tell Windows that they could go without them if they don't collaborate.
I fully enjoy what they have been doing as a Linux only patient gamer for the past years, but I am realistic.
In reality, it's likely a self-preservation move. Microsoft made what appeared to be a monopolistic move to control the entire Windows ecosystem when they added their own app store and the locked down S edition of Windows. If Valve both hadn't invested in Linux and Microsoft hadn't halted going down that path, they would have been screwed.
Iād doubt that. Everyone hated S mode: Corporate hated it, power users hated it, newbiesā¦probably ignored it. Even if MS continued down it, itād just be like Digg v4.
Personally, I think the profit incentive is a way to improve SteamOS further for free.
Iām not sure that Microsoft ever did halt going down that path. My wife recently bought a PC that came locked down by default and required some fiddling to allow running unsigned apps. This was Windows 10, not sure about 11.
I think it could be more that broad compatibility with everything is their main selling point, and by doing so they were undermining their own ecosystem.
However, this is mere speculation on my part.
I'm pretty sure the main selling point was being cheaper.
"Likely", man I am pretty sure Gaben openly talked about this, they haven't liked where windows was headed for a long time
Ehhhh it's a step in that direction. But as long as 96% or whatever of their users run Windows, it's hardly much of a bargaining tool.
I do think that's what they're working for. After all Windows could flip a switch at any time and royally fuck them.
I think Steam does have enough influence to be able to pull a sizable chunk of users away from windows.
Thatās a tough nut to crack. Even as a video game platform, they donāt write most of the software that they sell today. They would need to find some way to convince developers to write software for something thatās not the platform nearly all users are running.
They've more or less already done that with Proton and DXVK. Nearly all Windows games "just work" on Linux without developers needing to change anything. TBH whenever big studios develop Linux versions of games they're usually not well-done anyway; for now it's better if people develop with their comfy Windows tools and let compatibility tools take care of the translation. When the balance shifts to Linux dominance we can start pressing on them to learn how to use Linux SDKs.
no, that's making software made for the platform that everyone's running work on another platform. it's, like, the opposite of what the previous person was talking about.
The previous person was worried that Valve wouldn't be able to convince "a sizable chunk of users" to move to Linux because all of the software they sell is written for Windows. If we apply a little bit of critical thinking, we realize that Valve has actually already thought of this(!) and applied a different(!) solution that solves the same problem(!) without requiring "everyone to write software for something that's not the platform nearly all users are running". If you want to see Valve's attempt at getting everyone to switch to Linux without using compatibility tools you should look into how successful their Steam Machine campaign was.
steam on linux was officially launched because gaben said windows trying to build a walled garden can go fuck right off. and he was right on the mark; as microsoft keeps buying big studios and locking down their ecosystem more and more. steam going linux and the steam deck are direct responses to wrangle control out of microsofts hands - and with all rights, considering the debacle of directx when that launched and pushing gaming to make hardware development a priority which in turn made microsoft licenses sell for new computers.
Their main product is a proprietary software launcher that for decades has pushed videogames and the whole industry into a closed environment making them billions. It's good that they are now supporting linux and collaborating in open source projects but let's not forget who they are.
Let's also not forget how absolutely groundbreaking Steam was for digital distribution.
I really have a hard time accepting that they "pushed" the industry rather than that they offered a platform with features that were worlds beyond what was available at the time for game developers and publishers. No one was bribed. There were no shady backroom deals. No assassinations of competitors (in fact the opposite, doing experiments with cross platform purchases with the PS3 and with GOG). There was no embrace extend extinguish, as there was nothing already existing like it to embrace or extinguish.
Also saying that they are now supporting linux and open source is ignoring a long history of their work with linux. This isn't something new for them. What's new is yet another large step forward in their investment, not their involvement.
Look, like you, I am concerned about their level of control over digital distribution game sales for the PC market. But from a practical standpoint I find them incredibly hard to have any large amount of negative feelings about them due to their track record, and the fact that they are not a publicly traded company so they are not beholden to the normal shareholder drive for profit at any cost. I'd love to hear more reasons to be concerned if any exist rather than "proprietary" and "too big".
On top of that, Steam DRM is pretty notably easy to bypass, with what appears to be relatively little effort from Valve to eliminate the methods. They aren't doing the normal rat race back and forth between crackers and the DRM devs that you would expect.
Anyway, again I'll say: I'd love to hear more reasons to be concerned beyond "proprietary" and "too big".
I think a good comparison is Bell Labs and AT&T. A lot of good work was done by Bell Labs but it was mostly enabled by AT&Ts monopoly.
Beyond being one of the biggest for profits corporations in a rigged as fuck business they also engage in literally criminal activities such as promoting gambling to kids.
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/steam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation#Anti-competitive_practices
I'd like to see a Sankey graph of where Valve's money goes before I praise them that much for helping out a Linux distribution a bit.
Lots of major companies like Microsoft and IBM also contribute to Linux, it doesn't make them saints nor even necessarily compare to what they get for using the volunteer dev work inside Linux.
Gabe Newell is a billionaire, Steam is a defacto monopoly that objectively charges more than they have to, and literally everyone who works at Valve is in the 1%. Let's not fall over ourselves dick-riding them.
Oh come on. Mr negativity over here. FFS Valve has been a godsend compared to the likes of EA or Blizzard. I bet you complain when you get ice cream that it's too cold
Valve has ripped off every single game purchase to the tune of billions and billions of dollars (taking an objective 15% more than they need to from the total cost of every single game), for the past 20 years.
But let's thank them for that! Thanks Valve for making every single working class gamer poorer. We all love the fact that every single Valve employee is a multimillionaire, at the expense of literally every single game player and developer. What kind generosity! /S
How is it at the expense of the game player? Even if they paid less, the publisher and developers aren't going to pass the savings on to the consumer. That's wishful thinking in the same vain as hoping Starbucks would make their drinks cheaper because their rent went down.
If anything, one can argue that the 30% fee shelled out by the publisher pays for the various nice-to-haves that players get on Steam, like: a functional review system, free cloud save syncing, the workshop, game discussion forum, friends system, family sharing, game streaming, Steam input (which is a godsend for accessibility), etc.
This is the most dumbass asinine defense. So now you're pro landlord rent gouging?
Jesus fucking Christ how are people upvoting this flat out landlord simping crap.
It does not fucking matter if Ubisoft remains greedy. Every single independent self publishing dev gets 15% more money. If a landlord gogiges Starbucks, they're also going to gouge the independent business, and the family needing somewhere to live.
"Oh my corporate landlord might be owned by a billionaire and every single one of his employees might be a multimillionaire, but he's a good landlord because he gives us a washing machine. It might be old and clunky and never repaired, but hey that makes him a saint, right?"
The fucking fact that you brought up landlords rent seeking as a non issue is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard. You need to go outside, give your head a shake, and do fucking better.
Steam has what nobody else does and the only thing I pay for are games that are mostly on sale or from a keys site. It seems you have an extremely biased view, it seems om average Valve employees make about 107k or something close to that. They're certainly far from a terrible company like Nestle.
Try clicking past the first result next time you "research" something to prove how unbiased you are:
https://upptic.com/valve-structure-employment-numbers-revenue-revealed-in-lawsuit/
Also, stop dick riding corporations.
Revenue per employee is not that employee's salary. Pick your jaw up from your keyboard the next time you are insulting me.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
If you don't want to be insulted than don't blindly dick ride a corporation.
You are grade A braindead. Once again, that is not the employee salary. That is how fucken Gabe is buying yachts. Jfc, go take a business class or swipe a Business for Dumbies at a bookstore. Thats how much each of their employees makes them. Not how much each of their employees are personally paid.
Great! So in the context of the conversation, you then agree with me that Valve is an even worse company, that's definitely not worthy of praise since they can afford to make all their employees multimillionaires but instead keep it for themselves.
Glad we can agree on the entire fucking point of this thread: that Valve is a greedy company not worth praising or dick riding.
No, they're anti Starbucks price gouging. It's like all those companies taking advantage of a little inflation to drastically increase retail prices.
It's the opposite.
I said Valve is taking 15% more that they don't have to, they said who cares if a landlord drops Starbucks rent 15%, the consumer won't save. I pointed out that that means that not just Starbucks is being gouged but also independent stores and places that might actually drop their prices, or not increase them as quickly in the future.
There is literally no way to defend rent seeking. It makes everything more expensive for everyone.
I'm not defending landlords or rent gouging. I'm pointing out that when production or operating costs become lower in a for-profit entity, they increase their profit margin instead of passing their savings down to the consumer. Welcome to capitalism.
If you can't see how that connects with the hypothetical scenario of having Valve to take a 15% cut instead of 30%, let me do it for you:
Ubisoft makes a new Assassin's Creed game. They publish it on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox. All of them currently take a 30% cut, so they sell the game for $70. Now, suppose your petition to Valve works, and they lower their cut to 15%. Ubisoft is still going to charge $70 to buy the game on Steam, and the only thing changing is that they now make an extra $10.50 from Steam purchases compared to the others.
But, that's Ubisoft. What about an indie dev? Absolutely nothing different. Microsoft and Sony's distribution agreements make it a contract violation to have a lower MSRP on a competing platform.
In our current reality, that 15% more-than-necessry fee will never go into the hands of the consumer. You are not being a champion for the consumer by rallying against 30% platform fees, you're literally arguing to change the ratio of money going between two corporations.
I agree, but could you elaborate on the indie dev part? Why would they have distribution on PlayStation/Xbox?
I used the term "indie" a bit loosely. I had games like Stardew Valley in mind, where it started as a solo project but became popular enough to warrant porting to other platforms.
Well, not all indie games become that popular.
Yes you are defending rent seeking behaviour, which is what rent gouging landlords do.
Its not arguing about shifting money between two arbitrary corporations, it's about shifting money to the people actually creating something, not the people who own the store that sells it to you.
Every dollar Valve gets, is one less that a game developer had to spend on staff and creatives to make a better game.
Valve is the city. Indie devs can easily use itch.io or GOG instead.
You're just not getting it. That hypothetical money isn't going anywhere but the pockets of the people a level above the actual developers.
Are the developers a studio owned by a large publisher like Microsoft? Microsoft is funding the entire project and studio operating costs, and all the revenue is going back to them. They set the budget, and anything above the projected sales figures a nice bonus for Microsoft execs and shareholders.
But hey, maybe it's not Microsoftāmaybe it's a couple friends in a garage who went with a publisher to help fund development and set up distribution for all the major platforms. In exchange for their services and marketing, the publisher will take 60% of the sale price. Valve or whoever takes their 30% cut from them before it hits the publisher's bank account. The guys in the garage still only get the remaining 40%, even if the sale came from EGS with its lower fees.
Your premise of lowering platform fees leading to better games is only ever going to happen for early-access indie games where the devs quit their day job. Those devs are a tiny minority of gross PC game sales, and while it would be nice for them to be paid a bit more, it's not going to change anything for the average Joe Gamer consumer.
My point still stands: you're proposing something that doesn't actually benefit the typical consumer, but merely shifts the profit ratio between two profit-driven corporations.
Literally just objectively false.
If I self publish my game on steam, I get every dollar from it except for the ones that valve takes.
Yeah bro, some developers are not owned by Microsoft, what's a twist!
No dumbass, it's just fundamentally more efficient. Your premise of giving Gabe Newell 15% of every game sale and then deep throating him while you thank him for the opportunity, for literally no benefit or reason, is just asinine.
No. It doesn't. Your position is that you want to waste 15% of every gaming purchase on enriching Gabe Newell instead of the developers who actually made the game. Congratulations, that makes you a dumbass who likes wasting money on hero worship.
We hate rent seeking. We'll hate Steam if they raise the profit margin. We're not talking about rent gouging. Piv's point is that large publishers dominate the landscape and won't bulge their prices. This is compounded by Steam's anticompetitive clause against having a lower price on other platforms. That part is bad. However, the washing machine is well oiled and speedy. Epic's is the clunky one, unfortunately. The only Steam alternative I'll happily use is GOG and itch.io, where indies can still publish.
Thank you. You get it: the whole system is just broken.
Trying to shift that 15% away from Valve is effectively putting it into the pockets of publishers, as the overwhelming majority of video game sales are either developed by large publishers like Activision, or stuck with a third-party publisher that isn't just going to voluntarily pass the savings on to the consumers or developers.
If I buy a game on Steam, I know that 30% of my money is going to end up in someone other than the developer's hands. Support the devs by buying the game directly from them or on a lower-fee platform like Itch* wherever possible. Or, if it's only available on Steam and my money it going to go into some corporation's pockets, Valve is at least not legally incentivized to milk its consumers for the sake of shareholders.
*But never Epic. For as much as they preach about monopolies, their hypocritical actions demonstrate a clear desire to become one.
You don't seem to have idea of how much a billion is and how much money is valve making. Enjoy your icecream while it's cold because you can't afford too much of it.
Being cautious of a corporation is never a bad thing, but remember: Valve isn't a public company. They don't have the same incentives and fiduciary duties that led to the enshittification of most other companies and services.
Ultimately, yes, everything they do is entirely for their own benefit. But, they're also free to focus on their long-term growth and returns. As long as the leadership doesn't get changed to a bunch of shit-for-brains golden parachute MBAs, they're going to want to keep their customers happy. It's good for them, and it's not terrible for us. Everybody wins.
I would prefer they were a nonprofit, but I'm not going to complain when the mainstream alternatives to Steam are mostly comprised of shitty sales-focused storefronts created by companies beholden to their investors.
I'll tell you a secret: you don't need a proprietary launcher to run software
I'll tell you something you missed:
Steam's DRM is notoriously easy to bypass, allowing that. They also don't force DRM on their platform, it's entirely developer/publisher opt-in (and they are also free to add additional DRM on top if they wish), and many many releases on Steam run fine directly from the executable without the launcher running.
Edit: For the record, I pirate before I buy, buy on DRM free platforms (GOG mainly) where possible, and use a third party launcher to unify my collection across multiple storefronts and many many loose executables into one spot.
No, they don't. Literally every single gamer across the world pays 15% more on every single game purchase, for literally no reason except to make the 1% at Valve even richer.
And they don't have to hire MBAs because gamers dick ride them like Gabe isnt a self serving billionaire and keep forking over an extra 15% and then thanking them for the opportunity to do so.
Do you seriously believe that if a developer pays 15% less in platform fees to Valve, that savings will be passed on to us? Epic Games tried that. Guess what: games still cost us the same there as every other platform.
It literally either goes back to the consumer or back to the game developer.
Or, more likely, the publisher. But, that's beside the point.
As it has been demonstrated when Epic tried the "developers pay less fees here" approach, the average Joe Gamer doesn't benefit in any way whatsoever. Your premise of the savings being passed down doesn't exactly pan out.
To be fair, Epic Store was marred by exclusives and having way less features back then. Even now, their (Electron) launcher boots up way slower than (CEF) Steam, and their sales are way worse.
Is it Electron? Someone elsewhere mentioned it was actually an instance of Unreal Engine running for the webview component. Something about the EGS install directory containing the same UE settings file that games use for initializing Unreal
IDK then. spinning up an entire game engine just to do what Electron does seems unbelievably wasteful though.
I just downloaded and installed EGS to a Windows VM.
strings EpicGamesLauncher.exe | select-string "unreal"returns some interesting results:FCommunityPortalManagerImpl::SetUnrealEnginePortalViewModel{USER}Unreal Engine/Engine/Config/User{TYPE}.iniUnrealHeaderToolCannot call UnrealScript (%s - %s) while stopped at a breakpoint.UnrealVersionSelectorCreated with FUnrealEngineFileAssociationServiceFactory at D:/build/++Portal/Sync/Portal/Source/Programs/EpicGamesLauncher/Layers/Domain/Private/UserDomain.cpp:866A search for "electron" only matches the words "Electronic Arts"
...wait, what does it say about EA?
Oh really? Please do point me to the study you did where you gave 15% more revenue back to developers and then assessed their output quality.
Claiming that having the store take 15% less cut of revenue will have no effect is a quite frankly flat out absurd claim to make.
I'd say it's a lot more than "a bit". It's an enormous amount of help that pretty much everyone in the Linux (professional) community can, has, and will attest to.
I don't agree that they're a monopoly, because they've done absolutely nothing to prevent competition. Other stores do it to themselves.
I do agree though that their fees are exorbitant and their contributions to Linux are a teeny tiny fraction of their wealth, but I appreciate it regardless.
Yes they have. The steam friends network and the fact that you can't transfer your purchases, friends data, or community data to other platforms is an inherent form of lock in. Just because you're used to it because Facebook also does it, doesn't mean it's not.
Not being able to transfer purchases seems like an other-platforms problem. Steam has authenticated API for users' game libraries.
Is it a form of lock in or not?
No.
Anyone is free to access purchases given the user chooses to give that info, they just don't. Skill izzue
What do you expect them to do? Not actively helping your competition is not remotely the same thing as being anticompetitive.
It literally is if you have a monopoly.
It isn't. And they don't.
While I disagree with the other commenter's approach and attitude, he/she/they are partially correct with the comment they left next to this one.
There is no legal obligation for a company to fund or assist its competition, even if it holds a significant marketshare. The companies that do help their competition, like Microsoft with Apple in 1997 or Google with Mozilla today, begrugingly choose to do it so their lawyers can make the argument that they are not a monopoly because they still have competition.
If they've already been deemed a monopoly? Sure. That's a response to anticompetitive behavior.
Don't know anything about that.
That's funny because this is the opposite of what you seem to be suggesting. This is not helping their competition, this is paying another company hundreds of million dollars to be anticompetitive against their competition. They paid Mozilla (and dozens of others) to be the default search engine. Its the exact anticompetitive behavior that caused them to be legally classified as a monopoly.
https://wccftech.com/microsoft-invested-150-million-in-apple-27-years-ago-today-on-august-6/
Google has multiple ventures: advertising, search engine, email, web browser, cloud storage, cloud infrastructure, etc.
I'm not saying they don't get any other benefit from paying Mozilla. I'm saying that one of the reasons Google shovels money in their direction is to stop regulators from having a reason to take a closer look at Chrome's dominance.
In terms of browser engines, we have: Blink (Chromium), WebKit2 (Safari), and Gecko (Firefox). WebKit2 is exclusive to Apple devices, which leaves Blink and Gecko as the only two browser engines available on Windows and Linux. If Mozilla went bankrupt and stopped developing Gecko, Google's Blink engine would have no competition on non-Apple platforms, which would invite some regulatory scrutiny.
No it's not. In fact, GNOME's default browser uses WebKit, which is also FOSS since it was forked from the LGPL KHTML.
WebKit, or WebKit2? Last I checked, which was a year or so after WebKit was transitioned to a multi-process architecture, smaller FOSS browsers were stuck with the older single-process WebKit.
That must have changed since then, but if not, I can't imagine a forked single-process WebKit has successfully kept up with new web features introduced since.
Didn't know about the MS/Apple thing, thanks.
I hardly think this could be considered "helping" Apple.
I really don't think they do. And the contracts reflect as much.
Regardless, none of this has anything to do with my point that no companies have an obligation to help their competition, which you've already agreed with, so maybe I'm missing your point.
No, yeah. We both agree here. Zero obligation for a company to help it's competition, and the likely reason they would ever do it is either to profit or avoid regulatory scrutiny.
They literally, objectively, have, monopolistic anti-competitive power, largely thanks to blind corporate dick riding gamers like you.
And yes, in literally every single western democracy you have special obligations to actually further competition beyond normal if you're in a situation without competition, because competition is inherently beneficial.
They literally don't.
You literally don't.
Lock-in != Monopoly.
This is ridiculously unrealistic in a capitalist society.
It costs the platform money whenever a user downloads a game, and a user who didn't buy from their store isn't a user that they make money from. No other platform would voluntarily accept a recurring cost like that unless they profit from user data.
Also, it's not like they stop publishers from doing that themselves. Ubisoft and EA use the cd-key generated by steam to associate the game with your U-Play and Origin accounts.
They asked if they did anything anti-competitive. Lock-in is inherently anti-competitive.
Most of those companies actually contribute to the kernel or to foundational software used on servers, but few contribute to the userspace for desktop consumers on the level that Valve does.
So?
People more readily appreciate things that obviously directly affect them.
And the Linux Kernel which powers the whole thing directly effects them, so we should all praise Microsoft and IBM like we praise Valve right?
Userspace affects users much more. I value getting Wayland color management support much more than the following kernel gobblygook lifted straight from https://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges:
So?
Just because you don't understand electrical engineering doesn't make it less valuable then paint. If Valve is a saint for contributing to Linux then so is Microsoft and IBM and we should all dick ride Microsoft and IBM like the Valve dick riders in this thread.
The point was "People more readily appreciate things that obviously directly affect them." The only ways that directly affects users are improved execution times and footprints that users won't notice. So no, we should not all praise MS and IBM like we praise Valve, especially when Valve also contributes to the Linux kernel.
So basically "we should all be little dumb dumbs who praise the shiny bauble in front of us, not the actual work and effort that goes into creating something".
Interesting point.
Are you saying that creating drastic usability improvements don't involve work or effort? You'd rather get a CPU 2 generations newer instead of a federated social media platform?
Are you saying that creating literally all the code that make those usability improvements possible is not worthy of praise?
Do you only praise the window washer and not the architect or construction worker who built the building? Are you really sitting here trying to praise surface level sheen over the actual infratstructure and bones?
UX is important but so is the literal foundation it's built on. If Valve deserves praise as a saint for their Linux contributions, then so does Microsoft and IBM. If that makes you uncomfortable, the lesson to learn is to stop dick riding Valve, not that you need to praise IBM.
Valve: "Yeah, we funded Arch (btw)"
Valve are such Chads.
I'm just waiting for some FOSS purist to find fault in this.
FOSS purists are too busy malding over systemd, and Steam being proprietary DRM, and games being closed-source.
Better not tell anyone about DRM-free open source games on Steam then. Wouldn't wanna burst anyone's bubble.
I want to give the perspective that from a technical standpoint, even free games on steam require the steam client to install and while the license to play the game is free steam is licensing your account to own the game. The game doesn't require steam after that and usually this means the game is available elsewhere, but for the specific case of "free games on steam", steam is still acting to manage digital rights.
Means you can also zip the folder and archive it for later.
They do still have some basic protection. Steamās default, loose, DRM requires you to launch Steam when you open a gameās executable.
No, definitely not. When games don't integrate SteamWorks features such as friends lists (or were written by people who accounted for the features to just not be available instead of outright failing), they don't need Steam.
When the games use GPLed engines, Steam integration may not be legally possible anyway.
Off the top of my head I can immediately name Krita, the painting app by KDE whose Steam release has no Steam integration and runs just fine without.
Yesnt. I certainly played games on school pcs (Like HL2, Hotline Miami 2. Other students played Binding of Isaac and other smaller or rogue-like) and only with executables I got from Steam.
That may have been earlier than Steam's DRM. Nowadays you need to copy a steam emulator (a few DLLs) into the executables folder as well before sharing.
That's not exactly DRM though, that's just only supporting one distribution method.
You have to use GOG's servers to get games you purchased from them as well, that doesn't make that DRM, it just means that's the only distribution method they support.
To me, DRM has absolutely nothing to do with delivery, it's all about use once you have it.
If we're talking about Digital Rights Management, steam is acting in that role to manage your digital rights on the steam platform. They could allow you to download games without requiring an account login or client download, and they instead do not. They could allow you to download free games from the client or the website without requiring a login, and they do not.
GOG's website is also DRM for the same reason. It won't allow you to download games that aren't licensed digitally to your account, including free games. GOG has DRM-free games and installers fairly universally beyond that first check, and that means you can download them from alternative sources, but downloading from GOG 100% requires interacting with DRM.
To be direct: I don't care that Steam is DRM because it's minimally invasive and I currently trust Valve enough to use an operating system made by them as a daily driver. There are very few companies I'd say that about.
The Steam client is DRM at its core, even if it's acceptable DRM. I think it's important not to allow your thinking to shift from the reality that it is DRM just because it's personally acceptable.
I don't mind it, I will simp for Valve all day long, and if a company requires you to log in to an account with their server to check whether your account has the digital entitlement to then allow you to access a file or not, that's digital rights management.
When people say "DRM," they almost always mean the check when the game launches, not the one-time license check when you download a game. Whether they use their Steam platform or a webpage, I honestly don't see much of a difference, provided you end up with a DRM-free product at the end.
But yes, technically Valve is verifying that you own the game, but it's not really what is meant when the average person says "DRM."
I use OpenRC, and play OpenTTD, OpenRA and Tux Racer.
OpenTTD is on Steam, btw
Don't you play cdda?
Leaving the others aside, the last one is quite unsurprising considering the meaning of the acronym...
systemd controversy was never about purism. It was about some piece of software unasked for by the majority of users, including absolute majority of desktop users, being pushed with juvenile means and those disliking that being called words like "luddite".
It still is, believe me or not, I probably wouldn't find anything wrong in systemd (or pulseaudio, or Gnome 3) were it not pushed with that arrogant Apple or MS like approach of "we've rolled out this new feature in our system, and you're a weirdo".
Same reason I liked the very theoretical idea of something like Wayland, but Wayland itself I don't want to even try. Except for the possibility of something like CWM existing for it, that I can set up in 15 minutes with 20 lines of config file without levels of brackets etc (there is actual research as to how many levels various primates can process, chimps can't go above 3, and I'm apparently as intelligent as a chimp, because neither can I in practice, but so is Linus Torvalds with his famous quote about more than 3 levels of indentation ; the issue is that I don't want to strain my mind with that either when with a few X11 window managers I don't have to). There's none I've found yet.
Their politics trouble me. The technical parts may be sometimes arguable, but what isn't, our world is created with mistakes as building blocks. But I've started using Unix-like systems for the feeling of freedom and patience, and while RH stuff doesn't take away the former, it infringes on the latter.
While I agree with the politics part (especially the notorious suspend-then-hibernate thing), I do see why a lot of devs would ask for systemd-init: to just bundle 1 kind of service instead of a gazillion. Same thing with Flatpak and not needing to build a gazillion binaries for every distro that hasn't packaged you, even though FLatpak's sandboxing away from native libraries is something I just don't like.
How would that work? There were N init systems with one "main" one, now there are N+1 init systems with one "main" one, just different.
Anyway, init systems for developers being problematic seem for me a nonexistent problem. Writing a systemd unit takes less time than writing this comment with tea and buckwheat with milk as a distraction. Writing a sysvinit script takes something like that too. Same with BSD inits. Same with openrc.
While combined they take some time, packagers can do that. And even if they can't, time spent trying to persuade others that systemd makes things easier is orders of magnitude bigger than time spent writing service scripts\templates\units.
As per Arch wiki
If you're a FOSS purist, you shouldn't run Arch ethier way, because providing proprietary software for those who want it is one of the core principles of Arch.
You can use Parabola instead, which is basically FOSS-only Arch. This funding would likely also benefit Parabola indirectly.
Along with the recent Frog Wayland stuff, I'm happy to see Valve is gonna help linux desktop again lol.
From reddit:
I just heard of Frog today, and I don't really like it. It just seems like bypassing review. I like the competing proposal of experimental wayland protocols (merged into repository as "experimental" and iterative if 2 weeks pass without anyone opposing) much better.
After 15 years of wayland development hell, I'm honestly open to anything. Problem is I can definitely see an experimental branch being just as scrutinized. One of the core issues highlighted was that features and requests were rejected because of hypotheticals and the maintainers trying to avoid fragmentation like early Xorg.
Basic features from X11 are still missing. Everyone ended up somewhat fragmenting anyway via compositors because weston wasn't really useful for developers beyond a demo. Wayfire started out as a Compiz redux and now its being considered by several DEs like XFCE to be the default compositor which they should standardize around.
Regardless, I really hope they nail it down in the next year because the halfway migration to wayland is seriously harming Linux desktop, especially when lots of frontend UI has been done perfectly decades ago on X11, and wayland still not properly supporting new features like HDR.
I use Steam btw
It's stuff like this that restores my faith in humanity.
Man it sure is a good day to be both a Valve and Arch fanboy.
Dude this is seriously cool as fuck. Valves contributions are priceless to the future of Arch and the rest of the Linux ecosystem.
Actually huge news. Linux as a whole benefits and needs more of this imo.
I hope it ends up similar to OpenSUSE's OBS, or even better, that they can reuse a lot of the work OBS has done. I use it and think it's fantastic.
Great news! Crazy to think that Valve is hijacking/liberating the Windows gaming library. You would think that Microsoft would be doing more to prevent this.
don't jinx it
They kind of tried with UWP apps in the Microsoft Store, but they didn't catch on.
Valve has enough lawyer money to keep Microsoft at bay.
alright, time to wipe my Mint test/fun build and try out Arch. I don't do much with Linux but it's gonna be fun getting back into it. Who doesn't love the smell of a fresh OS install
Endeavour just gets rid of the install headache
That'll be... quite the Leap. I haven't done an Arch install, but the last time I did, it required a fair amount of reading since the installer doesn't walk you through everything. It's not hard per se, but it does take some time for the first install.
If you're not super familiar with Linux, I recommend holding off on Arch. This isn't coming from any form of elitism (I don't use Arch anymore) or lack of experience (I used Arch for > 5 years), just from reading between the lines of what you said, which indicates that you're probably not super familiar with Linux.
If you really want to do it, go for it! I think Arch is an absolutely fine distro, and I think there are a lot of good reasons to use it. I just don't want someone who may be new to Linux to get frustrated and end up not having fun. So don't let me discourage you, but also know what you're jumping into: probably a couple hours of getting the base system installed, and maybe another hour or two of installing packages to get to a usable system.
Or he could try a arch distro like manjaro.
You mean endeavourOS. Manjaro has a bad record. There's also a gaming-focused one called Garuda.
Exactly. Don't use Manjaro, I argue that it's less stable than Arch due to how updates are managed.
I like Garuda, but as someone who started with it itās a maybe for a first distro. Itās beginner friendly except when it isnāt.
It's really good news that there's another company behind Wayland now.
RH frankly directs it against people using "marginal" setups and applications, thus less influenced by it, and not for some ambitious goal.
Valve tend to be well-meaning guys. Anyway, in this case it's in their business interest to be well-meaning.
Valve is not well meaning. No large for-profit company is ever well-meaning. It's merely the case that Valve's best interest happens to align with those of the consumer, and they have decided that their business model is going to be to win over consumers' loyalty through goodwill rather than milking them for every penny they can get. And they are very successful at this, seeing that there has still not arisen any serious competitor to Steam. That's entirely because consumers are loyal to the platform. Valve provides a good service, consumers reward them with loyalty. It's not friendship, but it's symbiotic, which is as close as you can get to friendship in the harsh world of business.
Yada yada I think Valve is well meaning and I'm still to trust anything Microsoft does is well meaning. OpenAi is just the latest manifestation of how you could do things well but intentionally choose the evil path.
I think we will be getting proper arch on arm!
Would someone elucidate as to what this means for a normie PC gamer and begrudging windows user?
I would say this is great news all around. With SteamOS pushing the Linux market share higher than it's ever been, and a partnership with Arch to boost direct development, this could mean other companies taking a hard look at Linux and either developing native software or ensuring proton compatibility out of the gate.
I'm imagining "Runs on Arch" markers on software like the old "Works on Windows '95" stickers I used to see everywhere.
This puts competitive pressure on Microsoft. Valve's goal is to turn Steam OS into a legitimate competitor to Windows for gamers, and Microsoft should fear Valve's success.
Right now, Microsoft has no legitimate competitors in the PC gaming space. They are free to do anything they want to their OS and consumers have no choice but to tolerate it. If Microsoft say "watch these adverts", consumers open their eyes. If Microsoft says "pay up", they reach for their wallets. If Microsoft says "suck", they kneel.
If a competitor arises to Windows, then Microsoft will have to actually start worrying about losing customers to Steam OS. More importantly, every customer who switches to Steam OS is one who isn't paying for Game Pass and one who isn't buying games from the Microsoft Store and paying Microsoft their 30%.
Pretty much just that Arch Linux will be more secure, stable and reliable.
And for Valve, producing SteamOS images could be easier, meaning they can focus their dev efforts on something else.
And it supports competition against a locked down Windows-only gaming ecosystem that restricts Valve/Steams potential market. This is a great move for anyone interested in gaming or Linux.
Probably nothing. This is more steamdeck related stuff since the SteamOS is based on ArchLinux. And even then, it does not mean much for SteamDeck users. They wont notice much at all really. This might help with development a bit on valves end. The big news is really for ArchLinux users and maintainers which will see more effort in the development of that distro.
There is some wild speculation that maybe this makes arm for Arch Linux more official in the future. Which is based of the other recent news that Valve are creating an ARM emulation layer for running games on ARM devices. Which means maybe they are working on an ARM device and maybe need to start working on getting ARM support for Arch. Though again this is all wild speculation.
Yo a distro collabing with a corporation this is soo fire š„š„š„
Spent a few hours today installing vanilla arch for the first time because of this. Loving it so far.
This comment is missing the mandatory "btw." :(
hell yeah
This is a great step for humanity imo
Using OSS in your product and giving the OSS devs resources to improve their software, instead of trying to take over their project? Did Valve not get the memo that big tech companies are supposed to be evil?? Oh right, they have a monopoly on video game distribution and all of their products rely on DRM.
People who claim that Valve has a monopoly on PC games are already wrong but you claim that they have a monopoly on video game distribution in general is outrageously false. The 2022 overall video game revenue was a bit over US$180Bn. The PC game revenue was US$45Bn. In 2023, all of Steam was responsible for US$8.6Bn in revenue. The biggest PC games (Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox) aren't even on Steam and neither are any console or phone games.
Criticize Valve for actual things to criticize them for. Don't spread misinformation.
And even if they had a monopoly (which I agree that they don't), they have to actually abuse that monopoly to be a problem. Last I checked, the only requirement Valve has for games distributed on Steam is the devs can't sell Steam keys for less elsewhere, but they can sell as many Steam keys as they want outside of Steam w/o paying Valve anything. They can also generate keys for other distribution platforms and price them however they want.
That's extremely fair, and the fact that they're able to maintain a dominant position in the PC games distribution market without any exclusivity agreements or anything of that nature speaks volumes to the level of service they provide for both users and publishers/developers.
I have many games I own on Steam that I can play portably from a flash drive without Steam. DRM is still on the developer.
They have a massive marketshare, but that doesn't make them a monopoly. Developers are still free to distribute their games through any other storefront/launcher, and Valve isn't going out of its way to engage in anticompetitive practices like exclusive publishing deals with third-party studios.
"Monopoly", other platforms are free to compete, Valve isn't actively trying to stop them
Comment OP appears to have drank the Epic Games Kool-aid.
The world's biggest video game, Fortnite, is only available on Epic Games Store for most platforms. Epic's market share is gigantic, other video game developers just don't benefit of it because Epic promotes their own stuff first and foremost. If Epic had a storefront monopoly, it would be classified as anti-competitive behaviour.
You might be too young to remember, but DRM existed way before Steam, and the worse ones that exist today are the ones that the Devs/publishers add, not the steam one.
Remember Windows Live Games? Ah yes. Good ol' GTA4 on PC.
I'm interested, yet that is also obviously unsearchable.
Sorry, meant Windows Live Games
"Games for Windows Live"
Last I heard you could buy games from GOG or Epic and install them on a Steam deck produced and subsidized by Valve.
Or get them on PlayStation, Switch, or Xbox (Earth Walker claimed Steam has a monopoly on video game distribution in general).
Or, you know, a simple installer from the dev's website.
I haven't gamed on pc for quite some time, but I remember every gaming company adding "launchers" for their games that you had to run to install and play their games. Even Nvidia did this with their fucking drivers. :)
Valve doesn't do any of that bullshit. Maybe that's why gamers like them?
To be fair, weren't Valve the first company to do that? People were really annoyed at having to install steam just to play some Half-Life.
Of course, that was only 1 launcher, no launcher-in-launcher shenanigans back then.
Yep, Valve also normalized microtransactions significantly through TF2.
Once again, Valve started it as something reasonable: Cosmetic options, then expanded to allow shortcutting unlocking alt weapons through $1-3 charges instead of through game progression (achievements unlocked alt weapons at first). Other companies followed suite in ever increasingly predatory ways, and Valve got worse with it too over time.
I'd say it's maybe a little more honest to say they normalized the gambling exploitation in gaming with the TF2 lootboxes.
You didn't buy cosmetics, you bought a key to open a box that might get you the cosmetic you wanted.
They also originated loot boxes (TF2)
Hopefully this would lead to a more (stable version of) ArchLinux.
Arch isn't unstable. Users mess it up by installing a bunch of random crap from the AUR or fiddling with system files.
SteamOS addresses this by making the root level filesystem immutable and guiding the user to install containerized (flatpak) apps.
Exactly. I ran Arch for over 5 years, and the only "instability" I had was:
That's really it. I've since moved to openSUSE Tumbleweed and an AMD GPU, largely because of built-in snapper support and their server-oriented distros (Leap and MicroOS), and it wasn't because Arch was "unstable" or anything like that. In fact, I had far fewer issues with Arch than I did with the other distros I used before: Ubuntu and Fedora. It turns out, as you understand Linux better, you tend to mess things up less.
I've been using a Steam Deck for almost a year damn near daily with maybe 1 OS crash that was largely due to a very unstable game. How is ArchLinux unstable, exactly?
SteamOS is based on arch, but it has major differences. The steam deck's update mechanism is completely different from normal arch Linux.
Arch normally immediately updates to the latest version of every program. This is usually fine, but when a big bug is missed by the developers, it can cause problems.
The steam deck updates a base image that includes all the programs installed by default, and by the time it releases a lot of them aren't the absolute newest version. When valve updates SteamOS they definitely run a lot of tests on the base image to make sure it's stable and won't cause any issues.
SteamOS is also an immutible distro, meaning the important parts are read only. This also means updates are done to everything at once, and if something goes wrong, it can fall back to a known good version.
Not to say arch Linux is unstable (its been better for me than Ubuntu), but SteamOS is at a completely different level. It's effectively a completely different distro if we're talking about stability. I think what they're hoping is this support would allow arch to build out testing infrastructure to catch more issues and prevent them from making it to users.
This is not true though. Arch packages new program versions as soon as they can - for popular stuff this happens quickly but not everything updates quickly. And when they do publish a new package it goes to the testing repo for a short time before being promoted to the stable repos. If there is a problem with the package that they notice it will be held back until it can be solved. There is not a huge amount of testing that is done here as that is very time consuming and Arch do not have enough man power for this. But they also do not release much broken things at all. I have seen other distros like ubuntu cause far more havoc with a broken update then Arch ever has.
That's... a weird take. There are variants of Arch that focus on stability, if that's what you are after.
Which ones? I'm not aware of any besides specialised distros like SteamOS
Try #EndeavourOS!
Which is just Arch with GUI setup and DE pre-shipped
they added some nice tools though. e.g. their pacdiff & meld tool eos-pacdiff is pretty nice. then there is a kernel manager and a pretty clever update-script / wrapper around pacman and yay (eos-update). saying it is just Arch + GUI is selling it a bit short imho.
It uses the Arch repos directly though
https://itsfoss.com/arch-based-linux-distros/
Manjaro for example. I also thought Garuda would be focused on stability but according to this article potentially no. So maybe just Manjaro, I do remember reading about something else like it though...
Manjaro has a stability track record miles worse than Arch, to the point where someone made a GitHub wiki called āManjarnoā.
Manjaro does "stability" by delaying everything by two weeks. That doesn't really help at all and might hurt you for security updates, because those will wait the same two weeks.
They also don't hold back the aur which causes problems if an aur package is expecting a system package of a particular version, if I understand correctly