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?
Closed source isn’t necessarily evil, neither is DRM. It’s all in how you implement it.
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’d say in your case piracy was 1000% justified. You bought it, you should be able to play it.
I think piracy is acceptable if one of these two conditions are met:
- You already own a copy of the game
- The game is no longer sold as new, such that any legitimate copy would have to be secondhand.
The main problem is the “No end of life plan” issue
If the software/game/whatever has to call a server to verify itself then when the company goes under or stops supporting it then the software/game/whatever becomes useless without a crack of some kind that may or may not be possible for the layman to implement
Companies need an end of life plan for their products with DRM
Someone actually emailed Valve about this back in 2013. Here’s their response: https://i.imgur.com/4sa1Ln6.jpg
Thank you for contacting Steam Support. In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network, measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games.
It seems like Valve wants us to think they have an EoL plan. With the goodwill they’ve built over the years, I want to believe them.
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.
