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Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

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Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare?

I personally dislike cloudflare for not dropping KF, not sure if that's a majority opinion.

Yeah, even though I'd agree that KF is detestable, the way Cloudflare cracked under pressure was a public embarrassment. It's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt these days.

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#93
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you care? You really need to get over the "Linus said something bad about my mother 20 years ago" or whatever your issue is. It's just weird at this point.

You are the ones that need to get over the fact that these are Windows games, not Linux.

These games are targeting an ABI that happens to have come from MS.

My fucking linux machine runs on intel hardware that is targeting an arch made by AMD (x86_64).

There is no problem with sharing stable interfaces. The idea that we should not treat these as linux games because they consume an interface developed by MS, that is implemented just fine by proton on linux is... very very backwards.

Who gives a flying fuck who made the interface, as it can be implemented across platforms, I'm a-ok with the result.

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Id rather have static binaries than a flatpak/snap for "universal distribution", personally.

Given the choice I prefer native package -> AUR package -> AppImage -> Flatpack, in that order. (snap, you'll notice, is absent) Arch is pretty good at making the native packages work, so that's always ideal. The community is generally pretty good at competently packaging AURs, and they'll do it for slightly less free things, so that fills a lot of gaps. AppImages and Flatpaks are great when they work, but opaque and…

flatpak > appimage for security and updates.

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#95
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think embrace extend and extinguish...in reverse! 1. Make wine really really good. 2. Start adding Linux-only features. hehehe

Those Linux only features don't matter because games are targeting Win32.

the DXVK project out of all this has been a godsend for the older DX11, DX9 games on modern hardware, its being used to increase FPS on older titles on windows

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix is effectively transforming dynamic binaries to static ones. Might as well skip the step, stop pretending that drive space is expensive, and link everything statically.

Huh, never heard it put this way. I guess it's true though. Anyone disagree?

Farid Zakaria recently gave a talk¹ (at NixCon 2022) where I think he put it better: Nix (and Guix) blur the line between dynamic and static linking.

I think this is true, because with Nix and Guix, you actually have an end result with the positive characteristics of both kinds of linking.

His talk, based on his work on shrinkwrap² and nix-harden-needed², called for the creation of a new executable format for the Nix world. Seems apropos as a reminder that there are other possibilities!

(I think these kinds of solutions are definitely within reach for Valve from a technical perspective. Other tools are using them today.)

--

1a: https://youtu.be/HZKFe4mCkr4

1b: https://youtu.be/lzk4sldexX4

2: https://fzakaria.com/2022/03/15/shrinkwrap-taming-dynamic-sh...

3: https://fzakaria.com/2022/09/12/making-runpath-redundant-for...

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#97

Somebody needs to step up to save Clang now that Google has more or less abandoned it.

Google uses Clang for much of its production code and employs people to work on it. I don’t think saying that they’ve abandoned it is accurate.

It's been a (very) long time since I worked in Android OS land but at the time I could see effects of them actively moving projects from GCC to Clang. I always picked up the outsider impression that it was their preferred C++ toolchain. First I've heard of them abandoning it

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#98
post #23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really true, native Linux games are a much harder sell for publishers because the proportion of users is just too low.

Hence why Valve should make the needful to change that, instead of "emulating" Windows.

That's exactly what proton is for: bootstrap a linux gaming ecosystem without having to port thousands of games

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#99
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those Linux only features don't matter because games are targeting Win32.

the DXVK project out of all this has been a godsend for the older DX11, DX9 games on modern hardware, its being used to increase FPS on older titles on windows

Isn't Intel even shipping DXVK on window for their shiny new GPUs as it is often works better than their DX9 drivers?

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#100
If anyone from Valve is reading this, I'm not a gamer at all, but I bought a (fully loaded) SteamDeck largely to support your efforts, and secondly to have a cool portable computer. It is (in about a week) going to become a game console hooked up to my TV. I could have got an xbox for much less the price, but the openness, power, and linuxyness of the steamdeck was too attractive to pass up :-D

Please keep it up! you're the heroes we need in this fight.

P.S. I'll be buying games from your store also as my kids are gamers

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