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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

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No universal but I'm very much anti valve as they are among the few who continue to do business in Russia.

If Russia is where you draw the line boy do I have news for you! If your standards were universal, you wouldn't be doing business with any company at all.

As a hippie that lives in the Rocky mountains, why do you assume I do business with large corporations? And I definitely feel let down by Steam's take to continue to provide entertainment for the masses so that they don't have to contemplate what their country is doing. They are the circus in bread and circuses. But yes you are right, I should just be paralyzed from basing my opinion of any company because 'other companies, other countries'. What a productive take that would be.

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

#112
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually did in the past, but they've realised that many game devs can't be trusted to maintain Linux builds as a second platform. They're often left outdated, require dependencies they didn't ship with or simply have worse performance than the Windows builds running on Proton. These days they check both builds if available and suggest the devs which one to use by default; often the Windows builds over Proton ar…

The same devs that most likely are also shipping Playstation or Android versions of their game....

What does this have to do with anything?

Shipping something on Android does not guarantee functional builds for regular Linux, and PlayStation uses a heavily customized FreeBSD fork. Neither of which are helpful for much of anything.

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

#114
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No universal but I'm very much anti valve as they are among the few who continue to do business in Russia.

What would be the point in cutting regular Russian citizens off from video games? It may actually be a good way to communicate with them.

Video games are the modern 'circus' in 'bread and circuses' it provides an opiate for that masses to escape from confronting their current situation and gives the government an escape valve for young male angst. As to communication, have you seen Russianss on the Steam forums? It's all Zs, Russian flags, and ethnic slurs against Ukrainians.

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

#115
post #15

They would do better by sponsoring native GNU/Linux games, or even ports from other POSIX like platforms like Playstation/Android, instead of playing OS/2 with Windows games.

It looks like this is getting a lot of hate, but I think there's clearly some truth to it. As an initial effort to bring a huge library of games to Linux, Proton is brilliant and a huge achievement. But it does feel less secure, in the long run, than having developers writing games for Linux as a first-class platform from the start.

Idk what the transition plan could look like, but eventually we should hope to see the Steam Deck treated like any other console with highly optimized, native ports, and then hopefully some of that can be reused for 'more native' general Linux ports.

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

#116
post #51
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian is very nice these days if you don't mind a tiny bit of enabling non-free repos. Or Pop OS for a more It Just Works approach, if their desktop suits your fancy.

Right now I'm stuck with nVidia's Jetson line of products which is vendor-locked to Ubuntu. The problem is that while you can extend them with a large SSD drive, these products have a really small disk used for /. I could run another OS inside a Docker container, all to avoid this limitation in snap, but of course things will not become prettier.

You've been able to run the root on (nvme) SSD for a while now with Dusty's scripts, and more recently with the official installer.

I have great sympathy though, I am also using Ubuntu on Jetson and resent snap, especially since the new releases are 20.04 which have it more tightly integrated.

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Russia is where you draw the line boy do I have news for you! If your standards were universal, you wouldn't be doing business with any company at all.

Especially with entertainment, I haven't understood the anti-Putin sentiment. Is it really in the West's interest to stop exporting soft power there? Sanctions make sense to me, but this particular industry we should make an exception for, I'd say. Authoritarian regimes try to isolate their populace anyways, it'd be a shame to co-opt that.

Yes, let's ensure we continue to give young Russian males an outlet to escape from thinking about the current realities in their country. Steam is providing the modern circus in 'bread and circuses'. If anything, this is the exact soft power we should leverage to highlight to those your angst filled males that their current reality is isolating them. Or, we could just give an opium of the masses to keep them indifferent to reality in their rooms because 'soft power'.

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

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to be regularly updating the higher level packages anyway though, as they might contain vulnerabilities that are not due to underlying libraries. At which point, we might as well update them for library issues too.

Many games rarely update, though. They put out the original version, and then maybe a few patches to fix game-breaking bugs, and then that's how they exist from then on. If you're expecting them to update to address vulnerabilities, you're going to be very disappointed. That said, if the library changes the API or functionality at all, dynamic linking is going to break the game, and that's not good either. So gamedev…

For single-player games, I doubt it matters if there are unpatched vulnerabilities.

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

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Yeah, even though I'd agree that KF is detestable I am very curious about this tbh. Has anyone here gone to that site? I read that they just report publicly available info that people have voluenteered online. While I understand that doxxing is terrible and so is targeted harassment, are they that much worse than the daily mail or any other gossip magazine?

the difference between KF and a tabloid is that KF members go out of their way to interfere in their targets' lives
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