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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

#161

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

arrakeen wrote: post #132
haunter wrote: post #10

Linus at DebConf 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=310&v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc&feature=yo... >I’m on a record saying, that maybe Valve will actually save the Linux desktop. And it’s actually not because I think games are important! I don't care, I don't play games. I think some people do, so games maybe important. But the really important issue is I guarantee you Valve will not make 15 different binaries. And I also guarant…

didn't valve mostly mitigate the fat binary problem with their soldier runtime set of shared libs?

Yes, and then they realized that even that wasn't good enough because Linux Desktop ABIs are a shitshow, so they refocused on providing Windows ABIs instead to great success.

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

#162

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

butz wrote: post #63

Thanks to Valve Linux is single OS on my home computer. Most of the games from my medium sized Steam library are working, and few that does not work today, will probably be fixed in the future. Need to mention that I do not play new AAA titles or multiplayer games, but I enjoy older games, and some of those are broken on modern versions of Windows.

I really wish they would take some time to make their VR hardware work properly on Linux. Right now it is pretty much just that holding me back. It is sad that they are the company that gives a shit about Linux gaming and the only one that has a working VR headset for Linux, but only barely.

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

#163

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #146
camdenlock wrote: post #113

I continue to be terrified that some day in the future, in a moment of weakness, Valve will allow itself to be swallowed by Microsoft…

There's 0 chance of this happening at long as Gabe's around.

Yeah, problem with that is that Gabe is human and won't live forever. I worry about what will happen to one of the greatest forces in keeping PC gaming not only alive, but relatively open and free from bullshit, when Gabe isn't around.

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

#164

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

lillecarl wrote: post #134
pjmlp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Orders of magnitude bigger markets.

And actually stable ABIs with good documentation.

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

#165

Post by bayindirh »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #135
zeta0134 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why AppImage over Flatpack? I like the Flatpack ability to easily restrict network access to binaries. Probably possibly in all of the packaging formats, but limiting permissions feels like a functional piece of Flatpack.

Because AppImages need no daemons and plumbing. They are self contained binaries which contain everything it needs to run.

Running a big infra to run a single binary once in a while feels like a burden to some of us.

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

#166

Post by kabdib »

hnarn wrote: post #44
haunter wrote: post #10

Linus at DebConf 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=310&v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc&feature=yo... >I’m on a record saying, that maybe Valve will actually save the Linux desktop. And it’s actually not because I think games are important! I don't care, I don't play games. I think some people do, so games maybe important. But the really important issue is I guarantee you Valve will not make 15 different binaries. And I also guarant…

Unless we’re talking about embedded systems (and most of the time, not even then I’d guess for portable gaming devices for example), what is the actual drawback of these “huge” binaries? Wasn’t the reason to separate binaries and libraries in the first place to conserve disk space? They are then clearly versioned to signal that you can’t expect just any version of the library to work with the program you wrote. The t…

If we're talking about binaries for game titles, meh. Load time for the executable is utterly insignificant compared to the load time of a title's assets. Heck, shared libraries probably slow things down.

Typical games I have experience with were in the 5-20Mb range for executables, with tens of GB for assets. Most titles I looked at the performance of were terrible at scheduling I/O, often leaving 80% of their available disk bandwidth unused.

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

#167

Post by PostOnce »

mrkramer wrote: post #142
haunter wrote: post #10

Linus at DebConf 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=310&v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc&feature=yo... >I’m on a record saying, that maybe Valve will actually save the Linux desktop. And it’s actually not because I think games are important! I don't care, I don't play games. I think some people do, so games maybe important. But the really important issue is I guarantee you Valve will not make 15 different binaries. And I also guarant…

Why would I use Linux Desktop over Windows Desktop? Because it's FOSS, because of price, UX? I don't get it.

All of the above.

It's free (along with everything in the "app store"), it's stable, it isn't infested with ads, and the browser and word processor work exactly the same for all normal users. The OS shouldn't matter much to regular people who just want a web browser and maybe a word processor.

It's really easy to use now. The installation process is far less arduous than Windows and you don't have to sign up for a Microsoft account or get nagged about not doing so.

I would really struggle to imagine someone having trouble doing all their normally-Windows-based (filesystem, office suite, web browser) work on a mainstream distro now, even for the most technically illiterate user.

If you're a power user though, it's like moving from a Corolla to an F-35.

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

#168

Post by LarryMullins »

yazzku wrote: post #151
zopa wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah. His comic timing’s not the best but I think that was meant to be the joke.

Would have never guess it was meant to be a joke.

To be clear, you're joking right now, right? I think you must be, but given your previous comment I'm not sure. Dry sarcasm in text is hard...

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

#169

Post by ROTMetro »

vlunkr wrote: post #121
ROTMetro wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can see that, but it's a complex situation and I have counterpoints. - Young male angst has no shortage of outlets. Sports, both extreme and normal, tons of existing media, pirated media, blowing stuff up, etc. Taking away Steam accounts likely isn't going to turn them into revolutionaries. - In response the existing comments from Russians, that could be selection bias. Many of them could be commenting normally or…

So, the users of Steam and what they post on their public pages, is selection bias when judging the usefulness of communicating with... the users of Steam?

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

#170

Post by paranoidrobot »

mrkramer wrote: post #150
CBarkleyU wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like asking me asking you why I would drive a Mercedes over my BMW. How would you know? All you could do is to list a million things that are different on a Mercedes compared to a BMW and then claim every one of those differences makes a Merc better. Is that what you expect to get as replies to your question?

For a casual user who uses computer for work and gaming I would go with Windows. People say Linux is free and open source, more secure and you get privacy but is it really worth it? Idk.

I was a long time Windows user. Since the 3.11 days. Windows was originally very much "You do you". Outside of Domain-joined machines, it was much more of a suggestion to update. Thing would update when you restarted/shut down.

A basic Windows install had some basic tools and utilities, but they largely didn't push things on you - and once you had set preferences, that was that.

Then Windows 8/10/11 came around.

Ads through the UI. A half-dozen or more sponsored bits (both 3rd party and their own other products). You'd log in one day and find they'd installed some other piece of crap. Features were disappearing behind the Microsoft Store. You'd try and set up a machine, and it'd play stupid games about "Oh, you need a Microsoft Account to log in", hiding/removing options to skip if it detected an internet connection.

You'd install Chrome or Firefox, and it would beg and whine. They changed up how you set browser preferences twice, to deliberately make it harder to switch. It would "helpfully" reset browser preferences back to Edge "for security".

Updates were force-installed, regardless of whether you wanted to. I remember being at a conference and hearing from maybe a half-dozen presenters who'd all had Windows push an update during the conference. Some it was just before they were about to present. Some had their machine sitting in it's various phases of Updating for an hour or more. Some had Windows reset a bunch of other preferences/configuration, and fuck up demos they had planed.

For me, the security and privacy benefits are secondary to "Let me use the machine that I'm paying for".

Ubuntu/Pop_OS might prompt me to install updates, but I've never had it tell me I have 15 minutes before it is going to force applying updates, 5 minutes before I'm supposed to join a meeting. Ubuntu might have some sponsored bits, but they're gone when you remove them.

The end of Windows 7 was the end of me using Windows, because I just can't trust the OS to do what I want, when I want.

This isn't just me, either - I've converted three other non-techie folks over to Ubuntu, too - all they did was stuff in Chrome and the occasional bit of printing. They had similar issues with Windows forcing changes on them that they didn't want. Multiple times I'd had to reset browser settings, because Windows decided that Edge was better. So Edge imported their contacts, but not the Chrome apps and couldn't sync passwords to the Google Passwords service.

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