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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

#171

Post by TillE »

Spivak wrote: post #9

Proton is way better than it has any right to be and single handedly made Linux a viable gaming platform. The odds of any particular game working on Linux is higher than Mac now.

Proton is really remarkable, considering there have been several commercial gaming-focused products based on Wine going back many years, and none of them are nearly as good.

Apple has made a bunch of decisions that really hurt gaming on macOS, which is frustrating. Starting with the $99/year fee just for app notarization, which deters tiny indie games from being released on macOS. This has a persistent long-term effect as those same developers make bigger games.

And on the other end of the scale, they're still using Metal as their own modern graphics API, so everyone has to either use a third party compatibility layer (MoltenVK), or use their engine's least-mature, least-well-tested rendering backend. Either way performance is pretty much guaranteed to be worse than it could be.

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

#172

Post by LarryMullins »

ROTMetro wrote: post #114
vlunkr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Keeping Russian teens in a sedentary lifestyle with video games is good for Ukraine. It weakens the Russian military. If anything, they should be giving free games to young Russians. Give them lots of pornography, liquor and drugs as well. These things weaken nations.

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

#173

Post by hellotomyrars »

yellow_lead wrote: post #6
cowmix wrote: post #4

I bought Steam games and a Steam Deck just to support Valve... and I'm not really a gamer. However, the Deck has turned out to be a pretty good computing device.

I was thinking of doing this - how do you like it? How's coding on it?

If you're going to properly sit down with it somewhere it works fine. But you're going to want external keyboard/mouse, and most likely a bigger display. You'll need a hub/dock if you want to plug in more than one USB-C device.

Honestly a laptop makes a lot more sense in general for that still. You just pull it out and everything you need is there. But if the versatility of the device is appealing to you then it might make more sense. I have used it for traditional computing with a keyboard/mouse and portable monitor, but it is quite cumbersome to do so. But I value it much more and primarily as a portable games system. As an aside, the trackpads are great and for me the thing that sets it apart from any of the similar systems, but in desktop mode they aren't nearly as good or useful by comparison. Though it might be possible to change the way they work in desktop mode but the basic way it hooks input by default makes them pretty dumb trackpads.

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

#174

Post by manchmalscott »

amelius wrote: post #37
candiddevmike wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Snap really sucks because it forces you to have a /home/user/snap folder on the same filesystem as /. If you don't have that (e.g. home folder symlinked to another filesystem), then snap starts breaking in very weird ways. https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/limitations-in-snapd/9718 This actually means that at some point I will have to move away from Ubuntu.

I don't see anything there about needing to be on the same filesystem, just that the path is of the form /home/$user/snap. It says that having a home directory that isn't mounted at boot doesn't work, but that's different. Am I missing something?

I'm not sure why you'd need to symlink /home/ to another filesystem instead of just mounting that on /home/ directly, that's what I'm doing with root on ZFS and a separate dataset for /home/ with it's own mountpoint.

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

#175

Post by hellotomyrars »

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…

I find it pretty unlikely, both because of Gabe, but also Valve prints money and is private. They don't have anything to gain by being bought by microsoft.

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

#176

Post by werlkyhrkj »

COGlory wrote: post #149
slavik81 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not enough information for me to understand what's wrong, but I suppose maybe I should find a Steam Deck and try things out myself. If you want to follow up privately, my email is in my profile.

There are two drivers for AMD on Linux. There's the open source driver, Mesa, and there's the proprietary AMD driver, called AMDGPU. I'm not certain which driver Valve is using on Steam Deck (I've never had to look), but if they're funding Mesa, I'm guessing they're using Mesa. Unfortunately, some of AMD's GP-compute infrastructure is only supported on Linux through the proprietary driver. I believe these are ROCm an…

this is sorta true, but not quite

amdgpu is the underlying open source kernel module -- it's in the mainline kernel.

mesa is the open source userland driver, and runs atop the amdgpu kernel driver

amdgpu pro is the closed source userland driver, which also runs atop the open amdgpu kernel driver.

what's really nice about this is that you can run a fully open source stack in your host os while running amdgpu pro/rocm inside a container.

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

#177

Post by jeppester »

emersion wrote: post #137

I'm one of the developers contracted by Valve to work on gamescope, wlroots, Mesa, the kernel, Wayland, etc. Really happy that my contracted work helps not only SteamOS, but very often the whole ecosystem. Examples include radv/amdgpu fixes, tearing page-flips, a re-usable library to make use of KMS planes, and the list goes on.

Can I ask how it's decided what you are working on?

Given the variety of the projects you've mentioned it could seem that you have some degree of freedom, but I might be mistaken.

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

#178

Post by ROTMetro »

ROTMetro wrote: post #111
curiousgal wrote: post #31

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.

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 com…

I just need to point out these 'it's pointless to do anything' people are wrong. My small mountain town's 1Gb fiber ISP is local. Our power company is a co-op. The gas station I use is a co-op. My limited meat consumption comes from an organic Mennonite family farm. Summer months my produce comes from a local CSA and I'm lucky to have a great local flower CSA as well. You can actually live in the modern world in comfort AND choose how you live, even in the USA.

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

#179

Post by werlkyhrkj »

slavik81 wrote: post #158
BearOso wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually 3 drivers for vulkan, amdgpu-pro, amdvlk, and radv. In any case, ROCm works with the completely open source stack, and is open source itself. amdgpu, the kernel component, is the only thing needed for that, and modern upstream works fine. The integrated steam deck gpu simply can't work with it, though. The issue that has recently been resolved was that only the amdgpu-pro userspace had working OpenCL…

> The integrated steam deck gpu simply can't work with [the kernel amdgpu], though. That's a shame. I was hoping it was something I could help with, but that's a bit beyond the scope of what I can fix myself.

not sure why you added that "[the kernel amdgpu]" bit -- pretty sure that isn't what gp was saying.

the open source kernel driver is the only one in use and sits under both the open source and closed source userland driver stacks.

i'm pretty sure what they're saying is that rocm doesn't support running on the apu in the steam deck at all -- i'm dealing with a similar issue in bringing up a product on a different amd apu that has a beefy enough gpu for my application

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

#180

Post by moloch-hai »

stusmall wrote: post #97
saagarjha wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is a big push for their proprietary language "Carbon". Clang is way behind on implementing most C++20 features.
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