Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by smoldesu » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 9:42 PM UTC

moloch-hai wrote: post #180

stusmall wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, let this be a lesson to anyone who tries competing with a GPL product. Permissive licenses are cool up until the moment a FAANG company embraces your project, extends it and extinguishes it.

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

#182

Post by hellotomyrars » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 9:43 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #23

belval wrote: 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.

They tried earlier on before they realized this approach made way, way more sense. Even the native linux versions of games that have them often run worse than the windows version wrapped in Proton. Developers just aren't going to commit to making native linux versions for the most part and that isn't going to change. This is reality.

The magical thing is that they've done so much work with Proton that a device like the Steam Deck is more than a curiosity. It is a viable product. It is viable to play games on Linux in a way it has never been before. Even better, they aren't keeping it to themselves.

A purist ideology about linux isn't going to change reality. But Proton is. The Deck is a wildly popular device and the knock-on effect is going to be more systems running linux for regular people. The games may not be native but if they're indistinguishable from native games, then who cares? Meanwhile adoption of linux as a viable platform still goes up. Maybe on a long enough timeline things swing around, though I still very much doubt that.

The Year of Linux on the Desktop is still a fantasy, but reading the steam hardware survey, it is more true than it has ever been before, thanks to the Deck and Proton.

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

#183

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

rstat1 wrote: post #112

pjmlp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are closer to Linux APIs than Windows ever will.

Android even more so, assuming those that rely only on AGK/NDK.

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

#184

Post by vj636 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

mylons wrote: post #143

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.

is it public what they're paying these contractors?

I recently interviewed for one of these open source dev positions (Proton). From what I could gather from my conversations with the hiring manager, its somewhere between 120K to 160K for C Devs.

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

#185

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

gpderetta wrote: post #98

pjmlp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That only works if studios ever bother to write native Linux games, otherwise is like being happy MAME supports Linux.

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

#186

Post by roflyear » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 10:00 PM UTC

ROTMetro wrote: post #178

ROTMetro wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comf…

Where do they get their gas?

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

#187

Post by emersion » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 10:02 PM UTC

jeppester wrote: post #177

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.

Yeah, there is a lot of freedom, it's pretty similar to how an open-source project works. Pierre-Loup indicates what features would be nice to have (in gamescope or other projects), I can pick from that list. Or I can pick my own ideas and work on these. Or I can discuss with the other contractors, come up with an idea and coordinate our work. Sometimes I work on short-term bugfixes, sometimes I work on long-term plumbing efforts.

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

#188

Post by roflyear » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 10:03 PM UTC

hacym wrote: post #19

bdhcuidbebe wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News flash. This is not a news site.

Hacker News…

HN usually suppresses real "news" bc it is often divisive. They are cool with informative stuff like tech blog posts but not "News" as in recent events.

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

#189

Post by roflyear » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

hacym wrote: post #42

texasbigdata wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check out the economist, you’d be surprised it’s not all economics! Also those gosh darn New York Times newspapers don’t solely focus on NYC. Wtf! Don’t judge a book by the literal interpretation of its title?

Strange, I could have sworn that 99% of the things posted here are news and commentary on news.

Lol most posts here are certainly not news.

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

#190

Post by CamperBob2 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

jnwatson wrote: post #59

hnarn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Shared libraries can reduce load time as they might already be in page cache. There’s also potential for a small impact in reduced instruction cache misses. On the other side, link time optimization on static libraries allows deletion of unused functions and more aggressive inlining, so you might get that performance back and more.

Not only that, but executable images are demand-paged anyway. You can link 1 GB of static library code if you like; you won't pay the penalty unless and until those functions are actually called.

The whole debate is just stupid. If it inconveniences even one fewer user, then static linking is the way to go, because of the sheer number of drawbacks that shared libraries bring. Nobody cares how big the executable is. If you do, well... the best time to stop caring was 10 years ago, and the second best time is now.