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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

#191

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?

Not an expert, only checked a few threads shortly before its very end. From what i can tell...

- gossip magazines usually target "public figures". many jurisdictions have relaxed privacy rules around those. KF targeted whom they found... "interesting"

- haven't really read gossip magazines, but i assume they have a higher bar. for example, did any of those print the hunter biden dick pics requested to be deleted in the "twitter files"? cause you could be sure of them to have been on KF, if they had thread on him

- "publicly available info" is stretching it quite a bit. In the case of @elonjet, we that is info required by law/court to be public. KF, on the other side, is more like "stuff that was ever published somewhere" (as opposed to getting new stuff), so again your nudes are fair game for them, no matter any distribution rights

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

#192
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.

[deleted]

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

#193
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 played all of cyberpunk shortly after release on a 3950x and 3060ti on Steam+Proton+Ubuntu with very little problems. It did get very laggy in busy areas on occasion, but that was the exception not the rule. Obviously newer hardware helped, but it seemed Valve hurt the gaming experience less than CD Project Red did! Not really a gamer. Cyberpunk is probably my high water mark at 90 hours. It's so nice to not to hav…

That's really impressive, considering Cyberpunk had so many issues even on officially-supported platforms

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indiffer…

You can be sure that if we don't give them outlets, China will. Do you think nobody would fill the vacuum? If they'd ban every media import, that'd just be an opportunity for the regime to further solidify their own goals. For examples, look at what happened when McDonalds, Coca Cola left the country - they have the same shit, but now without the influence.

Whatever there is, there will be abuses of it, so yeah, many would just use the "opium" part of Steam. But there's another aspect of it that would still get imported, and that's any of the narratives that differ from the propaganda they are subjected to. With Steam specifically, they'd be exposed to titles like This War of Mine, and international communities where they'd experience that nobody gives a fuck about them being Russian, or even find it cool, despite the prevalent anti-Western propaganda in their own media.

And that all, I think, is worth more than sanctioning it.

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

#195
post #143

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?

No, but why would it be. I'd expect a competitive pay.

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

#196
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.

I'm sure you can spot the nationalists, of which there are many. But how do you differentiate them from the normal folk, who just use a non-descriptive nickname and just play the game? Zooming out a bit, in the group of "gamers" as in people who participate in gaming related discussions, you can find many toxic comments, sentiments and people, of which the ethnic slurs, Zs and everything doesn't even stand out.

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

#197
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Snap also stores stuff in /var/snap, and that probably also has to live on the same filesystem.

Anyway, now I'm working around limitations in Snap instead of Snap working around its own limitations in certain circumstances. The fact that Snap shows weird behavior and illogical error messages in these cases tells me that Snap is not (yet) up to the task of fulfilling this rather fundamental role in my OS.

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If so, that's more promising. The HIP runtime sits on the ROCm Runtime (ROCr), which sits on hsa-kmt (ROCt). I was under the impression that the driver handles pretty much all of the stuff that is hardware-specific.

It's an RDNA2 GPU and AFAIK, all the RDNA2 GPUs can be coerced into working with ROCm (even if they are not 'supported'). Maybe the Steam Deck is an exception. I don't know. I'll give it a spin over the holidays. Win, lose or draw, it sounds like I'll learn something interesting.

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

#199
post #94

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…

flatpak > appimage for security and updates.

Well you can statically link stuff in a flatpak… a distribution package however gets automatically rebuilt when a dependency changes, if it's statically linked.

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

#200

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…

Local co-ops are the opiates of the hippie masses. It keeps them plump and happy in their little faux communes and away from the fight against corporations, state and federal government. As someone who lives 5000 “miles” away I feel really strongly about judging these hillbillies/rockabillies that I’ve never met and I for some reason feel that they should be inconvenienced so that they can take up the fight against their government, which after all is the biggest imperial power on the planet.
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