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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

#81
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either static or dynamic is fine, package management has to be solved at another layer a la Nix.

Nix is effectively transforming dynamic binaries to static ones. Might as well skip the step, stop pretending that drive space is expensive, and link everything statically.

Huh, never heard it put this way. I guess it's true though.

Anyone disagree?

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

#83
post #16

Is Valve the only company in the world that is not universally hated by the HN and reddit crowd?

Cloudflare?

I personally dislike cloudflare for not dropping KF, not sure if that's a majority opinion.

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

#84
post #42

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.

I don't know... i frequently see dang linking to old posts of the "new" repost.

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

#85
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In another words, there is no money in GNU/Linux games.

Exactly. I played life is strange 2 recently. It has a native Linux Version. On startup it complained I should set my CPU governor to performance instead of governor. Then it said it only supports AMD and Nvidia cards. I pressed continue and the system hard-locked. This machine is about a year old today, and this is the only crash I had, ever. After that I configured steam to use the windows version instead, and I co…

Source ports to Linux are actually pretty rare. Most big games with a 'native' Linux version are non-native in exactly the same way as Proton ports— they run using a custom compatibility layer based on WINE or something similar. Often the port is of such high quality that you wouldn't be able to tell (Feral Interactive has done a ton of great ports this way), but this is still how most are done, especially for AAA games.

(In that sense, developers (or Linux porting studios) switching from their in-house compatibility layers to Proton isn't really a change in terms of those ports being 'truly native' or whatever.)

I wonder if what we're starting to see, rather than the inferiority of source ports, is actually that some of these alternative compatibility layers are just no longer keeping up with Proton, since Proton/WINE has such wide use/testing and rapid development these days.

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

#86
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence why Valve should make the needful to change that, instead of "emulating" Windows.

Think embrace extend and extinguish...in reverse! 1. Make wine really really good. 2. Start adding Linux-only features. hehehe

This would only have a chance of working if they dramatically improved performance over native I think.

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

#87

Somebody needs to step up to save Clang now that Google has more or less abandoned it.

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.

I hope you are right.

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

#89
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve is using the 'wrong' AMD gpu driver.

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.

I believe they're misrepresenting the issue. Blender's Flatpak is possibly broken, but I'd imagine the Steam Runtime version works without-flaw.

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

#90
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…

> what is the actual drawback of these “huge” binaries? The problem isn’t size. The problem is that with static linking it gets significantly more difficult to patch security vulnerabilities, because with dynamic linking, the vuln is gone once the underlying library is updated, however this wouldn’t happen with static linking.

This is only a problem if the tooling to track dependencies doesn't exist.

Many programming models (e.g. monomorphization as done in C++ and Rust) are fundamentally incompatible with dynamic linking. The tooling needs to handle those cases anyway.

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