The Arch Linux team has announced on its public mailing list that it will be entering into a direct collaboration with Valve.
As primary Arch Linux developer Levente Polyak discloses in the announcement post, “Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.”
Polyak continues, “This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors […] We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on the mailing list as work progresses.”
These quotes go to show how bigger corporations like Valve can still be a helpful, desirable influence in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community. While the rules of FOSS dictate that Valve was under no obligation whatsoever to give back to the community in any way, it’s had a great track record so far through Proton and is now directly funding the continued development of Arch Linux, which forms the foundation of its own SteamOS 3 operating system. It’s true that volunteers in FOSS make that part of the tech world go round, but it’s always nice when these projects can actually afford to pay people to get the work that needs to be done for the rest of our enjoyment.
Can’t wait to see the “Arch btw” splash screen when I’m loading the Deck in the future.
you know the stream deck is currently running on arch right?
No I didn’t, because, once again; it hasn’t told me like every Arch user ever has. ~that was the joke omg bud~
I love it that even among Linux users there are proselytizers that annoy everyone else. You’d think that switching to Debian or something would inoculate you from pretentious nagging to switch OS, but NOPE!
(I’m just salty because Valve didn’t pick my fav distro.)
OSes are for losers. Anyone who isn’t braindead runs a homebrew array of 555 chips running handwritten binary. Fuckin noobs.
Meh, that’s too much bloat.
I’ll wait and see what comes of it. Valve have been singlehandedly responsible for evolving Linux gaming by leaps and bounds, to the point where the only real hurdle right now is anti-cheat compatibility.
Their direct collaboration with Arch is massive for that reason alone
They have a battleeye proton build that devs can choose to ship with if you use that, but for some reason most (including GTA V online) just… Decide not to use it.
This is exactly how we know that they are actively trying to exclude Linux users and it never has been “too much development effort with too little market share”. They won’t tick the check box in EAC to allow use in Linux. They actively aim to exclude the open-source community because they are big corporations and would rather a different big corporation hold some of the power they don’t have yet instead of the “consumer”.
Eeh… I’d respectfully disagree on the anti-cheat being the only real hurdle right now.
Modding is still a massive pita and janky compared to windows, as an example.
Don’t get me wrong, Linux gaming has advanced entire geologic eras compared to where it was 10 years ago, 5 years ago, hell… even last year. I dont even have to reference protondb anymore, I just expect things to work in general, and they usually do, outside of the minority of games with asshole anticheat (most of that can even be run on linux, they just refuse to enable the option)
r2modman works natively on Linux
As much as it frustrates me that this is the best option for various reasons, there is at least now a native nexusmods client.
Granted, if your game isn’t supported by it and given that it’s early days, I do still agree with you.
the new mod client from nexus will be great, but I’d wager it’d be another year before its in a non-test state.
Doesn’t it currently only support like one or two games? I have a grandfathered premium account. It’s a must for me for the few games I used to mod. Not to mention all the other mod utilities that outright don’t work. Things the community has built. Not mad at them for not making another version of their apps.
Maybe one solution is for most games to have some kind of built in mod support? Bg3 basically did it. CP77 also kinda tried.
Still very early days, yes. R2modman supports more games also.
It’s definitely helpful for games to support their own modders also, and I can understand why most don’t put in the effort.
Fair
Tbh, you’d think modding would be easier with Linux’s file system, but no, it’s pretty bad. I really do wonder why that is.
Linux is really good at sandboxing and containerizing things. Not to mention the display manager/server changes from system to system and is optional.
These quotes go to show how bigger corporations like Valve can still be a helpful, desirable influence in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community.
Unfortunately, as far as bigger corporations go, there are very few that are “like Valve”…
Valve might stand alone
I wonder how much Arch-derivative distros like Manjaro or EndeavourOS will benefit from this, aside from Proton improvements.
Endeavour will benefit from it directly. There’s nothing proprietary in the distribution, except for a repository with their theming, a keyring/mirrorlist, and a few alpm hooks for nvidia and dracut installs.
With Manjaro it’s a little different, but who knows. They have other issues to worry about
I was JUST about to try out Manjaro. Are these ‘other issues’ a new thing or are you saying that because Manjaro is more of a departure from arch than endeavor is?
Oh no, not a new thing. Manjaro has a very long history of consistently fucking things up. I would not, in good consciousness, recommend Manjaro to anyone
Thanks for the info. I’ll give endeavor at shot.
+1 for endeavor from me, easy and stable
ackshually it’s endeavour
I can’t believe you’ve done this
Agreed, do endeavour, plain arch (maybe with something like arch install), or hard pivot and try nixos. Manjaro has never really been a good option.
+1 for Archinstall. I’m a Linux noob and getting everything set up was a cinch. Even had a spot to put in my address so I can get my first pair of thigh length striped socks from the AUR.
^that ^was ^a ^joke.
Manjaro probably has the most incompetent team of any serious linux distro, there’s no good reason to use it
As an EndeavourOS user, this pleases me greatly.
