Valve Is A Wonderful Upstream Contributor To Linux & The Open-Source Community

[HEL88]

HEL88

It's not bad, It's the worst company.

1. They pay their employees well. There is a queue to hire them.

2. Most customers are satisfied with their products.

3. And relatively new products like Azure (the world's second cloud) are attracting, thanks to their good reputation and quality , so many customers that revenue increases are in double digits.

You have a strange notion of being the worst.

[NeoMorpheus]

Thank you Valve, developers and Lord GabeN!

[unic0rn]

I know you're probably just trolling, but anyway.
Money doesn't advance Linux, code does.

I'll gladly hire a programmer that will do my work for free.

What do you mean you have to eat?

[user1]

As a long time Linux user, it's been the combination of Valve and AMD that has made everything so nice. While Steam was OK back in the day on Linux and we had a handful of native games, it wasn't until AMD released AMDGPU and opened up Mantle that things really started looking optimistic in regards to Linux gaming. Valve's Linux gaming and open source development took off like a rocket once AMD took out all the proprietary bullshit and provided an open source base for everyone to work with.

While Valve is a great contributor to the open source world, AMD really helped get the ball rolling and deserves an honorable mention.

Heck, AMDGPU is why I buy AMD hardware and use Linux and Valve for playing games. Back in 2013 I'd have gone back to Sony or NVIDIA/Windows for gaming needs if it weren't for AMD and AMDGPU. A decade later and I'm on my 3rd AMD graphics card, 2nd AMD processor, and I really have no desire to go back to game consoles or Windows.

Same here. Apart from the slightly better price / performance of AMD GPU's, the main reason I went with AMD is AMDGPU + its amazing Mesa drivers (RadeonSi and radv). I also use Windows from time to time, and since the last couple of years I always feel like the AMD Windows drivers (even Vulkan) lag behind in performance and input lag as well. Even if AMD now has a new OGL driver on Windows that is much better than the old one, it's still not on par with RadeonSi.

But here is a little thought experiment. Lately I've been thinking that at least a big part of the reason AMDGPU + AMD Mesa drivers are so successful is because the old fglrx blob sucked (way way more even than Nvidia's blob) so of course a better way forward was to start fresh, than try to improve the old crusty thing. Now let's imagine what if fglrx was at least as good as Nvidia's blob.. would AMD have still invested in open source drivers?

When it comes to Nvidia, I think the main reason they don't want to deal with open source drivers is because their blob is already performant (even if it suffers from the usual issues of binary blobs - screen tearing on X, slow Wayland progress, etc) and this way they can reuse the same driver code across different operating systems. So from an economical pov, I think it just doesn't make sense for Nvidia to create a new DRM driver (like AMDGPU) and new Mesa drivers because this way they'll have to maintain 2 different driver codebases.

When it comes to fglrx, I also think it might have shared code with AMD Windows drivers, so if fglrx was much better, I think there's a high possibility that AMD would've not invested in open source drivers. I know that AMD GPU's don't have these firmware restrictions that Nvidia has, and before AMDGPU there was also the old radeon kernel driver which was much better compared to Nouveau, but still, I think fglrx would've at least still be around.

Don't get me wrong, I'm more than grateful for AMDGPU + AMD Mesa, but AMD is still a company just like Nvidia, so I think it still prefers to make decisions if they economically make sense.

[HEL88]

My sincere condolences to those who are forced to use this. I wish you all the best, especially escaping this... wonderful stack.

This is only your opinion.

From StackOverflow.

More devs desire and admire C# than go, java, c, c++ etc. Good enough for me.





Asp.net core has a fifth place out of thirty-five. Yes, asp.net core is admire and desire in the development community.



And of course you are entitled to your own opinion. But the development community is of a different opinion than you. Maybe they don't have such preconceptions, and they are guided by what the technology offers, its capabilities and how comfortable it is to use.

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023

[drakonas777]

I don't care about "computer/os ideology/politics" much, but I like the fact Valve is still private. I think that focusing more on the products and less on maintaining maximum stock price is beneficial to us - users.

As for the products themselves, I own Steam Deck and I am very happy I purchased it. I consider myself a very cacual gamer if a "gamer" at all, since I play ~30mins a day, indie games and old RPGs mostly. For my particular case SD is perfect: runs everything I want from my library and functions more like a phone than PC: I play a bit, I put it away in sleep mode, I play a bit next day and so on. Game suspends and resumes are very useful feature for me. Also, I noticed that after the full charge SD can sleep for around a week. That's a very good result for x86-based device. But the most important thing was an entry cost of ~400EUR at the launch, when there were basically 0 similar speced devices at that time for this price. Even today SD price/value is still very very good.

Now I'm waiting to see what rumored Valve headset and stationary VR console are going to be about. Assuming they ar decent products and offers good price/value I will purchase something from Valve most likely. That stationary console is very intriguing especially, since it's possible that upcoming Strix Halo (or something like that, cause it's going to be semi-custom anyway) is actually an APU for it, but let's wait and see.

[doomsday]

Thank to you Valve , begin member since the beginning of steam.

As for M$ , if the entire office suite that is used in companies will be translated to Linux (teams,office,outlook) then we can say that this company has contributed something. They never do that because they want to eat cake and have cake. Awful and greed company. I presume they someday will forget about windows and do own Linux ecosystem same as they do with M$ Edge.

[Vistaus]

Money doesn't advance Linux, code does.

So all devs work for free? No wonder Red Hat is firing people from their team, can't have people work for free.

[Volta]

Microsoft has enriched Linux and brought many amazing technologies to Linux!

Yeah, right! You mean directx, win32 compatibility for running Windows apps?

They gave us VS Code, .NET, ASP.NET Core, EF Core, PowerShell, Edge, etc.

Which are trash.

Microsoft also have their own Linux distributions that they use in the cloud, and they contributed Hyper-V support to the Linux kernel. They probably contributed to Mesa, Wayland and X.Org Window System too with all their work around WSLg.

Why would I care about hyper-v? They have some true contributions, but mentioning them in the thread about Valve is nothing, but trolling.

[Vistaus]

Now we are talking. MS is just (ab)using opensource software to make money.

I agree with some of your other points, but what does this have to with MS? Is Red Hat abusing OSS to make money too? And what about Canonical? Ubuntu is free, but they also sell support plans.