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

[guglovich]

It's just a shame they made the Steam client itself terrible. Why is it necessary to make one thing better and another worse.

[bachchain]

Damn, if only they cared this much about their own products

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

[QUOTE=andyprough;n1411052]I don't game, other than an occasional round of SuperTuxKart.

That being said, I have questions before I praise Steam:

2) While Steam has contributed a number of graphics enhancements, didn't it do that out of self-interest, as Steam has been trying for years to run its own OS and devices where Steam can determine its own profits outside of having to be subservient to companies like MS, Apple, and Google? Correct me if I'm wrong.


The enemy of our enemy is our friend.

[andyprough]

I don't game, other than an occasional round of SuperTuxKart.

That being said, I have questions before I praise Steam:
1) Isn't Steam a proprietary walled garden where you don't really "own" games, but you pay to use them within the Steam system? Correct me if I'm wrong on this.
2) While Steam has contributed a number of graphics enhancements, didn't it do that out of self-interest, as Steam has been trying for years to run its own OS and devices where Steam can determine its own profits outside of having to be subservient to companies like MS, Apple, and Google? Correct me if I'm wrong.
3) Surely Valve is collecting massive amounts of data on Steam users. What's their privacy policy? Are they just another Google or Facebook - contributing a bit of code in order to entice more users and enrich themselves through the sale of personal data? Gmail is the classic example - "Great Free Email For Everyone!!" [don't mind us while we scrape and sell all your email data, provide backdoors to our government spy customers, etc].

[Volta]

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

What do you mean you have to eat?

If you pay some stupid foundation instead of a programmer, the programmer will starve.

[Volta]

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.

If you didn't get this I was writing how they are toward Linux. Linux aside, few years ago ms didn't pay too well to their employees (I posted few times about this at Phoronix and I doubt anything has changed). Most people I know aren't satisfied at all with ms products. I won't speak for Azure, though. In comparison to Intel, AMD, Valve, Red Hat they're the worst in the Linux world. As for now.

[bearoso]

Which is Electron, which is Chromium+Node. MS did nothing for crossplatform support there.

You're missing the big thing this gave us: LSP (language server protocol). Now we have intellisense-quality code completion in editors everywhere.

Before this, libclang was being used somewhat for C++ in stuff like QtCreator, but now there's servers for basically any language you can think of, and you can use them with traditional editors.

[Jonjolt]

No CS2 Beta for Linux users, Volvo plz fix

[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.

[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.