What Should Valve Do For Linux & Open-Source?

[leif81]

Contribute to KDevelop / QtCreator to make the platform more attractive for developers used to Visual Studio.

I'd love to see the energy put into Eclipse CDT which works for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

[nightmarex]

Release source code to antiquated games (gems) like half life 1, doing so will allow the community to keep these games alive for as long as users are around. Data content is still required so, they still can make revenue (and maybe even more since customers know they can play the game on any device they own)

Valve can push things to happen more than the average linux user can. They could push for documentation and opening of device drivers more so than the end user could ever do. They could finance open source developers like nouveau .

#1 wish. This is exactly what I would of said, release old codebase.
The financing of the drivers seems a bit out of scope but I wouldn't be against it.

Most everything else you touched in your article.

One thing I would love to see however is some wine finessing for games that wont run native but do run on wine. Skyrim made steam a lot of money and works great with wine. So do the double fist method port what you can , ensure wine does the rest and your Lin....*cough... Ubuntu client will be perfect.

[johnc]

If Valve could somehow get devs off the DirectX Kool-aid it would be a huge home run for open standards development.

[Hamish Wilson]

Someone should just do a IDE project from scratch. It should support every 'popular' language (C# (mono)/C/C++/python and so on) and at least GTK and QT for GUI stuff. And by support a language I mean Visual Studio level. A support site like the msdn for every language, code highlighting and suggestions, add-in functionality, GUI porting (you've a GTK application and can port the GUI to QT...more or less) and so on.

Strangely enough the closest thing to that would be Gambas, but that is only targeting the Visual Basic crowd.

Their dedication is really formidable and I hope other companies are gonna follow their example. The only thing that's missing now is a broad support by all the other major companies. Well, how about an integration of wine into the steam-client to close that gap 'till the rest of them climbs into the soon-to-be successful linux-boat?

If they do this what motivation would there be for these developers to ever go native? WINE may be an impressive technical achievement (even though it can be extremely frustrating at times) but it's greater effects are always something to worry about. It is the same reason people were worried about LIMBO; why would developers ever go native if you can just wrap your original Windows binary in a compatibility layer and be done with it?

As for general things they could do, all I can do is echo what other people and said and say that I would like to see improvements to the FOSS graphics drivers. That is all.

[89c51]

If Valve could somehow get devs off the DirectX Kool-aid it would be a huge home run for open standards development.

Doesn't this means that they will have to write a new and better open standard??

[squirtsoda]

Poor valve....

I feel a bit sorry for Valve, I have really never heard of a developer that had to FIX the OS they were working on before porting their software. I mean its understandable, graphics drivers and documentation for them have been in a sorry state, proprietary and open source. And x.org just plain sucks, so thats something else im hoping will change in the near future. But yeah, running into things like no S3TC support because of legal reasons, valves gonna run into a lot of those lol. Im also torn on them integrating some way for me to play the games that haven't been ported through wine, just some small back end that can install those games in the directory where wine is, this would be convenient but like everything with wine, it might just discourage devs from porting.

[johnc]

Doesn't this means that they will have to write a new and better open standard??

Nahh... There are plenty of AAA titles that aren't written in DirectX.

[jvillain]

I have been using Linux almost as long as it has been around and I am a huge Linux supporter. But What I think they should do is forget the Linux market atleast for now. I see two things comming and neither of them are good for Linux. First AMD and NVidia keep screwing the open source driver development meaning that any one using those drivers will always have horrible performance. This will translate to "Linux Sucks!!!" Especially when the MS PR departments start showing performance comparisons between the two. The other thing that will happen is people who other wise don't have the skill to debug some thing as complex as the video stack start installing the blobs and their systems become useless or they get frustrated because it doesn't work at all or it just leaves their machines buggy. This leads to another big black eye for Linux. Eventually Valve leaves the market and real graphics on Linux is crippled for another 5 years.

Don't get me wrong I am grateful for what Valve is trying to do. But I also think they can't succeed with out a change of attitude from the big two graphics companies that likely won't happen until another competor enters the graphics market. Bottom line is NVidia and AMD don't want graphics on Linux to suceed as it just makes their lives more difficult if they have to properly support another OS.

[1c3d0g]

I feel a bit sorry for Valve, I have really never heard of a developer that had to FIX the OS they were working on before porting their software. I mean its understandable, graphics drivers and documentation for them have been in a sorry state, proprietary and open source. And x.org just plain sucks, so thats something else im hoping will change in the near future.
...

You'll be surprised to know how many bugs are fixed by M$'s DirectX team when NVIDIA/ATI drivers uncover yet another glitch between their drivers and Windows.

Having said that however, I believe Valve should pour all their effort into advancing Wayland (it IS the future, sorry) and try to cope with X as much as they can. Valve, like many said before me, should NOT try to reinvent the wheel by writing new tool kits, changing underlying O.S. processes etc. Instead, they should choose one standard and push it forward as much as possible. This will force the greater Linux community to unite behind this effort and thus make it much easier for more developers to port their games. The last thing Linux needs is more fragmentation.

[Figueiredo]

I feel a bit sorry for Valve, I have really never heard of a developer that had to FIX the OS they were working on before porting their software. I mean its understandable, graphics drivers and documentation for them have been in a sorry state, proprietary and open source. And x.org just plain sucks, so thats something else im hoping will change in the near future. But yeah, running into things like no S3TC support because of legal reasons, valves gonna run into a lot of those lol. Im also torn on them integrating some way for me to play the games that haven't been ported through wine, just some small back end that can install those games in the directory where wine is, this would be convenient but like everything with wine, it might just discourage devs from porting.

I don't understand why all the fuss about wine. To me it really doens't matter if the game is wrapped around wine or not. What matter is *quality*, plan and simple. If linux is a attractive platform that a dev wants to target, then he must offer games that work in every aspect. If he can do that through wine or not, I don't really care. I'd even like wine to be a part of it because there are plenty of really great older games, which will never be ported and work right now on linux beacause of wine.