Former Valve Developer: Steam Linux Project Was The Hardest

[Hi-Angel]

I laughed so much to his linked "state of drivers" article.

Now I'm wondering, if cutting off those problems for the Vendor B was one of reasons to get released into FOSS.

[Las_]

Naive enthusiasts started buying AMD graphic cards years ago on the premise that AMD's future open source drivers would kick ass, only to discover that by the time the drivers were released, it lacked many features at best. At worst, their now obsolete graphics card isn't even supported.

There are Linux gamers still paying €50+ for unreleased games on Steam being promised that a Linux port of the game will be released in the future...

I learned a long time ago not to trust any promises made in future tense that appeal to fanboys or FOSS zealots.

ehh

AMD open source drivers *do* kick ass compared to nouveau and such. And it's getting even better now. Not much to complain about, so I wouldn't exactly call them "naive".

[johnc]

Ultimately the problem was Valve's lack of focus on a compelling end product, which was supposed to be the idea of PCs competing with consoles in the living room: i.e., the Steam Machines. You can't get game developers and GPU vendors to put out the required resources to support your platform if you yourself aren't even taking the product seriously.

At Steam Dev Days they seemed to have some pretty decent buy-in from many partners in the industry. And then it fell apart.

Rich would know better than any of us (unless Michael still has contacts at Valve) what happened behind the scenes. It could have been that the "flat" organization structure led to execution failures. Or maybe they didn't have enough resources (personnel). Or maybe they weren't truly committed or interested in the product. We can only speculate.

What we do know is:

Nintendo is able to do this.

Sony is able to do this.

Microsoft is able to do this.

Valve has a lot of talent on hand and hauls in a lot of cash.

[schmidtbag]

As with anything in life, things are much more difficult than they should be when they have already been completed but never left room for a major change. Linux isn't just simply binary incompatible with Windows. Linux is more than just OpenGL instead of DX. It is functionally and fundamentally different. It isn't perfectly straight-forward to port something, especially if that something has been ingrained in Windows for so many years.

When you have a 200 year old house, it's difficult to modernize the electric wiring or water pipes behind the walls without causing serious damage. When you have a country the size of Europe that has used Imperial units before metric was officially a thing, it is difficult to get everyone to comfortably switch. If Valve designed their software from the very beginning with the intention of being Linux compatible, they would not have encountered so many struggles.

[Beherit]

AMD open source drivers *do* kick ass compared to nouveau and such. And it's getting even better now. Not much to complain about, so I wouldn't exactly call them "naive".

Compared to nouveau, I am sure they do. However, if "and such" includes Nvidia's proprietary drivers, I beg to differ. The GTX 950 for $130 USD delivers better performance in the majority of games than the RX 480 that costs twice as much: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...ast-2016&num=1

My main point calling the buyers naive was that many buying Radeon cards long before the AMDGPU drivers were actually released, bought them based on future promises of the AMDGPU drivers, only to discover that once they're released that their cards are incompatible and they're still stuck with Catalyst.

[Geopirate]

Ultimately the problem was Valve's lack of focus on a compelling end product, which was supposed to be the idea of PCs competing with consoles in the living room: i.e., the Steam Machines. You can't get game developers and GPU vendors to put out the required resources to support your platform if you yourself aren't even taking the product seriously.

At Steam Dev Days they seemed to have some pretty decent buy-in from many partners in the industry. And then it fell apart.

Rich would know better than any of us (unless Michael still has contacts at Valve) what happened behind the scenes. It could have been that the "flat" organization structure led to execution failures. Or maybe they didn't have enough resources (personnel). Or maybe they weren't truly committed or interested in the product. We can only speculate.

What we do know is:

Nintendo is able to do this.

Sony is able to do this.

Microsoft is able to do this.

Valve has a lot of talent on hand and hauls in a lot of cash.

You have to keep in mind that Valve partnered with Ubuntu which was supposed to deliver Mir in 14.04. This means late 2014-2015 steam machines would have been running on a smooth, modern display server with consistent drivers instead of the X situation. Now we're looking at hope that we'll have working and widespread Wayland adoption by this time next year. Vulkan should also get in gear in a year or so. So, they will have the stable platform I'm sure the Ubuntu folks promised them when this all started about two and a half years after they expected to have it. There's also the hardware side of things. We're looking at $200 4k capable cards instead of double that a year ago. They have been pushed to the side by the VR hype as well. People still also have a very different Steam experience with the proprietary Nvidia driver than they do with any open source drivers. It's the truth, but one has to expect to be crucified for making that statement.

I think they will have another push for steam a year to a year and a half from now when they've actually gotten things together. They have been experimenting with Vulkan on DOTA2 and that seems to really be working well for a lot of people. They cite the driver situation as far as their continued efforts with that. As the infrastructure stabilizes more of his work will pay off for more people.

[pal666]

Wow, you copied the content of #6 and insulted another person

i insulted author of idiotic comment to which i replied. and obviously i replied before reading rest of the thread including #6. see, your comment is not very smart either

[pal666]

What we do know is:

Nintendo is able to do this.

Sony is able to do this.

Microsoft is able to do this.

lol, in what universe they are able to do linux consoles?

[pal666]

If Valve designed their software from the very beginning with the intention of being Linux compatible, they would not have encountered so many struggles.

valve games are running on linux without struggles. what do you mean by "their software" ?

[pal666]

if "and such" includes Nvidia's proprietary drivers, I beg to differ. The GTX 950 for $130 USD delivers better performance in the majority of games than the RX 480

if you can include nvidia windows driver, then surely you can include whole windows and it will have more games and most of them will be faster. so your comparison makes no sense except to artificially make nvidia look better than amd