Valve Reaffirms Commitment To Linux While Also Releasing Updated Proton

Following all the drama caused by Canonical announcing last week they'd stop their 32-bit archive with Ubuntu 19.10 and that leading to a mess of concerns including Valve saying they would not be officially supporting Ubuntu 19.10 and later, today they issued a statement reaffirming their commitment to Linux.

Pierre-Loup Griffais, the longtime Valve Linux developer who last week said they would not be officially supporting Ubuntu 19.10 and later, penned a post on the Steam Community board today providing more insight and praising more distribution choices compared to when Steam on Linux first started.

Due to the public outcry, Canonical reverted course to providing select 32-bit packages for Ubuntu 19.10 / 20.04 LTS. To that new approach, Griffais commented, "We're still not particularly excited about the removal of any existing functionality, but such a change to the plan is extremely welcome, and will allow us to continue to work towards improvements in the Steam distribution model without causing new headaches for users. Given the information we have on this new approach so far, it seems likely that we will be able to continue to officially support Steam on Ubuntu."

He also added, " There are several distributions on the market today that offer a great gaming desktop experience such as Arch Linux, Manjaro, Pop!_OS, Fedora, and many others. We'll be working closer with many more distribution maintainers in the future. If you're working on such a distribution and don't feel your project has a direct line of contact with us, by all means, have a representative reach out directly...We remain committed to supporting Linux as a gaming platform, and are continuing to drive numerous driver and feature development efforts that we expect will help improve the gaming and desktop experience across all distributions; we'll talk more about some examples of that soon."

Read the post in full.

Also out of the Valve camp today is Proton 4.2-8 with fixes for games embedding web browsers using the Steam client (Football Manager 2019), a fix for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, updating to Wine-Mono49., window management / alt-tab fixes, and controller fixes.