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SteamOS Update That Drops AMDGPU-PRO in Favour of Mesa Has Left Beta

posted by n1 on Friday June 09 2017, @08:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the update-to-freedom dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The big SteamOS beta update that Valve shipped last month has now officially been released into the stable updates branch.

This is a very large update. It includes a new 4.11 Linux kernel, and updated drivers for AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA graphics hardware. This update also switches SteamOS from the proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver to the open source mesa driver. Debian 8.8 and security updates are also included.

Source: GamingOnLinux

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @08:48AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @08:48AM (#523434)

    While I completely agree with the spirit you just said I just wanted to point your own chains to you

    * steam is DRM and thus fundamentally incompatible with free software
    * apparently all modern GPUs these days require proprietary firmware (please correct me if I'm wrong anybody)

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  • (Score: 2) by iwoloschin on Saturday June 10 2017, @10:40AM (1 child)

    by iwoloschin (3863) on Saturday June 10 2017, @10:40AM (#523454)

    You're not wrong, but you're focusing on the wrong thing. Who cares about the binary blob on your GPU, it's *probably* not spying on you. You should be very afraid of the binary blob in your CPU that *is* spying on you though.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @11:20AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @11:20AM (#523461)

      Blobs anywhere are bad, for freedom and for security among many other things.

  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday June 10 2017, @06:18PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Saturday June 10 2017, @06:18PM (#523539)

    True enough. Which is why GOG is better. I'm not 100% RMS Pure though, I don't mind closed in things like games nearly as much as I do on the more important bits. But no, I don't like DRM and I don't like that Steam must be running to play a one player game. So I don't take this story as anything but an endorsement of the work on the Free Radeon driver and lots of love towards AMD/ATI for proving a modern GPU can have a Free driver because they documented one. That was what we kept saying, that the Free Software World could write drivers as good as, or better than, the internally developed ones if we had quality documentation. AMD finally decided to see if we were right. So now lets frost those widgets so great that the performance numbers between AMD and NVIDIA become lopsided. Frost em so hard the future Steam Machines ship AMD. A few future vendors will perhaps learn a lesson.