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Several sites, including OS Technix, are reporting that Arch will be collaborating with Valve. A heavily modified in-house Arch distro is used by Valve for SteamOS.
In an exciting development for the Linux community, Arch Linux has announced a new partnership with Valve, the company behind the Steam gaming platform and Steam Deck. This collaboration will see Valve financially support two major projects for Arch Linux: an improved build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave.
[...] By providing freelance backing, Valve's support allows Arch Linux to work on these critical projects without being hindered by limitations in volunteer time. This will significantly accelerate progress and enable the Arch Linux team to tackle ambitious endeavours that would have otherwise taken much longer.
The collaboration will lead to the development of a robust build service infrastructure. This infrastructure will involve servers for building software, potentially similar to continuous integration systems. The system will likely manage compiling and distributing software, simplifying the process and reducing the need for custom setups for different devices.
The introduction of a secure signing enclave marks a significant advancement in security for Arch Linux. This enclave will leverage code signing to provide a higher level of assurance that packages downloaded from the official repositories haven't been tampered with. Users will be able to cryptographically verify the origin and integrity of software packages, making it much harder for malicious actors to distribute compromised software.
There is speculation that Valve might publicly release SteamOS in the future or that native support for games on GNU/Linux will improve greatly.
Previously:
(2021) Valve's Upcoming Steam Deck Will be Based on Arch Linux--Not Debian
(2015) Steam Now Has 1500 Linux-Compatible Game Titles
(2015) Valve's SteamOS Dreams Beginning to Look Like Reality
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday October 01, @12:36PM (6 children)
Yes and no. Tech companies suck. Tech companies that have found a perfect middle-man position to wriggle into and take free money forever really suck.
But. Valve is doing something important in this space, which is turning PC gaming from something that depends on another awful ugly greedy middleman company, who thinks they get to call the shots on all home computing into a slightly less powerful force. When capitalism is a force that works for the consumer this is how it does so.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Freeman on Tuesday October 01, @01:22PM (5 children)
Also, if you want a much better source of games, you should be buying from GOG and pretty much nowhere else. And/or contributing to and/or using Open Source games.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 01, @01:35PM (1 child)
That sounds great in theory. In practice, when gaming on Linux it's so much easier to use Steam and Proton than it is to spend hours trying to configure Wine to get the game working.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday October 01, @06:57PM
This is because Valve has done a lot of the heavy lifting for you, which goes to show that Valve is doing valuable things. It does suck that GOG doesn't have a Proton equivalent and/or configs for WINE for their games, but GOG is quite a bit smaller than Valve.
I experienced this directly when setting up kiddo's machine using MX Linux. It's much simpler to just get the game on Steam and use Proton. Even though I had the game on GOG, the game didn't function perfectly with default settings using PlayOnLinux. Generally, if it "just works" with PlayOnLinux (WINE frontend), then I am golden. Otherwise, I really don't want to take the next several minutes, hours, and/or days to get the game to run perfectly.
There are some games that support Linux natively, but those are still kinda few and far between. Not quite as few as there used to be, but Proton+Valve is a double-edged sword in that regard.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday October 01, @03:56PM
My problem isn't that this isn't a good idea. It's a pretty great idea overall.
But you can't solve systemic issues by expecting incredibly high standards of technical competence and (I don't know a word how to describe this?) moral independence from the population at large. People just can't all live up to that expectation.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Tuesday October 01, @05:55PM (1 child)
Using only actual fully OpenSource games is pretty limiting to make that a non-starter for most.
I love GoG, but GoG doesn't offer linux builds of games even if they exist. Nor do they actively support Linux the way valve does so there is a bit of a conundrum there.
I also tend to buy multiplayer games on steam, because its generally easier to get into games with my friends that way than to have to worry whether gog users and steam users can cross-play or whether there's special tricks required to do it, or deal with version mismatches due to deltas in the release schedules etc. (where Steam gets an updated binary a few days before GoG ...)
So I mostly use GoG for Good-old-Games :) that are single player and run on windows. In a perfect world I'd shift more to GoG but its not a perfect world, and I'm pragmatic.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday October 01, @07:01PM
I'm more or less in the same boat as you. I don't need to spend a long time getting something working on WINE, when I could have the game installed and running via Steam in a tiny fraction of the time. Also, Steam is well organized. Even assuming you have a front-end like PlayOnLinux, which does compartmentalize things a bit (like Proton), it's just more clunky.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"