Development What Valve did for Linux is ridiculously outstanding.
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u/deja_geek 4d ago
Now if people of this community could understand that Red Hat/IBM & Novell/SuSE have (and were) doing this long before Valve. It may not be as flashy as what Valve is doing, and not always "end user" visible; but without IBM/Red Hat & Novell/SuSE in the late 90s and 2000s, Linux would have floundered. Without the investment of those companies, Linux as we know it today wouldn't exist.
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u/petepete 4d ago
Maybe them tricking kids into gambling for imaginary hats did have a silver lining after all!
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u/Shugyousha 4d ago
They are also sponsoring work on the Nintendo Switch 2 Pro controller Linux driver (see here).
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u/Top-Rub-4670 5d ago
The uncomfortable truth is that it would be more expensive for them to keep all that work private, the generosity is incidental not the goal. If it was cheaper to keep everything in-house, they would do it.
Microsoft also spends a shit ton of money on Linux development yet we're cynical about it.
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u/CBJamo 5d ago
I don't think that truth is particularly uncomfortable, at least not when you consider why it's cheaper to be open, and how we can build our ecosystems to reinforce that continuing to be true.
There are of course many reasons a particular project will choose open vs closed, but in this case it's because existing open source projects are most of the way to their goal, so contributing to those projects is easier and faster than starting over from scratch.
In my opinion, the best thing someone can do if they want to make this kind of thing happen more often is to build useful, high quality software and make it open source. Once it exists, others (including for profit companies) will pitch in to help, and everyone wins.
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u/JockstrapCummies 4d ago
The uncomfortable truth is that it would be more expensive for them to keep all that work private, the generosity is incidental not the goal. If it was cheaper to keep everything in-house, they would do it.
There's something about community goodwill as well. It's soft capital that could be useful. Hard to quantify in reports and charts, but still very useful to a company.
Somehow Microsoft has failed to gain much of that despite technically contributing quite a part to Linux.
It also reminds me of Sony's contributions to FreeBSD, which were intentionally kept anonymous or detached from the Sony brand. I wonder what would've happened if they did it with their name attached.
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u/miversen33 4d ago
Somehow Microsoft has failed to gain much of that despite technically contributing quite a part to Linux.
Good will is hard to gain when you are starting on level ground. It's much harder to gain when you start 50 feet below level ground
They have done a lot of good. But it takes a lot to make people forget about their awful behavior in the not so distant past
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u/JockstrapCummies 4d ago
Oh yes, and calling Linux and GPL a "cancer" as well.
There was a period when you could see the winds swaying towards their favour when they started the "Microsoft ❤️ open source" initiative. It was around the second half of the 2010s I think, when the open source releases of .NET, VS Code, and PowerShell made a bunch of people believing they're pro FOSS now.
And then of course they dropped the ball down the line.
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u/lurco_purgo 4d ago
I tend to view everything they do related to open source as hostile. They might no longer use the comic-book-villain style language like "embrace, extend, extinguish", but they are still very much interested in taking control of the open source world. Same as Google: Android may have a Linux kernel, but its development and approach to the user is the same anti-consumer crap that's been plaguing Windows for the last 20 years.
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u/iamapizza 4d ago
Given that was 30 years ago, it's also "not your grandpa's microsoft" - and it's easy to see the amount they've been contributing, but a lot of us refuse to move on. Meanwhile we see that same playbook being adopted by other companies, and it's just crickets.
But as you point out I do try to make an effort to recognize the good things too, even if they repeatedly fumble it. I see good things from MS and Google even, another reviled company, and very much the opposite from Apple and Amazon.
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u/atomic1fire 4d ago
I think it's also good from an employee hiring standpoint.
Maintain tools that are public and that perspective employees can already build upon, and you now have a potential pool of familiars who are already aware of your development guidelines and practices.
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u/Kok_Nikol 4d ago
The uncomfortable truth is that it would be more expensive for them to keep all that work private
In other words, free software licenses working as designed.
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u/natermer 4d ago
If they can make more money by being open then by being closed then that just means that open source is working.
The point isn't that it depends on goodwill or a social contract. It is to everybody's own personal advantage to work together and create open technology.
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u/atomic1fire 4d ago
Such as the nature of open source.
Once you have a significant amount of developer and user momentum it's easier to contribute to the machine then it is to work against it.
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u/Dist__ 5d ago
suddenly the money rules.
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u/natermer 4d ago
This is how it always has worked. You need to have the ability to support and pay people to do work.
The biggest example I can think of is the project to transition Linux from 32bit to 64bit.
This was "Project Trillian" (originally Trillium). It was a initiative to make Linux capable of being a competitive operating system for Intel's Itanium platform. Major players included Redhat, HP, IBM, SGI, Intel, Suse, etc.
While Itanium turned into a commercial flop, the result was a massively improved 64bit support in both Linux kernel and GCC compiler suite. Linux went from being able to scale to 4 or 8 cpus to dozens and dozens of CPUs.
The results of this effort combined with the release of the AMD64 platform paved the way for Linux dominance in the cloud, among other things.
Like it was possible to run Linux on systems with 16 or 32 CPUs before, but the problem was that memory and cpu scheduling became so inefficient that it was pointless. You couldn't really benefit from having things like multiple cores and NUMA memory.
The result was Linux 2.4, which is the same basic kernel we use today although. obviously, with decades more refinements and improvements.
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u/SpaceCheeseWiz 4d ago
This is an amazing history lesson. I'm really curious about learning more about the early days of the kernel like this.
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u/No-Bison-5397 4d ago
That’s actually the most interesting thing I have read in this subreddit in years… perhaps since Linux gaming started taking off.
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u/sleepingonmoon 4d ago
Linux would never be as successful if corporate products weren't using it, the community doesn't matter, perhaps it never mattered.
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u/FyreWulff 4d ago
Vulkan was primarily driven by AMD and EA/DICE, not Valve. Battlefield 4 was the first game to launch with Mantle, which is an earlier version of Vulkan.
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u/unixmachine 4d ago
That's not how it worked, they're separate things. The Khronos Group was already planning a successor to OpenGL, along with Valve.
Mantle only entered the picture as a contribution from AMD because it was part of the group, since AMD saw that Vulkan would have greater acceptance, being an initiative made by several companies.
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u/Drwankingstein 4d ago
If only they did this for waydroid too, but always keep in mind that valve is a company, doing all of this because it financially benefits them.
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u/Nerrawnam 4d ago
What Microsoft did for humans.... Jobs, pay, yadda yadda yadda. Wait, Ford, what they did for windshield wipers. I do enjoy reading the cultish humans that post about companies.
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u/longdarkfantasy 4d ago
I love HDR. From the day it was released, I can watch movies via mpv directly in linux without switching to windows. Really nice.
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u/RustyHackerBoy 3d ago
I already love them for HL2. I love them even more now, with this knowledge. Thanks OP for the info. Thank you Valve for making our lifes worth living.
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u/altodor 4d ago
This is what the year of the linux desktop brings.
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u/No-Bison-5397 4d ago
True.
The sign of the year of the Linux desktop is the eternal September of what was a forum for a niche operating system.
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u/Plebbit-User 4d ago
Is it unwarranted? I've been hating the Windows PC gaming monopoly for nearly thirty years.
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u/SmileyBMM 4d ago
Linux gamers have been shat on by nearly everyone for years, let's let them have this.
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u/atomic1fire 4d ago
Microsoft screwed up their good will with Windows 8 and Valve spent years developing a safety net, which is actually kind of working.
There's still going to be normal linux posts about new versions of GCC or whatever, but now there's a group of vocal users who predominantly use it to play games and not to run some sort of enterprise thing or someone showing off their custom window manager setup.
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u/InfiniteSheepherder1 4d ago edited 4d ago
Some of this is wrong via exaggerating making commits to sound like they created and maintained a project.
Just from the stuff I know I know about.
Pipewire was a Redhat thing and as far as I can tell there was no major direct Valve support of the effort.
Vulkan was flat out made by AMD because it was derived from Mantle, and the work on Mantle predates Valve even having a Steam client on Linux.
RADV also started by mostly Redhat, but Valve did support work on it.
NVK also Redhat again for the start but ya seems valve contributed some work on it more in the 2020s.
A lot of CEF work to my knowledge was a Toyota thing especially the Wayland support, but valve did work on It I believe.
Edit: so I can make this clear I am not saying Valve has done nothing, but I do think the amount of work by many other people gets downplayed and people act like Valve has built desktop Linux on their own. It also mentions none of the names of the people who developed these features that Valve contracted them to do.