Patroncast S04E40 - What could be Valve's end goal with Proton, Arch linux and ARM support
Added 2024-10-07 09:54:12 +0000 UTCHey everyone!
In today's episode, we'll talk about the recent moves Valve is making with funding Arch Linux, testing ARM emulation and Android support in Proton, and various other leaks / rumors, to try and see what the end goal is for them here, and how it could benefit us Linux gamers, or just Linux users in general.
I hope you'll enjoy the episode, have a great week!
Comments
This is a bit like the when Google released Web RTC. Until then Skype was the gold standard of video telephony. And Skype was bought by Microsoft. Google move destroyed that dominating position not by burning energy on competition but by making everybody else compete with Skype. Valve tries to make everybody compete with Windows. They don't care, where people play, as long as they buy their games on Steam.
Steffen Voß
2024-10-08 08:27:55 +0000 UTCSo funny and so true! :-)
Druid Piwochlap
2024-10-08 07:52:49 +0000 UTCAh nice! Yeah, the tinkering needed to play games on Linux a few years ago made playing these things more attractive to me as well. I don't know why, but just being able to have the game run on an OS that wasn't designed for it made the game more enjoyable somehow
The Linux Experiment
2024-10-08 07:51:08 +0000 UTCYeah, it's probably not a well laid out plan with 100s of steps and milestones, it's probably something spomeone at Valve wants, and they're pushing in the general direction, and they'll reassess depending on how fast or slow things move. I would also be surprised to see them stop at being a translation layer to facilitate game porting, if they reach that point, they'll likely want to move to being the entire dev platform
The Linux Experiment
2024-10-08 07:50:13 +0000 UTCHahah I hope so too!
The Linux Experiment
2024-10-08 07:48:48 +0000 UTCA slightly unrelated comment: you made me smile saying that probably gaming isn't something interesting to many of us. Well, until 5 years ago I couldn't care less about gaming. I only discovered the pleasure of playing modern games as a side effect of my passion for Linux - this was another cool area where I could tinker. Now, The Witcher / Cyberpunk / RDR2 etc. later, I am totally here for the content like your last patroncast.
Druid Piwochlap
2024-10-08 05:51:17 +0000 UTCAll that said, even in the face of the quoted recent movements, I still find it far more likely that those are all just incremental stuff and the above is at best filed under "keep moving in that general direction and read this if you get there".
Emil Johansen
2024-10-07 14:20:58 +0000 UTCI realize I've been making some noise about this over the years, but if we're following this optimistic projection to the fullest, I wanted to clarify one thing: Yes, that would mean much further reach for the compatibility layer, but no way in hell is Valve going to stop short of becoming a platform. All the players in software know that the golden meal ticket is to become a platform. Become a bigger platform and you make bigger monies. Lock people in and you secure your meal ticket. It seems unlikely that Valve would _lock off_ parts of the compatibility layer - given increased interest in regulation and an environment with hungry Fortnite-fueled lawyers. What they could, and IMO most likely would, do is provide a "premium" option for devs. Essentially a Proton version of the Apple dev tools & services environment. You don't _have_ to build in the Valve walled garden, but building & testing Proton titles there is significantly easier and Valve already provided an easy integration for the game engine you use or a toolkit for integrating your in-house engine with that same tools suite.
Emil Johansen
2024-10-07 11:02:21 +0000 UTCSounds convincing! I hope, you are right.
Steffen Voß
2024-10-07 10:16:10 +0000 UTC
