- cross-posted to:
- lobsters
- linux@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- lobsters
- linux@programming.dev
We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.
This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.
These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.
Valve are such Chads.
Man it sure is a good day to be both a Valve and Arch fanboy.
Actually huge news. Linux as a whole benefits and needs more of this imo.
I hope it ends up similar to OpenSUSE’s OBS, or even better, that they can reuse a lot of the work OBS has done. I use it and think it’s fantastic.
I use Steam btw
Along with the recent Frog Wayland stuff, I’m happy to see Valve is gonna help linux desktop again lol.
From reddit:
Anybody remembers Linus saying “I hope Valve comes and fixes the packaging issue on Linux”? (yeah, on that ancient DebConf)
I hope Valve comes and fixes the very slowness of anything Wayland.
I just heard of Frog today, and I don’t really like it. It just seems like bypassing review. I like the competing proposal of experimental wayland protocols (merged into repository as “experimental” and iterative if 2 weeks pass without anyone opposing) much better.
After 15 years of wayland development hell, I’m honestly open to anything. Problem is I can definitely see an experimental branch being just as scrutinized. One of the core issues highlighted was that features and requests were rejected because of hypotheticals and the maintainers trying to avoid fragmentation like early Xorg.
Basic features from X11 are still missing. Everyone ended up somewhat fragmenting anyway via compositors because weston wasn’t really useful for developers beyond a demo. Wayfire started out as a Compiz redux and now its being considered by several DEs like XFCE to be the default compositor which they should standardize around.
Regardless, I really hope they nail it down in the next year because the halfway migration to wayland is seriously harming Linux desktop, especially when lots of frontend UI has been done perfectly decades ago on X11, and wayland still not properly supporting new features like HDR.
Dude this is seriously cool as fuck. Valves contributions are priceless to the future of Arch and the rest of the Linux ecosystem.
alright, time to wipe my Mint test/fun build and try out Arch. I don’t do much with Linux but it’s gonna be fun getting back into it. Who doesn’t love the smell of a fresh OS install
That’ll be… quite the Leap. I haven’t done an Arch install, but the last time I did, it required a fair amount of reading since the installer doesn’t walk you through everything. It’s not hard per se, but it does take some time for the first install.
If you’re not super familiar with Linux, I recommend holding off on Arch. This isn’t coming from any form of elitism (I don’t use Arch anymore) or lack of experience (I used Arch for > 5 years), just from reading between the lines of what you said, which indicates that you’re probably not super familiar with Linux.
If you really want to do it, go for it! I think Arch is an absolutely fine distro, and I think there are a lot of good reasons to use it. I just don’t want someone who may be new to Linux to get frustrated and end up not having fun. So don’t let me discourage you, but also know what you’re jumping into: probably a couple hours of getting the base system installed, and maybe another hour or two of installing packages to get to a usable system.
man you weren’t kidding hahah. I appreciate everyone’s replies but I’ll definitely just leave Mint on there for now. I didn’t get past the install process when it asked about connecting to a Wi-Fi network. I did some commands but couldn’t find any networks, I think maybe a driver issue with my Wi-Fi adapter? ohh well
I still have the USB install drive if I’m feeling adventurous! and you’d be correct, I have little knowledge of Linux, I’ve only messed with a few simple distros like PopOS, Ubuntu, Mint, and another one I’m forgetting. I can’t even get Steam to start up on my Mint distro haha
Garuda can definitely get Steam working for you quickly, though it abstracts the system more so you may or may not find it harder to fix problems due to not understanding the jargon
Or he could try a arch distro like manjaro.
You mean endeavourOS. Manjaro has a bad record. There’s also a gaming-focused one called Garuda.
Exactly. Don’t use Manjaro, I argue that it’s less stable than Arch due to how updates are managed.
I like Garuda, but as someone who started with it it’s a maybe for a first distro. It’s beginner friendly except when it isn’t.
Endeavour just gets rid of the install headache
Garbage distro with a garbage community.
dannnnn
Care to elaborate?
https://fedia.io/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/1250293/Arch-Linux-and-Valve-Collaboration/comment/7534737#entry-comment-7534737
So the admins do their job and you had an issue
That doesn’t seem like a big deal
Punishing the person seeking help while doing jack shit to the people insulting & trolling while hiding the whole thing so others can’t see is certainly not how I want to see the moderation job to be done. But if you want to circlejerk with toxic trolls, then go right ahead.
The posts you had a problem with were deleted, what more can they do? Leaving them up just encourages that behaviour
Archinstall is super easy. Just copy a few commands from the wiki to join a wifi network and then it will take everything from there.
Until you reach the part where you want to partition and encrypt your drives.
It’s stuff like this that restores my faith in humanity.
Great news! Crazy to think that Valve is hijacking/liberating the Windows gaming library. You would think that Microsoft would be doing more to prevent this.
don’t jinx it
Ha ha 😂
They kind of tried with UWP apps in the Microsoft Store, but they didn’t catch on.
Valve has enough lawyer money to keep Microsoft at bay.
This is a great step for humanity imo
It’s really good news that there’s another company behind Wayland now.
RH frankly directs it against people using “marginal” setups and applications, thus less influenced by it, and not for some ambitious goal.
Valve tend to be well-meaning guys. Anyway, in this case it’s in their business interest to be well-meaning.
Valve is not well meaning. No large for-profit company is ever well-meaning. It’s merely the case that Valve’s best interest happens to align with those of the consumer, and they have decided that their business model is going to be to win over consumers’ loyalty through goodwill rather than milking them for every penny they can get. And they are very successful at this, seeing that there has still not arisen any serious competitor to Steam. That’s entirely because consumers are loyal to the platform. Valve provides a good service, consumers reward them with loyalty. It’s not friendship, but it’s symbiotic, which is as close as you can get to friendship in the harsh world of business.
Yada yada I think Valve is well meaning and I’m still to trust anything Microsoft does is well meaning. OpenAi is just the latest manifestation of how you could do things well but intentionally choose the evil path.
hell yeah
Would someone elucidate as to what this means for a normie PC gamer and begrudging windows user?
I would say this is great news all around. With SteamOS pushing the Linux market share higher than it’s ever been, and a partnership with Arch to boost direct development, this could mean other companies taking a hard look at Linux and either developing native software or ensuring proton compatibility out of the gate.
I’m imagining “Runs on Arch” markers on software like the old “Works on Windows '95” stickers I used to see everywhere.
This puts competitive pressure on Microsoft. Valve’s goal is to turn Steam OS into a legitimate competitor to Windows for gamers, and Microsoft should fear Valve’s success.
Right now, Microsoft has no legitimate competitors in the PC gaming space. They are free to do anything they want to their OS and consumers have no choice but to tolerate it. If Microsoft say “watch these adverts”, consumers open their eyes. If Microsoft says “pay up”, they reach for their wallets. If Microsoft says “suck”, they kneel.
If a competitor arises to Windows, then Microsoft will have to actually start worrying about losing customers to Steam OS. More importantly, every customer who switches to Steam OS is one who isn’t paying for Game Pass and one who isn’t buying games from the Microsoft Store and paying Microsoft their 30%.
Pretty much just that Arch Linux will be more secure, stable and reliable.
And for Valve, producing SteamOS images could be easier, meaning they can focus their dev efforts on something else.
And it supports competition against a locked down Windows-only gaming ecosystem that restricts Valve/Steams potential market. This is a great move for anyone interested in gaming or Linux.
Probably nothing. This is more steamdeck related stuff since the SteamOS is based on ArchLinux. And even then, it does not mean much for SteamDeck users. They wont notice much at all really. This might help with development a bit on valves end. The big news is really for ArchLinux users and maintainers which will see more effort in the development of that distro.
There is some wild speculation that maybe this makes arm for Arch Linux more official in the future. Which is based of the other recent news that Valve are creating an ARM emulation layer for running games on ARM devices. Which means maybe they are working on an ARM device and maybe need to start working on getting ARM support for Arch. Though again this is all wild speculation.
Spent a few hours today installing vanilla arch for the first time because of this. Loving it so far.
This comment is missing the mandatory “btw.” :(
I think we will be getting proper arch on arm!