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Comment by Kees_Veel | Hacker News Reader

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Kees_Veel

It's still not open source. That would be worth reading.

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Proton definitely is. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

Yeah nice. But I didn't mean proton.

What did you mean? Because Proton is pretty much what this news is about so I'm a bit confused.

I would have to assume that OP is lamenting the fact that the games themselves are not running natively on open source, and the existence of Proton detracts from game developers / publishers targeting Linux/OSS because now they don't really have a need to.

Or he could be lamenting that the games themselves are not open source, but I haven't heard many of even the most die hard OSS evangelists suggest that AAA gaming content should be open sourced.

The games I mean. I guess I'm in the wrong topic here, but if you play those games, you implicitly have to trust their secret code on your network. User account and all. Obviously most here have done that a long time ago and don't even give it a second thought. This is normal in these times of Windows and Facebooks, but I still care.

There never was a time when the majority of games were open source, all the way back to 8-bit home computers. This was long before Windows, Facebook or an open source UNIX flavour even existed.

I believe Valve is working on Flatpak sandboxing for games. If this happen that would be one more reason to game on Linux instead of Windows.

It's not as good as open source but let's be real, you'll never get AAA open source games.

Games don't need to access personal data (such as contact, phone number, photos, files, private messages, etc.) so with strong sandboxing I guess it could be a okay solution privacy-wise

To the best of my knowledge Valve's container system has no relation to Flatpak.

I think it does :

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3797

"Recent versions of Steam can optionally put each game in its own container, using a Flatpak-derived tool named pressure-vessel."

> It's not as good as open source but let's be real, you'll never get AAA open source games.

Free software philosophy (the "F" in "FOSS") allows the art and data files (levels) of a game to be proprietary, while keeping the code open-source. Sell the game itself, code comes for free.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/funding-art-vs-funding-softwa...

I already run Steam in Docker for this reason, with its own home directory mounted as a subdirectory of my real one. Even before games swiping my homedir I was worried about Steam wiping my homedir, as it's already done once in the past. [1]

Though ironically that means I can't use the new Proton runtime thing ("Soldier runtime" I think?) that sandboxes games via user namespaces, because my distro doesn't build the kernel with userns support so it would require me to give the Docker container more privileges.

[1]: https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671

Perhaps OP means the games themselves are not open-source?

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