It's been great to see that Valve have been pushing so many of their improvements upstream rather than trying to keep them to themselves - long may it continue.
Yes, the Linux team at Valve really understands how open source incentives align with their own. Since they & their contractors upstream almost everything they do, they don't have to maintain a diff, or even build most of the software they ship (they just use Arch packages for most stuff, as mentioned in the article). Unlike many proprietary companies who try to keep as much as possible in-house, Valve understands you get higher quality software with a lot less work overall when you work with and are friendly to upstream projects, even if it means a bit more work and negotiation up front.
I was the creator & lead dev on Proton for its first 5 years (2016-2021), and from day 1 Valve understood that most of the work we did for them would be going upstream[1]. It wasn't even a conversation point in the early meetings. They've taken the same approach with every other OSS project they've worked with, and it shows in the great results & community relations. Valve is a great open source citizen.
[1] E.g. https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/aeikum/2019/3/27/how-proton...
In your opinion, what steps should Apple take, and in what order, to make Mac a compelling, long-term platform for third-party game developers? They're certainly showing some interest in making games happen (GPT, raytracing), but most of the efforts so far seem to be pre-aligned in their favour (Metal, Apple Arcade).
I dunno, man. They've burned a lot of bridges, and they are a small piece of the pie[2]. Not a lot of incentive for people to put up with their BS.
[1] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6...
[2] macOS: 1.57%, Linux: 1.82%, Windows: 96.61% https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
I'm here to inform you that that ship (with some notable exceptions, such as Baldur's Gate 3 releasing on Macs today, I think, which is FANTASTIC) has more or less sailed. Tim Cook is neither a programmer, nor a gamer, nor an open-source advocate, and every move Apple makes and has made since he took the helm shows where his priorities lie, and they're not in the AAA gaming market (and additionally, they're starting to be open-source-developer-hostile, IMHO). I think macOS would have achieved a ton more success (it would have basically become a better, more user-friendly Linux) had Apple open-sourced it and simply made Mac hardware the "reference" macOS hardware (between you and me, I also think this move would have instantly garnered Gabe's support), but it's simply not going to be. Apple likes their walled garden and their 30% App Store cut and their iOS-specific lame-games and their proprietary CPU/GPU/SoC architecture that is only being pried open by extremely clever individuals like Asahi Lina https://github.com/asahilina and Alyssa Rosenzweig (with zero help from Apple other than "leaving the door open," essentially... Which, by the way, they can still shut at any time...)
I've become more of a Linux fan over the years but only after I found NixOS- which unfortunately has kind of a steep learning curve. The reason why I couldn't use Linux as a daily driver until NixOS is that Linux's huge customizability (and my need to experiment and explore!) also lead directly to huge opportunities to brick your system or just break things in general (which happened again, and again, and again for me, across many distros such as Ubuntu, Arch, Manjaro, Pop_OS, etc.). Linux is thus like a hugely customizable sports car without brakes or safety belts. NixOS gives you both of those, so you get to fly with the sports car, enjoy all the customizability, but if anything goes wrong (which it rarely does, thanks to NixOS's architecture), you can instantly roll back to any prior version of the OS and its declaratively-installed apps and configs. It's the best of all worlds, currently, completely open-source, but the learning curve is still too steep for most. (I have hope that a NixOS-derived more-user-friendly distro like https://snowflakeos.org/ may help here, but it will take time.)
In parallel with that, gaming on Linux became "viable" (modding is still tougher than on Windows, but that will eventually be easier too) thanks to Valve's Proton efforts.
Largely though, I agree with your conclusion. It speaks volumes that Apple's most significant GPU translation efforts to-date (Game Porting Toolkit) is largely based on Open Source DXVK code. Apple and Microsoft basically have the same tactic now; push a high-level GPU API across your software platforms, using your clout to force developers onto it and 'lock them in' to your ecosystem, so to speak. The bigwigs might try to tell you that this is necessary for a quality native port, but I've doubted those words since I beat Elden Ring on Linux. Apple publishing the G.P.T. is their shameful admission that a Vulkan driver would fix gaming on Mac.
To me it sounded like there was a group within Apple that wants to create an emulation layer (and did essentially) but that leadership hates the idea and in its current state it is a compromise that it even exists at all.
Heh, I hadn't heard that, but I can totally believe it. Openness really isn't their forte.
yeah, like I said. Tim Cook is neither a gamer, nor a programmer, nor an open-source advocate. Any one of these might open the door, but if you have none of them? Best of luck.
Success in the gaming market, maybe. But Apple isn't a dedicated gaming company like Vavle. Mac is still a status icon (and most of the time, a pretty good machine in general) and macs dominate college campuses and especially the art industry. Which is why they have a higher market share than Linux.
Their moves are more hostile to open source, but it has a similar goal to Valve: make and own the entire vertical stack. And now with M1, they can converge that and more or less launch IOS and Mac devices on the same chips. That's why the IPhone 15 is running pretty modern games.
Gaming on Mac is definitely not my first choice, but I don't have the time, energy, or budget to deal with separate computers these days (or the fan noise and summer heat of a desktop GPU). Limited to whatever comes out on Mac or GeForce Now :/
And unfortunately it's hard to use Linux on desktop for frontend work. Adobe Suite is a must for me, and Linux font rendering is different enough to Macs and Windows that it's hard to get an apple to apple comparison of how a web page would look on mainstream computers.
I'm sure it's come a long way though! When I first tried desktop Linux in the 2000s, it didn't have the right fan drivers and melted my laptop, cracking the glass table underneath lol.
In the meantime... off to play BG3!
I'm a frontend dev happily using Linux, btw. I have no use for Adobe Suite, though. Figma is enough, and runs on any OS with a web browser. I agree font rendering is a bit different, but not so much that it's ever been a problem in my experience.
In fact GFN works so well I ended up getting a Logitech GCloud (https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/cloud-gaming/cloud-...) to replace the Deck, because it has a much better screen, battery life, and is like half the weight. It only streams games though (cheap Android hardware) and has sketchy ties to Tencent, unfortunately. But for anywhere with good internet, it's wonderful... ultra graphics on a nice screen in a lightweight and quiet form factor.
As for dev on Linux, yeah, that sounds right! I use Adobe less and less these days, frankly, but I do really enjoy any chance I get. Used to do a lot of graphics work with the dev work, before my job became super-specialized :( Right now I'm really happy with my Macbook, but if ARM ever gains a foothold in the PC laptop market and we see better hardware (especially performance/watt and decibels/performance) in the future, I'd reconsider that. Apple Silicon is pretty phenomenal for the time being... blows my old ThinkPads out of the water.
Wow, than k you. I know it takes a village, and it’s always a team effort, but still thank you. My windows PC is gathering dust now. I only use my Linux laptop and steam deck now. If a game doesn’t run on Linux, I just won’t play it anymore.
That’s a huge change, and I really appreciate it.
Thanks to everyone who contributed.
I know I'm not the only (ex-)Wine/Proton dev who posts here on HN :)
I remember being really disappointed when they did - I assumed gaming on Linux would be following the same path, because what the fuck kind of company breaks down a wall by repeatedly bashing their forehead into it?
Steam machines did not do well, and instead of Valve saying "Maybe this is a money pit we should abandon", they just shoveled money into it until it was mostly full.
Going back a few years, my experience was that you had to do some research to see if a game was likely to work, install it through wine, and then usually faff around with a load of winetricks/configurations/packages/etc to get a game that mostly worked (often with some weird bugs, performance issues, etc).
Now there's a whole library of games that you can just right click -> install and they work perfectly well on Linux. And of course that wouldn't have been possible without the years of work building up to it - but it was a massive improvement when Valve threw their weight behind it and built it directly into the Steam client.
Then realized it doesn't support Linux. I can't install it. I was shocked.
And then I realized how crazy it is that I had presumed a game would run on Linux. How far we've come.
Once you've chosen a Proton version, the option to "Install" will be available in your game menu.
I gave up on Windows a couple years ago, and most Steam games run in Linux using Proton through Steam. Some modern titles with fancy DRM don't work, but I generally don't buy those anyway (Denuvo, certain anticheats, etc).
For non-Steam games, I do the same thing, either with Steam (by adding a non-steam game installer, and using proton to install it), or by using Lutris (https://lutris.net/). I generally use Lutris with my GoG library.
To the point that I'm far more likely to find a game with clunky default controls on Steam Deck than I am one that won't play. And learning to use some of the more advanced control features of the system goes a long way to fixing that.
I need to take the time to do that some day. I’ve seen people swear Factorio was playable and fun on the deck, but the controls were just always too much of a struggle to get working in a way that worked for my brain.
I could play, but I just couldn’t get it smooth enough that the controls got out of my way.
I’d love (and hate) to have Factorio playable on the steam deck.
I had managed to get used to the Steam Input mappings so my experience may not reflect too much on you, but the official mappings are also pretty nice. IIRC they also show control hints underneath the map for context-sensitive actions, which help a lot too.
Thanks, that's deeply concerning to me since I have a baby I need to keep alive. But I'll give it a go sometime.
Like, I've used Linux through college and dual-booted for a good decade, so I'm familiar with how Linux works as a daily driver. But what makes it so hard to distribute a Linux version? Even for devs who do think the same they seem to struggle with that compatibility.